In This Issue:

1. Improving secondary-school classroom discussions

2. Fine-tuning elementary math discussions

3. Getting the most out of professional learning communities

4. A full-court press to close the achievement gap

5. Four ways to support the growth of readers and writers

6. The frequency and impact of teacher “churn” in New York City

7. Key factors in the success of Asian-American students

8. Using picture books to bring ancient history alive

9. Short items: (a) Sesame Street puts the ideas of Carol Dweck and Jeff Howard to music;

   (b) Pixar on storytelling; (c) Hans Rosling’s website

 

Quotes of the Week

“Great teachers love their students. Greatness in our field is always a labor of love – of our students, our colleagues, our work, our subjects, and our purpose. Love can be the primary driver in our profession if it can be channeled into a new definition of what schools must become to prepare students for a world in which the ability to continue learning beyond the K-12 system is vital to their success and well-being.”

            Rick DuFour in In Praise of American Educators (Solution Tree, 2015)

 

“While teaching students about brain growth and brain malleability certainly has a place in the education of students of color and of poverty – in fact of all students – much more is needed.”

            Jon Saphier (see item #4)

 

“Surrounding students with messages that they have the ability to learn is at the core of closing the achievement gap.”

            Jon Saphier (ibid.)

 

“Mathematics teaching based on modern conceptions of learning usually consists of presenting ‘worthwhile mathematical tasks’ to students without telling them how to solve them, inviting them to work individually or in small groups on those tasks, and then selecting students to share their thinking in whole-class discussions orchestrated by the teacher.”

            Damon Bahr and Kim Bahr (see item #2)

 

“If we do all the heavy lifting for students in reading complex texts or writing, they begin to lean on that support rather than learn from it. Whoever does the work does the learning.”

            Paula Bourque (see item #5)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Improving Secondary-School Classroom Discussions

            In this article in English Journal, Lisa Barker (Towson University) remembers with embarrassment how, as a high-school English teacher, she responded to every correct student response by saying, “Rock and roll.” Looking back, she wonders, “What was I thinking? I mean that literally: What was going on in my head? Was I trying to communicate my enthusiasm for the fact that students were contributing? Was there something particularly high-quality about their utterances that I was aiming to praise?... I wasn’t being strategic; I was on autopilot.” Unfortunately, the Initiate-Respond-Evaluate pattern (the teacher initiates with a question, a student responds, the teacher evaluates) is a perennial staple in classrooms; lots of teachers aren’t even aware they’re replicating it and haven’t considered its disadvantages.

            Barker quotes Sarah Michaels and Catherine O’Connor on a more effective teacher role in a whole-class discussion: “to support the students to think productively with one another, ensure that talk is respectful and equitable, and make sure that everyone can hear and understand each other (something students rarely do on their own).” Building on Michaels and O’Connor, Barker says an academically productive discussion should have these elements:

-   A belief that students are capable of participating in a high-level discussion;

-   Well-established ground rules;

-   Clear academic purposes;

-   Deep understanding of the academic content;

-   A “discussable” text – a novel, story, poem, article, film, etc. – that is open for interpretation and to which all students have access;

-   A framing question and follow-up questions;

-   An appropriate talk format;

-   A set of strategic “talk moves” – for example, affirming, correcting, or restating  students’ responses.

The problem is that all too many classroom discussions don’t meet these criteria. Observing discussions in a number of middle- and high-school classrooms, Barker found that teachers almost always made a quick comment after every student response (OK, Yeah, Excellent, Definitely), paraphrased the student’s response, or repeated what he or she said so everyone could hear (thereby implicitly communicating that students could respond in quiet voices and the teacher would do the work of making sure everyone heard).

            These patterns are not always ineffective, says Barker. But what struck her was that when teachers were shown transcripts or watched videos of their classroom discussions, they were universally unhappy with their talk moves and wanted to improve. What really troubled Barker was that all these teachers had been through extensive methods coursework or professional development with her, and the sessions explicitly focused on high-quality classroom discussions. This clearly demonstrated that PD is not enough to change deeply-ingrained teaching patterns.

