In This Issue:

1. Igniting enthusiasm in middle-school students

2. What an excellent shop class suggests for teaching Common Core ELA

3. The difference between compliant and engaged students

4. Handling difficult conversations

5. Toggling between home dialect and academic English

6. What explains the success of Success Academies in New York City?

7. What principals trust most when doing teacher evaluations

8. Lessons from the Los Angeles iPad initiative

9. Sharing schools’ health and wellness information

10. Short items: (a) Harvard’s Usable Knowledge website; (b) The NBA Math Hoops app

 

Quotes of the Week

 “We can change textbooks, shrink class sizes, publish test scores, and build new buildings, but unless we change what adults do every day inside their classrooms, we cannot expect student outcomes to improve.”

Thomas Kane in a Brookings paper, September 11, 2014,

            http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/09/11-teacher-eval-common-core-kane

 

“When choosing between the observer’s version of events and their own recollection of what happened in class, most teachers (like most humans) will choose the latter.”

Thomas Kane (ibid.)

 

“Never diet without a bathroom scale and a mirror.”

Thomas Kane (ibid.)

 

“Our founding fathers envisioned a society that balanced success and happiness with the common good. We now seem to have lost that balance. And the irony is that the intense focus on happiness doesn’t appear to be making children happier.”

            Richard Weissbourd in “What Is Success?” by Mark Russell in Harvard Ed. Magazine,

Fall 2014 (p. 6-7), http://www.gse.harvard.edu/ed/fall-2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Igniting Enthusiasm in Middle-School Students

(Originally titled “Motivating Young Adolescents”)

            “The era of blaming young adolescents for their lack of motivation is over,” says author/consultant Rick Wormeli in this Educational Leadership article. He starts off with twelve things that de-motivate students:

-   Telling them how important today’s lesson will be in high school and beyond;

-   Teachers who talk the whole class period or speak endlessly when disciplining;

-   Complex assignments that students don’t have the skills to complete and have no clear evaluative criteria;

-   Telling students what they’re probably feeling and thinking;

-   Teachers who see teaching middle school as something to do until a high-school position opens up;

-   Fs, zeroes, and other marks of failure;

-   Spending the day working on weaknesses;

-   Treating middle-schoolers like elementary-school kids;

-   Belittling a student’s strong emotional response to something minor in his or her life;

-   Classes that claim to be relevant to students’ lives but deny them access to technology;

-   Unwavering program fidelity or blind adherence to pacing guides;

-   Sarcasm.

Teaching young adolescents, says Wormeli, is a “dance between middle schoolers’ lingering childlike curiosity and their mounting distractions: peers, sex, risk-taking, pop stars, and keeping track of body parts in time and space.” He suggests seven strategies and says, “Although any one of these motivational elements may not work every time, several in tandem likely will.”

            • Realize that motivation is created with students. “Our goal should be a classroom culture that cultivates curiosity and personal investment,” says Wormeli, “one in which students feel safe to engage in the activity or topic without fear of embarrassment or rejection.”

            • Understand that there’s no such thing as laziness. “If a student appears lazy, there’s always something else going on that we can’t see – or can’t control,” he says. “Humans are hard-wired to do demanding and complex things. Young adolescents are developmentally primed for learning things that are intellectually and physically advanced and for getting excited about their growing expertise and the freedoms that come with competence.” If they’re disengaged, what’s the reason? An exhausting job outside of school? Responsibilities at home? Skill deficits? Fear of looking stupid?

            • Empathize and build trust. “Young adolescents intensely value teachers’ opinions of them,” says Wormeli. “[They] need to trust that teachers won’t humiliate them or let them humiliate themselves.” They must know we have their backs – specifically, what will the teacher do when a student gives a wrong answer in class?

            • Remember where they are. For ideas on what’s developmentally appropriate, Wormeli suggests the Association for Middle Level Education’s list of effective practices at http://bit.ly/ZnlmeH. Wormeli mentions incorporating social interaction in lessons, switching activities every 10-15 minutes, helping students recover from bad decisions and failures, teaching each topic in more than one way, showing enthusiasm for the subject, and offering regular opportunities for students to include their own culture and develop a unique voice.

