Marshall Memo 753
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
September 17, 2018
1. Six traps new teachers should avoid
2. Why would any district continue to use VAM to evaluate teachers?
3. Doing justice to global warming in science classes
4. Strategies to reduce implicit bias
5. How many mistakes is it okay for struggling readers to make?
6. Better ways for students to solve math word problems
7. What should we make of disappointing research on preschools?
8. History books to hook reluctant readers
“Problematic items do sometimes occur even in good tests, and that is one more reason it is never acceptable to make a consequential decision based on a single test score.”
Daniel Koretz, Harvard testing expert, quoted in “Should These Tests Get a Failing
Grade?” by James Stewart, The New York Times, August 24, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/business/nyc-admissions-tests-shsat.html
“I had little or no information about grammar when taking the test. I only knew that, (a) You end sentences with a period, and (b) You put some commas in between.”
A New York City student taking a test prep course to prepare for the SHSAT exam,
quoted in “Cram Session” by Tyler Foggatt in The New Yorker, September 17, 2018,
“Dismayingly, the campaign to cast doubt on the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change echoes loudly in our nation’s science classrooms.”
Ann Reid (see item #3)
“Past research shows that racial biases play a more significant role in actions that take place under pressure or uncertainty about how best to respond.”
Simone Ispa-Landa (see item #4)
“[S]hift the focus of teacher evaluation from ‘Who should I fire?’ to ‘How can I help teachers improve?’”
Kevin Close and Audrey Amrein-Beardsley (see item #2)
“No one ever built a cathedral by waving a wand. Instead, magnificent cathedrals are built one stone at a time. In the same way, we can build a solid structure of learning using proven programs every year.”
Robert Slavin (see item #7)
(Originally titled “Tips for New Teachers: Avoiding the Siren Calls”)
“Teaching is one of the only professions in which new hires bear the full responsibilities of the profession beginning on their first day on the job,” say New Jersey educators Mark Wise and Beth Pandolpho in this ASCD Inservicearticle. Here are their suggestions on how new teachers can avoid “siren calls” that might lure them to ineffective practices:
•First things first– avoiding the compulsion to “cover” everything in the curriculum. Like a movie director, teachers must make choices on which elements will move the story (learning) forward and which need to be cut. When planning lessons, teachers need to put in the essential elements (the “big rocks”) first, making it easier to make on-the-fly decisions about what to abandon or shorten.
•Choose the right format or strategy– avoiding faddish practices that don’t fit the situation. Teachers can have students sit in rows, groups, a circle, or a fishbowl. They can lecture, stage a debate, have students think/pair/share, or rotate through stations. And they have many options with technology. The question is not what’s coolest, but what is best for the learning objective.
•Circulate with a purpose– avoiding the tendency to walk around monitoring compliance. The right questions in the teacher’s mind: What am I looking for? What am I listening for? What is the evidence? What will I do if I don’t see it? Is this a time for an all-class mini-discussion?All those questions lead back to the planning objective: How can I make students’ thinking visible quickly and efficiently so I know if they are “getting it?”
•Check the understanding of the whole class– not calling on only the students who raise their hands. Teachers should use systems that accurately assess all students’ learning in real time so as to reveal misconceptions and errors and make good decisions on immediate next steps.
•Produce mental sweat– not doing the heavy lifting for students. “We want our students to succeed,” say Wise and Pandolpho, “but when we over-scaffold, even with the best intentions, we are not doing our students any favors.” It’s not enough to teach students how to “do school;” to be prepared for college and life, students need to work hard, make mistakes, get feedback, fix problems, and become autonomous learners.
•Allow time for reflection– avoiding the pressure to “move on.” Especially in middle and high schools, students traipse from class to class with little time to consolidate what they’re taking in. They need time and space to jot answers to big-picture learning questions, followed by small-group discussions: What new information did I learn? How does this connect to what I already know? What questions do I still have?
“Learning from What Doesn’t Work in Teacher Evaluation” by Kevin Close and Audrey Amrein-Beardsley in Phi Delta Kappan, September 2018 (Vol. 100, #1, p. 15-19), www.kappanonline.org; the authors can be reached at [email protected]and [email protected].
In this article in Education Week, Ann Reid (National Center for Science Education) conducts a quick inventory of the state of planet Earth: “From simple increases in temperatures to complex feedback effects on ocean currents, weather patterns, and hydrological cycles, the consequences of human-driven climate change are no longer distant theoretical threats, but the subject of near-daily headline news.” However, she says, “the scientific consensus on climate change that emerged more than 30 years ago is not yet accepted by the American public.” Why? A public-relations campaign funded by political and corporate groups has swayed public opinion: only 58 percent of Americans accept that warming is caused by modern civilization, and there is a stark political divide: 84 percent of liberal Democrats hold that belief, compared to only 26 percent of conservative Republicans.