            Barker worked with these teachers to see if change was possible. The teachers had taken the first step by watching a video recording or reading a transcript and becoming aware of classroom moves with which they were not happy. The second step, prompted by Barker, was asking themselves:

-   What are my most common responses to students?

-   How do they seem to shape the conversation?

-   What might students be hearing when I say these things?

-   To what extent do these moves align with my goals for student learning?

The third step was reviewing the criteria for academically productive discussions (see above), zeroing in on those that needed improvement, and, over time, working to break old habits. Teachers found these were the most helpful areas:

            • Establishing ground rules – “Teachers preceded discussions,” says Barker, “by explicitly establishing norms for speaking and listening (‘Let’s go over some norms for today’), explaining to students why these norms were important, and sometimes providing scaffolding in the form of sentence frames students could use to change the topic of discussion, add to a previous speaker’s idea, or ask for clarification.” Some teachers were open with students about their desire to change unproductive discussion patterns, especially the habit of repeating what each student said. “Making students aware of where teachers wanted to improve their practice modeled humility and an openness to noticing and learning from mistakes,” says Barker.

            • Clarifying academic purposes – “Some teachers realized their responses became automatic because they had lost sight of what they wanted their students to learn,” says Barker. “Either they hadn’t specified a particular skill or understanding they were working toward, or they had concrete goals for student learning, but, as discussions unfolded, they lost track of these aims because of the complex nature of orchestrating discussion.” These teachers worked on being more explicit about the content they wanted students to learn and the speaking and listening skills they sought to improve – teaching with discussion and teaching for discussion.

            • Aligning purposes with questions and discussion strategies – Having established ground rules and clarified what they were trying to accomplish, teachers focused on improving their questions and talk moves. Teachers also were intentional about when not to talk, becoming more comfortable with an awkward silence after a student response to encourage others to join in, rather than reflexively affirming, restating, paraphrasing, or asking another question. “Although teachers refrained from taking unnecessary turns,” says Barker, “they did not relinquish their role as facilitator; they interjected strategically with talk moves to ask important follow-up questions that aligned with their learning objectives or to reorient students when a norm needed reinforcing.”

            Barker gives several examples of teachers’ better-developed intentions and the kinds of questions they asked in class discussions:

-   Essential understanding: Students will understand that themes are disputable statements; students shouldn’t equate a topic (like innocence, which is essentially a summary requiring only recall) with a theme (which requires interpretation).

-   Question: And what is the book saying about this topic?

-   Essential understanding: Students will understand how authors develop themes (e.g., through characters’ relationships and inner thoughts) and how we can apply these approaches to our own narrative writing.

-   Question: What insights does this book give us for our own writing? If we want to communicate a theme to our readers, what are some ways we can do that?

-   Key speaking and listening skill: Students will be able to use textual evidence, referring to a page number, wait for all listeners to find the page, and then orient listeners to where to look on the page.

-   Questions: What in the text makes you think that? What evidence do we have to support that idea? Orient us to where you are in the text.

-   Key speaking and listening skill: Students will be able to agree or disagree with another person’s ideas, not with the person.

-   Question: What do we think about that idea?

Some teachers created “cheat sheets” to keep track of intentions, questions, and student responses.

            What happened in these classrooms? “In a relatively short amount of time,” Barker reports, “the nature of discussions in teachers’ classrooms exhibited promising shifts. Teachers clarified their purposes and aligned these intentions with their norms, questions, and talk moves. Students were speaking more and more often, and were building on each others’ ideas.”

 

“Under Discussion: Teaching Speaking and Listening” by Lisa Barker in English Journal, January 2017 (Vol. 106, #3, p. 87-91), http://bit.ly/2lDVquk; Barker can be reached at [email protected].

