In This Issue:

1. A tribute to Rick DuFour

2. Who’s doing the work here?

3. Using student achievement to evaluate teachers

4. Predictive analytics as a tool for early intervention

5. Doing right by African-American students

6. Strategies for boosting the achievement of African-American students

7. Guided reading done right

8. Using primary sources to teach U.S. history

9. Short item: Educator guide on refugee and immigrant children

 

Quotes of the Week

“Developing individual teachers’ knowledge and skills is important but not sufficient. The challenge facing schools is expanding the ability of a team of teachers to achieve goals for all their students and developing the ability of the entire faculty to move the school toward its vision.”

            Rick DuFour (see item #1)

 

“We rarely understand what people mean until we ask them. Moreover, they may not know themselves what they mean until they’re asked. This is why, on subjects of any depth and complexity, the dialogue, rather than the sermon, is the model for intellectual engagement. The sermon may preach humility, but only the dialogue puts it into practice.”

            Lyell Asher in “Your Students Crave Moral Simplicity. Resist.” in The Chronicle of

Higher Education, February 10, 2017 (Vol. LXIII, #23, p. B3-B5), no free e-link

 

 “Many middle-level teachers spend hours providing feedback to students that is only sometimes put to good use. Feedback is meaningless if it does nothing to improve student learning. Teachers know this, but are often exhausted by the endless cycle of teacher-driven assessment and feedback.”

            Rachael Williams (see item #2)

 

 “If I had to distill our job as elementary teachers to a few fundamentals, at the heart would be, ‘Make sure our students love to read.’”

            Justin Minkel (see item #7)

 

“The barrage of indignities and microaggresions that black children suffer daily can take an exhausting toll on their development of a positive self-identity, their ability to focus, their willingness to listen, their readiness to trust, their emotional well-being, and their motivation to excel.”

Vernita Mayfield (see item #4)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A Tribute to Rick DuFour

            We lost a great educator last week: Rick DuFour died on February 8^th after a long battle with lung cancer. I’ve admired his work over the years and have summarized no fewer than 31 of his articles in the Memo. Here are some quotes from those articles, all of which you can access in the archive:

 

Teaching

(Reflecting on himself as a teacher in the 1970s) “I had a sense of smug self-satisfaction because I believed that my challenging assessments, my willingness to devote hours to grading papers, and my commitment to returning tests promptly was proof positive that I was a great teacher… It never even occurred to me to review the results with colleagues, to use this evidence of student learning to inform and improve my teaching, or to provide students with additional time and support to master the content.”  (Memo 610)

 

“If those within the school believe that the causes of student learning lie outside their spheres of influence – in the genes or social background of their students – school improvement efforts will be viewed as futile, if not ridiculous.”  (with Timothy Berkey, in Memo 146)

 

“[T]here’s no such thing as a universally effective teaching strategy; the effectiveness of any given strategy can only be determined by evidence of its effect on student learning.”  

(with Mike Mattos, in Memo 480)

 

“Regardless of how ‘good’ a faculty may consider its school, for the parent whose child does not learn, the school has failed the child – 100 percent.”  (Memo 318)

 

“If every question is answered by the quickest or loudest students or by volunteers, other students can and will stop engaging.”  (Memo 361)

 

“We will not let you off the hook. We will see to it that you do what is necessary to be successful. We won’t place you in a less rigorous curriculum, nor will we lower our standards for this course or grade level. We will give you the support, time, and structure to help you be successful, but we will not lower the bar.”  (with Rebecca DuFour, in Memo 372)

 

“Teaching is the profession that creates all other professions.”  (Memo 636)

 

Professional Learning Communities

“Despite compelling evidence indicating that working collaboratively represents best practice, teachers in many schools continue to work in isolation… Educators must stop…hoarding their ideas, materials, and strategies and begin to work together to meet the needs of all students.” (Memo 38)

 

“[T]he best staff development happens in the workplace rather than in a workshop.”

