In This Issue:

1. Growth mindset thinking makes its uncertain way into schools

2. A middle-school teacher tries to shift to student-centered math

3. Harnessing adolescent rebelliousness

4. “Firewalks” in a California high school

5. The potential of instructional rounds

6. Fidgeters of the world, unite!

7. Keys to a successful staff retreat

8. Teaching about the election

 

Quotes of the Week

“Doing more things does not drive faster or better results. Doing better things drives better results.”

James Clear in “The Myth of Multitasking: Why Fewer Priorities Leads to Better

Work,” http://jamesclear.com/multitasking-myth

 

“In my experience, meaning is derived from contributing something of value to your corner of the universe. And the more I study people who are able to do that, people who are masters of their craft, the more I notice that they have one thing in common. The people who do the most valuable work have a remarkable willingness to say no to distractions and focus on their one thing.”

            James Clear (ibid.)

 

“As a teacher, talking less and asking students to take more responsibility for their learning involved layers of complexity that I had not anticipated… For example, many students and parents believed that a good mathematics teacher could and would clearly explain the concepts and procedures before students tackled a problem and that struggling with the material was a bad sign.”

            Jamie Wernet (see item #2)

 

“There are two adolescent imperatives: To resist authority and to contribute to community.”

            Rob Riordan (see item #3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Growth Mindset Thinking Makes Its Uncertain Way Into Schools

            In this Education Week article, Evie Blad reports that a recent poll found 77 percent of U.S. teachers believe “growth mindset” is an important factor in their students’ achievement. Teachers told pollsters they regularly use several key components:

-   Praising students for effort – “Great job. You must have worked really hard at that.”

-   Praising students for taking risks and persevering;

-   Encouraging students who are already doing well to keep working to improve;

-   Encouraging students to try new strategies when they are struggling;

-   Praising students for their learning strategies;

-   Suggesting that students get help from other students on their schoolwork.

However, 85 percent of teachers said they wanted more professional development to use growth mindset insights most effectively. While the central ideas are intuitive to many educators, it takes time and collaboration for them to filter down to daily classroom practice.

Because much of teachers’ knowledge about growth mindset has come from articles and discussions with peers rather than systematic training, some misconceptions persist. “They become very focused on labeling students’ behavior and not really probing what’s driving that behavior,” says Stanford University researcher Jacquie Beaubien. Among the ideas stemming from incomplete understanding:

-   Equating a growth mindset with a general sense of optimism;

-   Emphasizing sheer effort;

-   Mistakenly identifying a student who lacks interest in a subject as someone who has a fixed mindset and is afraid of making mistakes in front of peers;

-   Teachers focusing on how they communicate with students rather than thinking about broader classroom practices.

Because training is so spotty, there are also some key growth-mindset practices that are not being emphasized enough in classrooms, including:

-   Having students evaluate their own work;

-   Using on-the-spot and interim assessments;

-   Having students revise their work;

-   Encouraging multiple strategies for learning;

-   Peer-to-peer learning.

And because not all teachers have been exposed to the new thinking on growth mindset, especially in schools with high teacher turnover, ineffective classroom practices persist, including:

-   Praising students for their intelligence;

-   Praising students for earning good scores or grades;

-   Telling students that it’s understandable if they are having difficulty because not everyone is good at a given subject;

-   Encouraging students by saying things like, “This is easy, you will get it in no time.”

Practices like these are particularly harmful for low-income students, who are more likely to have a fixed mindset about intelligence and talent – but who have been shown to benefit most dramatically when they shift to a growth mindset.

            Beaubien and her colleagues at the Stanford Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS – https://www.perts.net) are offering online growth mindset training modules for teachers and encouraging grassroots efforts to spread effective practices. In Baltimore, for example, two teachers became enthusiastic about the ideas, formed a group of peers to read books and share strategies, and spread ideas to other schools. Now growth mindset training is part of the district’s new teacher induction.