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2. Fine-Tuning Elementary Math Discussions

            “Mathematics teaching based on modern conceptions of learning,” say Damon Bahr (Brigham Young University) and Kim Bahr (a kindergarten teacher) in this article in Teaching Children Mathematics, “usually consists of presenting ‘worthwhile mathematical tasks to students without telling them how to solve them, inviting them to work individually or in small groups on those tasks, and then selecting students to share their thinking in whole-class discussions orchestrated by the teacher.” Watching a master teacher lead a discussion makes it look easy, but it’s actually difficult to keep all students engaged while individual students speak. The best discussions build on and honor students’ thinking; provide students with the opportunity to share ideas, clarify their thinking, and develop convincing arguments; and advance all students’ mathematical thinking. The authors propose four strategies to pull this

off:

            • Tell students what to listen for. Bahr and Bahr suggest assigning students listening roles in three possible categories: Comprehension (Would you explain that thinking in your own words? Is ---’s thinking the same or different from---’s thinking?); connection (What are you noticing about the way these things fit together? Can you try this in a new situation?); and consensus (How do you know it is true in all cases? Can you think of a more efficient way?).

            • If necessary, teach students how to engage in each type of listening. Younger students will need direct instruction on how to ask questions and on the different types of questions they can ask – for example, describe, compare, relate, see patterns, justify, prove, generalize.

            • Call on the listeners to respond during and after each sharing. This could be an all-class response (choral, thumbs up/thumbs down, Plickers), asking for volunteers, or calling on students at random (the Bahrs like random calling best). When students have been assigned a listening role and feel responsible for it, say the authors, “you will be amazed at how rapidly the engagement level of your listening students will increase.”

            • Have routines in place for when listening students cannot or choose not to respond. When students don’t respond, it’s usually for one of three reasons: (a) they’re not interested because the topic lacks personal meaning or is developmentally inappropriate; (b) the subject matter is too difficult; or (c) they weren’t listening (for any number of reasons). The Bahrs suggest using think/pair/share to get all students talking and warmed up before an all-class discussion. If students are still not responding and it’s for the first reason, teachers might tweak the curriculum. For the second and third reasons, they suggest teaching students two culturally acceptable responses to their question-asking classmates:

-   I’m sorry, I was listening but didn’t quite understand what you said. Would you mind repeating it?

-   I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. Would you mind repeating what you said?

 

“Engaging All Students in Mathematical Discussions” by Damon Bahr and Kim Bahr in Teaching Children Mathematics, March 2017 (Vol. 23, #6, p. 350-359), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2kS0QNP; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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3. Getting the Most Out of Professional Learning Communities

            In this Kappan article, consultant Michael Wasta says many teacher teams are looking at student work and assessments, identifying areas where kids are having difficulty, and defining specific goals for improvement and criteria for progress. But after observing more than 100 PLCs in action, Wasta and his colleagues noticed that a crucial part of the data process is often missing: “how team members would have to change their teaching practices to reach those goals.” This, he says, squanders a “tremendous opportunity to help teachers find out precisely what is and is not working in their classrooms.” All too often, teacher teams are looking at effects without investigating the causes – their day-to-day instructional practices.

            To fill this gap, Wasta recommends that when teams analyze student results, they go

beyond vaguely defined follow-up strategies – for example, We will increase the amount and quality of feedback to students – and get much more specific, drawing on research-based practices, for example:

-   Deliver feedback within the class period as close as possible to task completion;

-   Indicate errors students made and specific corrections that are needed;

-   Link corrections to a clear criterion;

-   Encourage students to keep working until a problematic item is correct.

“The key to this process lies in identifying precisely what counts as exemplary performance,” says Wasta. Then it’s possible to tell whether it was the strategy that was flawed or the fact that it was poorly implemented. Teams should aim for a “sweet spot, ensuring some consistency of implementation while still letting individual teachers bring their own style and creativity to the classroom.”

            Outlining the details of a follow-up classroom strategy is the first step. Next, team members should monitor how they’re doing by observing each other’s classrooms or viewing 10-15-minute classroom videos. In one school implementing the four-part student feedback strategy outlined above, a team concluded that: (a) overall, the strategy wasn’t being implemented very well at all; (b) one teacher was doing much better than the others, making her the go-to person for the team; and (c) the second practice (indicating student errors in real time) wasn’t being implemented by any of the teachers.

