Marshall Memo 618

A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education

January 4, 2016

 

 


In This Issue:

1. Qualities of an effective school leader

2. Practice-embedded educational research

3. Getting better at getting better

4. A sea change in school discipline policies

5. Zero tolerance for abandoning the use of discretion

6. Are traffic-light behavior charts effective?

7. Short items: (a) One teacher’s approach to grading math tests; (b) A history website

 

Quotes of the Week

“The willingness to be thin-skinned at times in order to sense the pulse of the school; the strength to be thick-skinned at times in order not to overreact to criticism.”

            One of John Hanly’s criteria for an effective school leader (see item #1)

 

“Test-based accountability systems create policy incentives to lower test difficulty, generate sometimes irresistible temptations to cheat, and almost universally encourage dedication of time to unproductive test preparation rather than real teaching.”

            Catherine Snow (see item #2)

 

“The point is not just to know what can make things better or worse; it is to develop the know-how necessary to actually make things better.”

            Anthony Bryk (see item #3)

 

“When a child’s behavior commands our attention, we need to ask ourselves, ‘What do I want this student to learn from my response to his/her action?’”

            Heather Bleakley Chang (see item #6)

 

“The idea that a zero-tolerance philosophy based on punishment and exclusion could create effective learning climates has proven to be illusory.”

Russell Skiba and Daniel Losen (see item #4)

 

“I strongly believe that all rules should be followed.”

Richard Curwin (see item #5)

 

“Consequences have the goal of changing future behavior, not punishing the past.”

            Richard Curwin (ibid.)

 

“Fair is not equal. We are never fair when we treat all students the same.”

            Richard Curwin (ibid.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Qualities of An Effective School Leader

            “A teacher affects eternity,” says Adam Rohdie (Greenwich Country Day School) in this article in Independent School paying tribute to his mentor and friend, John Hanly, who was battling Parkinson’s disease. Just before Hanly went into hospice care, Rohdie asked him for a list of the ten most important qualities to look for in a school principal. “He, of course, gave me 14!” says Rohdie. They are:

-   A passion for education, a respect for and love of teachers, and a delight in students;

-   An eye for potential in others – being able to spot a diamond in the rough;

-   The ability to stay cool under pressure;

-   The confidence to say, “I don’t know the answer to the problem that you raise; I’ll have to think about it.”

-   Willingness to share the credit but to shoulder the blame;

-   The ability to motivate and build a team;

-   The ability to inspire trust;

-   Genuine delight in the success of the people who work with you;

-   The discernment to know when to let someone go and when to give that person a second chance;

-   The willingness to be thin-skinned at times in order to sense the pulse of the school; the strength to be thick-skinned at times in order not to overreact to criticism;

-   Solid judgment based on experience, thoughtfulness, personal integrity, courage, and compassion;

-   Engagement in life and all of its complexities, frustrations, and joys;

-   The ability to take the long-term view, to distinguish what is important from what is merely urgent;

-   Discretion, balance, and perspective.

 

“Touching Eternity” by Adam Rohdie in Independent School, Winter 2016 (Vol. 75, #2, p. 12, 14), no e-link available

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2. Practice-Embedded Educational Research

            “Transcending the low status of educational research will require demonstrating its relevance to improvements in practice,” says Catherine Snow (Harvard Graduate School of Education) in this article in Educational Researcher. She believes that the “alarming fecklessness” of K-12 research over the years – “the gulf between the science we do and the science we need to improve educational outcomes” – can be traced to two flaws in the traditional research model: (a) many of the most relevant and potentially helpful areas for research – reading comprehension and classroom management, for example – have not been primary targets for basic scientists; and (b) the assumption “that if the basic science was sound, the application process was simple, requiring only interpretation or translation.” Not so!