            • Give descriptive feedback. Middle-school students are constantly asking themselves, Am I normal? How am I doing? Teachers must give them a clear sense of what’s expected academically and clear feedback on where they stand in relation to goals. “Motivational teachers provide many exemplars, formative feedback, and opportunities for students to self-assess,” says Wormeli. It’s also important for students to have a chance to revise and improve their work in response to feedback.

            • Teach the way the mind learns. Young adolescents crave vividness, structure, and patterns, says Wormeli. Prime their brains for each lesson with goals that relate to personal experience, show them a pathway to mastery, and build in links to the arts, social studies, math, foreign languages, and literature. “The key to solid learning,” he says, “is for students to make these connections themselves, not just be told about them.”

            • Tell stories. “Young adolescents are like first-time visitors to an esoteric sculpture museum who don’t understand why everyone’s so impressed with a particular piece of art,” says Wormeli. “Then a museum curator explains the story behind the artist or his technique, and the skeptic is jarred into wide-eyed appreciation and curiosity… Young adolescents are storytellers and story receivers. Narratives not only appeal to their theater of the mind, but they also provide connections among disparate parts.”

 

“Motivating Young Adolescents” by Rick Wormeli in Educational Leadership, September 2014 (Vol. 72, #1, p. 26-31), http://bit.ly/1vSvqd9; Wormeli can be reached at [email protected].

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2. What an Excellent Shop Class Suggests for Teaching Common Core ELA

            In this AMLE Magazine article, Joanne Kelleher, an assistant principal in Long Island, New York, offers a succinct list of the key changes being introduced by the Common Core.

In Math:

-   Favoring depth over breadth;

-   Working toward automaticity of basic functions;

-   Finding the balance between practice and understanding.

In ELA:

-   Resetting the ratio of fiction and nonfiction;

-   Incorporating close readings of complex texts;

-   Including more academic vocabulary in lessons.

During a recent visit to an industrial arts/technology class in her middle school, Kelleher realized that it contained a number of lessons for Common Core ELA implementation:

            • Learning is messy. “In the technology education classroom,” she says, “there’s the cutting, the sanding, the sawing, the drilling, and the finishing. You can count on paint spills, sawdust, and mismeasurements… The ELA CCSS require that students engage in critical thinking: analyzing, interpreting, delineating, assessing, and evaluating. As students grapple with new ideas, they argue, explain, and justify, building support for their ideas from within the text. This idea development can get loud and messy.” It’s messy for teachers too, but in the end, “something wonderful starts taking shape.”

            • Learning is noisy. In the technology classroom, it’s hammers, saws, and power tools. In the ELA classroom, ideas are being expressed, explored, and argued, and sometimes it’s organized chaos – and noisy.

            • Learning is autonomous. “All around the technology classroom, students move about as if on a personal quest,” says Kelleher. They find the right tool and put it to work: “creating the product is an independent, hands-on/minds-on experience. And so it should be in the ELA classroom. Students need to increasingly read and write on their own, with real purpose.”

            • Mistakes happen. Technology education teachers routinely order enough materials to allow for 20-25 percent waste; for them, mistakes are an integral part of the learning process. In ELA classes, says Kelleher, “We should expect mistakes and welcome them, because mistakes are students’ way of showing us what they (and we) still need to learn.”

            • Craftsmanship matters. Skill and artistry are built into every successfully completed project, and the same is true when students read first-rate texts and write their own masterpieces. Kelleher points to Common Core Standard 4 (interpreting words and phrases), Standard 5 (analyzing text structure), and Standard 6 (point of view and purpose). “These elements are the craft,” she concludes. “Craft grabs your attention. Craft leaves you in awe. Craft invites you to imagine that your work can be better.”

 

“Common Core ELA: Lessons from Tech Ed Class” by Joanne Kelleher in AMLE Magazine, September 2014 (Vol. 2, #2, p. 21-24), www.amle.org; Kelleher can be reached at [email protected].