(Memo 45)

 

“Developing individual teachers’ knowledge and skills is important but not sufficient. The challenge facing schools is expanding the ability of a team of teachers to achieve goals for all their students and developing the ability of the entire faculty to move the school toward its vision.”  (Memo 45)

 

“Educators rename their traditional faculty or department meetings as PLC meetings, engage in book studies that result in no action, or devote collaborative time to topics that have no effect on student achievement – all in the name of the PLC process.”  (with Doug Reeves, in Memo 628)

 

“Providing educators with structures and time to support collaboration will not improve schools unless that time is focused on the right work.”  (Memo 375)

 

“One of the more pointless debates going on in many school districts is who will decide how teams will use their collaborative time… Both sides should be able to agree that if teachers do not use the collaboration time for the purpose intended (that is, if they don’t co-labor on the right work), there will be no gains in student achievement.”  (with Rebecca DuFour, in Memo 359)

 

“Collaboration by invitation never works.”  (Memo 159)

 

“We will know a new era has dawned in education when educators engaged in the deepest and most meaningful learning won’t even recognize they are participating in professional development… Professional development as an event or workshop will give way to a process of continuous learning. The generic professional development presented to an entire faculty a few designated days each year will give way to ‘just-in-time’ learning specific to the issues confronting a team.”  (with Rebecca DuFour, in Memo 364)

 

“PLCs operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous, job-embedded learning for educators. The fundamental structure of a PLC is collaborative teams of educators who work interdependently to achieve a common goal, for which members are mutually accountable.”  (with Rebecca DuFour, in Memo 356)

 

“In the final analysis, the ultimate test of effective assessment is simple: does it provide teachers and students with the information they need to ensure that all students learn at high levels.”  (with Rick Stiggins, in Memo 287)

 

Leadership

“Schools that resort to the ‘if only’ strategy spend their time looking out the window for the solutions to their problems. Schools that commit to the can-do strategy spend their time looking in the mirror. Which way are you looking?”  (Memo 43)

 

“One of the most essential responsibilities of leadership is clarity – clarity regarding the fundamental purpose of the organization, the future it must create to better fulfill that purpose, the most high-leverage strategies for creating that future, the indicators of progress it will monitor, and the specific ways each member of the organization can contribute both to its long-term purpose and short-term goals.”  (Memo 211)

 

“A school committed to learning will bring teachers together to make certain they provide a consistent answer to the question, ‘Learn what?’”  (with Rebecca DuFour, Damon Lopez, and Anthony Muhammad, in Memo 140)

 

“Rallying support for a realistic, credible, attractive vision of what the school might become is part of the daily work of principals.”  (with Timothy Berkey, in Memo 146)

 

“Most importantly, principals must not mistake congeniality with collegiality. They must strive to create a culture in which teachers talk about teaching and learning; observe each other teach; plan, design, research, and evaluate the curriculum; and teach each other what they have learned about their craft.”  (with Timothy Berkey, in Memo 146)

 

“In too many schools and districts, decisions are based upon preferences and perceptions rather than evidence of effectiveness. The question that has driven initiatives has been ‘Do we like it?’ rather than ‘Does it help more students learn at higher levels?’”  (with Rebecca DuFour, Memo 190)

 

“Strategic planning isn’t doing, training isn’t doing, writing mission statements isn’t doing, talking isn’t doing, even making a decision isn’t doing unless it results in action.”  (Memo 211)

 

Teacher evaluation

“The odds are far greater that a tenured teacher would be struck by lightning during his or her lifetime than found to be an ineffective teacher.”  (with Robert Marzano, in Memo 281)

 

“In truth, most schools play a form of educational lottery with children.”  (Memo 56)

 

“The way we’re going to improve schools is not by supervising and evaluating individual teachers into better performance; it’s by creating a culture in which teams of teachers are helping one another get better.”  (Memo 636)

 

“Research has consistently established that merit pay does not improve student outcomes or change teacher behavior in a positive way, that it may actually contribute to declines in student learning, and that it’s typically abandoned within a few years of implementation.”  (with Mike Mattos, in Memo 480)

 

“[T]he core mission of formal education is not simply to ensure that students are taught but to ensure that they learn.”  (Memo 38)

 

Tracking, retention, and hard work

“Research has made it abundantly clear that putting the least capable and least motivated students together in a class with a curriculum that is less challenging and moves at a slower pace increases the achievement gap and is detrimental to students.”  (Memo 361)

 

“The research is overwhelmingly against retention, but facts are merely an annoyance to those with strongly held opinions.”  (Memo 628, with Doug Reeves)

 

“Education is not a zero-sum game. Helping one group of students learn does not take learning away from other students.”  (Memo 369)

 

“Even the grandest design eventually translates into hard work.”  (Memo 38)

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2. Who’s Doing the Work Here?