This spurred them to set a measurable goal for improvement and redouble their efforts to implement the strategies. Some approaches they considered:

-   Observe the most proficient teacher;

-   Prepare and deliver mock lessons to the team;

-   Research video examples of exemplary implementation;

-   Bring in an outside expert;

-   Video classroom samples and review and critique them as a team.

“In effect,” says Wasta, “these teachers are designing and implementing their own professional development, focusing on an issue that they have identified as important to them. Over time, they will monitor both data streams – the change in their practice and the change in student performance – and these sources of information will guide the direction of their work.” Wasta believes these are the key conditions for the PLC process to work really well in a school:

-   Active leadership by the principal;

-   Teacher commitment;

-   Trust – between leaders and teachers, and among teachers;

-   Time – a minimum of two 45-minute team meeting blocks a month;

-   Patience – a recognition that progress will take weeks or months;

-   Some structures – roles, agendas, notes.

 

“PLCs on Steroids: Moving Teacher Practice to the Center of Data Teams” by Michael Wasta in Phi Delta Kappan, February 2017 (Vol. 98, #5, p. 67-71), www.kappanmagazine.org; Wasta can be reached at [email protected].

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4. A Full-Court Press to Close the Opportunity Gap

            “Surrounding students with messages that they have the ability to learn is at the core of closing the achievement gap,” says author/consultant Jon Saphier in this Kappan article. “While teaching students about brain growth and brain malleability certainly has a place in the education of students of color and of poverty – in fact of all students – much more is needed. Teachers must convey their belief to students through how they handle everyday events… and they must do so mindfully with language that has embedded meaning of their belief in their students.”

Saphier says this is a key ingredient in how some schools are overcoming the disadvantages with which many disadvantaged children enter school. In effect, educators in these schools have taken on a broader mission about belief, confidence, tools, and desire:

-   Giving students the belief that effort can expand their ability to do well academically;

-   Helping them develop the confidence that they already have enough brain power to do demanding work;

-   Teaching them the strategies for exerting effective effort;

-   Getting them to care enough to want to succeed.

This mindset work combines with other policy moves within a school – dealing with tracking, bell-curve beliefs among adults, discipline inequities, and unequal access to advanced classes – to close the achievement gap.

            Saphier is particularly interested in how verbal interactions in classrooms can send the right messages to students – for example, the teacher returning to a student who gave a partially correct answer to make sure he or she gets it completely right and sees the teacher as believing that’s an ongoing expectation. “When we add this set of teaching skills to the job definition of teaching,” he says, “and when we build them into teacher training, hiring, induction, evaluation, and continuous development, then we will be well on our way to eliminating the opportunity gap in this country.”

            In a sidebar to the article, Saphier lists 50 ways to get students to believe in themselves and take ownership for their learning (summarized from his new book, High-Expectations Teaching, Corwin, 2017):

• Verbal behaviors and teacher choice of language in daily interactions: Calling on students equitably; responding effectively and tenaciously to student answers; giving strategic help; changing attitudes toward errors (persevere and return); giving tasks and assignments; giving feedback according to criteria for success with encouragement and precise diagnostic guidance; framing re-teaching positively; being persistent when students don’t meet expectations, pursuing and continuing to call for high-level performance; pushing back on fixed-mindset language and student helplessness.

• Regular classroom mechanisms for generating student agency: Frequent quizzes and a flow of data to students; students self-correcting and self-scoring; student error analysis; regular re-teaching; required re-takes and re-dos with highest grade given; cooperative learning protocols and teaching of group skills; student feedback to teacher on when the pace of instruction is too fast or they need clarification; reward system for effective effort and gains; structures for extra help.

• Daily instructional strategies for clarity: Communicating objectives in student-friendly language and unpacking them with students; clear and accessible criteria for success, developed with students; exemplars of products that meet criteria for success; checking for understanding; making student thinking visible; frequent student summarizing.

• Explicitly teaching students: Effective effort behaviors; student self-evaluation of effective effort; learning study skills and other strategies of successful students; attribution theory and brain research.