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3. The Difference Between Compliant and Engaged Students

(Originally titled “4 (Secret) Keys to Student Engagement”)

            In this article in Educational Leadership, author/consultants Robyn Jackson and Allison Zmuda draw a distinction between compliant and engaged students. “The compliant, dutiful learner is easy to manage, does what’s expected, and participates when there’s little risk of being wrong,” say Jackson and Zmuda. They follow directions, complete assignments, and get good grades, but their hearts aren’t in it.

Engaged students, on the other hand, follow their own train of thought, focus on the learning, and share their thoughts without being prompted, sometimes without consideration of their classmates. “Straightforward questions bore them, but questions that are personally relevant or that require teasing out ambiguity fascinate them,” say Jackson and Zmuda. “These learners take risks; they’re not afraid to try something new. Engaged learners can be needy. They’re often annoyed by interruptions, they question everything, and they’ll follow an idea even if it takes them outside the parameters of the assignment.”

            “Compliance may make for a smoothly run classroom,” they continue, “but it doesn’t help students expend the effort they need to meet the demands of challenging standards or take what they’ve learned and apply it to their lives.” But how do we get real classroom engagement? Jackson and Zmuda suggest four strategies:

            • Provide clarity. “When you’re in the weeds of daily instruction,” they say, “you may lose sight of the larger purpose. It’s vital you make sure that every assignment, question, and conversation is connected to a clear learning goal.” Ask yourself, what am I asking students to do? How do all these pieces fit together? What’s the point of learning this? How can students track their progress over time? Students should ponder big-picture essential questions about the unit. Rather than just having students memorize various energy sources – nuclear, coal, oil, solar, and wind – get them thinking about a bigger question such as, How can the United States become more energy independent? Then give students clear structures to answer the questions you pose.

            • Offer a relevant context. Jackson and Zmuda describe a teacher’s frustration when she introduces a new unit on perimeter and area and students ask, Why do we need to know this? Why is it so important to be able to do this? and Why will we ever need to know this in life? “Our students need to know that the work they’re being asked to do is relevant and important to them – right now,” say Jackson and Zmuda, and quote a workshop participant saying, “Someday is not a day of the week.”

The challenge is to make curriculum relevant, meaningful, and designed for an audience beyond the teacher. “Once they understand area and perimeter,” they say, “students have a much greater understanding of space, and they can use what they learn to make all kinds of decisions about space – from installing carpet or a pool, to figuring out how many books they can reasonably stuff in their lockers, to determining how many props can comfortably fit on the stage for the spring play.”

            • Create a supportive classroom culture. Students get discouraged and disengaged when their work is criticized and given low grades. Can students access the material, understand the discussion, and meet the challenges you’re giving them? Have likely misconceptions been anticipated, have students been introduced to difficult vocabulary, is there a scaffold for handling new concepts, and is individual support available to help them revise their work when it isn’t up to par?

            • Provide an appropriate level of challenge. Students may be able to complete assignments that can be easily Googled or “Khanified”, but they don’t respect them and there’s little value-added. “We have to train them for the world they’ll inherit,” say Jackson and Zmuda, “and in that world it’s unlikely that employers will pay them to solve a non-problem.” Teachers need to give assignments that ask students to frame ideas, questions, or predictions; to figure out a real problem; and to risk failure to get to the final product. “Offer experiences that enable them to play with ideas; solve complex, real-world problems; and dig deeper” – for example, interviewing a personal hero, figuring out a way to cover themselves so they won’t get poison ivy next summer, and designing headphones that won’t cause long-term hearing problems.

 

“4 (Secret) Keys to Student Engagement” by Robyn Jackson and Allison Zmuda in Educational Leadership, September 2014 (Vol. 72, #1, p. 18-24), http://bit.ly/YMbriS; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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4. Handling Difficult Conversations

            In this article in SmartBlog on Leadership, Mary Jo Asmus says there are lots of ways to rationalize avoiding difficult conversations:

-   The problem will go away if I ignore it.

-   It’s a small thing.