            “Many middle-level teachers spend hours providing feedback to students that is only sometimes put to good use,” says Australian school leader Rachael Williams in this article in AMLE Magazine. “Feedback is meaningless if it does nothing to improve student learning. Teachers know this, but are often exhausted by the endless cycle of teacher-driven assessment and feedback. It can be difficult to step back and change what is a widely accepted system of summative grading and commenting.”

            The key, says Williams, is getting away from the notion of the teacher as “the omniscient critic whose job it is to point out mistakes” and getting students to take a more active role in the feedback process. Here are her suggestions:

            • Establish different expectations. Students usually start the year or semester with the expectation, explicitly or implicitly, that the teacher will give them grades and comments when their work is done. What about starting with a very different expectation – that students will learn more if they are actively involved in the feedback process?

            • Clarify learning outcomes. This means student-friendly learning targets and every student understanding what’s involved in successfully meeting those goals, including perusing exemplars of student work from previous years. Williams suggests having students do an initial self-assessment of what they know and don’t know about the learning target (perhaps with red, yellow, and green “traffic light” stickers).

            • Give students the tools to provide effective feedback. Students should have frequent opportunities to self-assess throughout the learning process, getting ongoing feedback on how they are progressing toward the learning goal. Peer feedback can be effective if students are tutored in going beyond vague praise or unhelpful detail. John Hattie suggests giving students prompts like these: What worked well was…, Even better if…, I noticed… , I wondered…

It’s especially helpful if students focus feedback to classmates on a specific question – for example, if the learning target is presenting a balanced argument, looking for the effective presentation of both sides of the argument.

            • Give less feedback. Williams says that when teachers do too much of the feedback work, it signals that the teacher, not the student, is responsible for learning – and perhaps that the adult doesn’t believe the student is capable of doing the work. “A more balanced approach,” she says, “is to ask students to self-assess before meeting with the teacher… Students bring evidence of their learning and self-assessment to the discussion, allowing them to view themselves as valued and effective agents in their learning.” It also gives the teacher an opportunity to offer students feedback on their feedback: Does this help you understand what you’ve mastered? Do you know what to do next?

 

“Feedback for Students, by Students” by Rachael Williams in AMLE Magazine, February 2017

(Vol. 5, #1, p. 8-10), http://bit.ly/2l7rJl3; Williams is at [email protected].

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3. Using Student Achievement to Evaluate Teachers

            “Despite the tremendous political capital, money, and time that educators, state

officials, and policymakers have spent on reforming teacher-evaluation systems,” say Kate Walsh, Nithya Joseph, Kelli Lakis, and Sam Lubell in this National Council on Teacher Quality white paper, “states have been running in place with no evidence of real change with regard to the distribution of final evaluation ratings.” As was the case when the widely read TNTP “Widget Effect” study was released in 2009, virtually all teachers are still being rated proficient or above – despite a concerted policy effort to include student achievement as a significant factor in teachers’ evaluations. Common sense tells us, says Walsh, Joseph, Lakis, and Lubell, that it’s “highly unlikely” that virtually all teachers are effective or highly effective when student achievement is so uneven. “If districts label all of their teachers effective, then an evaluation becomes essentially pointless…”

How did this happen? The explanation, say the authors, is that almost all states’ policies allow teachers whose students didn’t make adequate progress to still get satisfactory or even exemplary performance ratings. “Since the main purposes of rating teachers,” they continue, “are to inform efforts to support and develop all teachers, to recognize and reward effective ones, and to intervene where teachers with performance issues continually fail to improve, such a low bar for rating teachers’ performance is counterproductive.” The authors’ position is that no teacher should be able to earn a passing summative evaluation unless his or her students make satisfactory learning gains.

