In This Issue:

1. Applying 12-step strategies to organizational change

2. Noticing and acting on unethical behavior

3. Is math anxiety just another name for “bad at math”?

4. What do students really need to succeed in a community college?

5. Can high schools teach the basics and deeper stuff?

6. The critical importance of early learning

7. Technology and time management

8. Short items: (a) David Brooks on the democratic ideal; (b) The National Oceanic and

    Atmospheric Administration website

 

Quotes of the Week

“Most of my history classes in high school would be, they gave us notes, like fill-in-the-blank or something. But the lectures in college, they don’t give you anything. You have to take all the notes yourself.”

            A community-college student adjusting to new expectations (see item #4)

 

“Organizations can’t change their culture unless individual employees change their behavior – and changing behavior is hard… One of the best ways to change human behavior is to gather people with similar problems together.”

            Keith Ferrazzi (see item #1)

 

“As parents, technology advocates, and some education leaders call for increasing the amount of computer science and coding taught in school, a glaring problem is obvious to teachers across the country: few young women seem interested.”

            Laura Pappano in “Computer Science for Everyone?” in Harvard Education Letter,

July/August 2014 (Vol. 30, #4, p. 4-6), www.edletter.org

 

“One thing about cheerleading that may not be obvious is we are about routines, procedures, getting things right. We are about the order of things.”

            Ria Galanos, Virginia computer science teacher and cheerleading coach, quoted in ibid.

 

“Self-questioning, skepticism, and perfectionism are great survival mechanisms for keeping our dumb, imperfect species out of trouble. Do we really want women emulating poker players and race-car drivers, or would society be better off if we dudes took a page from our self-doubting sisters’ playbook?”

            Skip Griffin of Reno, Nevada in a letter to The Atlantic, July/August 2014 (Vol. 314,

#1, p. 14), responding to a cover article on female self-confidence by Katty Kay and

Claire Shipman (summarized in Marshall Memo 536)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Applying 12-Step Strategies to Organizational Change

            “Organizations can’t change their culture unless individual employees change their behavior,” says consultant Keith Ferrazzi in this Harvard Business Review article, “– and changing behavior is hard.” He and his colleagues have noticed that the change strategies embedded in Alcoholics Anonymous and other addiction-treatment programs are quite successful at modifying deeply ingrained behaviors – and can be helpful to leaders who aspire to change their organizations. Here are several such strategies:

            • Nothing happens without a readiness to change. “You can’t force people to change – you can only help them want to,” says Ferrazzi.

            • Replace old habits with new ones. For example, a restaurant chain’s managers used to start each day sitting in an office reviewing the previous day’s numbers. Then they tried a different routine – talking to crew members about anything unusual that happened the day before and only then looking at the numbers. This made managers much more aware of what was happening in the restaurant and improved business.

            • Peer support and pressure drive change. “One of the best ways to change human behavior is to gather people with similar problems together,” says Ferrazzi. Convening peer groups can create mutual generosity, a judgment-free attitude, and accountability, and also increase pressure on reluctant employees to change.

            • Sponsorship deepens commitment and sparks results. Outside experts are less effective than tapping the knowledge and enthusiasm of internal early-adopters to coach and mentor new employees.

            • Less hierarchy can be a catalyst for change. Project groups are often more effective when they are led by peers.

            • You are the company you keep. Smart leaders identify the positive people in their organization and orchestrate work groups and office geography to maximize their impact on others.

            • Continuous introspection is key. “Early on in the AA program, members examine their past behavior and start trying to change,” says Ferrazzi. Organizations need to follow a similar path, taking a “moral inventory” and acting accordingly.

            • Changes in practice may represent breakthroughs. It’s better to focus on changing practices than mindsets, says Ferrazzi – shift the conversation from guilt, shame, remorse, and resentment to specific behaviors that get results.

            • Acknowledge small wins. AA emphasizes achievable goals – for example, not drinking that day – and celebrating milestones of sobriety. “Change managers should take a lesson from this practice and find ways for employees to demonstrate and celebrate incremental achievements,” says Ferrazzi.