-   I don’t want to make a scene and am concerned about the person’s reaction.

-   I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings.

-   I’m afraid my emotions will get out of hand if I address it.

“[S]imilar to that little light on the dashboard of your car that says, ‘Check engine soon,’ things you don’t take action on can become worse,” says Asmus. “And that’s when you have an even bigger and tougher problem to deal with.” Here are her suggestions:

            • Set an intention for your behavior. Be clear about your goal, express care for the individual, engage in a dialog, and remain calm.

            • Breathe. “Before the conversation begins, take a few moments to breathe deep belly-breaths full of compassion for the person you need to talk to,” Asmus advises, “because your feedback may not be easy for them to hear. Remember that this person is a complex human being and may not be aware of the harm caused.”

            • Let go. You can never be sure why the person is acting in this particular way, so release any assumptions about intent. This opens you up to learning what’s really going on.

            • Be respectfully direct. “Most people will prefer that you don’t beat around the bush,” says Asmus. “Tell them what you’ve observed and the impact it has on you, the team, or the organization. Realize that this is your truth, not the truth. Be open to the idea that there may be more to the story than you expected.”

            • Listen. Don’t feel the need to control the conversation. It may go in unexpected directions. If emotions become intense, take a break.

 

“5 Steps for Having Tough Conversations” by Mary Jo Asmus in SmartBlog on Leadership, September 3, 2014, http://smartblogs.com/leadership/2014/09/03/5-steps-for-having-tough-conversations/

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5. Toggling Between a Home Dialect and Academic English

            In this Education Week article, Sarah Sparks reports on the perennial debate around how schools should deal with students’ home dialects. There are more than two dozen English dialects in the U.S., from Boston Brahmin to New Orleans Y’at, crossing geographic regions, race, and class, and a significant number of children enter school speaking one of them. Fifteen years after the heated debate over “Ebonics” in the Oakland, California schools, studies have shown that the sooner elementary students learn to “code-switch” or toggle between their dialect and academic English, the better they do in school – but it usually takes three or four years to master this.

“The more you used dialect features, the more difficult it was for you to do well…,” said Jan Edwards of the University of Wisconsin/Madison, author of a 2014 study. This is true because dialect-speaking students have difficulty understanding their teachers and school texts – and teachers have trouble understanding those students.

But the approach used is important. Just throwing a lot of English grammar at students and correcting them when they speak in dialect doesn’t work. “Students don’t understand what’s wrong with what they are doing,” says Holly Craig, a University of Michigan professor working on this problem. “It’s what their family at home sounds like, what their community sounds like.” Some experts believe it may be more difficult for a child to make the transition from a dialect to academic English than it is for a student speaking a foreign language to learn English. But the strategies and methods may be similar: developing academic vocabulary, making cultural connections, and helping students recognize underlying similarities and differences.

One key issue is changing some educators’ and parents’ attitudes about dialects. “There’s a thinking that anyone using nonstandard English is operating at a lower level of cognitive skill,” says John Rickford, a linguistics and humanities professor at Stanford University, “but… that’s not true. All languages require very complex thinking – and can provide different angles for instruction.”

Holly Craig and Stephen Schilling have created the ToggleTalk curriculum for kindergarten and first-grade SELs (standard English learners). The program’s 20-minute, three-to-four-times-a-week lessons explicitly teach the skill of how to tell when different types of speech are appropriate. Here are five common dialect issues that ToggleTalk addresses:

-   Plurals: The child often keeps the s in the plural that ends with a vowel sound, but drops it following a consonant sound: Two shoes, but Three ball.

-   Past tense: In a simple past tense, the child uses the ending ’ed only if doing so adds an additional syllable: The boy decided, but The frog jump.

-   Subject-verb agreement: The child drops the s from verbs in sentences that would be singular: The sign say ‘Danger.’

-   Supporting verbs: The child omits any copula, or “being” verbs: I don’t know what she doing.

-   Articles: The child omits articles or uses only “a”: Dog found some frogs.