            Who was responsible for the current situation? Walsh, Joseph, Lakis, and Lubell did a thorough analysis of each state’s policies and point an accusing finger at state education agencies – while scratching their heads about the motive. “In states adopting new evaluation laws over the past several years,” they say, “lawmakers declared that by amending evaluations to include objective measures of student learning, evaluations would become a tool to more meaningfully assess teacher performance. But this goal was lost when state educational agencies drafted regulations and guidance that minimized the role of student growth in final evaluation ratings. What remains unknown is why state educational agencies put forth regulations and guidance that would allow teachers to be rated effective without meeting their student growth goals, or even if they knew the implications of their decisions. Regardless, what is known is that in all but a few states, the influence of the student learning component on summative evaluation ratings was minimized before these systems were ever implemented.”

            [It certainly sounds logical that student achievement should be a significant part of teachers’ evaluations, which is why the Obama administration’s Race to the Top legislation and most states moved in that direction. But in the last few years, most assessment experts have raised serious concerns about the validity and reliability of using test scores for high-stakes evaluations of individual teachers. And when teacher-developed assessments have been used in non-tested grades and subjects, there’s evidence of widespread gaming of the system by teachers who are concerned, quite naturally, about high-stakes use of the data in their evaluations.

So maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to blame state education agencies for creating such porous regulations. The problem, rather, lies with a well-intentioned but fatally flawed approach to evaluating teachers. It’s now clear that there isn’t a fair and accurate way to include student achievement in individual teachers’ evaluations. But there are ways, used by a number of successful schools, to get teacher teams working together to measure their students’ beginning- and end-of-year achievement and collaborating during each year to get their students achieving at high levels. Their collective value-add can be noted in individual teachers’ evaluations in a way that rewards collective effort without high stakes.

The keys elements are: (a) valid, school-based measures of student learning such as Fountas-Pinnell reading levels, six-trait writing rubrics, performance assessments, and portfolios; (b) a focus on students’ growth during the school year; (c) teachers’ collective responsibility for student learning using frequent formative assessments; (d) regular classroom visits by supervisors and instructional coaches to monitor and support the process; and (e) keeping the stakes at the medium level, so everyone takes the process seriously but there are no incentives to game the system.  K.M.]

 

“Running in Place: How New Teacher Evaluations Fail to Live Up to Promises” by Kate Walsh, Nithya Joseph, Kelli Lakis, and Sam Lubell, a National Council on Teacher Quality white paper, January 2017, http://www.nctq.org/dmsStage/Final_Evaluation_Paper

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4. Predictive Analytics As a Tool for Early Intervention

            In this New York Times article, Joseph Treaster (University of Miami) reports that administrators at Georgia State’s school of nursing analyzed a decade of student records and were surprised to find that a low grade in the introductory mathematics course was highly predictive of students dropping out of the school: only 10 percent of students who got a C in this math course graduated, compared with 80 percent who got at least a B+ or better. “Algebra and statistics, it seems, were providing an essential foundation for later classes in biology, microbiology, physiology, and pharmacology,” says Treaster. The data gave Georgia State educators the information they needed to intervene early and prevent student failure.

            Similarly, data analysts at Civitas Learning found that students who got less than an A or B in a foundational course in their major were much less likely to graduate; if they weren’t successful with the conceptual building blocks, things did not go well down the road. And the University of Arizona found that solid grades in English composition were crucial to future grades.

            Before predictive analytics, many of these mediocre or low grades went unnoticed, says Treaster. Academic advisors were looking at grade-point averages and not zeroing in on the warning signs of “predictor” courses that were disproportionately important to future success. “Such insights may revolutionize the way student advising works,” he says. Georgia State, for example, more than doubled its advising staff, reaching the national standard of one advisor for 300 students (it used to be one for 750 students).