            Snow believes that the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), initiated a little over a decade ago, is a promising departure from the past. SERP points the way to practice-embedded educational research that gets scholars working in close partnerships with practitioners in the complicated world of schools; starts with urgent problems of practice while maintaining rigorous methodology; and produces results that will be far more helpful in improving teaching and learning. An example in medical research would be shifting from proving the germ theory of infection to getting hospital personnel to wash their hands before working with patients.

            Such a change in researchers’ emphasis, Snow believes, will also result in spreading the word about solid research findings that “could be authorized today and made tomorrow.” Some examples:

-   Early childhood programs staffed by well-trained professionals with rich language skills have a very positive effect on children’s development.

-   “Test-based accountability systems create policy incentives to lower test difficulty, generate sometimes irresistible temptations to cheat, and almost universally encourage dedication of time to unproductive test preparation rather than real teaching.”

-   When adolescents start school later in the morning, their attendance and receptiveness to learning improve.

-   When teachers plan and work together, there are improvements in practice, professional commitment, and satisfaction.

-   Authentic classroom discussions, even if they are relatively brief, improve student learning and engagement.

-   Typical school-level professional development “is largely a waste of time and money.” PD focused on specific teaching and learning challenges and tied to current curricular efforts (rather than general pedagogical principles) is much more likely to produce results.

Implementing research findings like these may seem daunting, says Snow, “but we should take heart from recalling a few of the ways in which education has improved over the past 150 years:

-   We no longer assume that beating children improves their learning.

-   We no longer assume that anyone who knows how to read can teach reading.

-   We no longer assign any adult who speaks English to teach it as a second language.

-   We are now convinced that punishing children for speaking their native language is both cruel and educationally counterproductive.

-   We recognize the value to students of learning in settings where they encounter a diversity of ethnicities, races, cultures, and religions, all treated with equal respect and honor.”

“Progress on these points,” Snow concludes, “suggests that perhaps we can move forward on making changes that may now seem challenging or even controversial but that in 20 years’ time may appear just as straightforward and obvious as these now do.”

 

“Rigor and Realism: Doing Educational Science in the Real World” by Catherine Snow in Educational Researcher, December 2015 (Vol. 44, #9, p. 460-466), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1IMrXVG; Snow can be reached at [email protected].

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3. Getting Better At Getting Better

            In this article in Educational Researcher, Anthony Bryk (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) tees off on solutionitis – the tendency to attack educational problems without thinking through and understanding their true nature. Several examples:

-   Breaking large dysfunctional high schools into several small schools without anticipating how devilishly difficult it would be;

-   Hiring instructional coaches without orchestrating the conditions that would allow them to work effectively with teachers;

-   Telling principals to be instructional leaders without cutting down on other duties that consume their time;

-   Introducing value-added teacher evaluation without a full understanding of the statistical properties and limits of those methods.

“In each instance,” says Bryk, “there was a real problem to solve, a nugget of a good idea, and in most cases, an academic research base that lent some credibility to the reform. Educators, however, typically did not know how to execute on these ideas… We become disappointed when promised positive results do not readily emerge, and then we just move on to the next new idea.”

            Bryk is also critical of three broader school-improvement strategies: performance management, which (he says) sets measurable goals but isn’t helpful with the “how to;” evidence-based practice, which is excruciatingly slow from ideas to execution; and professional learning communities, which depend too heavily on the knowledge and sophistication of local practitioners and don’t have a clear methodology for scaling up.

A better way, says Bryk, is building practice-based evidence within networked communities. Implemented well, this approach:

-   Focuses on the specific questions that practicing educators confront;

-   Embraces their learning-by-doing orientation;

-   Makes improvements in valued student outcomes the central objective;

-   Integrates existing social science research and methodology;

-   Sees educators as active inquirers bound together by norms and structures similar to those in a scientific community.

