Marshall Memo 765
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
December 10, 2018
1. Pedro Noguera on pathways to equity
2. What’s really going on in U.S. classrooms?
3. The uneven quality of assignments students are given
4. Turnaround pointers from a Virginia middle school
5. Skeptical questions about high-tech personalized learning
6. Structuring civil discussions on hot topics
7. Strategically using boredom to spark creativity
8. Which is better, reading hard copy or listening?
9. Award-winning Africa-themed children’s books
“Uneven, scattered curriculum isn’t just boring or confusing; it can widen the gaps between students from affluent backgrounds and their peers from low-income families.”
Sonja Santelises, Baltimore City Superintendent, in “I Say” in The Learning
Professional, December 2018 (Vol. 39, #6, p. 3), originally in The Washington
Post, https://wapo.st/2RIHVX2
“Whereas the world outside of our schools has been transformed by information technology, the data we collect on classroom practices is somewhere between nonexistent and laughably rudimentary.”
Michael Petrilli (see item #2)
“The quality of learners’ experiences should not be dependent on which teacher they happen to get.”
Lori Wiggins and Shantha Smith (see item #4)
“‘Warm demanders’ are able to produce the greatest academic gains for students.”
Lori Wiggins and Shantha Smith (ibid.)
“We’re much more likely to punish the kids with the greatest needs. And how do we punish them? Typically by denying them learning time… There must be consequences for inappropriate behavior, but the consequences need not involve not learning. We have to be much more creative.”
Pedro Noguera (see item #1)
In this Cult of Pedagogyarticle, Jennifer Gonzalez interviews UCLA professor Pedro Noguera on what it takes to get across-the-board excellence in schools. “Some of these are things we need to speak up about,” says Gonzalez, “some are shifts we need to make in our own mindsets, and others are changes we can implement in our own practices.”
• Challenge the normalization of failure. Some schools have come to accept that students from certain backgrounds will underperform and be disproportionately disciplined and assigned to special education. One way to push back, says Noguera, is focusing on students in these groups who are beating the odds and seeing what’s different about them, “because those outliers will tell you what we need to do more for the other kids.”
• Speak up for equity. Certain practices – for example, assigning inexperienced teachers to students with the greatest needs – perpetuate and widen achievement gaps. Confronting such practices can be uncomfortable, but those are important conversations: “If you want to just be nice,” says Noguera, “you’re not going to make any change.”
• Embrace immigrant students and their culture. This means giving these students access to a rigorous curriculum, school counselors, and other resources, with language never acting as a barrier.
• Tell students the secrets of high achievement. “We have to demystify success for kids,” says Noguera – study skills, note-taking, organization, time management, and other strategies can make all the difference.
• Get parents on the same page. “Partnerships have to be based on respect, trust, and empathy,” says Noguera, “– not pity, but empathy.” Parents need to know how to reinforce at home what educators are doing in school, including staying in touch with teachers, giving kids a place to study, asking about their work, and getting them to bed on time.
• Align discipline practices with educational goals. “We’re much more likely to punish the kids with the greatest needs,” says Noguera. “And how do we punish them? Typically by denying them learning time… There must be consequences for inappropriate behavior, but the consequences need not involve not learning. We have to be much more creative” – using restorative justice, community service, and other approaches that address relationships between students and adults.
• Accelerate (versus remediating).It’s predictable that labeling students as slow learners, grouping them with similar peers, and giving them mediocre curriculum materials and teaching practices will set up those students for failure. “Instead,” says Noguera, “we should be focusing our efforts and resources on acceleration, opportunities to help students who are behind to move more quickly through the curriculum – like in summer programs, for example, so they can be caught up for the following school year.”
• Focus on day-to-day teaching practices. “I think it’s a mistake when we put equity under this kind of rubric of addressing implicit bias,” says Noguera. “That’s not to say that we don’t need to do that, but if you don’t connect that back to what teachers do on a regular basis to teach their students, then you’re not going to see a change in outcomes, and changing outcomes ultimately is what this is about.” We know more than ever about what works in classrooms, and the focus should be on making sure teachers are using the most effective practices in every classroom every day.
• Work with outside agencies. “We can’t expect the teachers to be the social workers and counselors and to teach,” says Noguera. “We need partnerships with hospitals, with health clinics, with nonprofits, with churches, with any community entity or agency that can help us in addressing the needs of our students.” That includes nutrition, eyeglasses, and housing for homeless families.