Of course, predictive analytics can be used to push out at-risk students, as happened when the president of St. Mary’s University in Maryland said the university should “drown the bunnies” who struggled. But Treaster reports that most universities are using predictor course grades, and other data on students’ academic and non-academic progress, to orchestrate strategic support to help them succeed. Georgia State has already brought about significant improvement in its four-year graduation rate by effective follow-up on student data.

            [In K-12 schools, what are the predictor subjects and courses that give early warning of future problems? Are schools using data to provide early intervention and support?  K.M.]

 

“Grades That Foretell Your Future” by Joseph Treaster in The New York Times Education Life, February 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/education/edlife/will-you-graduate-ask-big-data.html?_r=0

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5. Doing Right by African-American Students

            In this Kappan article, Vernita Mayfield (Leadervation Learning) recalls what the principal said to her after her rambunctious 11-year-old son was once again removed from his classroom, this time for crawling on the floor: “Your son needs to return to the school in his neighborhood. He is a troublemaker. He’ll likely just end up in jail anyway.” African-American children, says Mayfield, bear “the weight of negative perceptions and expectations” in several ways: expected criminality, assumed intellectual mediocrity if not inferiority, and not belonging. “The gravity of these weights cannot be overstated,” she says. “But educators can be aware of what’s confronting black students and measure their own responses.” Her suggestions for an “emotional action plan” for schools:

• Don’t rely on anecdotal exceptions. Yes, some African-Americans have escaped harsh experiences, but the vast majority have not.

            • Realize that black students’ burdens are worse than those experienced by other students. “The barrage of indignities and microaggressions that black children suffer daily can take an exhausting toll on their development of a positive self-identity, their ability to focus, their willingness to listen, their readiness to trust, their emotional well-being, and their motivation to excel,” says Mayfield.

            • Empathize. “It is painful for a child to understand why they are refused respect even when they have complied with everything society requires them to do to earn it,” she says.

            • Vision statements and packaged programs are not enough. “The values, beliefs, and perceptions that educators bring to their work lie at the core of creating equitable systems for black children,” she says, and those need to be addressed.

            • Educate the staff on implicit bias, as difficult as that will be. “Too often,” says Mayfield, “professional development in culturally responsive teaching looks like campfire bonding at Camp-Everybody-Get-Along.” It takes much more than a one-shot workshop to change attitudes and practices. “Integrate a common language of culturally responsive practices and expectations into every professional meeting. Foster a culture of mutual caring and trust – an environment where there is accountability for actions, expectation for progress, and support for change.”

            • Look carefully at discipline data by race. Look for patterns within and across classrooms, grades, and schoolwide before deciding on a plan of action.

            • Observe one another’s classrooms with a critical eye. Ask questions like, Who answered questions during the lesson and who didn’t? Whose hands were recognized and whose were not? Which students are leaders and which are not? Who is placed in honors and advanced classes? How are expectations for student behavior toward each other taught, practiced, and reinforced? Follow up by using the observations to decide on an agenda for change, one step at a time.

            • Every day, provide encouragement and support. “Applaud their efforts as well as their accomplishments,” says Mayfield. “Help them set manageable goals and clear paths for achieving them. Examine how you welcome students to school and create a sense of belonging.”

 

“The Burden of Inequity – and What Schools Can Do About It” by Vernita Mayfield in Phi Delta Kappan, February 2017 (Vol.98, #5, p. 8-11), www.kappanmagazine.org; Mayfield can be reached at [email protected].

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6. Strategies for Boosting the Achievement of African-American Students

            In this Kappan article, Derek Mitchell, Jesse Hinueber, and Brian Edwards (Partners in School Innovation) say it’s unwise for schools to try to be colorblind. “Although the impulse is understandable and the sentiment is admirable,” they say, “…[w]e cannot avoid being affected by racial currents in society, whether we acknowledge them or not… Schools that do achieve strong results for black students address racial dynamics carefully yet directly, empower students to bring their whole selves to school, and teach in ways that leverage students’ experience and cultures.” Here are the details of what these schools do:

            • Direct attention, strategies, and resources to black student achievement. This includes looking at multiple indicators (grades, discipline data, graduation rates) while treating students’ race and culture as central to their identity – as assets to build on. For example, the Oakland, California schools have seen positive results from the Manhood Development Program, which focuses on the contributions of Africans and African Americans from ancient times to the present, emphasizes careers and civic engagement, brings in peer mentors, and features role models in school assemblies.

