In This Issue:

1. Celebration 101

2. Effective teacher coaching

3. A study of co-teaching in middle-school inclusion classrooms

4. A Nevada ELA team tries lesson study

5. Approaching a new school year with a “design” perspective

6. Tutoring Philadelphia students in writing

7. Anxious and depressed teens on devices: chicken or egg?

8. How effective is Direct Instruction?

9. Children’s books that feature Asian Americans

 

Quotes of the Week

“The single best low-cost, high-leverage way to improve performance, morale, and climate for change is to dramatically increase the levels of meaningful recognition for – and among – educators.” 

            Robert Evans (quoted in item #1)

 

“Talk to any teacher, and you’ll soon realize something surprising: they’re lonely. No, not in the typical sense of craving social relationships. Teachers are lonely in the sense that they do most of their jobs as the only adult in the room, without interaction or feedback from peers or coaches. Many educators crave genuine responses from experienced colleagues and administrators. It’s one of the best ways to improve.”

            Gerard Dawson in “How to Plan and Run a Pilot for Video-Driven Teacher 

Observation,” THE Journal, July 24, 2018, https://bit.ly/2NI9EEV

 

“Flipped classrooms really shine when they move the less social components of learning out of the classroom, and that creates space for improving the human interactions within the classroom.”

            Michael Ralph in “Making Your Flipped Classroom More Human” in Edutopia,

            June 8, 2018, https://edut.to/2JwnVHb; Ralph can be reached at [email protected]. 

 

“When we’re anxious, we gravitate toward experiences that dull the present anxious moment. Enter mobile devices, the perfect escape into a two-dimensional half-life, one that teenagers can make sense of.” 

            Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (see item #7)

 

“We live in a literate society, where conventional spelling is a necessity if a person wants to be taken seriously at work.”

            Renee Llanes in “Beyond the Weekly Word List” in Edutopia, June 25, 2018, 

            https://edut.to/2Ir7nLf

 

“That’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.”

            Yogi Berra

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Celebration 101

            “When celebrations continually remind people of the purpose and priorities of their organizations, members are more likely to embrace the purpose and work toward agreed-upon priorities,” say Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas Many, and Mike Mattos in this article in All Things PLC. Here are their suggestions for making celebrations optimally effective:

• Explicitly state the purpose of a public celebration. Each one should reinforce the school’s or district’s purpose, vision, collective commitments, and goals.

• Make celebrations everyone’s responsibility. “If the formal leader is the sole arbiter of who will be recognized,” say the authors, “the rest of the staff can merely sit back and critique the choices. All staff members should have the opportunity to publicly report when they appreciate and admire the work of a colleague.” 

• Establish a clear link between the recognition and key goals. Celebrations can’t seem random, with people being recognized regardless of their contributions. The question is, “What behavior or commitment are we attempting to encourage with this recognition?” The key criterion is that the recognition be genuine and heartfelt; then there’s no danger of overdoing celebrations.

• Use celebrations to tell stories. “Good stories personify purpose and priorities,” say the authors. “Good stories appeal to both the head and the heart, and are more compelling and convincing than data alone. They bring data and evidence to life and persuade people to act in new ways.” 

• Create opportunities for many winners. Celebrations “can be disruptive and detrimental,” say the authors, “if there is a perception that recognition and reward are reserved for an exclusive few… An effective celebration program will convince every staff member that he or she can be a winner and that his or her efforts can be noted and appreciated.” Adlai Stevenson High School in Illinois never has a faculty meeting without celebrating the efforts and commitment of individuals and teams, and thousands of “Super Pat” awards (small tokens of appreciation that represent a pat on the back for a job well done) have been given out over the years. 

The authors conclude with a quote from Robert Evans: “The single best low-cost, high-leverage way to improve performance, morale, and climate for change is to dramatically increase the levels of meaningful recognition for – and among – educators.” 