In each lesson, children read books, role-play, and discuss when to use their home dialect and when to use academic English. “It’s about reframing it for the students,” says Craig. “Standard [English] is associated with education, academics. It’s formal language, and children can pretty quickly learn what’s formal and informal, like clothing for home and church.”

A pilot of the ToggleTalk curriculum in Flint, Michigan produced positive results in students’ awareness of the distinctions between dialects – some asked each other to “use your formal words” in math and other classes outside the program – but no statistically significant gains in word decoding. The program is now being tested in ten districts in five states. “It’s another way to get at the black-white achievement gap,” said Craig, “by focusing on language skills in a positive way, not a negative way.”

 

“Language Program Focuses on Dialects” by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, September 10, 2014 (Vol. 34, #3, p. 1, 14), www.edweek.org

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6. What Explains the Success of Success Academies in New York City?

            In this Education Gadfly article, Paul Bruno takes a close look at what we know and don’t know about the impressive test-score gains of the Success Academy charter schools in New York City under the leadership of Eva Moscowitz. Bruno’s analysis can be used in other situations where school success is under the microscope.

            • Creaming – What we know: The seven longest-established Success Academies have more African-American and Hispanic students than the city as a whole (95.9% versus 68.9%), fewer English learners (6.6% versus 13.6%), and fewer students with special needs (14% versus 17.5%). What we don’t know: The conscientiousness and I.Q. of Success Academy students, the types of special needs, and whether Success Academies are more successful in teaching ELs English and in mainstreaming students with special needs.

            • Attrition – What we know: Success Academy cohorts shrink considerably as students move through the grades – for example, Harlem 1 opened with 73 first graders in 2006-7 and tested only 32 eighth graders in the spring of 2014 – 56 percent attrition. Harlem 4 did somewhat better with 30 percent attrition. However, the annual attrition rate in regular New York City public elementary schools is 10 percent, so Success Academy schools are not unusual. What we don’t know: Which students are leaving Success Academies and why – for example, are students with special needs or discipline problems being pushed out, as some charter opponents claim, and what are the characteristics of the students who replace those who leave?

            • Peer effects – What we don’t know: Whether Success Academies are attracting higher-achieving students, who then have a positive influence on their peers. Researchers disagree on the impact of peer influence, with some contending that instructional methods make the biggest difference. “These mechanisms are not well understood in general and have not been carefully studied at Success Academies in particular,” says Bruno.

            • Test prep – What we don’t know: How Success Academies prepare students for state testing – the degree of narrow test prep activities versus careful alignment with state standards. We also don’t know how Success Academies’ methods compare to those of regular New York City public schools.

            • School culture and instructional methods – What we know: Success Academy schools embrace the “no excuses” approach – more instructional time, strict rules for student behavior, highly selective teacher hiring, ongoing use of assessments, high expectations, and a focus on traditional reading and math skills. Success Academies have also modified the balanced literacy approach in significant ways. What we don’t know: Whether the “no excuses” approach to discipline and academics attracts (and repels) a particular type of family, how Success Academies differ from regular New York City schools, what approach they are using in math, and whether science and history are still emphasized despite the focus on basic skills.

            Bruno says that many other charter schools in New York City [and also some regular public schools] boast that they’re using the same approaches as Success Academies – yet Moscowitz’s schools are doing considerably better. “Given how little we know about Success Academies,” he says, “we should be very cautious about leaping to conclusions – positive or negative – about the factors contributing to their students’ success.”

 

“What Do We Really Know About Eva Moskowitz’s Success” by Paul Bruno in The Education Gadfly, September 10, 2014 (Vol. 14, #37), http://bit.ly/1BtB4mb

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7. What Principals Trust Most When Doing Teacher Evaluations

            In this Education Week article, Denisa Superville reports on a new study from Vanderbilt University showing that principals rely mostly on classroom observations when evaluating teachers. Here’s the percent of principals who rated each data source as “valid to a large extent”:

-   Teacher observation: 84%

-   Student achievement or growth: 56%

-   Teacher surveys: 22%

-   Student surveys: 22%

-   Parent feedback: 14%

Among the barriers to using value-added data as part of teacher evaluation were the timing (data aren’t available until after teachers’ evaluations are finalized), availability for only a few grades, lack of specific feedback on classroom practices, and wariness about validity (the formulae are often not publicly released). As the figures above show, few principals made use of data from surveys in teacher evaluation.