But to be successful, networked improvement communities must come to grips with two key features of K-12 schools – their extraordinary complexity and the inevitable variability of human performance:

            • System complexity – Compared to the simple structure and aspirations of the one-room schoolhouse, today’s K-12 institutions are dauntingly complex: ambitious curriculum goals, accountability for standardized test results, a huge variety of physical and online classroom materials, new technology devices every few years, heterogeneous classrooms, cultural diversity, an increasing emphasis on non-cognitive learning, individual education plans, learning specialists, external service agencies, tutoring, summer school, teacher-evaluation rubrics, instructional coaches, and more. When these various components are poorly aligned, students fall through the cracks as they move from classroom to classroom and school to school, says Bryk. “Communication breakdowns can also occur as students and teachers interact with counselors, social workers, family members, and others both inside and outside school.”

It’s hard enough for educators to bring coherence to all these moving parts, and yet there’s a tendency in schools, as there is in the field of medicine, to think we can improve outcomes by adding more tools, more training, and more technology – or by imposing top-down mandates to achieve some measure of uniformity. Physician Atul Gawande has this cautionary note about his own specialty: “In surgery, you couldn’t have people who are more specialized, and you couldn’t have people who are better trained. And yet we still see unconscionable levels of death and disability that could be avoided.” With K-12 schooling, says Bryk, “we do need a stronger knowledge base, better professional education programs, and more-effective use of technology to advance student learning. Yet, as in medicine, developments along these lines taken alone are not likely to redress the unsatisfactory student outcomes we now see.”

To improve results, says Bryk, we need first to understand the system and work to get its multiple components working more productively together under a variety of conditions. The Baltimore Public Schools’ recent effort to improve teacher evaluation provides an instructive example. District leaders were about to go down the conventional path – form a committee, develop a new procedure, train principals, and implement – but Jarrod Bolte, then the director of teacher development, thought it would be a good idea to begin by gathering some relevant data. He and his colleagues asked a small group of new teachers to keep track of who provided them with advice and feedback over a two-week time period. Some teachers received almost no feedback, while others had 10 or more professionals trying to help, among them the:

-   Principal

-   Department head

-   District mentor

-   Site-based mentor

-   Teach for America mentor

-   Executive director

-   Academic content liaison

-   Special education liaison

-   Alternative certification provider

-   Other consultants and central-office helpers.

All of these supports had been introduced with good intentions, but no one had stepped back and looked at things with a system perspective – or with the individual teacher in mind.

“So Baltimore had two quite different problems to solve,” says Bryk. “For some teachers, the issue was too much feedback from too many different people – feedback that was uncoordinated, often incoherent, and sometimes in outright conflict… Elsewhere, the problem was not enough feedback. The challenge was how to assure that every new teacher received regular advice that might actually help him or her improve… Surely the last thing one would want to do in this case is add still another disconnected process on top of all of this.”

            • Variability in performance – The complexity of K-12 schools naturally produces a wide range of teacher and administrator performance and student learning – something resembling a bell-shaped curve. The goal of an effective improvement process is to understand what’s going on at either end of the distribution and use the insights to bend the curve to the right, getting rid of the least-effective practices and scaling up what’s working best.

Here’s an example from a large-scale field trial of Reading Recovery (a short-term tutorial program for first-graders who are having difficulty learning to read). On average, the effect size in the trial was an impressive 0.70, but some schools had exceptionally positive results – 1.2 and greater – and some had negative results – less than 0.2. “Understanding the contours of this variation and the likely factors that contribute to it is key to achieving better outcomes more reliably at scale,” says Bryk. Does the program work better for some students than for others? What part does the choice, preparation, and skill of teachers play? How about the program’s integration with each school’s core literacy program? Are operational factors involved, with some higher-achieving students getting tutored and some deserving students not getting the full treatment? If so, why? And what about the “positive deviants” – the schools that get really large learning gains? What specifically are they doing that could be replicated elsewhere?

