In This Issue:

1. Focusing on student learning during classroom observations

2. Institutional “architecture” that fosters effective teaching and learning

3. The critical importance of a coherent K-12 curriculum sequence

4. The best use of primary source documents in history classes

5. What does real student engagement look like?

6. Tween and teen graphic novels about mental health

7. Short items: (a) A new K-12 research website

 

Quotes of the Week

“Students  who look busy, engaged, or compliant can fool both teachers and observers into believing that learning is occurring. A neat notebook, a lively group discussion, or students nodding along – these are all proxies. They look good but don’t prove that students have understood or can apply knowledge.”

            Michael McDowell (see item #1)

 

“When students say, ‘This is boring,’ parents and educators should query whether the student is truly bored or has been tasked with wading through a difficult section of text… Our cultural values right now seem bent on avoiding boredom at all costs, which almost certainly means sacrificing difficulty.” 

            Liz Cohen in “Reading’s Thin Line Between Difficult and Boring” in Education Next,

            January 28, 2026

 

“Leadership practices that center evaluation and judgment inadvertently create conditions that make learning less likely; they increase self-protection, reduce openness, and narrow the range of instructional risks teachers are willing to take.”

            Isobel Stevenson (see item #2)

 

“Creating psychological safety does not mean avoiding challenge or lowering expectations; it means deliberately reducing the role of judgment in learning spaces so that teachers can surface uncertainty, examine their practice honestly, and engage in improvement without having to defend their professional work.”

            Isobel Stevenson (ibid.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Focusing on Student Learning During Classroom Observations

            In this Edutopia article, veteran educator/author Michael McDowell compares two ways a supervisor or instructional coach might observe what’s going on in a classroom:

            • Outside-in – The observer takes notes on the teacher’s actions – explaining concepts, asking questions, calling on students to check for understanding, managing student behavior, handling transitions – and scores those actions on an evaluation rubric.

            • Inside-out – The observer looks over students’ shoulders to see if they understand what’s being taught based on what they write or the diagrams they draw; the observer also asks students questions to check their level of understanding. 

            McDowell says the first approach often gives teachers superficial and off-target feedback. “Students who look busy, engaged, or compliant can fool both teachers and observers into believing that learning is occurring,” he says. “A neat notebook, a lively group discussion, or students nodding along – these are all proxies. They look good but don’t prove that students have understood or can apply knowledge.” 

            These proxies are time-honored cultural expectations of instruction that teachers, students, and supervisors unconsciously carry in their heads. Following the conventional outside-in approach, classroom observers who take notes at the back of the classroom run the risk of missing the most important thing: are students making sense of what’s being taught? “Unless observers intentionally look past surface signals,” says McDowell, “they risk reinforcing rituals instead of disrupting them.” 

The second approach solves this problem, he says, providing much more helpful information to affirm what’s working and fine-tune instruction when necessary. Administrators and instructional coaches can take three steps to be better observers and have more-productive interactions with teachers afterward:

            • Rethink the purpose of observations. Rather than trying to describe teacher actions and give rubric ratings after infrequent, longer visits, McDowell suggests making short, frequent observations focused on what’s getting through to kids, “revealing patterns of learning and identifying actions that impact student learning.”

            • Collect evidence of learning. “Observers should focus on what students write, say, and do,” says McDowell, by walking around the classroom looking at the notes and artifacts of a few students and, when the teacher isn’t speaking to the whole class, asking those students curiosity-based questions on their work. Through students’ eyes, observers are seeing the tasks, structures, and resources the teacher is orchestrating and what students are experiencing and extracting.

            • Follow up with the teacher. The observer shares preliminary notes with the teacher and, within 24 hours, has a face-to-face meeting to discuss and interpret the evidence of student learning. “The observer doesn’t tell the teacher what they did wrong,” says McDowell. “The atmosphere is clinical and collaborative, akin to two doctors looking at an X-ray. Because the notes focus on student output rather than teacher moves, the natural defensiveness of being watched evaporates.” The meeting concludes with “one small, high-leverage shift” – perhaps a follow-up check for understanding or possible ways to explore student thinking the next day. 