• Opportunities for choice and voice: Students empowered to tell the teacher when they feel they’re being left behind; student-generated questions and constructivist teaching; negotiating the rules of the “classroom game”; teaching students the principles of learning; being sensitive to students’ learning styles; students being able to fulfill requirements in nonstandard ways, proving they are experts in a particular area; culturally relevant teaching and personal relationship building; student-led parent conferences.

• Schoolwide policies and practices: Effective hiring and assigning of teachers; personalizing knowledge of and contact with students; scheduling and grouping for maximum impact on teaching and learning; content-focused teams that examine student work in relation to their teaching; reward system for academic effort and gains; push, support, and extra help for struggling students – a hierarchy of intervention.

• Programs that enable students to value school and form a peer culture that supports academic effort: Quality after-school programs and extracurricular activities; building identity and pride in belonging to the school; creating a vision of a better life attainable through learning the things the school teaches; seeing successful people who look like them and value education; building relations with parents through home visits and focusing on how parents can help their children succeed.

 

“Getting Students to Believe in Themselves” by Jon Saphier in Phi Delta Kappan, February 2017 (Vol. 98, #5, p. 48-54), www.kappanmagazine.org; Saphier is at [email protected].

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5. Four Ways to Support the Growth of Readers and Writers

(Originally titled “Building Stamina for Struggling Readers and Writers”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, Maine literacy coach/author Paula Bourque describes the negative feedback loop in which many less-successful students are stuck: reading is slow and frustrating and offers few psychic rewards, so they don’t do much reading, which means they don’t put in the hours needed to build fluency and proficiency, which makes them even less likely to read. Bourque suggests four ways teachers can create a virtuous feedback loop:

            • Scaffolding – “If we do all the heavy lifting for students in reading complex texts or writing, they begin to lean on that support rather than learn from it,” says Bourque. “Whoever does the work does the learning.” For example, a class is reading Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” and the teacher writes challenging vocabulary on the board with definitions. A better approach would be to read the first two stanzas aloud and ask, “What’s the mood of this poem? How does it make you feel? Are there any words Poe used that you don’t know?” Students mention quaint, entreating, obeisance, decorum and the teacher invites them to read the poem and figure out the meanings. “If we shift our goal from merely having learners complete a task to helping them build a strategic system while working on tasks,” says Bourque, “we can choose better scaffolds. Students don’t lose stamina simply because they struggle. They lose stamina when they struggle with no strategies or hope of success.”

            • A mental model – Less-proficient students are often discouraged when they’re not making enough progress. Bourque suggests having students think of the brain as a car and themselves as the driver. That way they can think of what they’re doing to get started (adjust seat, adjust mirrors, fasten seat belt, start engine) versus the distance to the destination. “Just as the driver decides when to turn, slow down, or stop,” says Bourque, “writers make important decisions about word choice, structure, and when to shift to a new point. Students are empowered when they understand they are the ones driving their brains and their learning.”

            • Growth mindset – A teacher frequently encourages students (“You’re doing great. Keep it up”), which seems helpful but doesn’t build persistence and proficiency for future challenges. Better to note what the student has done (“I see you know how to pull the numbers out of the word problem to make your equation”) and then suggest a resource (“So now, which signal words do you see on the anchor chart that tell you what to do?”). When the student chooses the correct word, the teacher asks, “How do you know?” – again, getting the student to do the thinking. It’s also helpful to confer with students after a lesson:

-   What was the most challenging part?

-   What did you do to face that challenge?

-   How did you feel at first? How do you feel now?

-   What can you take away from this challenge to help you next time?

• Emphasizing process over product – Teachers can do this by drawing attention to the step-by-step work:

-   As they write, have students use “look-fors” – notes that direct the reader’s attention to decisions they made (Notice the sensory words I used).

-   Post drafts, mark-ups, edits, and revisions alongside a finished piece of work, showing the “messiness” of the process.

-   Have students count the number of words they write in a given amount of time, noting improvement.