 

“Celebrating in a PLC” by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Thomas Many, and Mike Mattos in All Things PLC, Summer 2018, no e-link available

Back to page one

 

2. Effective Teacher Coaching

            “The failure of traditional PD programming to improve instruction and achievement has generated calls for research to identify specific conditions under which PD programs might produce more favorable outcomes,” say Matthew Kraft and Dylan Hogan (Brown University) and David Blazar (University of Maryland) in this Review of Educational Researcharticle. They summarize a growing consensus that effective professional development needs to be job-embedded, intense, sustained, focused on discrete skills, and actively involve educators. Given these desiderata, teacher coaching would seem to be a promising avenue for improving instructors’ knowledge and classroom skills, hence boosting student achievement. 

Kraft, Hogan, and Blazar report on their meta-analysis of 60 studies of teacher coaching, finding average effect sizes of 0.49 standard deviations on classroom instruction and 0.18 standard deviations on student achievement. These impact figures compare favorably to almost all other forms of professional development and schoolwide interventions. Although coaching is expensive (one estimate is $3,300 to $5,200 per teacher), if support is focused on the teachers most in need of improvement, the authors believe it’s more cost-effective than providing conventional PD to all teachers. 

However, the researchers noticed that the impact of coaching was much more positive in initiatives with around 50 teachers, a small number of coaches, and teachers volunteering to take part. Larger-scale initiatives – 100 or more teachers, more coaches, and teachers with mixed levels of interest – had much less impact. Kraft, Hogan, and Blazar note two key considerations in taking coaching to scale:

• The quality of coaching– Building a corps of capable coaches whose expertise is well matched to the diverse needs of teachers in the school or district is essential. Some districts recruit highly effective local teachers as coaches, which can subtract from the amount of good teaching in classrooms. One solution is to make coaching only part-time. Pairing teachers with different strengths and weaknesses and encouraging them to coach each other is a promising strategy. Some districts are adding coaching to the evaluation duties of administrators, but this can undercut the trusting relationship necessary for coaching to be successful, and may also result in infrequent and superficial coaching if evaluators aren’t trained and supported. Web-based virtual coaching using video technology can maximize the impact of high-quality coaches and cut down on travel time and expense; surprisingly, studies have found little difference in the impact of virtual and in-person coaching.

• Teacher buy-in– “No matter the expertise or enthusiasm of a coach,” say Kraft, Hogan, and Blazar, “coaching is unlikely to impact instructional practice if the teachers themselves are not invested in the coaching process… Coaching requires teachers to be willing to open themselves to critique and recognize personal weaknesses. This openness on the part of teachers is facilitated both by a school culture committed to continuous improvement and by strong relational trust among administrators and staff members.” 

“The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence” by Matthew Kraft, David Blazar, and Dylan Hogan in Review of Educational Research, August 2018 (Vol. 88, #4, p. 547-588), https://bit.ly/2v3iKST; Kraft can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

3. A Study of Co-Teaching in Middle-School Inclusion Classrooms

            In this article in Exceptional Children, Jade Wexler (University of Maryland) and seven colleagues report on their observations of co-teaching partners (one general education and one special education) in 16 middle-school ELA inclusion classrooms in four states. After spending over 33 hours in classrooms, the researchers came away with two major concerns:

            •Less-than-stellar literacy instruction– Students were reading grade-appropriate connected text a fair amount (either orally or silently), but they received very little instruction from either teacher to boost their comprehension – pre-teaching vocabulary, building background knowledge, and explicitly honing strategies like main idea and previewing. This is a problem, say the authors, since “without regular opportunities to practice reading text and apply literacy strategies, students may suffer from a lack of exposure to critical content and vocabulary and incidentally-learned background knowledge and an inability to apply literacy strategies when their comprehension breaks down while reading independently.”

            •Not taking full advantage of having two teachers– “The overall goal is that students benefit from the expertise of both teachers,” say the researchers, “but that is not what we observed.” Content-area teachers and their special-education co-teachers led instruction together about one-third of the time, and the rest of the time, content-area teachers were in charge and co-teachers were observers, assistants, and even attendance-takers. Teaching partners used only a small number of the co-teaching models available to them, and students with disabilities received very little individual or small-group help from either teacher. The result, say the researchers, was that “for most of the time (86.5%), students were engaged in whole-class or independent work, where opportunities to respond and receive feedback are typically less than when students are participating in small-group or peer-mediated instruction.” 