            The cost of continuing to use superficial, evaluative outside-in classroom observations is high, concludes McDowell. “Students are left with misconceptions, and schools mistake motion for progress. The inside-out observation method offers a path forward. By starting with the student experience, we can transform observations from rituals into engines of growth.”

            [This approach has great potential, but I’m concerned about one detail. McDowell says that observers should send notes to the teacher via e-mail or a shared document before meeting – for example, Seven out of 24 students wrote the formula correctly; three students could explain why the formula works.

This seemingly objective information carries an implicit criticism – Only seven students in the class correctly could write the formula! Only three students could explain the formula!– and is likely to make the teacher defensive. I believe it’s best to hold off on feedback – even if it seems “low-inference” – until the face-to-face meeting, when the teacher and observer can look together at the observation data, talk about other factors the observer might not be aware of, and decide on an actionable next step.  K.M.]

 

“Flipping the Lens on Classroom Observations with the ‘Inside-Out’ Method” by Michael McDowell in Edutopia, January 28, 2026

 

Back to page one

 

2. Institutional “Architecture” that Fosters Effective Teaching and Learning

            In this Coaching Letter, consultant/author Isobel Stevenson (Partners for Educational Leadership) lists some reactions teachers sometimes have to new central-office initiatives:

-   I don’t have time for this.

-   Is this just another thing we have to do?

-   My kids aren’t ready for this. 

-   I tried that before but it didn’t work.

-   This might work in theory, but our context is different.

-   We’re already doing this.

-   We tried this a few years ago and it fizzled out.

-   This feels like it’s undermining my professional autonomy and creativity.

-   Am I going to get dinged for this if I try it and it doesn’t go well?

-   Is this going to be another walkthrough “look for”?

Recalling these reactions got Stevenson thinking about practice architecture – the structures and conditions that undergird the work of front-line educators. “What people can do in practice is prefigured by the architecture of the situation they’re in,” she says. “People make choices according to what they know how to do, what is sustainable over time (because heroes burn out pretty quickly), what they think is valued, what they think they might be ‘dinged’ for (which is code for some kind of risk or judgment).”

She continues: “Teachers don’t fail to enact equitable, ambitious instruction because they lack virtue; they are operating inside architectures that make some moves easy, some moves costly, and some unthinkable… If we want different teaching, different learning, and more-equitable outcomes, then we have to stop asking whether people willchange and start asking what must change in the system so that they can.” 

            What does a school system’s practice architecture look like in practice, and what role does it play in delivering high-quality, equitable instruction? Stevenson describes three aspects:

            • Expectations – what teachers are asked to accomplish and how. This includes shared definitions of rigor, struggle, support, and success. “In districts where equitable instruction is possible,” she says, “there is a shared way of talking about students, learning, and teaching that rejects deficit explanations and centers opportunity to learn, task quality, and instructional support as causal mechanisms. Struggle is named as evidence of thinking, not incapacity; rigor is defined in terms of cognitive demand rather than pacing or coverage; differentiation is understood as responsive teaching during students’ engagement with shared, grade-level tasks, rather than pre-emptive simplification.”

            • Details – the nitty-gritty conditions that shape what teachers can actually do, including schedules, learning tasks, curriculum materials, pacing guides, and the physical and organizational structure of the school. Ideally, says Stevenson, these conditions “make ambitious instruction feasible rather than heroic. Teachers have regular, protected time to plan, study tasks, examine student work, and learn from one another; they have access to grade-level, cognitively demanding tasks so that ambitious instruction is the default rather than an act of individual invention; and they work within schedules and pacing expectations that prioritize depth of understanding over coverage. Classroom tools and routines – such as discussion structures, representations, and formative assessment practices – are treated as instructional supports rather than compliance mechanisms.” 