This learning-by-doing approach is strikingly different from randomized field trials, the gold standard of traditional research. A more-pragmatic approach, says Bryk, uses “iterative testing to guide the development, revision, and continual fine-tuning of new tools, processes, work roles, and relationships. It also recognizes that we often do not know whether any change that we introduce will actually lead to improvement or if it might produce unintended negative consequences as well. Such ambiguity is intrinsic to complex adaptive systems.”

This approach, he continues, “guides us toward starting small, learning quickly, and thereby minimizing the likelihood of harm in case we have it wrong. Change ideas are continuously refined based on evidence from what actually happens as the ideas are gradually taken up across increasingly diverse settings. Interestingly, we learn the most when a change fails to produce expected results or creates unintended consequences. This forces deeper thinking about the system we are trying to improve (‘We must be missing something important here – what might it be?’).” These cycles of inquiry are a highly effective way that schools can learn to improve. In short, he says, “improvement research calls for data not for purposes of ranking individuals or organizations but for learning about how instructional practices and organizational processes actually work.” The data are not for “a distant authority seeking to hold them accountable or a researcher studying them… but to inform efforts to improve.”

Bryk’s dream is a series of networked learning communities, each seeking to understand a problematic area and generate workable solutions. “Envision national networks of teachers and schools engaged with researchers and program developers around select high-leverage educational problems,” he says. Some worthwhile targets: All new teachers successfully educate their students. All children read proficiently by third grade. All students are career and college ready by the end of high school. All children achieve a valued occupational certification, a two-year degree, or a four-year diploma.

“Participants in such networks join together around a shared working theory,” Bryk continues. “They deploy common measures, inquiry methods, and communication mechanisms to anchor collective problem solving. They establish processes for how individuals carry out the work and establish evidentiary standards for warranting claims about effectiveness… These networks would aim to inform educators as to what is more likely to work where, for whom, and under what conditions. Moreover, as educators used this knowledge, the knowledge itself would evolve and be further refined through its application… If educators joined together in structured improvement networks, our field would have extraordinary capacities to innovate, test, and rapidly spread effective practices.”

Here is Bryk’s summary of previous research practices and a radically new paradigm for developing practice-based evidence:

-   Previous approach: Problems are urgent so we need to implement fast and scale wide.

-   New paradigm: Learn fast and implement well in a variety of conditions and contexts.

-   Previous approach: Teacher-proof through scripted curriculum or accept that every classroom and school is unique (thereby accepting wide variation as inevitable).

-   New paradigm: Refine quality processes, tools, work rules, and relationships to support complex work in different situations.

-   Previous approach: Researchers are “knowers” and school people are “doers” who should implement research findings.

-   New paradigm: All players are improvers.

-   Previous approach: Generate lists of what works.

-   New paradigm: Figure out how to make it work, with replicability as the new gold standard.

-   Previous approach: Focus on estimation of effect size – the average distance in outcomes between the intervention group and the control group.

-   New paradigm: Focus on sources of variability in performance and use the insights to fuel continuous tests of change.

-   Previous approach: Teachers are individual craftspeople and their autonomy must be respected.

-   New paradigm: Working together we can accomplish much more.

“The point,” concludes Bryk, “is not just to know what can make things better or worse; it is to develop the know-how necessary to actually make things better.”

 

“Accelerating How We Learn to Improve” by Anthony Bryk in Educational Researcher, December 2015 (Vol. 44, #9, p. 467-477), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1Pb7mHr; Bryk can be reached at [email protected].

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4. A Sea Change in School Discipline Policies

            “The idea that a zero-tolerance philosophy based on punishment and exclusion could create effective learning climates has proven to be illusory,” say Russell Skiba (Indiana University) and Daniel Losen (University of California/Los Angeles) in this article in American Educator. Recent research has overwhelmingly discredited the “get tough” approach to school discipline: it isn’t effective in reducing individual misbehavior or improving school safety; frequently-suspended students are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior and get involved with the juvenile justice system; and there are often negative academic consequences for disciplined students, including lower grades and increased incidence of dropping out. In addition, the logical-sounding and politically popular zero tolerance policies have produced the most negative social and academic outcomes for students from historically disadvantaged groups. The widespread investment in security – video cameras, metal detectors, officers – has not improved most students’ sense of safety in school.