             “The findings from this study,” the authors conclude, “highlighted the need to develop PD that incorporates explicit guidance for co-teachers in how to increase instances of text reading opportunities with co-occurring literacy instruction, providing specialized roles for both teachers, increase the amount of small-group and peer-mediated instruction, and use co-teaching models that allow students to benefit from specialized support from each teacher.” 

 

“Reading Comprehension and Co-Teaching Practices in Middle School English Language Arts Classrooms” by Jade Wexler, Devin Kearns, Christopher Lemons, Marisa Mitchell, Erin Clancy, Kimberly Davidson, Anne Sinclair, and Yan Wei in Exceptional Children, July 2018 (Vol. 84, #4, p. 384-402), https://bit.ly/2K7Syy2; Wexler is at [email protected]. 

Back to page one

 

 

 

4. A Nevada ELA Team Tries Lesson Study

            In this article in The Learning Professional, author/researcher/consultant Bradley Ermeling says that teacher teamwork in same-grade/same-subject groups is a key factor in effective schools. “One of the biggest challenges with collaborative planning,” he says, “is balancing the level of detail and scope of content that can be discussed meaningfully in a limited amount of time.” Some teams try to take on too much and run out of time; others talk about general instructional ideas and never get into any depth on effective practices and student learning.

A better strategy (widely used in Asian schools) is for teams to choose one lesson and focus discussion on one or two pivotal learning segments: the instructional moments when teachers’ moves bring students to grasp the key learning goal of the lesson. Ermeling describes how a team of English teachers in a Las Vegas high school adopted this approach. In the five years before doing so, the team had been unsuccessful in its weekly planning meetings, frequently overloading lessons with too many ideas and strategies and running out of time before reaching closure. Coached by Ermeling, they followed these steps:

            • Getting the story straight– Teachers established a clear learning goal for a lesson on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness– being able to analyze symbolism in literature – and then thought througha lesson story line to lead students to that outcome. 

• Planning the lesson– Teachers mapped out three parts to the lesson: (a) discussing and analyzing symbolism in a painting by Harmen Steenwyck; (b) discussing and analyzing symbolism in two different posters for the 2009 film The Road(which students had studied earlier in the year); and (c) creating original artistic posters for Heart of Darkness. 

• Finding the light-bulbmoments– Teachers identified the points in the lesson when students should “get it” and then devoted most of their planning time to fine-tuning the lead-up to those points: 

-  What will the teacher say and not say during the pivotal segments?

-  What probing questions will be used?

-  What are some ways students may respond at these moments?

-  What possible misconceptions might students have?

-  How could teachers address them?

-  What should teachers look for as students learn?

The team decided to focus on the first lesson segment, on the theory that looking at the Steenwyck painting would build students’ capacity to interpret and explain literary symbols. Teachers did a trial run of this discussion with imagined teacher-student exchanges. In their next meeting, the team analyzed the hypothetical dialogue and revised their follow-up responses to better facilitate student insights on key symbols and themes, and considered other symbols they might use. Finally, teachers planned the second and third segments of the lesson.

            • Listening up– Teachers chose several students who would be observed closely as the lesson was taught, and then enlisted the principal and an instructional coach to watch the first rollout of the lesson. Each observer zeroed in on a “case study” student and jotted notes on how that student responded to the pivotal moment of the lesson. 

            • Debriefing and reflecting on pivotal moments– Discussing the lesson afterward, teachers noted that about two-thirds of students successfully chose textual evidence to support their interpretation of symbols. But looking at student work samples, the team saw several areas that needed more work. Following a structured agenda, the team asked:

-  What does the evidence from observations and student work suggest about students’ strengths and continuing needs?

-  How did our pivotal instructional segments contribute to this, and what teaching is required to address continuing needs?

-  What did we learn about our design rationale? How would we revise it on the basis of our latest evidence and insights?