• Teach the way students learn versus expecting them to learn the way we teach. “Kids learn through experience,” says Noguera. “Kids learn through mistakes. Kids learn by asking questions, through interaction.” Teachers need to get students actively involved, closely monitor their learning, and constantly improve teaching practices.
“There are lots of examples of schools that are serving kids well, all kids,” concludes Noguera. “And the existence of those schools is the proof that the problem is not the children. The problem is our inability to create the conditions that foster good teaching and learning.”
“10 Ways Educators Can Take Action in Pursuit of Equity” by Jennifer Gonzalez in The Cult of Pedagogy, December 2, 2018, https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/10-equity/
In this Education Gadflyarticle, Michael Petrilli bemoans the fact that K-12 decision-makers are “flying blind” on some important questions:
“To Improve Educational Practice, Let Researchers Peek Into the Black Box of the Classroom” by Michael Petrilli in The Education Gadfly, December 5, 2018 (Vol. 18, #48),
In this article in Principal Leadership, Lori Wiggins and Shantha Smith, principal and reading specialist in an Arlington, Virginia middle school, describe their multicultural school (60 nationalities, 30 home languages) as warm and caring toward students, academically underperforming, and initially not eager to change. Wiggins and Smith aimed to keep the warm culture but make the school more academically demanding. “‘Warm demanders,’” they say, “are able to produce the greatest academic gains for students.” Here are their ideas for improving schools like theirs:
•Face the facts.Teachers might do a gallery walk of state test results. “Looking at data is very personal for teachers,” say Wiggins and Smith. “Some may think that bad data means you are bad at what you do.” Leaders’ role is getting their colleagues to see the data as the key to improvement – “obviously you need to know how students are doing to determine whether and when to fix the system.”
•Pose the DuFour questions. What do we want students to learn? How will we know they have learned it? How do we respond when students have difficulty?These questions point to the need for clear grade-by-grade learning objectives and common assessments.
•Develop the core curriculum. This includes the “what” – standards, learning objectives, and a common language – and the “how to” – unit and lesson plans, assessments, and other materials. “The quality of learners’ experiences should not be dependent on which teacher they happen to get,” say Wiggins and Smith.
•Identify teacher leaders. Principals simply “cannot be part of every conversation about instruction and instructional practices,” they say. “Strong teacher leaders bridge the gap… Initially, this work may include removing long-standing individuals from positions and elevating different teachers to those leadership roles.” These peer leaders need to be free of low-level administrative duties and able get their colleagues to work in new ways. Ideally, teacher leaders teach part-time and are able to coach colleagues, give demonstration lessons, and help teachers think in new ways and continuously improve their practice.
•Give common team assessments and compare results. Scheduling assessments and the time to analyze them is a vital administrative function, along with modeling and supporting candid, non-defensive conversations about students’ work. “If one teacher has significantly different results,” say Wiggins and Smith, “the team is better able to identify what contributed to the difference.”
•Identify struggling students. “Effective core instruction is present when 75-80 percent of learners demonstrate mastery of the skill,” they say. “How do you operate with surgical precision to impact the remaining 20 percent?”
•Reorganize to maximize resources. “Learners who need the most should have access to the best,” say Wiggins and Smith. “…we must acknowledge that every teacher may not be equipped to meet the learning needs of all students.” That means restructuring classes, reviewing and modifying services, and deciding on criteria for placing students.
•Maintain focus and momentum. This might involve selectively abandoning programs that aren’t aligned with the core curriculum, saying no to a field trip request, and respectfully pushing back on ill-conceived district initiatives.
In this article in Education Week Teacher, former high-school educator Cynthia Roy takes a hard look at adaptive high-tech programs that claim to boost students’ achievement by customizing learning to their interests and needs. “As tech giants make districts irresistible offers,” she says, “it becomes increasingly important that we think critically and ask ourselves how personalized learning will impact public education – for both teachers and students.” Her questions:
•How does technology affect students’ social-emotional development?There is troubling research (for example, Sherry Turkle’s 2015 book, Reclaiming Conversation) on the isolating effect of immersion in electronic devices versus face-to-face communication.
•Are ed-tech products more effective than traditional teaching? It’s not clear that students will retain knowledge and skills using fast-paced digital programs. “Without effortful thinking and making meaningful and emotional connections to concepts and ideas,” says Roy, “we easily lose information.”