Here are the troubling statistics on the percentage of U.S. secondary students who received at least one out-of-school suspension during the 2011-12 school year (the national average was 10.1%):

-   African-American – 23.2%

-   Students with disabilities – 18.1%

-   American Indian/Alaska Native – 11.9%

-   English language learners – 11%

-   Latino – 10.8%

-   Hawaiian/Pacific Islander – 7.3%

-   White – 6.7%

-   Asian – 2.5%

Studies have revealed racial bias in suspensions and other disciplinary consequences, with African-American students more likely to receive harsher consequences for the same offenses than their white peers. Recent research also shows that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students are at increased risk of expulsion, experiencing a hostile school climate, and being stopped by the police and arrested.

The unintended consequences of harsh discipline policies have registered with many policymakers, educators, and parents, and new approaches are being implemented in many parts of the U.S. There are four types of promising alternative strategies, some of which are being implemented simultaneously:

Relationship building – Interventions that foster positive teacher-student interactions have been shown to reduce the use of suspensions and expulsions, especially for black students. Restorative practices that build relationships and repair harm after conflicts have also shown positive results (a 47 percent drop in suspension rates in the Denver Public Schools), as has the MyTeachingPartner professional development program.

Social-emotional learning – These programs aim to build students’ skills in recognizing and managing their emotions, appreciating others’ perspectives, establishing positive goals, making responsible decisions, and handling interpersonal situations effectively. When the Cleveland Metropolitan School District implemented an SEL program, it recorded a 50 percent drop in negative behavioral incidents.

Structural interventions – Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a widely-used program that focuses on staff training to prevent discipline problems. It’s had some success, although Skiba and Losen note that it needs to be supplemented with additional components to bring about the best outcomes for African-American students. For PBIS to be effective, there needs to be staff buy-in, administrative support, and the time and money to implement it consistently schoolwide. Other structural interventions include improving school climate, rewriting codes of conduct, and being systematic in responding to threats of violence.

Classroom content and climate – Another study addressing racial disparities in discipline had several specific recommendations: teachers communicating high expectations and fairness for all students; creating a bias-free and respectful environment; ensuring academic rigor; and engaging in culturally relevant and responsive teaching.

These approaches all depend on professional development, administrative support, collaboration with community agencies, well-formulated alternative strategies, increased presence of mental health and instructional support personnel in schools, working with parents to promote less-punitive approaches at home, and ongoing collection and analysis of disaggregated discipline data.

 

“From Reaction to Prevention: Turning the Page on School Discipline” by Russell Skiba and Daniel Losen in American Educator, Winter 2015-16 (Vol. 39, #4, p. 4-11, 44),

http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/ae_winter2015skiba_losen.pdf

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5. Zero Tolerance for Abandoning the Use of Discretion

            “I strongly believe that all rules should be followed,” says Richard Curwin in this Edutopia article. That’s his positive spin on the idea of zero tolerance – that no rule violation will be tolerated. “Unfortunately,” says Curwin, “those with social agendas have perverted this concept in both school and law… Schools set up zero tolerance with only one mandatory consequence because they want a foolproof system – even a fool can do it.”

            Curwin believes that classroom management needs to start by establishing values – that is, principles, attitudes, and the reason for rules. Some examples:

-   This school will always be safe for everyone.

-   Everyone who enters the school doors will learn.

“All rules are related to and developed from values,” says Curwin. “They are written in terms of observable behavior, and thus can be enforced – for example:

-   Weapons will not be allowed in this school.

-   All schoolwork must be done by the person whose name appears on the paper.”