-  What insights about teaching and learning did we gain from this lesson that might apply to our general teaching practice?

As the team went through this protocol, teachers saw that the lively discussion of symbolism in the painting had created opportunities for students to verbalize their ideas about symbols, articulate their analysis, and allow further probing of details and explanation. Teachers also concluded that students needed further instruction to take the next step of writing paragraphs to capture that level of thinking and analysis.

            “Over a six-year period,” concludes Ermeling, “research at this school site suggests that teachers who used pivotal segments report increased satisfaction with team planning, increased clarity about what they are teaching, better understanding of how their instructional choices affect student outcomes, and renewed commitment to the ongoing refinement of teaching and learning.” 

 

“Pivotal Moments in Teaching” by Bradley Ermeling in The Learning Professional, June 2018 (Vol. 39, #3, p. 28-32), https://learningforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pivotal-moments-in-teaching.pdf; Ermeling can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

5. Approaching a New School Year with a “Design” Perspective

(Originally titled “Lead Like a Designer”)

            In this article in Education Update, authors Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson list the characteristics of what they call “design-inspired leadership:”

-  User- or student-centered;

-  Recognizes the intelligence in the room regardless of status;

-  Focuses on practices that result in learning;

-  Begins with possibilities;

-  Leads with What if…?

-  Prefers action;

-  Starts with questions;

-  Embraces ambiguity;

-  Comfortable with “messy” learning;

-  Values great questions and experimentation;

-  Has a growth mindset.

They contrast this to traditional leadership, which is leader- or teacher-centered; heavily influenced by organizational hierarchy; focused on “best practices;” answers questions with yes, but, or no; begins with constraints; is slow to act; starts with answers; is fearful of the unknown; prefers things to fit in boxes; takes the safe path; values being right; avoids risk; and has a fixed mindset.

Gallagher and Thordarson suggest five ways that school leaders and teachers can move from traditional to design leadership:

            • Shift from problem solving to problem finding. This means resisting jumping to immediate solutions and instead asking questions. A principal might kick off a beginning-of-the-year staff meeting by asking what colleagues are excited about as they start the year, what priorities they have, and how they see their dreams aligning with the school’s vision.

            • Orchestrate learning experiences that stretch the status quo. For example, replace the traditional back-to-school night by having teachers offer learning activities that get parents collaborating, asking each other questions, and sharing information about their children.

            • Challenge practices that aren’t helpful. Colleagues might be asked to identify a rule or practice that interferes with learning, ask why it exists, and modify it to improve student learning, even if it causes some inconvenience for adults. 

            • Create rapid learning cycles. A bold new idea that seems impossible for the beginning of the school year might be broken into pieces with feedback solicited after each stage.

            • Be a storyteller. “The start of each year is like opening a new book on what learning will look like in your school,” say Gallagher and Thordarson. “If you focus on schedules, rules, and routines, then your students will discover that compliance is the overarching theme of their learning story for the year.” What if the focus were teambuilding to lay a solid foundation of collaboration and communication skills? 

 

“Lead Like a Designer” by Alyssa Gallagher and Kami Thordarson in Education Update, July 2018 (Vol. 60, #7, p 1, 4-5), https://bit.ly/2NwhvoH

Back to page one

 

6. Tutoring Philadelphia Students in Writing

            In this interview with Eric Hoover in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tim Whitaker, a former journalist who founded Mighty Writers to help inner-city youth improve their writing, reflects on his work. Many of the secondary-school students he and his colleagues have worked with over the last decade are great storytellers, have a “razor-sharp sense of humor,” know how to tell a story verbally, “but writing is all new to them.” There’s a lot of catching up to do.

            Whitaker steers away from asking students to do really intimate writing at first, but as they begin to reflect on their experiences, deeply personal narratives surface and the writing shapes students. One young woman suffering from depression wrote about her illness “so clearly, so poignantly, that after she shared it with some other kids, her personality underwent a big change… She was almost proud of the fact that she suffers from this really painful disease, that she could fight it and get on the other side of it.”