            • The goal is progress, not perfection. Change is rarely linear, he says, advocating clients to overcome setbacks and move forward to the next win. “Celebrating the reversal of a relapse can help desired behaviors regain momentum,” he says.

 

“Managing Change, One Day at a Time” by Keith Ferrazzi in Harvard Business Review, July-August 2014 (Vol. 92, #7/8, p. 23-25), no e-link available

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2. Noticing and Acting on Unethical Behavior

            In this Harvard Business Review article, Max Bazerman (Harvard Business School) reports on his study of why some managers see and act on ethical problems while others don’t – or turn a blind eye. The problem, as he sees it, is a set of factors that cloud people’s vision:

            • Ambiguity – “Often the data provide only strong hints, but not convincing evidence, that something is amiss,” says Bazerman. In an ethical dilemma that he himself confronted, he had concerns but didn’t follow up because of exhaustion and fear that negative publicity would be harmful.

            • Motivated blindness – This can explain “why we want to think the best of our family members, friends, and colleagues and are disinclined to speak against those with influence in our offices and workplaces,” says Bazerman – for example, the behavior of some high-ranking officials in the Catholic Church in response to sexual abuse by priests, and the fact that some administrators at Penn State University failed to report evidence of similar crimes by assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.

            • Conflicts of interest – “Extensive research shows that our desires influence the way we interpret information, even when we are trying to be objective,” says Bazerman. If we have a reason to wish for a particular outcome, that definitely affects the way we see the facts.

            • The slippery slope – Transgressions often start small and are then rationalized and become routine even as they are more and more serious.

            • Misdirection – It’s possible, of course, that others lie to us to cover up their own mistakes or reap financial gain.

            • Indirect harm – When a fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh kills hundreds of employees, there are several layers of blame: the factory owner, government inspectors, and American buyers pushing for rock-bottom prices. The more removed one is from the situation, the easier it is to rationalize inaction.

            “Unfortunately, simply being aware of the factors that blind us to ethical failure isn’t enough,” says Bazerman. He offers three recommendations to help us be “first-class noticers”:

-   Look inward to analyze previous mistakes. In a situation that went sour, were there questions that could have been asked or actions that could have been taken?

-   Push back when people say, “We don’t do things that way around here.” Sometimes it takes an outsider to see that bad habits need to be changed.

-   Create a noticing organization. “As a leader, it’s not enough to work just on your own noticing skills,” says Bazerman. “You must also help others in your organization overcome the obstacles to seeing and rooting out bad behavior.” People must have clear direction to ask questions, dig deeper, and speak up.

 

“Becoming a First-Class Noticer: How to Spot and Prevent Ethical Failures in Your Organization” by Max Bazerman in Harvard Business Review, July-August 2014 (Vol. 92, #7/8, p. 116-119), no e-link available

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3. Is Math Anxiety Just Another Name for ‘Bad At Math’?

            “To many people, ‘math’ is a scary four-letter word,” say Sian Beilock (University of Chicago) and Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) in this article in American Educator. “They don’t like it, they don’t feel like they are very good at it, and they just want to stay away from it.” Math anxiety is associated with poor performance in schools and colleges – and with on-the-job errors by nurses, financial planners, and many others around the world. When does math anxiety get started, where does it come from, and what can be done about it?

            Beilock and Willingham report on research showing that math anxiety emerges early, affecting as many as 50 percent of first and second graders, is directly related to math performance (the more anxiety, the less well students do on math assessments), and is not correlated with performance on reading assessments. So is math anxiety just a manifestation of being bad at math? The authors think not. People with math anxiety would do better at math if they weren’t so anxious. That’s because anxious thoughts (fear of making a mistake, looking stupid in front of other students, displeasing the teacher) impair their working memory, or their mental “scratch pad,” and this means they’re less able to keep several things in mind at the same time – essential to manipulating numbers and solving problems. Brain scans have found this effect when highly math-anxious people even thought about doing math.