 

“Teachers Seize on ‘Growth Mindset,’ but Classroom Practice Lags” by Evie Blad in Education Week, September 21, 2016 (Vol. 36, #6, p. 1, 10-11), www.edweek.org

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2. A Middle-School Teacher Tries to Shift to Student-Centered Math

            In this article in Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, Michigan teacher Jamie Wernet describes her reentry to the classroom after several years in graduate school. She thought she was definitely ready to move away from the comfortable (and manageable) lecture-and-note-taking pedagogy she’d used before. In fact, she was psyched to implement the Connected Mathematics 3 curriculum (new to her school) in ways that would bring high-level tasks, cognitive demand, meaningful math discussions, and effective and equitable group work to her classroom.

But making these changes was not a simple matter. “As a teacher,” says Wernet, “talking less and asking students to take more responsibility for their learning involved layers of complexity that I had not anticipated… For example, many students and parents believed that a good mathematics teacher could and would clearly explain the concepts and procedures before students tackled a problem and that struggling with the material was a bad sign.” Here were some of the challenges she faced in the opening weeks of school:

-   Building on student thinking was difficult without classroom norms that supported productive student work.

-   Encouraging students to use mathematical reasoning and persist with solving problems didn’t make her feel successful and competent.

-   Figuring out what she should do next and managing classroom time often kept her from using real-time assessments to respond to students’ understanding.

“The whole approach often felt as uncomfortable as ill-fitting shoes,” says Wernet. “Secretly, I longed to just ‘show and tell’ for a while. I began to grow weary and unsure of myself.” But she persisted and by the end of the year, her students were getting into a groove. She shares three lessons from the year:

            • Think big – and small. Wernet found that her big-picture goal for the year – implementing student-centered instruction that helped develop students’ persistence in solving problems – was hard to measure day by day, and as a result, she often felt overwhelmed and discouraged. To maintain her sanity, she set smaller, weekly goals that were way-stations to the ultimate outcome. Some examples:

-   Showing student work on a document camera at least twice weekly;

-   Preparing and asking one high-level question each day;

-   Anticipating students’ strategies for one core lesson;

-   Using a written record for real-time assessments;

-   Using student work in the summary phase of lessons;

-   Not taking students’ pencils to help them during work time.

“I set a limit of two weeks,” says Wernet. “If I did not experience success with a goal, I moved on to a new goal and decided later whether to return to the problematic goal. Over time, these small-scale changes became a natural part of my teaching, and together they led to bigger changes in the structure and tone of my classroom.”

            • Limit initiatives to those that support the big goal. “As we try to change and grow our practice, whether self-driven or motivated by policy or district-level change,” she says, “we will encounter more ideas than we can possibly implement in a year or even our whole career. It pays to focus on a smaller set of objectives, and for a while, selectively choose initiatives that fit those goals.” For example, Wernet went to a workshop that presented 50 great classroom apps and chose two or three that specifically encouraged mathematical communication and offered assessment strategies that she believed would support multiple competencies.

            • Collaboration is key. “My biggest support came from working alongside other mathematics teachers,” says Wernet. Within her school, she co-taught, observed colleagues, discussed goals (big and small), monitored students’ progress, and (with some trepidation) invited other teachers to observe her teaching and give feedback. She joined an online group of Connected Math teachers and chatted about pacing, classroom policies, and strategies on specific problems. Finally, she visited other Connected Math schools and watched lesson videos at http://www.connectedmath.msu.edu and http://www.teachingchannel.org.

            The results were positive. Wernet believes she grew measurably as a professional and her student outcomes, she says, have been “exciting and sometimes surprising.”

 

“Lessons Learned Going Back to School” by Jamie Wernet in Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, September 2016 (Vol. 22, #2, p. 68-71), http://bit.ly/2d3cjXU; Wernet can be reached at [email protected].

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3. Harnessing Adolescent Rebelliousness

            “The brains of adolescents are notoriously more receptive to short-term rewards and peer approval,” says Amanda Ripley in this New York Times article, “which can lead to risky behavior.” But young people are also very attuned to autonomy and social justice. “There are two adolescent imperatives,” says Rob Riordan of High Tech High in California: “To resist authority and to contribute to community.” Might it be possible to take advantage of these characteristics to bend teenage rebelliousness toward wholesome ends? A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tested that possibility.