            • Foster adult learning about race, culture, class, and power. “Teachers of all races can successfully serve black students,” say Mitchell, Hinueber, and Edwards, “and professional development can accelerate the process. School leaders play an important part by providing time and support for professional learning, modeling an assets-based approach toward students and staff, and demonstrating profound respect for students and families.” Ongoing PD topics should include historical school experiences of black students, implicit bias, teacher expectations, courageous conversations, discussion protocols, and key aspects of culturally responsive instruction. One particularly important point: teachers need to give honest and helpful feedback to students, not fall into the common trap of overpraising black students in an effort to boost their self-esteem. The most successful teachers are “warm-demanders.”

            • Build strong relationships between educators and black students. Effective schools “don’t search for a silver-bullet instructional strategy,” say the authors, “but, instead, understand that trusting relationships are essential to creating a thriving academic community.” This means building rapport with students and their families (home visits are very helpful), allowing more student and family voice in parent conferences, and building a firm alliance with students focused on achievement. Teachers might think of the curriculum as mirroring students’ backgrounds, providing windows to expose students to other cultures, and building bridges that connect the two. This kind of curriculum goes beyond superficial items like food, dress, and music, focusing on “deep culture” – how kinship and fairness are defined.

            • Foster non-cognitive skills and student agency. This includes giving students a sense of belonging (I am part of this academic community), value (This work is important to me), growth mindset (With effort, my skills will keep on improving), and self-efficacy (I can do this). One particularly effective gap-closing strategy is having students reflect on and write about the principles that guide their lives.

 

“Looking Race in the Face” by Derek Mitchell, Jesse Hinueber, and Brian Edwards in Phi Delta Kappan, February 2017 (Vol. 98, #5, p. 24-29), www.kappanmagazine.org; Mitchell can be reached at [email protected].

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7. Guided Reading Done Right

            “If I had to distill our job as elementary teachers to a few fundamentals,” says Arkansas teacher Justin Minkel in this Education Week article, “at the heart would be, ‘Make sure our students love to read’… Let’s make sure we don’t sabotage that pleasure for the young readers in our care.” Minkel outlines five essentials he tries to embed in his grade 2-3 classroom:

            • Give kids real books. Not decodable texts (That bad rat sat on a black mat. Smack that bad rat!) or photocopied packets. Even commercial readers produced by textbook companies are inadequate, he believes. Kids need high-quality children’s books in their hands and, if the school can afford it, students should be able to take books home to build their own libraries. E-books are also good, taking advantage of Michelle Obama’s Open eBooks initiative http://openebooks.net and apps like Epic https://www.getepic.com, which provides audiobooks for children.

            • Eschew busywork. Studies show that filling out low-level worksheets, copying vocabulary words, and drilling letter sounds are not a good use of precious classroom time, says Minkel: “Children need to think while they read, so it’s important to have them predict, infer, make connections, and ask questions.” During guided reading and all-class discussions, he suggests modeling the kind of pondering that adults do as they read and helping students infer “between the lines” content, then having students talk with a partner and/or write brief responses. Students should be immersed in good reading during guided reading, in centers, through headphones, and during independent reading time.

            • Make it a conversation. Minkel is not a fan of the sing-song teacher voice, beginning every question with, “Boys and girls…”, and talking to a group of five students the way one would speak to the whole class. “I usually read aloud at least part of a book while the kids follow along in order to model fluency, strategies for figuring out tricky words, and the mental work involved in predictions, connections, and inferences,” he says. “But we spend a lot of time just talking about the story or topic we’re reading about… Their eyes light up and they blurt out connections, facts they know about the topic, sudden epiphanies, or questions that had never occurred to them before… A conversation is fundamentally different from a lecture, and it’s a huge reason that guided reading is worth the considerable prep time and management it takes to keep four or five groups engaged at once.”