            • Accountability – who gets to makes instructional decisions, who answers to whom, and what happens when instruction doesn’t immediately “work.” Ideally, says Stevenson, “authority over instructional improvement is not concentrated solely at the top but is distributed across roles in deliberate ways: teachers are positioned as partners rather than enforcers, and leaders are responsible for creating the conditions, and removing the barriers, so that learning can occur. Norms make it safe for teachers to surface uncertainty, examine their practice publicly, and take instructional risks without fear of blame or punishment. Accountability is defined toward learning and improvement rather than surveillance, with clear distinctions between spaces for growth and spaces for evaluation.”

            Stevenson goes on to share three concerns stemming from her consulting work with schools. First, she’s noticed that some well-intentioned, hard-working teachers have a mental model of being “maximally helpful” to their students:

-   Answering questions and explaining things to avoid student confusion;

-   Premature scaffolding;

-   Differentiating task demand.

“While this ensures that students are maximally successful in the short term,” she says, “(they get the assignment done quicker, better, and with less friction), it doesn’t do them any favors in the long run, because the cognitive demand of the task is reduced and therefore opportunity to learn is constrained and therefore students are likely to learn less over time.” 

            To counteract this tendency, says Stevenson, the practice architecture of a district or school must convey “that the job of teachers is to maintain cognitive demand, not to be maximally helpful.” That expectation needs to be conveyed in how principals and other instructional support staff talk about teaching in workshops, team meetings, and other conversations about teaching and learning.

            Second, Stevenson is concerned that school and district leaders aren’t paying enough attention to the material conditions needed for highly effective teaching. She and her colleagues hear from teachers all the time about:

-   Schedules that don’t work; 

-   Multiple interruptions during instructional time; 

-   Teacher collaboration not baked into the schedule;

-   Teacher contracts that actively get in the way of collaboration time; 

-   No easy access to high-quality tasks, which are essential for effective lessons.

“I know very well that districts don’t have limitless resources,” says Stevenson, “but I also know that we are not necessarily talking about huge amounts of money, but coordination, organization, and prioritization.”

            Third, Stevenson is concerned about teachers being evaluated by administrators who lack expertise in the teacher’s subject area. This problem, she believes, stems from “deeply ingrained and largely unquestioned assumptions about authority, expertise, and judgment… a widely accepted mental model of leadership in which positional authority is treated as a proxy for instructional judgment.”

Research consistently shows, says Stevenson, that teachers being judged by clueless supervisors is a “weak lever for change, particularly when it is coupled with power over evaluation or employment… People reliably become defensive when they experience threats to their competence, identity, or standing. And judgment (especially when delivered by someone with formal authority) is one of the most reliable ways to trigger those defenses… Leadership practices that center evaluation and judgment inadvertently create conditions that make learning less likely; they increase self-protection, reduce openness, and narrow the range of instructional risks teachers are willing to take.”

Stevenson’s conclusion: “Creating psychological safety does not mean avoiding challenge or lowering expectations; it means deliberately reducing the role of judgment in learning spaces so that teachers can surface uncertainty, examine their practice honestly, and engage in improvement without having to defend their professional work. When leaders shift from being judges of practice to designers of the conditions under which practice improves, they fundamentally alter the social-political architecture of the system – and, in doing so, change the practice architecture for teaching and the improvement of teaching.”

 

“Coaching Letter #225” by Isobel Stevenson, January 28, 2026; Stevenson can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

3. The Critical Importance of a Coherent K-12 Curriculum Sequence

            In this article in The Learning Dispatch, Carl Hendrick (Academica University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam) says he finds the phrase teaching and learning vague and unhelpful. He prefers instructional design, which covers three key areas:

-   Curriculum – what we teach;

-   Instruction – how we teach it;

-   Assessment – how we know if students have learned it.