A continuum of consequences follows each rule, allowing the teacher (or possibly the student) to choose the most appropriate follow-up. “Having discretion to choose the most effective consequence is essential,” says Curwin, “because, as every teacher knows, different children require different remedies… Consequences have the goal of changing future behavior, not punishing the past.” They might include contacting a parent, restorative justice, planning a new course of action, learning new behavior skills, or helping others.

            Zero tolerance as it’s been practiced in many schools “focuses only on turning consequences into mandatory punishments,” says Curwin. “It completely ignores values and rules… This injustice can be rectified with common sense and an accurate definition of terms.” Consider the case of Zach, a high-school student who had lost his mother and had to deal one morning with his abusive, alcoholic father waving a gun and threatening to kill Zach and his younger brother. When Dad passed out, Zach picked up the gun, drove his brother to school, and turned the gun over to the high-school principal. Under zero tolerance, Zach was expelled for bringing a gun to school. Here’s how Curwin suggests it should have been handled:

-   Consider the value. In this case, the value is safety for all. Zach honored the value by immediately giving the gun to the principal. However, he did bring it to school and it could have discharged accidentally, so there needs to be a consequence.

-   Consider the rule. “Did Zach break the rule?” asks Curwin. “Yes, he did. Thus a consequence, with consideration of the value, should be implemented.”

-   Consider the consequence. Expulsion is disproportionately harsh. Zach should be guided to choose a consequence from all the options available. In this case, it might include understanding that he should go directly to the police under similar circumstances.

Two objections are often raised to allowing schools some flexibility with consequences. First, it might encourage students to think they can get off the hook with a good excuse. “Yet draconian consequences are often ignored or forgiven for certain students,” says Curwin, “including athletes, high-achieving students, or those from good homes or the right racial background. A range of consequences allows the school to pick the best one to fit the circumstances without ignoring the rule violation.”

            The second objection is that discretion leads to unfairness. However, says Curwin, “Fair is not equal. We are never fair when we treat all students the same. No one would go to a doctor who gives all his patients aspirin regardless of their condition because he wants to be fair.” The school’s goal must be to pick the consequence that has the best chance of working.

 

“The Real Meaning of Zero Tolerance” by Richard Curwin in Edutopia, September 29, 2015,

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/real-meaning-of-zero-tolerance-richard-curwin

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6. Are Traffic-Light Behavior Charts Effective?

            In this Education Week Teacher article, former teacher Heather Bleakley Chang (now at Temple University) raises concerns about the commonly used discipline system that has

misbehaving students move their name, usually on a clip or clothespin, from Green to Yellow or Red. When students in Chang’s primary-grade classes broke a rule and were told to move their name, she remembers the most common responses:

-   A sad face – Did this mean the student was remorseful and would quickly shape up?

-   A full meltdown – Did this show that the student cared about the infraction?

“Reflecting on my teaching experience and observations in classrooms as a supervisor and coach,” says Chang, “I’ve concluded that teachers use behavior charts to exert power over children they perceive as disobedient. In moments of frustration, teachers resort to the behavior chart to shame and threaten students into submission. It sounds harsh, but that’s what I was doing when using a behavior chart. I expected that students’ embarrassment would motivate them to stop the disruptive behaviors. I wanted students to consider that if their end-of-day color was red, their parents would be mad, and that would motivate them to get themselves together.”

            Upon reflection, Chang has come to believe that there are three problems with the traffic-light approach to classroom management:

            • There are significant differences in how students react to being asked to move their names – some care a lot, others brush it off. The variables are students’ level of sensitivity, how much they care about their teacher’s and peers’ opinions, and what their parents are likely to do if they get a negative report. Teachers have very little control over these factors.

            • The Green-Yellow-Red behavior system teaches students to focus on the chart rather than their actions. The ratings, controlled by the teacher, become the ultimate judge of behavior, sorting students according to their level of obedience. The problem is that public shaming doesn’t reliably improve behavior.