The researchers took 489 Texas middle-school students and had some of them read a typical health class article on eating a diet low in sugar and fat, with colorful pictures of fresh foods. The remaining students read an exposé of food companies reformulating products to make them more addictive and labeling unhealthy foods so they looked healthy. “We cast the executives behind food marketing as controlling adult authority figures,” said Christopher Bryan (University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business) and David Yeager (University of Texas/Austin), “and framed the avoidance of junk food as a way to rebel against their control.”

The next day, in a different setting, students were asked to choose which snacks they wanted in anticipation of a big celebration. Students in the second group were 11 percentage points more likely to forgo at least one unhealthy snack like Oreos, Cheetos, or Doritos and choose fruit, baby carrots, or trail mix. They were also seven percentage points more likely to choose water over Coke, Sprite, or Hi-C. These might seem like small differences, but the researchers say it would translate into losing about a pound of body fat every 6-8 weeks – a public health triumph! Bryan and Yeager plan a follow-up study to see if these healthy choices persist over time.

“What’s really exciting about this study and other work like it is that if you can appeal to kids’ sense of wanting to not be duped, you empower them to take a stand,” says Ronald Dahl (University of California/Berkeley). “If they are motivated, you can change their behavior profoundly.” A similar campaign against cigarette smoking showed students piling up 1,200 body bags outside the office of a tobacco company (the approximate number of deaths from smoking every day), with an African-American youth using a megaphone to call out the company and an older white man peering nervously out a window above. It’s estimated that the advertising campaign of which this spot was a part prevented 450,000 teens from starting smoking between 2000 and 2004.

Teenagers seem to be particularly sensitive to “even a whiff of mission,” says Reynolds. “Adolescents have this craziness that we can criticize – or we can tap into,” says Ron Berger of EL Education. “This is a time in their lives when justice matters, more than any other time.” Berger’s schools have worked this notion into the curriculum, spurring students in one Chicago school, for example, to engage in community activism and present their opinions to the mayor.

A big unanswered question is whether the positive behavioral shifts in the experiments will last more than a few hours; after all, almost no obesity prevention programs for adolescents result in long-term weight loss and there is a powerful consumer culture pushing young people in the other direction. The ultimate coup, says Reynolds, would be getting teens to see the food industry’s ads as a “booster shot of indignation, rather than temptation.” Then, says Bryant, “the food industry is paying to undermine their own products.”

 

“Can Teenage Defiance Be Manipulated for Good?” by Amanda Ripley in The New York Times, September 13, 2016, http://nyti.ms/2cr0T2s

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4. “Firewalks” in a California High School

            “For more than a half century, an array of stakeholders has bemoaned Latino/a underachievement in U.S. schools,” says Marnie Curry (University of California/Santa Cruz) in this American Educational Research Journal article. “Longitudinal displays of Latino/as’ high dropout rates, poor test scores, and low rates of college graduation signal the seeming permanence of this crisis. The culprit most often cited is the historic legacy of racism/colonialism/oppression, which manifests in educational institutions as deficit thinking and assimilationist school practices, especially culturally discontinuous instruction. The resulting ‘subtractive schooling’ begs the question of what ‘additive’ school for Latino/as might look like.”

            Curry describes how Mario Molina High School (MHS), a small urban Title I school in northern California, instituted “firewalks.” These are a rite of passage in which each sophomore and senior is required to testify publicly on their personal and academic development. The audience is a circle of caring peers and adults who contemplate each student’s journey toward graduation and beyond in a “safe, confidential, but ‘brutally honest’ environment.” The firewalk ceremony (modeled after the ancient rite of walking over hot coals) ends when the audience stands to show its confidence that the student has reflected deeply and shown the habits needed for advancement. If members of the group choose not to stand, the firewalk continues and, if consensus on graduation is not reached, the group negotiates a plan for remediation. This is all part of the school’s mission to “make great people” – graduates who are caring, thoughtful citizens with moral and social consciences.