“Dismayingly,” says Reid, “the campaign to cast doubt on the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change echoes loudly in our nation’s science classrooms.” When asked in a recent poll, “What proportion of climate scientists think that global warming is caused mostly by human activities?” only about 40 percent of responding teachers gave the correct answer (81-100 percent). And 60 percent of teachers report encouraging their students to debate the causes of global warming – “a topic,” says Reid, “no more scientifically controversial than photosynthesis.”
Reid doesn’t blame teachers, pointing instead to textbooks, state science standards and professional development, all of which lag behind the scientific consensus on this topic. In addition, there’s pressure on teachers from students, colleagues, and community members who feel passionately about the issue. Nevertheless, Reid sees three reasons for optimism:
• Science teachers are hungry for more information on climate change. Two thirds of teachers in the study cited above want thorough professional development on the subject. Many are also aligning their curriculum to the Next Generation Science Standards, which deal accurately with global warming.
• Lots of information is available. “There are so many different lines of evidence for climate change,” says Reid, “and the evidence is so clear, that it is entirely feasible to develop inquiry-based climate change lessons for any middle- or high-school science class: general science, biology, chemistry, physics, environmental science, or Earth science.”
• Teaching climate science is compatible with different religious and political positions. There is a surprising amount of public support for teaching about climate change, says Reid, and it’s possible for a devout evangelical or firm conservative to accept the science.
In this article in Educational Researcher, Nicole Ispa-Landa (Northwestern University) says implicit bias and racial disparities in discipline persist even in schools implementing restorative justice, social-emotional learning, and schoolwide positive behavioral supports. Ispa-Landa lists four possible reasons. It might be “principled resistance” by some teachers “to educational reforms that clash with their professional principles, self-understanding, emotional responses, and framing of the problems that proponents of the reform aim to address.” It could also stem from teachers’ beliefs about whyproblem behaviors occur, locating the cause within the misbehaving child. “Because of implicit and explicit racial biases,” says Ispa-Landa, “this is especially true if the child is from a historically stigmatized racial group. Viewing the source of the problem as internal to the child obstructs teachers from examining how their actions can contribute to the problem.”
A third possibility is a particular attitude: “Teachers with a punitive or zero-tolerance mindset,” says Ispa-Landa, “believe and behave as though the best way to deter student misbehavior is through the application of harsh, automatic, and exclusionary school punishments.” This mindset is especially likely to result in racially skewed discipline. Finally, teachers might not have had adequate training to successfully implement restorative justice and other progressive interventions. “Past research,” says Ispa-Landa, “shows that racial biases play a more significant role in actions that take place under pressure or uncertainty about how best to respond.”
The interventions she recommends come from social psychology research and are based on the idea that implicit bias is a “habit of mind” that can be modified through deliberate effort. Once an educator is aware of implicit bias, these strategies can bring about significant improvement:
•Individuating– This involves “deliberate efforts to focus on specific details about a person, increasing the salience of these details relative to information about the person’s social category (e.g., race or gender),” says Ispa-Landa. Individuating has been shown to have a positive impact on doctors’ interactions with patients, and can certainly work in classrooms as teachers develop closer knowledge of and relationships with their students.
•Perspective-taking– This involves “intentional efforts to imagine another person’s perspective,” says Ispa-Landa, “thinking another person’s thoughts or living in another person’s situation.” It’s a cognitive process, different from empathy, which is an emotional reaction (feeing what someone else feels). “The two are related,” she says, “as perspective-taking is thought to stimulate affective empathy, while affective empathy helps in adopting the other’s perspective.” One study in a hospital asked nurses to imagine how patients’ pain affected their lives, and the dosages they gave black and white patients became much more similar than before the perspective taking.
Of course there are times when implicit bias overrides efforts to individuate and take a student’s perspective – in moments of stress, with severe behavior problems, at certain times of the day. Ispa-Landa suggests some steps schools can take to reduce disproportionality in discipline:
In this article in The Reading Teacher, Emily Rodgers, Jerome D’Agostino, Robert Kelly, and Clara Mikita (The Ohio State University) address the question of what level of reading accuracy – 95%, 90%, 85% – is best to support primary-grade students who are having difficulty with reading. There’s a surprising lack of consensus about how much challenge is best, with different researchers making the case for easy, instructional, and hard texts. “Without direct empirical evidence that truly isolates the effects of various accuracy ranges on reading proficiency,” say the authors, “we are left with several important questions: Does accuracy (and, conversely, amount of error) matter to reading progress for beginning readers who are having difficulty learning to read? Is it deleterious or helpful to their progress if they read with less than 90% accuracy in a highly supportive literacy intervention setting?” These questions are even more important with the advent of Common Core standards, which call for more reading of challenging tests.
Rodgers, D’Agostino, Kelly, and Mikita conducted a study of oral reading and came to an unequivocal conclusion: When bottom-20th percentile students read texts with low accuracy (less than 90%), there is a negative effect on their reading development. Conversely, the more these students read at the instructional or easy level, the better their downstream results. In other words, the more time lower-achieving students spend reading texts in their comfort zone – not too hard and not too easy – the better they will do. “Perhaps most important,” say the authors, “we found no support for assertions that students in a supportive instructional setting benefited from lower accuracy rates.”