            What kicks off math anxiety? Beilock and Willingham say it is associated with children’s math abilities when they first enter school – for example, counting objects, deciding which of two numbers represents the larger quantity, and mentally rotating three-dimensional objects. Having difficulty with these basic skills starts a self-reinforcing cascade of anxiety and poor performance. Oddly, it’s students with the best working memory who are most impaired by anxiety, perhaps because they’ve come to rely on working memory in other areas and it’s shut down by anxiety.

A second source of math anxiety is the signals students get from home, the classroom, and society in general. Children can pick up signals from adults that math is, indeed, something to be worried about. Those students who enter school with math skill deficits are especially susceptible to a teacher’s or parent’s negative comments about the subject. Two studies have shown a direct correlation between female primary-grade teachers’ level of math anxiety and their students’ math performance at the end of the year: the more anxious the teachers were, the worse their students did, especially girls.

There’s a lot more research to be done, but given what we know so far, what can be done? Beilock and Willingham have these suggestions: 

• Ensure fundamental skills. Parents can build their children’s basic counting and spatial skills, and for students who enter school without them, teachers need to diagnose weaknesses and work quickly to improve them before anxiety sets in.

• Focus on teacher training. Building elementary teachers’ confidence and knowledge is essential to reducing their math-anxious vibes. Researchers have found that it’s more effective to teach teachers how to teach math concepts than focusing on the math concepts themselves.

• Don’t use timed math assessments. Racing the clock heightens anxiety; the simple remedy of untimed tests makes it possible for many students to do better work. [See Marshall Memo 538 for an article about timed tests.]

• Get students to write about their feelings. Studies have shown that having students write freely about their emotions about a specific situation (like a looming test) for about 10 minutes can help boost performance. The student thinks, “Oh, maybe this math test isn’t really that big of a deal” and working memory is freed up to focus on the math. Here is the actual prompt that was used in one such situation (students were assured that their writing was anonymous and would not be seen by their teacher): Take the next several minutes to write as openly as possible about your thoughts and feelings regarding the exam you are about to take. In your writing, really let yourself go and explore your emotions and thoughts as you are getting ready to start the exam. You might relate your current thoughts to the way you have felt during other similar situations at school or in other situations in your life. Please try to be as open as possible as you write about your thoughts at this time.

• Think carefully about what to say when students are having difficulty. If we say, “It’s okay, not everyone can be good at these types of problems,” students may interpret that to mean that the work is too hard for them and there’s no hope. “Consolation sends a subtle message that validates the student’s opinion that he’s not good at math, and can lower a student’s motivations and expectations for future performances,” say Beilock and Willingham. A better statement would be, “Yes, this work is challenging, but I know that with hard work you can do it!” Following up with specific study strategies and assistance adds to the power of that statement.

 

“Ask the Cognitive Scientist – Math Anxiety: Can Teachers Help Students Reduce It?” by Sian Beilock and Daniel Willingham in American Educator, Summer 2014 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 28-32, 43), http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2014/Beilock.pdf

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4. What Do Students Really Need to Succeed in a Community College?

            In this Teachers College Record article, Melinda Karp (Columbia University) and Rachel Bork (The Wallace Foundation) examine the extremely low graduation rates of students in community colleges – only about 30 percent earn an associate’s degree within three years. Even young people who are theoretically “college ready” – they passed placement tests or completed remedial courses – drop out of community colleges in large numbers.

This suggests that there is more to college readiness than academic skills – a set of unspoken expectations, behaviors, and attitudes essential to success. “Colleges and college personnel do not clearly express these expectations to students,” say Karp and Bork, “nor do they help students understand how to meet those expectations. Often, students feel confused about these expectations, or uncomfortable enacting them… The mismatch between faculty expectations and student knowledge about those expectations disadvantages students and may contribute to low student success rates.” This is particularly true of students whose families don’t have prior experience with post-secondary education.