“The extent to which these three elements are aligned,” says Hendrick, “largely determines whether learning occurs at all.” If the curriculum introduces ideas in an arbitrary sequence, students are asked to build knowledge without foundations. If instruction assumes prior knowledge the curriculum hasn’t provided, learners are stranded. If assessments test skills that weren’t taught, students’ efforts are meaningless and the feedback is useless. In an unaligned classroom, even the most motivated student will fail. 

            The middle portion of instructional design – instruction – can be the weakest of the three, says Hendrick – a set of fun, engaging, but disconnected activities from Pinterest that fail to move knowledge along a meaningful continuum. “You cannot teach well what has been poorly selected or badly sequenced,” he says. “You cannot Growth Mindset your way through a poorly designed system any more than you can climb a staircase with missing steps.” 

Retrieval, a potentially powerful method of solidifying knowledge and skills, is of little help when the bigger picture hasn’t been established. The key, says Hendrick, is to “identify what matters, sequence it sensibly, teach it explicitly, then, and only then, retrieve it strategically. Skip the prior steps and you are simply asking students to rehearse confusion.” 

Of course students can’t take in the whole curriculum all in once; that overloads their cognitive capacity. In a well-designed sequence, students master chunks before combining them into a larger structure. The romantic notion of having students learn by tackling authentic, complex, real-world problems seldom works, says Hendrick, because kids haven’t mastered the sub-component skills and knowledge. “The task is not merely difficult,” he says; “it is architecturally hostile to the way learning accumulates. The student who misses a crucial early step does not simply have a gap; they lack the stable subassembly upon which everything else was meant to rest.” 

With early reading, for example, “systematic instruction builds stable subassemblies: letter-sound correspondence becomes automatic, freeing attention for blending; blending becomes automatic, freeing attention for word recognition; word recognition becomes automatic, freeing attention for meaning. Each level of the hierarchy stabilizes before the next is built.” 

How does this apply to artificial intelligence? AI tools are touted for being “human-like,” but Hendrick doesn’t think that’s the right goal. Human learning is highly inefficient, he says: “It is slow, wasteful, and indifferent to individual failure. It operates through blind variation and selective retention, a process that took hundreds of thousands of years to produce language and basic tool use. The feedback is harsh, the signal-to-noise ratio is poor, and progress is purchased at extraordinary cost. From an instructional point of view, it is almost maximally inefficient.” 

“Schools,” Hendrick continues, “exist precisely because this is an unacceptable model for education. They are artificial systems designed to bypass the evolutionary bottleneck, to compress centuries of accumulated  knowledge into sequences that can be learned in years rather than lifetimes… The artificial classroom is not a deviation from how learning ought to happen; it is a deliberate correction to how learning happens when left to the vagaries of nature.”

Many educational AI systems are suboptimal, says Hendrick, not because they are artificial but because they aren’t artificial enough. They should be designed around and correct for humans’ natural learning weaknesses:

-   Limited working memory;

-   Trial and error;

-   Wandering and vulnerability to distraction;

-   The tendency to take the path of least resistance, to satisfice rather than persist.

“A genuinely intelligent learning system,” he says, “would not ask how humans learn when left to their own devices. It would ask how learning can be made faster, safer, and more reliable under real cognitive constraints.” 

            This is not an argument against effort or high expectations, says Hendrick. “It is an argument that effort and expectations are themselves shaped by the architecture within which they operate. A student who struggles with a well-designed sequence is developing genuine resilience. A student who struggles with a chaotic sequence is learning that struggle is pointless. The difference is not in the student… it is in the surface they are traversing.” 

            Hendrick shares a analogy from a 1969 book by Herbert Simon. An ant is making its way across a wind-swept beach. It might seem like the ant has a sophisticated internal navigation system as it makes its way through an immensely complex pathway of twists, zigzags, and detours, buffeted by the wind. But this is incorrect, says Hendrick. “The ant has a simple goal (get home) and simple rules (go around the pebble, climb the dunelet), and the complexity of its behavior is merely a reflection of the complexity of the environment it must navigate.”