Another key component is the school’s advisory program driven by guiding principles around habits of life, mind, and work. This is part of the school’s philosophy about tests: “We believe that standardized tests are not the only way to measure a student’s learning. Of course we want MHS students to be prepared to take those tests and do well on them, but we also want MHS students to be transformed into life-long learners who are engaged and excited about learning. Tests do not transform students, learning does!”

            The sophomore and senior firewalks are different. Sophomores go to Yosemite National Park for a three-week outdoor experience at the end of the school year. Students sleep in tents and engage in a number of physical and socio-emotional challenges – trust falls, a seven-mile hike with 2,700-foot elevation gain (leaving no sophomore behind), navigating a rope spider web, writing letters to a classmate, talking about what they admire in a peer, sharing a personal struggle. Students then return to the school and sit in circles discussing their progress and readiness to become juniors. They answer about 21 questions, among them: What inspires you? Do you have any regrets from the first two years of high school? How have you shown leadership? What are your college plans? What career do you want to pursue? Where do you think you will be in five years? What’s your favorite class? At the end of the ritual, the audience says whether each student is ready to move on. Not every student gets the nod.

            Senior firewalks don’t involve the wilderness experience and are more formal (including dress-for-interview attire) and twice as long (an hour for each student). In preparation, seniors prepare self-assessments evaluating their academic work, strengths, struggles, growth, and plans for the future, and then compose an opening statement. The audience/judges are prepared with the type of questions they will ask and the criteria for their decision. They are told, “When you stand, you stand for real. You have a responsibility to the seniors to be honest, thoughtful and reflective. Each of you holds a stake as to whether or not this senior graduates. If you do not stand for a senior, you have the responsibility to explain why you are not standing. Know that your voice is going to be heard if you don’t stand for that senior. On the other side, if you stand just to make it easy, then you are taking away a powerful learning opportunity for them before they graduate.” Seniors are asked 18 questions, and a decision is made on each student. Every year, a few students don’t graduate – they need more work, better friends, better goals, all specifically spelled out.

Curry studied this school’s ritual through the lens of “authentic cariño” – heartfelt care. Her conclusions: First, authentic cariño “is the cornerstone of additive education… an essential element to the well-being and academic success of poor and working-class youth of color.” Second, schoolwide rituals like firewalks “enhance authentic cariño at an institutional level while fostering non-dominant students’ healthy identity development, collective social conscience, reflexivity, and agency.”

 

“Will You Stand for Me? Authentic Cariño and Transformative Rites of Passage in an Urban High School” by Marnie Curry in American Educational Research Journal, August 2016 (Vol. 53, #4, p. 883-918), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2d0Zq5L; Curry can be reached at [email protected].

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5. The Potential of Instructional Rounds

            In this American Educational Research Journal article, Thomas Hatch and Kathryn Hill (Teachers College, Columbia University) and Rachel Roegman (Purdue University) examine whether instructional rounds contribute to social networks among administrators and support a district-wide focus on teaching and learning. Rounds are brief observations of a sampling of classrooms within a school by groups of teachers, administrators, or both. Ideally, rounds should foster:

-   A common language about and understanding of high-quality teaching;

-   A collaborative learning culture versus a culture of compliance;

-   A more coherent approach to improving instruction.

Despite the popularity of this approach and the possibility that these goals might be met, say Hatch, Hill, and Roegman, “the evidence base on the effects of rounds is limited, and the precise mechanisms through which rounds could contribute to the development of a common focus on instruction and ultimately to the improvement of classroom practice has not been fully explored.” In particular, they note, “rounds-like initiatives are unlikely to be effective and may be counterproductive unless many key conditions are already in place: The purpose needs to be clear, observations need to be carried out in a climate of trust, and everyone involved needs to understand how the observations connect to other improvement efforts.”