            • Don’t rush guided reading. Minkel believes it’s a mistake to try to work with all five groups during the reading block. “Make time for a meaningful session, even if that means you don’t meet with every group every day,” he says. “I meet with my lowest group of readers four or five times a week, while I only check in with my highest group once or twice each week.” Minkel has found that 20 minutes is a good amount of time for in-depth reading and discussion with each group.

            • Teach students to work independently. Every day Minkel has his students take a guided reading pledge: “I promise to use all my time to read, write, and think; to speak in a 12-inch whisper [so only a person 12 inches away can hear], and to let Mr. Minkel work with his group.” Students self-assess after each round on how they’ve done.

            “As adults,” Minkel concludes, “we read for pleasure or purpose. We make inferences, connections, and predictions, visualize what the author describes, ask questions, and apply what we have read to our lives and our world. We also laugh, wonder, and feel powerful emotions. We combine dozens of mental processes in reading a single page – and we very rarely write all that mental work down. Teachers need to make sure students get plenty of time to experience the joy of simply reading a great book, free from the annoyance of an assigned task or constant interruptions.”

 

“Guided Reading: How to Make Kids Hate (or Love) to Read” by Justin Minkel in Education Week, January 31, 2017, http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2017/01/31/guided-reading-how-to-make-kids-hate.html

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8. Using Primary Sources to Teach U.S. History

            In this article in AMLE Magazine, Sean Robertson, Vanessa Scanfeld, and Vincent Dotoli (Harlem Academy, New York) and Chris Cunningham (King School, Connecticut) describe how they have thrown out history textbooks and used primary sources in their place. What’s wrong with textbooks? The biggest problem is superficial coverage that doesn’t engage students in meaningful questioning or the kind of thinking that makes learning stick. “Primary source analysis is a central tool in developing students’ confidence when faced with challenging texts,” say Robertson, Scanfeld, Cunningham, and Dotoli, “and is increasingly recognized as a fundamental component for college and career readiness.”

            Harlem Academy has been using this approach since 2010, having students decode

primary texts by reading them aloud in class, highlighters in hand, and when a student says, “Ding!” stopping to define an unfamiliar word. Here’s their procedure:

-   Read the document carefully, defining unfamiliar vocabulary.

-   Re-read the document and identify the main idea.

-   Write an attribution sentence that includes the author, title, year, and main idea.

-   Select 5-10 key words or phrases that best support the main idea.

-   Follow the attribution sentence with a full paragraph summary integrating all the key words and phrases and then write a concluding sentence.

Students also develop empathy by putting themselves in the shoes of historical players. “As students learn that history is driven by basic human motivations, desires, and fears,” say Robertson and colleagues, “they come to understand the role of individuals in defining our nation’s path and their potential to effect change.”

            Here are some of the online sources Harlem Academy has used to gather primary source material:

-   The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, a searchable database of vetted lesson and unit plans and more than 60,000 primary sources: https://www.gilderlehrman.org

-   The Avalon Project (Yale Law School) has hundreds of primary sources on U.S. history: http://avalon.law.yale.edu

-   Georgetown’s September 11^th Sourcebooks has hundreds of documents on 9/11 and other national security issues: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/sept11/

-   The Stanford History Education Group’s Reading Like a Historian curriculum has 71 document-based lesson plans in 11 units: https://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh

-   The World Digital Library has a database of more than 7,000 primary sources searchable by date, location, and theme: https://www.wdl.org/en/

 

“Throw Out Your History Textbook: A Case for Primary Source Analysis” by Sean Robertson, Vanessa Scanfeld, Chris Cunningham, and Vincent Dotoli in AMLE Magazine, February 2017 (Vol. 5, #1, p. 25-27), http://bit.ly/2kCJoO7; Robertson is at [email protected].

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9. Short Item:

            Educator guide on immigrant and refugee children – This article in Teaching Tolerance has facts about undocumented students, frequently asked questions about immigration raids, and options for K-12 educators: http://bit.ly/2kvbEpl

 

“Immigrant and Refugee Children: A Guide for Educators and School Support Staff” from Teaching Tolerance, Spring 2017 (#55)

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