Hasn’t there already been a lot of work on “college knowledge”? Yes, say the authors, but it’s been focused almost entirely on finding a college that’s a good fit, applying and getting in, and securing financial aid. There’s also been research on college persistence, but that has focused on academic and social integration. And media portrayals of college life – Greek and Gossip Girl, for example – are almost entirely about four-year residential college life. Karp and Bork’s interviews and research looked at community colleges where many students commute to the campus. They found a set of unspoken role expectations for which high schools and colleges don’t do a good job preparing students. The role of a new community college student is more fluid than that of a high-school student or a workplace employee in three ways:

Structure:

-   High school – High structure involving daily homework, etc.

-   Workplace – High structure with discrete job tasks

-   Community college – Low structure, with a student-designed schedule and freedom to figure out the best ways to study

Feedback:

-   High school – Frequent feedback on tests, etc.

-   Workplace – Frequent supervisor feedback

-   Community college – Sporadic feedback on infrequent graded assessments

Variability:

-   High school – Low variability: discrete assignments

-   Workplace – Low variability: specific approaches to doing work

-   Community college – High variability: independent study for exams, projects

The big question for entering students, say Karp and Bork, is, “How does one figure out how to enact a role that has less structure and clarity than one is used to?” As one student put it, “And now it’s like I got one class and then I’m done for the whole day. So it’s like, what am I supposed to do?” What’s required is a degree of self-awareness and self-monitoring of strengths and growth areas that many young people don’t possess.

            Drawing on extensive interviews of students and college personnel, Karp and Bork suggest four areas in which students need detailed preparation as they enter college:

            • Academic habits – Students may be able to write an essay or factor a polynomial, but they may not know how to: Manage workflow independently:

-   Using a syllabus;

-   Completing work without clear due dates or projects to be done in increments.

Organize and manage time and time-related demands:

-   Finding the best time and place to study;

-   Planning ahead in order to carve out enough time to complete assignments;

-   Studying in new ways and finding which methods work best.

Independently take reflective notes:

-   Taking notes from multiple sources;

-   Discerning what is likely to be most important.

Use the tools of the trade:

-   Making optimal use of resources like Blackboard and the library;

-   Regularly accessing tools without explicit instructions to do so.

On note-taking, one student said, “Most of my history classes in high school would be, they gave us notes, like fill-in-the-blank or something. But the lectures in college, they don’t give you anything. You have to take all the notes yourself.”

            • Cultural know-how – The norms in community colleges are usually white and middle-class, and while students aren’t expected to leave their personal cultures at the door, they need to adopt new roles in these ways: Engage in collegiate discourse:

-   Using academic and non-colloquial language in speaking and writing;

-   Engaging in discussion about opinions;

-   Being open to new ideas.

Demonstrating culturally defined forms of respect:

-   Give-and-take with professors;

-   Putting forth good effort.

Recognizing that community college is less forgiving:

-   Not expecting exceptions;

-   Adhering to rules and deadlines;

-   Adapting to instructors’ personal styles.

On the second item, a student said: “If you go in their class and be disruptive and, you know, just aren’t very nice, then they’re not going to be very nice to you, and they’re not going to be lenient, especially if you turn in an assignment late.”

            • Balancing multiple roles and time constraints – Here are the three key areas: Make college a priority:

-   Taking responsibility for meeting deadlines;

-   Stick-to-it-iveness.

Using the fluidity to their advantage:

-   Finding a schedule that works with their personal circumstances

-   Filtering out distractions;

-   Having a plan;

-   Modifying obligations.

Communicating with instructors early and often:

-   Earning acknowledgement of the balancing act by honest and frequent talks.

One student said, “I work full time and have three children and a husband and a home. I can’t just run over to [campus] and hope that somebody’s going to be at the tutoring center.”

            • Help-seeking – “Community college students are expected to engage in help seeking behaviors that are proactive and self-directed,” say Karp and Bork. “They must do this in a timely manner and in ways that are culturally delineated with a strong sense of what they need…” Here are the key areas: Demonstrate awareness of need:

-   Asking for help early;

-   Anticipating areas that might become problematic in the future.