            Hatch, Hill, and Roegman did a two-year analysis of instructional rounds in three districts focused on whether this practice got educators in different roles (teachers, principals, other supervisors, and central-office administrators) working together effectively in “communities of practice” to improve instruction. The researchers were particularly interested in whether instructional rounds forged decentralized, reciprocal social networks that improved communication, trust, and practice. They found that the impact of rounds in these districts was quite mixed, for several reasons:

-   Educators who took part had different roles in their districts, worked at different grade levels, and most were located in offices in different buildings. This hampered formal and informal communication except when they were doing rounds together.

-   The districts had other parallel initiatives to foster communication about instruction, including PLCs, and the links among them were not always coherently managed.

-   Administrative turnover affected implementation, especially in one district where the key administrator in charge of instructional rounds left after the first year.

-   The number of participants in rounds – ranging from 9 to 19 – resulted in some communication and fragmentation issues.

-   Rounds participants tended to communicate along their own institutional pathways – for example, curriculum and instruction or school management – and teachers sometimes got different messages from different rounds participants.

-   Rounds didn’t happen frequently enough for educators from different buildings, roles, and interests to forge strong bonds and buy into a common instructional message.

In addition, the broad purpose for rounds articulated by the district superintendents – building relationships, establishing a shared focus on instruction, and helping administrators shift from a managerial to an instructional mindset – may not have helped “facilitate the flow of technical knowledge about instruction that might be relevant for specific groups of students at different grade and performance levels in different subjects,” say Hatch, Hill, and Roegman.

            “These results show,” the authors conclude, “how much work remains to be done to fill in the details in what, for the most part, have been broad assumptions about the benefits of rounds and the role that organizational routines involving collective, structured observations might play in building social networks and ultimately, contributing to improvements in instruction district-wide… [T]he findings suggest that the current approach to rounds as a broad, general strategy to build a community of practice across a district needs to be replaced by a view of rounds as one among several different routines that can be used strategically to influence and manage formal and informal networks. In short, social networks are themselves a resource that administrators can use to support the development of social capital.

“Just like other resources, however, social connections are limited. Individuals cannot spend all of their time talking with everyone else. Education leaders need to balance their investments of time, energy, and money in different organizational routines and different networks in order to accomplish different purposes… In turn, using routines like rounds to enable key leaders to serve as hubs and brokers between and among different kinds of networks may prove particularly powerful. From this perspective, the work of instructional leaders needs to shift from trying to promote a focus on instruction in general to thoughtfully orchestrating connections among the many formal and informal networks related to teaching and learning in their districts.”

 

“Investigating the Role of Instructional Rounds in the Development of Social Networks and District-Wide Improvement” by Thomas Hatch, Kathryn Hill, and Rachel Roegman in American Educational Research Journal, August 2016 (Vol. 53, #4, p. 1022-1053), available for purchase at http://aer.sagepub.com/content/53/4/1022.abstract; Hill can be reached at [email protected].

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6. Fidgeters of the World, Unite!

            In this New York Times article, Gretchen Reynolds has advice for teachers who tell fidgeting students to just sit still: let them tap their toes and jiggle their legs. Why? Because fidgeting is good for their health.

“Sitting is one of the scourges of modern life,” says Reynolds. “The health consequences of muscular immobility are well documented… Studies show that uninterrupted sitting causes an abrupt and significant decline in blood flow to the legs.” This causes vessel walls to pump out proteins that, over time, contribute to hardening and narrowing of the arteries. Blood pressure rises, increasing the risk of atherosclerosis. The simplest solution is to get up and move around, increasing blood flow in the legs, but when standing up is not an option, fidgeting is a good substitute.

In a study in the July issue of The American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology, Jaume Padilla (University of Missouri/Columbia) and his colleagues had college students sit for three hours with one leg immobile and the other regularly fidgeting. They measured a striking difference in blood flow between the two legs: a precipitous decline in the immobile leg and an increase in the fidgeting leg, compared to the baseline. At the end of the three hours, when the researchers tested the ability of the subjects’ legs to respond to changes in blood pressure, the immobile legs no longer worked as well as they had during baseline testing, meaning that they were already not as healthy as they had been. The arteries in the fidgeting legs responded as well or better than before.