            • When students are downgraded on the chart, they’re not led to think through why the problem behavior occurred – the precipitating events or emotions that caused them to break a rule or expectation.

            “When a child’s behavior commands our attention,” says Chang, “we need to ask ourselves, ‘What do I want this student to learn from my response to his/her action?’” She believes there are better ways to teach students how and why to respect their peers, teachers, classrooms, and themselves and become productive members of classroom communities. “When children act out,” she continues, “teachers should talk to them about their feelings and actions, and coach them through difficult situations. With teacher guidance, children learn how to manage their emotions more appropriately. In addition, talking to students about their feelings and actions builds student-teacher trust, and provides teachers with valuable information about each child’s needs.”

 

“Three Problems With Traffic-Light Behavior Charts” by Heather Bleakley Chang in Education Week Teacher, December 28, 2015, http://bit.ly/1RZrJ0p

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7. Short Items:

            a. One teacher’s approach to grading math tests – This video from The Teaching Channel shows California middle-school teacher Leah Alcala demonstrating her new method of grading tests. She highlights each student’s errors, doesn’t give a grade, and has students look over their tests and talk through each mistake with classmates and with her. Only later can students check their grade online. They can re-take the test, using a different version. Alcala says this approach gets students focused on the mathematics rather than grades. One goal, she says, is to “normalize the process of making mistakes.”

 

“Math Test Grading Tips” by Leah Alcala on The Teaching Channel, January 2016,

https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/math-test-grading-tips

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            b. A history website – Chronas http://chronas.org is a new site (in beta stage) with text, graphics, and interactive maps orchestrated by Dietman Aumann. It looks promising.

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About the Marshall Memo

 


Mission and focus:

This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 44 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”

 

To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 64 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).

 

Subscriptions:

Individual subscriptions are $50 for a year. Rates decline steeply for multiple readers within the same organization. See the website for these rates and how to pay by check, credit card, or purchase order.

 

Website:

If you go to http://www.marshallmemo.com you will find detailed information on:

• How to subscribe or renew

• A detailed rationale for the Marshall Memo

• Publications (with a count of articles from each)

• Article selection criteria

• Topics (with a count of articles from each)

• Headlines for all issues

• Reader opinions (with results of an annual survey)

• About Kim Marshall (including links to articles)

• A free sample issue

 

Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:

• The current issue (in Word or PDF)

• All back issues (also in Word and PDF)

• A database of all articles to date, searchable

    by topic, title, author, source, level, etc.

• A collection of “classic” articles from all 11 years

Core list of publications covered

Those read this week are underlined.

American Educational Research Journal

American Educator

American Journal of Education

American School Board Journal

AMLE Magazine

ASCA School Counselor

ASCD SmartBrief/Public Education NewsBlast

Better: Evidence-Based Education

Center for Performance Assessment Newsletter

District Administration

Ed. Magazine

Education Digest

Education Gadfly

Education Next

Education Week

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Educational Horizons

Educational Leadership

Educational Researcher
Edutopia

Elementary School Journal

Essential Teacher

Go Teach

Harvard Business Review

Harvard Educational Review

Independent School

Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)

Journal of Staff Development

Kappa Delta Pi Record

Knowledge Quest

Literacy Today

Middle School Journal

Peabody Journal of Education

Perspectives

Phi Delta Kappan

Principal

Principal Leadership

Principal’s Research Review

Reading Research Quarterly

Responsive Classroom Newsletter

Rethinking Schools

Review of Educational Research

School Administrator

School Library Journal

Teacher

Teachers College Record

Teaching Children Mathematics

Teaching Exceptional Children/Exceptional Children

The Atlantic

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The District Management Journal

The Journal of the Learning Sciences

The Language Educator

The Learning Principal/Learning System/Tools for Schools

The New York Times

The New Yorker

The Reading Teacher

Theory Into Practice

Time Magazine

Wharton Leadership Digest