            Students making their way through K-12 schools are like the ant, says Hendrick. “We exhort it to try harder, to believe in itself, to develop a growth mindset. We send it to courses about resilience. We put up posters about famous ants who overcame adversity. All the while, the beach remains as it was, windswept, cluttered, and indifferent to the ant’s good intentions. Simon’s ant does not need motivation; it needs a different surface. And if we want to understand why students succeed or fail, we would do well to spend less time examining their internal states and more time examining the representations we have placed before them. Behavior does not emerge from willpower alone. It takes the shape of the environment we build. The problem is rarely the ant. The problem is almost always the beach.”

 

“In Praise of Artificial Learning” by Carl Hendrick in The Learning Dispatch, January 16, 2026

Back to page one

 

4. The Best Use of Primary Source Documents in History Classes

            In this American Enterprise Institute article, history teachers/authors Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman say that when consultants visited one of their Massachusetts high schools several years ago, one of the rubric criteria for a good social studies lesson was daily use of primary source documents. Bassett and Shiffman disagree. “Overloading kids with primary sources,” they say, “has become a common social studies pedagogy problem. It’s too much, too fast, and with too little context.” 

            The logic behind this approach to evaluating history classes is that (a) historians work with primary sources, (b) we want students to think like historians, so (c) students should as well. “The mistake here,” say Bassett and Shiffman, “is that historians are adult experts at ‘doing history,’ while history students are utter novices. And the novice’s task of learning history is not at all the same as the expert’s task of doing it.” Historians have lots of factual and conceptual knowledge and analytical skills and can quickly make sense of archival letters, manuscripts, and photographs.

            High-school students, on the other hand, have little background knowledge and are quickly overwhelmed as they try to make sense of historical documents. “Novices,” say Bassett and Shiffman, “must expend large amounts of their limited mental bandwidth to simply understand the topic they are investigating, let alone how to carry out an investigation. Burying history students in primary sources pushes them into cognitive overload.” One published curriculum demands that students interpret five 19^th-century documents in a single lesson. Subjected to this, say the authors, “students will either tune out or fake their way through it.” 

            What’s the alternative? Bassett and Shiffman believe history teachers should “respect our novices and equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to understand history, including through primary sources.” The Four Questions Method they developed in their classrooms guides students to answer these questions with each major historical event:

            • What happened? “Whatever techniques teachers use,” say Bassett and Shiffman, “history learning should always start with the story. That lays the foundation for deeper understanding.” Students build storyboards telling a coherent narrative of the key events and personalities involved – events, dates, people, pictures – writing Because… But… and  So… sentences. 

            • What were they thinking? Students then dive into the heads of the people in the story and try to understand their world as they themselves saw it. Here’s where primary sources come in: the teacher devotes an entire class to doing a close reading of a single original document. The class contextualizes it, placing it in the narrative they’ve just created. Then students do a close reading, decode what may be archaic language, and finally interpret the purpose and assumptions of the document’s author and write up their conclusions. “Voila,” say Bassett and Shiffman, “you’ve got a brief formative assessment that demonstrates the extent to which they truly understand what characters in history were thinking.” 

            • Why there and then? The class analyzes why events unfolded in this particular context – for example, why was there such a focus on identifying and executing witches in Salem, Massachusetts and not in other places?

            • What do we think? Building on a foundation of factual knowledge, the psychology of key actors, and the historical context of events (including a close analysis of a few primary sources), students formulate and defend their own interpretation.

            “These activities take time to do well,” say Bassett and Shiffman. “But giving lessons the time they need, we’re able to teach students that historical questions are serious, that they take serious intellectual work to answer, and that our answers won’t always agree.” Less is more with primary sources, they believe – spending serious time on a few well-chosen documents rather than engaging in “artifact overload” with only superficial understanding.  “We’ve seen that engaging with fewer, well-selected primary sources,” they say, “and undertaking the rigorous intellectual work it takes to interpret them seriously fosters a deep understanding of history and the historian’s task.”