Gaining knowledge of available resources:

-   Knowing what resources are available;

-   Knowing when to use resources, how to do so appropriately, and which ones to use.

Developing a sense of agency:

-   Taking initiative to seek out help;

-   Asking for assistance rather than waiting for it to be offered;

-   Advocating for oneself.

As one college instructor put it, “And so I guess that’s the problem, there is a group that does not ask the questions that need to be asked, who don’t even know that they need to be doing that.” A student said, “It’s college. They do everything; they have the Learning Center, the Tutoring Center, they’ve got the library; they’ve got all these computer labs. I mean, they offer everything… You have to figure it out on your own.”

 

“‘They Never Told Me What to Expect, So I Didn’t Know What to Do’: Defining and Clarifying the Role of a Community College Student” by Melinda Karp and Rachel Bork in Teachers College Record, May 2014 (Vol. 116, #5, p. 1-40), http://bit.ly/1z1TASu

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5. Can High Schools Teach the Basics and Deeper Stuff?

            In this Harvard Education Letter article, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine (Harvard Graduate School of Education) ask how schools can consistently bring students to deeper learning, so they can:

-   Transfer knowledge and skills to new situations.

-   Analyze, synthesize, and create.

-   Understand not just the content but also the structure of disciplines.

-   Become proficient in affective as well as cognitive dimensions.

-   Engage in open-ended play, exploration, and experimentation.

-   Get involved in apprentice-like relationships.

Mehta and Fine say they rarely find schools that are good at teaching the basics and open-ended problem-solving and creative thinking. Indeed, they say, “the methods used to ensure consistent baseline achievement can preclude opportunities for more powerful learning.”

            The authors describe a high school with frequent diagnostic assessments, careful segmentation of learning, mastery learning, and gradual release of responsibility. All its students pass state tests, and many go on to four-year colleges. But Mehta and Fine worry about how these students will do in the real world.

            The authors describe a second high school that emphasizes project-based learning. Students are given challenging, open-ended tasks that take weeks to complete – for example, developing a field guide to a local watershed – and are encouraged to learn from their mistakes. Visitors notice “a joyfulness about their learning,” say Mehta and Fine – but academic results are uneven and students never see parts of the traditional curriculum.

            Somehow, say the authors, high schools need to teach the basics and immerse students in the messiness of academic disciplines. One magnet high school has all 10^th graders spend a whole semester designing, carrying out, revising, and writing up an original experiment – doing what David Perkins calls “playing the whole game at the junior level.” Mehta and Fine say that such experiences, “which inevitably include dead ends and disappointments alongside triumphs, help them to understand what real work in the sciences entails.” To empower disadvantaged students, they believe, teachers need to teach them the deeper skills, bring them into the knowledge-production business, and introduce them to what Lisa Delpit calls the “culture of power.”

 

“The Elusive Quest for Deeper Learning” by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine in Harvard Education Letter, July/August 2014 (Vol. 30, #4, p. 8, 6-7), www.edletter.org

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6. The Critical Importance of Early Learning

            In this article in American Educator, author and ACT Inc. researcher Chrys Dougherty says that early learning is key to closing the economic achievement gap. Why? Because disadvantaged students start school behind, learning takes time, learning is cumulative, students develop strong interests in the primary grades, and catching up becomes increasingly difficult as students move through the grades.

What are the important components of early-learning programs? Strong leadership, skillful staff selection, clear academic goals, robust instructional programs and strategies, a good start in reading, a content-rich curriculum (including vocabulary development), monitoring and effective use of data to adjust instruction and intervene with struggling students, and activities that develop students’ academic and social behaviors – paying attention, completing assignments, persisting with difficult tasks, and regulating impulses.

            All this is well known, so what prevents districts from doing a better job with early education? Dougherty points to some accountability designs that lead to short-sighted decisions limiting instruction in science, social studies and fine arts; weak professional development of teachers; and several erroneous beliefs about early learning:

            • Content learning will be boring for young children – “Whether content is meaningful and interesting to students depends largely on how it is taught and on whether students have the prior knowledge needed to appreciate the new information,” says Dougherty.