“To be honest, we were surprised by the magnitude of the difference,” said Padilla. The muscular contractions associated with fidgeting are quite small, but they are sufficient to combat some of the unhealthy consequences of sitting. The results of one sedentary session are probably not permanent, he said, but frequently sitting without moving is likely to result in permanent changes.

 

“Why Fidgeting Is Good Medicine” by Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times, September 20, 2016, http://nyti.ms/2crJB4A

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7. Keys to a Successful Staff Retreat

            In this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Rob Kramer (University of North Carolina) says he is a survivor of some less-than-satisfactory faculty retreats. Based on that, he has some advice for those who organize retreats:

            • A clear and legitimate rationale. Kramer tells the story of a new administrator who arrived, conducted a quick “listening tour,” and scheduled a retreat to talk through a number of changes she wanted to make in the organization. People who believed the place was in pretty good shape felt attacked, became increasingly disgruntled, and the day was a disaster – not to mention a waste of time for everyone. “Retreats go poorly,” says Kramer, “when the reason for the retreat does not match the organization’s true needs.” A better approach would have been to work with key stakeholders to develop the agenda, get buy-in, and engage everyone in an open and task-oriented fashion.

            • No hidden agendas – If trust is an issue in an organization, it’s essential that the conveners are honest about how a retreat will be handled and everything is above board. For example, if administrators are going to step out during a faculty discussion, they need to really absent themselves and let faculty members talk through their issues without interference or spying.

            • High-quality facilitation – An effective leader keeps the trains running on time and is efficient, practical, and easy to work with. Kramer once watched an external facilitator who dressed flamboyantly, told lots of stories, bowed whenever there was applause or laughter, and at one point juggled three scarves. “Retreats are not ‘edutainment,’” he says. “They work best when every participant has a vested interest in what is being discussed and understands how the outcomes of the session will affect them and their work.”

 

“Death by Retreat” by Rob Kramer in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2016 (Vol. LXIII, #4, p. A36-A37), http://bit.ly/2cXh1by; Kramer can be reached at [email protected].

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8. Teaching About the Election

            In this article in Usable Knowledge, Leah Shafer explores the challenge of teaching about this year’s presidential contest. Some school leaders are discouraging teachers from getting into this heated political arena, but discussions are bound to happen, and the question is how to handle them as part of every school’s core mission: getting young people ready for citizenship. “No matter what students grow up to do with their lives,” says Harvard education professor Meira Levinson, “they all have civic rights and responsibilities, so they need to be prepared.” Shafer lists some unique attributes of the 2016 election:

            • Students may be more invested in this election than usual. “Something that has generally seemed distant and irrelevant to their own lives suddenly feels very personal,” says Rebecca Park after teaching about the campaign over the summer. Students arrived with especially strong opinions about the candidates.

            • That doesn’t mean students are well-informed. A colleague of Park’s in the summer course found that often students didn’t have facts to back up their opinions about candidates, policies, and the inner workings of presidential campaigns.

            • Students may have very strong emotional reactions to the campaign. “The rhetoric surrounding immigration, mass shootings, and police brutality may make students uncomfortable, angry, or scared,” says Shafer, “and they may bring those emotions into the classroom.” This may be especially true of African-American, Muslim, and Hispanic students.

            • The campaign’s rhetoric may be difficult to confront in a school setting. Says Levinson, “Many of Trump’s statements seem to violate moral and civic norms that schools are committed to teaching: anti-racism, respect for others, democratic ideals, and anti-bullying.” This makes conducting a mock debate quite tricky.

            • Essential questions are helpful. For example, one for civics educators might be, How should we live together?

            • One suggested resource is a case study developed by Levinson, available free at http://www.justiceinschools.org/2016-election. Students can also look at candidates’ websites and draw their own conclusions about policies and the constituencies and regions of the U.S. that candidates represent.

 

“Civics in Uncivil Times” by Leah Shafer in Usable Knowledge, September 14, 2016,

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/16/09/civics-uncivil-times

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