            Teachers who’ve implemented the Four Questions sequence report that students initially tend to struggle with the second question – What were they thinking? – “because they aren’t used to the level of intellectual rigor a strong answer requires,” say Bassett and Shiffman. “But by mid-year, students who encounter primary sources on assessments have no problems with them.”

 

“History Teachers Love Primary Sources. Do Students?” by Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman, (introduced by Robert Pondiscio) in American Enterprise Institute, November 20, 2025; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected]; Bassett and Shiffman’s book is From Story to Judgment(John Catt, 2021)

 

Back to page one

 

5. What Does Real Student Engagement Look Like?

            In this Education Week article, Rebecca Huggins says there are three ways students can appear to be engaged in class:

-   Students are out of their desks, talking, collaborating, or working in small groups.

-   Teacher and students are having a lively discussion.

-   Students are leading an activity or discussion focused on things that interest them.

In all three cases, the engagement might be superficial and not involve meaningful learning. Observers need to look for “explicit modeling, deliberate practice, and timely, targeted feedback,” says Huggins. “If we spent more time creating classrooms like that, we wouldn’t need to ask whether our students were engaged. They simply would be.”

 

“The Three Big Misconceptions About Student Engagement” by Rebecca Huggins in Education Week, December 5, 2025

Back to page one

 

6. Tween and Teen Graphic Novels About Mental Health

            In this Edutopia feature, Kansas teacher/librarian Amy Brownlee recommends twelve middle-grade graphic novels whose characters are dealing with anxiety, depression, OCD, eating disorders, addiction, and other mental health issues (click the article link below for cover images and brief summaries):

-   Just Roll with It by Veronica Agarwal, illustrated by Lee Durfey-Lavoie, age 8-12

-   Growing Pangs by Kathryn Ormsbee, illustrated by Molly Brooks, age 8-12

-   Crumble by Meredith McClaren, illustrated by Andrea Bell, age 8-12

-   Speechless by Aron Nels Steinke, age 8-12

-   Smaller Sister by Maggie Edkins Willis, age 9-12

-   Living with Viola by Rosena Fung, age 9-12

-   Weirdo by Tony Weaver Jr., illustrated by Jes Wibowo and Cin Wibowo, age 10-14

-   Puzzled: A Memoir About Growing Up with OCD by Pam Cooke, age 10-14

-   Friends Forever by Shannon Hale, illustrated by LeUyen Pham, age 10-15

-   Buzzing by Samuel Sattin, illustrated by Rye Hickman, age 11-14

-   Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett Krosoczka, age 11-15

-   The Flip Side by Jason Walz, age 12-17

 

“12 Graphic Novels About Mental Health” by Amy Brownlee in Edutopia, January 27, 2026

 

Back to page one

 

7. Short Items:

a. State-by-State Reading Scores and SES – Scroll down and select a state on the left side to reveal an interactive scatterplot comparing every elementary school’s community income and third-grade reading proficiency. Then hover over each dot to see the data on that school. The yellow dots are schools well above the line of best fit – those that beat what seems like economic determinism. The charts include data on 41,883 schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

 

“Bright Spots: These Schools Are Beating the Odds in Teaching Kids to Read” by Chad Aldeman and Eamonn Fitzmaurice in The 74, November 4, 2025

 

Back to page one

 

            b. A New K-12 Research Website – The new Live Handbook of Education Policy Research features a growing number of summaries of research on key areas that are updated as new findings come to light. Among the current topics: Teacher Supply and Turnover, Ability Grouping and Tracking, Grading Policies, Teacher Evaluation, and Early College Credit Courses.

 

Spotted in “The Education Research Handbook That Never Closes” by Bruno Manno in Education Gadfly, January 8, 2026

Back to page one

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright 2026 Marshall Memo LLC, all rights reserved; permission is granted to clip and share individual article summaries with colleagues for educational purposes, being sure to include the author/publication citation and mention that it’s a Marshall Memo summary.

 

If you have feedback or suggestions, please e-mail [email protected]

 

About the Marshall Memo