•Is there too much emphasis on mastery?“As opposed to the fast track to perfection,” says Roy, “we want our students to acknowledge imperfection without judgment, view challenges as opportunities, and ultimately value the process over the end result.”
•Is there too much emphasis on correct answers and linear thinking?“Messiness” is often part of a healthy learning process, says Roy. “But standardized tools and processes common to adaptive learning programs don’t allow for the messy non-linear thinking and frustration that can lead to insight and creativity.”
•Will ed tech products undermine the art of teaching?“Humans, not tech platforms, are best able to merge knowledge domains and build relationships with children in order to differentiate instruction according to interest and need,” says Roy.
•Will ed tech marginalize public schools?“Change isn’t bad,” she concludes, “but if Gates, Zuckerberg, and any other wealthy pro-market ed reformers have their way, we might find ourselves even more reliant on and attached to expensive tech.”
In this Education Weekarticle, Catherine Gewertz reports on a Colorado school’s approach to teaching civil discourse on controversial subjects. “In two very ordinary classrooms here,” says Gewertz, “students are aware that they’re trying to do something extraordinary, something many adults around them seem unable to do: study a problem, understand the arguments on all sides, and discuss it together to see what solutions might work best for the country.”
An American Government class, using an approach designed by the civics organization Street Law, Inc., addressed the question of whether Congress should outlaw assault weapons (another class discussed whether the U.S. should require citizens to vote). Here is the protocol they followed:
“The Gift of Boredom” by John Spencer in Educational Leadership, December 2018 (Vol. 76, #4, p. 12-17), https://bit.ly/2AYjkWT; Spencer can be reached at [email protected].
In this New York Timesarticle, Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) says he is often asked, “Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?” The worry behind the question is that listening to a book is somehow not as good as reading it. Actually, says Willingham, “each is best suited to different purposes, and neither is superior.”
First, the ways that reading and listening are similar: studies have shown that adults get nearly identical scores on a reading test if they read or listen to a passage. “Once you’ve identified the words (whether by listening or reading), the same mental process comprehends the sentences and paragraphs they form,” says Willingham. This isn’t surprising, since writing was invented less than 6,000 years ago – not enough time for new cognitive wiring to evolve.
But there are differences. Consider the importance of prosody – the verbal inflections of pitch, tempo, and emphasis unique to the spoken word. The sentence, “What a great party” is straightforward on the printed page but could come across as a genuine compliment or a sarcastic put-down, depending on the way it’s spoken. Similarly, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” when read could be taken as a question about the man’s whereabouts (inferring that the stress should be on art), but in a performance, Juliet would stress Romeo, helping the playgoer know that she’s musing about his name.
So does listening produce better comprehension? Perhaps for narratives and pleasure reading, but not for more challenging texts. Researchers tested two groups of students, one that had a science text delivered via a 22-minute podcast, the other in print. Both groups spent the same amount of time listening and reading, but in a written quiz two days later, the readers scored 81%, the listeners 59%. Why? The printed format allowed readers to slow down, re-read, and stop and think – much more cumbersome with the podcast.
But for the vast majority of audiobook “readers,” who listen while they drive, work out, or otherwise multitask, light reading uses time that would otherwise be empty of literary content. Still, the content can’t be too demanding. “The human mind is not designed for doing two things simultaneously,” says Willingham, “so if we multitask, we’ll get the gist, not subtleties.”
“So listening to a book club selection is not cheating,” he concludes. “Our richest experiences will come not from treating print and audio interchangeably, but from understanding the differences between them and figuring out how to use them to our advantage – all in the service of hearing what writers are actually trying to tell us.”
This year’s Children’s Africana Book Awards (winners and honorable mentions):
Books for young readers
“Children’s Africana Book Award” in Africa Access Review, December 2018,
http://africaaccessreview.org/childrens-africana-book-awards.
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About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and other educators very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 48 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, writer, and consultant lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 60 carefully-chosen publications (see list to the right), sifts through more than a hundred articles each week, and selects 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, pulls out several striking quotes, provides e-links to full articles when available, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday evening (with occasional breaks; there are 50 issues a year). Every week there’s a podcast and HTML version as well.
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
All Things PLC
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
District Management Journal
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
English Journal
Essential Teacher
Exceptional Children
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Language Arts
Literacy Today(formerly Reading Today)
Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Social Education
Social Studies and the Young Learner
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Learning Professional(formerly Journal of Staff Development)
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time Magazine