Marshall Memo 798
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
August 12, 2019
1. Third graders learn about fractions and social justice
2. Are students getting better at spotting online hoaxes?
3. Jennifer Gonzalez on dealing with late and missing student work
4. Getting to know middle-school students, part 2
5. Keys to effective writing instruction
6. Children’s books to accompany forthcoming movies
7. Making school libraries work for teenagers
8. Short item: Free online racial equity curriculum
“Turning ambition into aspiration is one of the job descriptions of any teacher.”
Agnes Callard, quoted in “The Art of Decision-Making” by Joshua Rothman in The
New Yorker, January 21, 2019, https://bit.ly/2FuGAQ8
“The ability to express ideas in writing is one of the most important of all skills. Good writing is a mark of an educated person and perhaps for that reason it is one of the most important skills sought by employers and higher education institutions.”
Robert Slavin, Cynthia Lake, Amanda Inns, Ariane Baye, Dylan Dachet, and Jonathan
Haslam (see item #5)
“Perhaps more than any other subject, writing demands a supportive environment, in which students want to become better writers because they love the opportunity to express themselves, and to interact in writing with valued peers and teachers… Motivation is particularly important. If students love to write, because their peers as well as their teachers are eager to see what they have to say, then they will write with energy and pleasure.”
Robert Slavin et al. (ibid.)
“For as long as teachers have assigned tasks in exchange for grades, late work has been a problem.”
Jennifer Gonzalez (see item #3)
In this article in Rethinking Schools, third-grade teacher Ilana Greenstein describes being inspired by a San Francisco Exploratorium exhibit that graphically displayed:
“Critical Thinking Is Critical: Octopuses, Online Sources, and Reliability Reasoning” by Jodi Pilgrim, Sheri Vasinda, Christie Bledsoe, and Elda Martinez in The Reading Teacher, July/August 2019 (Vol. 73, #1, pp. 85-93), https://bit.ly/2ZNcKOj; Pilgrim can be reached at [email protected].
“For as long as teachers have assigned tasks in exchange for grades, late work has been a problem,” says Jennifer Gonzalez in this Cult of Pedagogyarticle. How can teachers hold students accountable while still keeping them motivated? When she was a teacher, most of her nine-week grading periods ended with the same unproductive dynamic: a few students working their way through piles of make-up assignments and gradually boosting their scores from 37 percent to 41, then 45, then 51, and finally to a passing grade. At that point, says Gonzalez, she and the students would “part ways, full of resolve that next marking period would be different. And the whole time I thought to myself, This is pointless. They aren’t learning anything at all. But I wasn’t sure what else to do.”
For starters, she believes it’s a good idea for teachers to answer some basic questions about grades.
Gonzalez then lists some possible solutions she found when she went on Twitter and asked what other teachers do:
•Penalties– Teachers reported a range of consequences for late work, including escalating point deductions, getting a grade but no feedback, not being allowed to revise and improve work, and parent contact. Gonzalez says it’s important to have incentives, because late work is less useful for student learning and a burden on teachers.
•A separate grade for work habits– These include meeting deadlines, neatness, and following non-academic guidelines like font size and correct headings. One school gives a separate “Behavior” grade that doesn’t factor into GPA, but students can’t be on the honor roll with a low behavior grade. There’s usually a correlation between work habits and academic grades, and it’s a good idea to zero in on students where this is not the case (and, of course, with students who score low on both).
•Homework passes– Things happen in students’ lives, and forgiveness passes give students a break – perhaps an extra day to hand in assignments. Teachers who responded to Gonzalez’s outreach mentioned ways of handling these, including offering them only for low-point assignments, setting a cap on the number per marking period, and limiting the percent of a grade that can be recovered.
•Extension requests– Quite a few teachers have a policy of requiring students to turn in somethingon the due date – either the assignment or a written request for more time, with the reasons.
•Floating deadlines– Some teachers reported giving students a range of dates to submit work, allowing students to plan their work around other life activities. A variation is building in incentives to submit work earlier – perhaps faster feedback or extra credit. An advantage of this is spreading out the teacher’s correcting workload over time.
•Students submit work in progress– Some digital platforms like Google Classroom let students submit assignments while they are still working on them, allowing the teacher to see how far they’ve moved and what needs work.
•Full credit for late work– The rationale here is that if the work is important and students have completed it, it deserves to be graded. Of course there’s the worry that this policy will lead students to disregard deadlines, and some teachers put a temporary zero in the gradebook until work was submitted, to push students to bring closure. A variation is giving a deadline for late work, most commonly when the assignment has been graded and returned to other students. But teachers who take the full-credit-for-late-work approach have been surprised that it had little or no effect on the amount of work handed in on time. The big advantage was not having to spend time calculating deducted points.
•Other preventive measures– Teachers mentioned involving students in setting deadlines (so that major athletic and school events are taken into account), not assigning homework (all meaningful work is done in class), and making homework optional or self-selected (not all students need the same amount of practice).
“Experiment with different systems,” Gonzalez concludes, “talk to your colleagues, and be willing to try something new until you find something that works for you.”
In the second part of this AMLE Magazinearticle (see Memo 797 for part 1), teacher/ author/consultant Rick Wormeli suggests ways to get to know students throughout the year.
• Online portfolios and social media postings– Tuning in (appropriately) on students’ YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, websites, and 6-second vines can be revelatory.
• Experiences– Particularly helpful, says Wormeli, “is time together working on something important or tough to do” – for example, an all-day hike up a mountain, working together on an extended service project, or building and maintaining the school’s website.
“Getting to Know Our Students” by Rick Wormeli in AMLE Magazine, August 2019 (Vol. 7, #3, pp. 31-35), no e-link available; Wormeli is at [email protected].
“The ability to express ideas in writing is one of the most important of all skills,” say Robert Slavin, Cynthia Lake, and Amanda Inns (John Hopkins University), Ariane Baye and Dylan Dachet (University of Liège, Belgium), and Jonathan Haslam (Institute for Effective Education, England) in this Education Endowment Foundation paper. “Good writing is a mark of an educated person and perhaps for that reason it is one of the most important skills sought by employers and higher education institutions.” The researchers reviewed high-quality research on programs that teach writing from 2nd through 12th grade and synthesized the key characteristics:
“Writing Approaches in Years 3 to 13: Evidence Review” by Robert Slavin, Cynthia Lake, Amanda Inns, Ariane Baye, Dylan Dachet, and Jonathan Haslam, Education Endowment Foundation, July 2019, https://bit.ly/2ThcJiX; Slavin can be reached at [email protected].
“What will make the teens who walk into your library keep coming back?” asks Texas librarian Karen Jensen in this School Library Journalarticle. Above and beyond the basics of creating an attractive space, curating a first-rate collection, and hosting engaging and relevant programs, here are her suggestions:
Free online racial equity curriculum – PROJECT READY (Reimagining Equity and Access for Diverse Youth) is available at http://ready.web.unc.edu. The curriculum has 27 professional development modules for educators and youth workers. The units, developed by 40 researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policymakers, can be completed by individuals or in small groups.
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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 Teacher
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