            Whitaker agrees with William Zinsser’s maxim, Writing is thinking on paper. “Most people start writing before thinking,” says Whitaker. “They’re just tapping away, and usually what comes out is kind of a mess… Our instructors are taught to get the kids to converse with each other about the topic at hand before beginning to write.” It’s also important to choose topics that stir strong interest and opinions – NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem, interactions with the police, national political leaders.

            “We make it clear that revision is God,” says Whitaker. “That everything they do is a first draft. We never put down texting, but we say, ‘OK,  you want to go to college? You’re going to have to be able to express that on paper, clearly.’ The only way to do that is to do a draft, revise it, and work with somebody so that by the time you submit it, it’s polished. We make no bones about the fact that writing is hard work.” This is especially important when students write their college essays.

 

“‘Writing Is Hard Work, Especially If No One Ever Taught You How:’ An Interview with Tim Whitaker” by Eric Hoover in The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2018 (Vol. LXIV, #38, p. A6-A7), available to subscribers at https://bit.ly/2LxHpfj

Back to page one

 

7. Anxious and Depressed Teens on Devices: Chicken or Egg?

            In this New York Times article, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (Hunter College) says there’s no direct research evidence that smartphones arecausing the recent increase in teens’ anxiety and depression. Rather, heavy smartphone and social media use may be the result of other factors. “Teenagers are struggling with anxiety more than any other problem,” says Dennis-Tiwary, “and perhaps more than ever before. There’s a good chance that it is anxiety that is driving teenagers (and the rest of us) to escape into screens as a way to flee fears.” 

The common thread of anxiety is difficulty coping with uncertainty, and uncertainty is everywhere for today’s teens:

-  Economic – The job outlook for young people is worse than it was for their parents.

-  Factual – The “post-truth” ethos infuses the digital ecosystem and is hard to escape.

-  Self-sufficiency – Overinvolved parents make too many decisions for teens, preventing the development of self-reliance and grit, without which people are at loose ends.

“When we’re anxious, we gravitate toward experiences that dull the present anxious moment,” says Dennis-Tiwary. “Enter mobile devices, the perfect escape into a two-dimensional half-life, one that teenagers can make sense of.” But the net effect is more anxiety from an addictive loop of distraction, quick messages, photos, “news,” and videos.

            It helps to limit screen time, and it’s good that some tech companies are taking steps to make their products less addictive, but the deeper solution, says Dennis-Tiwary, is to address the “public health crisis of anxiety that is causing teenagers too much suffering and driving them to seek relief in the ultimate escape machines.” 

 

“Teens Are Stressed. But Don’t Just Blame Phones” by Tracy Dennis-Tiwary in The New 

York Times, July 15, 2018, https://nyti.ms/2KUP47c; Dennis-Tiwary can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

8. How Effective Is Direct Instruction?

            In this Review of Educational Researcharticle, Jean Stockard and Timothy Wood (University of Oregon), Cristy Coughlin (Safe and Civil Schools), and Caitlin Rasplica Khoury (The Children’s Clinic) report on their meta-analysis of Direct Instruction, a structured, explicit, systematic approach to classroom pedagogy. The researchers studied Direct Instruction(capitals), the model developed by Siegfried Engelmann and his colleagues in the 1960s, not direct instruction(lower case), a broad set of programs with elements of systematic and explicit instruction. 

What were the results? An analysis of 328 studies found strong evidence for the effectiveness of Direct Instruction. The authors note that the Common Core and other curriculum initiatives promote student-led, inquiry-based approaches. “The strong pattern of results presented in this article,” they say, “appearing across all subject matters, student populations, settings, and age levels, should, at the least, imply a need for serious examination and reconsideration of these recommendations. It is clear that students make sense of and interpret the information that they are given – but their learning is enhanced only when the information presented is explicit, logically organized, and clearly sequenced. To do anything less shirks the responsibility of effective instruction.” 