 

“Study: Teacher Data Remain Untapped” by Denisa Superville in Education Week, September 10, 2014 (Vol. 34, #3, p. 1, 12), www.edweek.org; the study is titled “Principal Use of Teacher-Effectiveness Measures for Talent Management Decisions” by Ellen Goldring, Christine Neumerski, Mollie Rubin, Marisa Cannata, Timothy Drake, Jason Grissom, and Patrick Schuermann, available at

http://principaldatause.org/assets/files/presentations/Gates_Convening-Opening_Presentation-201405.pdf

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8. Lessons from the Los Angeles iPad Initiative

            In this Education Week article, Benjamin Herold sums up the lessons that a school board committee and outside experts have drawn from the extremely rocky $30 million iPad initiative in the Los Angeles Unified School District:

• Urgency is no excuse for poor planning. The district rushed the distribution of iPads to students, some of whom quickly figured out how to defeat the filters and gain access to all sorts of inappropriate material on the Internet. “I can certainly understand the moral urgency around equity of access,” said Mark Edwards, superintendent in Mooresville, North Carolina, “but you have to balance that urgency with the necessity of due diligence.”

• Be wary of one-size-fits-all solutions. The district purchased iPads pre-loaded with a single digital curriculum package from Pearson. There’s an emerging consensus that students at different grade levels need different programs and a variety of technology platforms.

• Don’t play favorites with vendors. Some critics believe the bid specifications were narrowly tailored to the iPad and the Pearson curriculum. “A lot of people knock on superintendents’ doors,” said Leslie Wilson of the One-to-One Institute, “because they’re key decision-makers. The kinds of relationships they develop speak to their integrity and ethics, and they have to be careful about making decisions based on the needs of children, not who has the slickest device or the greatest salespeople.” The L.A. superintendent staunchly defended his decisions, but the district is nonetheless reconsidering some aspects of the program.

 

“Hard Lessons Learned in L.A. iPad Initiative” by Benjamin Herold in Education Week, September 10, 2014 (Vol. 34, #3, p. 1, 13), www.edweek.org

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9. Sharing Schools’ Health and Wellness Information

            In this Education Week article, Evie Blad reports that Colorado is one of several states whose school “report cards” tell whether each school offers 30 minutes of daily physical activity, has an on-site nurse, and houses a school-based health center. Oregon recently added chronic absenteeism (how many students miss 10 percent or more of school days for any reason) to its model school report card, arguing that absenteeism can serve as a “proxy indicator” for health and wellness.

And some schools are collecting student scores on the Pacer Test, which measures aerobic fitness in a running exercise, in addition to body-mass index data, to see which non-academic factors are correlated with academic success. (Some privacy advocates have expressed concern about safeguarding confidential student health data.) Michelle Welch, a Nebraska wellness facilitator, would like to include consideration of data from the Gallup Hope Index, which measures students’ perceptions about the future. “It all ties together,” she says. “Our big approach is a whole-child approach. We’re not raising a bunch of test scores, we’re raising a bunch of kids.”

 

“School-Level Report Cards Add Health Metrics” by Evie Blad in Education Week, September 10, 2014 (Vol. 34, #3, p. 1, 14), www.edweek.org

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10. Short Items:

            a. Harvard’s Usable Knowledge website – This site, http://www.gse.harvard.edu/uk, sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, includes research updates by faculty members. Currently there are links to articles and videos on early education, creating caring classroom environments, and Common Core, among others.

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            b. The NBA Math Hoops app – This free app, http://www.nbamathhoops.com/app.php, helps students improve their math skills in the context of professional basketball.

 

“Give Math a Shot” by Rachael Apfel in Harvard Ed. Magazine, Fall 2014 (p. 14)

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