What are the implications for primary-grade classrooms? Of course making errors, problem-solving, and fixing mistakes are necessary for learning, say Rodgers, D’Agostino, Kelly, and Mikita. “Not only do errors give us insight into a student’s processing of print, but errors may also be self-instructive, particularly if a student makes an error and then self-corrects.” But there is a tipping point where making too many errors is harmful to the reader. Classroom implications:
In this article in Teaching Exceptional Children, Sarah Powell (University of Texas/ Austin) and Lynn Fuchs (Vanderbilt University) note that many teachers tell students to solve math word problems by telling them to watch for key words (more, altogether, share, twice) to decide which operation to use, or having students practice with one operation at a time (“Today we’re doing subtraction word problems”). There is no research evidence that either of these approaches works for students with learning disabilities, say Powell and Fuchs, and there are problems using them with any students.
Here are examples of where the key word strategy fails because students seize on the key word without grasping what the problem is really about:
Powell and Fuchs recommend two alternative strategies, which they say are especially effective for students with special needs:
•Attack strategies– Give students a general plan for processing and solving word problems. Here are some possible formulas, the first four using acronyms:
FOPS: Find the problem. Organize information using a diagram. Plan to solve the problem. Solve the problem.
•Schema instruction– Students categorize word problems within problem types, applying an efficient solution strategy for each schema. There are three additive schemas – combining, comparing, or changing – and three multiplicative schemas – equal groups, comparison, and proportions or ratios. Schema instruction requires much more instructional time than the attack strategies, perhaps spanning an entire school year, and there needs to be an explicit focus on how key vocabulary words are used in math problems. Schema strategies are especially helpful with multi-step word problems, say Powell and Fuchs.
“Effective Word-Problem Instruction: Using Schemas to Facilitate Mathematical Reasoning” by Sarah Powell and Lynn Fuchs in Teaching Exceptional Children, September/October 2018 (Vol. 51, #1, p. 31-42), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6130842/; Powell can be reached at [email protected].
In this article on his website, Robert Slavin (Johns Hopkins University) says there’s disappointing news for educators who thought quality preschool was a silver bullet for long-term student achievement. A large-scale, authoritative study in Tennessee has called into question the widely cited 1993 Perry Preschool study, showing that a year in a good preschool does not predict that students will be successful in future grades and life. “Clearly, the Tennessee study was a major disappointment,” says Slavin. “How could preschool have no lasting effects for disadvantaged students?” He cites other studies that reached the same conclusion, producing a sobering picture of the downstream results of preschool. What are the implications? asks Slavin. Do we throw in the towel?
“No,” says Slavin. “I would argue that rather than considering preschool magic-or-nothing, we should think of it the same way we think about any other grade in school. That is, a successful school experience should not be one terrific year, but fourteen years (pre-K to 12) of great instruction using proven programs and practices… No one ever built a cathedral by waving a wand. Instead, magnificent cathedrals are built one stone at a time. In the same way, we can build a solid structure of learning using proven programs every year… There are programs proven to be effective in randomized experiments, at least for reading and math, for every grade level, pre-K to 12… If we improve our schools one grade at a time and one subject at a time, we can see accumulating gains, ones that do not require waiting for miracles. And then we can work steadily toward improving what we can offer children every year, in every subject, in every type of school.”
The current issue of Phi Delta Kappanhas extensive data from the 50th year of polling the U.S. public’s attitudes on public schools. The headlines and questions:
© Copyright 2018 Marshall Memo LLC
About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and other educators very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 48 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, writer, and consultant lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 60 carefully-chosen publications (see list to the right), sifts through more than a hundred articles each week, and selects 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, pulls out several striking quotes, provides e-links to full articles when available, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday evening (with occasional breaks; there are 50 issues a year). Every week there’s a podcast and HTML version as well.
Individual subscriptions are $50 for a year. Rates decline steeply for multiple readers within the same organization. See the website for these rates and how to pay by check, credit card, or purchase order.
Website:
If you go to http://www.marshallmemo.comyou will find detailed information on:
• How to subscribe or renew
• A detailed rationale for the Marshall Memo
• Publications (with a count of articles from each)
• Article selection criteria
• Topics (with a running count of articles)
• Headlines for all issues
• Reader opinions
• About Kim Marshall (bio, writings, consulting)
• A free sample issue
Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:
• The current issue (in Word and PDF)
• All back issues (Word and PDF) and podcasts
• An easily searchable archive of all articles so far
• The “classic” articles from all 14+ years
Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
All Things PLC
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
District Management Journal
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
English Journal
Essential Teacher
Exceptional Children
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Language Arts
Literacy Today (formerly Reading Today)
Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Social Education
Social Studies and the Young Learner
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Learning Professional (formerly Journal of Staff Development)
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time Magazine