The researchers add that Direct Instruction doesn’t compromise teachers’ creativity and ability to bring their own personalities to their classrooms. “In fact,” they say, “the carefully tested presentations in the programs free teachers from worries about the wording of their examples or the order in which they present ideas and allow them to focus more fully on their students’ responses and ensure their understanding.” For this and other reasons, Direct Instruction “could substantially reduce current achievement disparities between sociodemographic groups.” 

 

“The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research” by Jean Stockard, Timothy Wood, Cristy Coughlin, and Caitlin Rasplica Khoury inReview of Educational Research, August 2018 (Vol. 88, #4, p. 479-507), 

https://bit.ly/2M0w9o5; Stockard can be reached at [email protected]. 

Back to page one

 

9. Children’s Books That Feature Asian Americans

            In this article in Literacy Today, Noreen Naseem Rodriguez (Iowa State University) says that despite the fact that Asian Americans are the fastest growing subgroup in the U.S. (on track to be 10 percent of the population by 2050), they are almost invisible in school curriculums and libraries. Rodriguez, who is Asian American, recalls reading Tikki Tikki Temboand The Five Chinese Brothersin school and being left with a bad taste without really knowing why. Now she sees how the first book (beloved by many teachers and librarians) is far from authentic, shifting a Japanese folktale to China and perpetuating the stereotype that Asians all look alike and speak gibberish. In the second book (published in 1938 and still widely available), Chinese people have bright yellow skin, slanted eyes, and all look alike – not only the quintuplet brothers, but all the other characters as well. 

            What’s needed, says Rodriguez, is curriculum content and children’s books that portray the diversity of Asian-Americans and the rich history they bring to the U.S., as well as their contributions over the centuries. Here are her suggestions (for her full list with annotations, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MOoYg9-k2sDZK_MZYlLGYEDlfTWjW0Cck2OQpAcdAZk/edit):

-  The Braceletby Yoshiko Uchida (Puffin)

-  Cooliesby Yin (Philomel)

-  Dear Miss Breedby Joanne Oppenheim (Scholastic)

-  Dia’s Story Clothby Dia Cha (Lee & Low)

-  A Different Pondby Bao Phi (Capstone)

-  Going Home, Coming Homeby Truong Tran (Children’s Book)

-  Half Spoon of Rice: A Survival Story of the Cambodian Genocideby Icy Smith (East West Discovery)

-  Inside Out and Back Againby Thanhha Lai (HarperCollins)

-  Landedby Milly Lee (Frances Foster)

-  Paper Son: Lee’s Journey to Americaby Helen Foster James and Virginia Shin-Mui Loh (Sleeping Bear)

-  A Path of Starsby Anne Sibley O’Brien (Charlesbridge)

-  Sugarby Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown & Company)

-  Sylvia & Akiby Winifred Conkling (Yearling)

-  Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remixby Jacqueline Briggs Martin and June Jo Lee (Chronicle)

-  Hiromi’s Handsby Lynne Barasch (Lee & Low)

-  Maya Lin: Artist-Architect of Light and Linesby Jeanne Walker Harvey (Henry Holt)

-  Mountain Chef: How One Man Lost His Groceries, Changed His Plans, and Helped Cook Up the National Park Serviceby Annette Bay Pimentel (Charlesbridge)

-  Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Storyby Paula Yoo (Lee & Low)

-  Sixteen Years in Sixty Secondsby Paula Yoo (Lee & Low)

-  Sky High: The True Story of Maggie Geeby Marisa Moss (Tricycle)

-  Bringing Asha Homeby Uma Krishnaswami (Lee & Low) 

-  Double Happinessby Nancy Tupper Ling (Chronicle)

-  Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violinby Chieri Uegaki (Kids Can)

-  Juna’s Jarby Jane Mahk (Lee & Low)

-  The Twins’ Blanketby Hyewon Yum (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

 

“Avoiding the Single Story” by Noreen Naseem Rodriguez in Literacy Today, July/August 2018 (Vol. 36, #1, p. 32-33), no e-link available; Rodriguez is at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

© Copyright 2018 Marshall Memo LLC; anyfeedback to[email protected]

 

About the Marshall Memo