            • Young students should mainly learn content close to their everyday experience. The perennial “expanding horizons” curriculum embodies this belief – learning about families in kindergarten and first grade, neighborhoods in second, the community in third, state history in fourth, U.S. history in fifth. Dougherty believes this seriously limits young students who are capable of learning about the wider world much earlier in their development.

            • Students can learn everything they need later by looking it up online. “Understanding and evaluating the cacophony of information and opinion on the Internet – or even knowing what to look up – requires prior knowledge of the subject area being addressed,” says Dougherty. “[L]earning enough to make informed decisions usually requires sustained study, not just the acquisition of a few isolated pieces of information.” Students need to be exposed to lots of well-chosen background knowledge from the very beginning.

            • Teaching academic content in science, social studies, and fine arts will crowd out the basics. Not true, says Dougherty, if content knowledge and vocabulary are integrated into reading and math by using read-alouds and media. Early research suggests that this approach may actually produce higher student achievement in reading and math.

 

“Starting Off Strong: The Importance of Early Learning” by Chrys Dougherty in American Educator, Summer 2014 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 14-18),

http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2014/Dougherty.pdf

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7. Technology and Time Management

            In this article in The Atlantic, James Fallows is optimistic about the ways we’ll be able to master technology to guide our lives in the years ahead. “We’ve been through the worst,” he proclaims. “The next stage in information technology will put people back in control, or closer to it.” Here are the specifics:

            • Escaping the e-mail nightmare – For most people, e-mail is still overwhelming. Senders get to generate endless tasks for us – read this, do that, schedule a meeting, pay a bill – at no cost to themselves. But market mechanisms will shift the cost back to the sender, says Fallows, and rapidly improving filters will screen out most of the worthless stuff as we “teach” them who we want to hear from and who we don’t.

            • Anticipatory intelligence – Smartphones can now change time zones as we travel from one to another, and cars let us know when they’re low on gas or a tire needs to be pumped up. Fallows says computers will get better and better at scoping out our needs and letting us know without prompting.

            • Better ways of inputting and outputting information – Siri’s amusing errors notwithstanding [ask her for the meaning of life], voice-recognition software has improved by leaps and bounds, and will soon be the most efficient way to get information into devices. Our computers and smartphones will also get better at “talking” to us – perhaps whispering prompts in our ear.

            • From macro to micro – Software is getting more adept at showing us the big picture of our schedules, projects, and annual goals – then allowing us to zoom in on the details. “You don’t want a constant litany of the thousands of things you want to get done,” says Mark Bernstein, the creator of Tinderbox, “but you need to be able to look over the whole list from time to time. Finding ways to make your information visible without letting it get underfoot is the big challenge.”

 

“How You’ll Get Organized” by James Fallows in The Atlantic, July/August 2014 (Vol. 314, #1, p. 30-32), http://theatln.tc/1pCXECh; see Marshall Memo 41 for an earlier article by James Fallows on time management and Memo 458 for a Fallows interview with David Allen.

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8. Short Items:

            a. David Brooks on the democratic ideal – In this New York Times column, Brooks sums up his call for a more idealistic view of the U.S. historical purpose: “The democratic gospel was both lofty and realistic. It had a high historic mission, but it was based on the idea that biblical morality is necessary precisely because people are selfish and short-sighted; capitalism is necessary because economies are too complicated to understand and plan; democracy is necessary because concentrated power is always dangerous, no matter how seductive it seems in the short term. Sure there have been setbacks. But if America isn’t a champion of universal democracy, what is the country for?”

 

“The Spiritual Recession” by David Brooks in The New York Times, June 27, 2014,

http://nyti.ms/1mdiYR2

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            b. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website – This website has resources on the water cycle, ocean currents, thunderstorms, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, climate science, and environmental issues in the Great Lakes: www.education.noaa.gov.

 

“Resources: What’s Up With the Weather?” in American Educator, Summer 2014 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 41)

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