-   Use portfolios to create a tangible learning history, prompting students to think in terms of “I used to…” and “Now I…”

 

“Building Stamina for Struggling Readers and Writers” by Paula Bourque in Educational

Leadership, February 2017 (Vol. 74, #5), available online at http://bit.ly/2lCmSbR

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6. The Frequency and Impact of Teacher “Churn” in New York City

            In this article in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Allison Atteberry (University of Colorado/Boulder), Susanna Loeb (Stanford University), and James Wyckoff (University of Virginia) report on their study of teacher turnover in New York City schools from 1974-2010. The authors report that 41.5% of teachers were new to their positions each year (the churn rate was quite consistent through the years of the study, and quite similar to schools across New York State), with the lowest rate in elementary schools (36.2%), more in middle schools (44.4%), and the most in high schools (46.9%). Of new-to-position teachers, these were the reasons and percentages:

-   Just started teaching – 15.4%

-   Transferred from another district – 6.2%

-   Transferred from another school within the district – 24.9%

-   Moved from another grade or subject within the school – 53.5%

Taking into consideration that these are a percentage of the 41.5% of new-to-position teachers, a little over a quarter of all teachers moved within their school to a new subject or grade assignment each year, sometimes to fill a vacancy created by a teacher who left, but much more often through choice or reassignment.

Were certain students more likely to be assigned to a new-to-position teacher? “Overall,” report Atteberry, Loeb, and Wyckoff, “there is some evidence that historically underserved groups of students are more likely to be assigned to switching teachers (even within the same school), certain kinds of teachers are more likely to be switched, and certain schools may experience greater degrees of switching; however, these relationships tend to be weak.”

The most important question tackled by the authors is the impact on student achievement in classrooms of new-to-position teachers. “These teachers face the challenge of preparing a year’s worth of material, perhaps in an unfamiliar work environment,” say the authors. Therefore, their conclusion is not surprising: “Switching teacher assignments negatively affects student achievement across all four types of switches.” The effects on students are worst for brand-new teachers, who are novices to the job, the school, their colleagues, and the subject matter. Negative effects are somewhat less pronounced moving down the other three churn categories, with the least impact (though still significant) for within-school switchers because they’re familiar with teaching, the district, and the school’s culture.

“The estimated impact of within-school churn is not large in absolute terms,” say Atteberry, Loeb, and Wyckoff. “However, given that about a quarter of all teachers each year are churning within the same school, these small negative decrements add up: The estimated impact of churning is, on average, about a quarter of the size of the impact of being assigned to a brand-new teacher…” This suggests that principals should keep an eye on this factor when assigning students each year.

            The authors acknowledge that within-school teacher moves can sometimes benefit students – e.g., a particular teacher works much better with second graders than sixth graders and the move is positive. The key variable here is the savvy of the principal. But the authors were unable to isolate data on positive teacher moves; overall, they found that churn had a negative effect on student achievement.

 

“Teacher Churning: Reassignment Rates and Implications for Student Achievement” by Allison Atteberry, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, March 2017 (Vol. 39, #1, p. 3-30), http://bit.ly/2l10Ewr

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7. Key Factors in the Academic Success of Asian-American Students

            In this article in Kappan, Todd Pittinsky (Stony Brook University/SUNY) summarizes research on why the achievement gap between Asian-American and white students is widening, even among lower-SES Asian-American students:

-   A growth mindset – Asian-American families attribute achievement to effort, not innate intelligence.

-   Education as a priority – Families make significant sacrifices to ensure that their children go to the best possible schools.

-   Respect for teachers – Children get a clear message about this.

-   The student’s job – Another message: the child’s main task is to succeed in school because it’s the pathway to a successful life.

-   Self-esteem is earned – Praise is given for excellent results, not just effort. Asian-American students generally have lower self-esteem than their non-Asian peers, but it rests on a more solid foundation.

 

“Learning from the Other Achievement Gap” by Todd Pittinsky in Phi Delta Kappan, February 2017 (Vol. 98, #5, p. 80), www.kappanmagazine.org; Pittinsky can be reached at [email protected].

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8. Using Picture Books to Bring Ancient History Alive

            “Young adolescents today are multimodal thinkers, learning about the world through an array of simultaneous images and words swirling around their computer screens, iPhones, or televisions,” says Katherine Batchelor (Miami University, Ohio) in this Middle School Journal article. “This leaves many middle-school social studies teachers with the daunting task of asking students to temporarily leave the 21^st century and imagine ancient civilizations that flourished 8,000 years ago.” A helpful way of supplementing dry, committee-written textbooks, says Batchelor, is using carefully chosen picture books. Here are some of her recommendations:

Ancient China:

-   Forbidden City by Barbara Knox (2006)

-   Red Butterfly: How a Princess Smuggled the Secret of Silk Out of China by Deborah Noyes (2007)

-   We’re Riding on a Caravan: An Adventure on the Silk Road by Laurie Krebs (2005)

-   The Silk Route: 7,000 Miles of History by John Major (1995)

-   A Single Pebble: The Story of the Silk Road by Bonnie Christensen (2013)

Ancient Egypt:

-   I Am the Mummy Heb-Nefert by Eve Bunting (1997)

-   Tutankhamen’s Gift by Robert Sabuda (1997)

-   Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books by Karen Leggett Abouraya (2011)

-   Seeker of Knowledge: The Man Who Deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphs by James Rumford (2000)

Ancient Greece:

-   Wise Guy: The Life and Times of Socrates by M.D. Usher (2005)

-   King Midas: The Golden Touch by Demi (2002)

-   Cupid and Psyche by Charlotte Craft and Kinuko Craft (1996)

Ancient India:

-   Taj Mahal by Caroline Arnold (2007)

-   Elephant Dance by Teresa Heine (2004)

-   In Andal’s House by Gloria Whelan (2013)

Ancient Islam:

-   Muhammad by Demi (2003)

-   The Genius of Islam: How Muslims Made the Modern World by Bryn Barnard (2011)

-   Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns: A Muslim Book of Colors by Hena Khan and Mehrdokht Amini (2012)

-   Deep in the Sahara by Kelly Cunnane (2013)

Ancient Japan:

-   Basho and the River Stones by Tim Myers (2004)

-   Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho by Dawnine Spivak (1997)

-   Hokusai: The Man Who Painted a Mountain by Deborah Kogan Ray (2001)

-   Yuki and the One Thousand Carriers by Gloria Whelan and Yan Nascimbene (2008)

Mesopotamia – Babylon, Sumer, and Assyria:

-   Ishtar and Tammuz by Christopher Moore and Christina Balit (1996)

-   Zahara’s Rose by Libby Hathorn (2009)

Ancient Rome:

-   Escape from Pompeii by Christina Balit (2003)

-   You Wouldn’t Want to Live in Pompeii by John Malam and David Salariya (2008)

-   Pompeii: Lost and Found by Mary Pope Osborne and Bonnie Christensen (2006)

-   Rome Antics by David Macaulay (2011)

South America: Aztec, Inca, and Maya:

-   Rain Player by David Wisniewski (1995)

-   The Flame of Peace: A Tale of the Aztecs by Deborah Nourse Lattimore (1991)

-   The Lost Treasure of the Inca by Peter Lourie (2002)

Ancient Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay:

-   The Fire Children by Eric Maddern (1993)

-   Mansa Musa: The Lion of Mali by Khephra Burns (2001)

-   Sundiata: Lion King of Mali by David Wisniewski (1992)

 

“Around the World in 80 Picture Books: Teaching Ancient Civilizations Through Text Sets” by Katherine Batchelor in Middle School Journal, January 2017 (Vol. 48, #1, p. 13-26), http://bit.ly/2l0foMY; Batchelor can be reached at [email protected].

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9. Short Items:

            a. Sesame Street puts the ideas of Carol Dweck and Jeff Howard to music – This 2014 video by Janelle Monáe captures the effort-based, growth mindset that can be so transformation in classrooms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLeUvZvuvAs

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            b. Pixar on storytelling – In collaboration with Khan Academy, Pixar created this website on storytelling https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/storytelling with segments on the storyteller’s unique perspective, favorite stories, words and character, and specific advice.

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            c. Hans Rosling’s website – Gapminder http://www.gapminder.org is the website created by Swedish graphic presentation guru Hans Rosling to visually dramatize the issues he cared about, especially ending world poverty. It contains some of his last video presentations.

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