Marshall Memo 575
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
February 23, 2015
1. How professional development activities are seen by teachers and higher-ups
2. Criteria for effective instructional coaching
4. A school focuses on classroom math questions
5. Two ways to improve the quality of academic discourse
6. Ongoing, continual assessment of teaching and learning
7. A math problem that will get third graders thinking
8. Another clever math problem
9. Best practices for preventing and responding to bullying
“Talk straight, demonstrate respect, create transparency, right wrongs, show loyalty, deliver results, get better, confront reality, clarify expectations, practice accountability, listen first, keep commitments, and extend trust.”
Stephen Covey’s trust behaviors, quoted in “The Character of a Coach” by Kay
Psencik in in Journal of Staff Development, Feb. 2015 (Vol. 36, #1, p. 52-55)
“It is for developing the muscle of thoughtfulness, the use of which will be the greatest pleasure in life and will also show what it means to be fully human.”
Anne Hall, a university professor of English, on the purpose of post-secondary
education, quoted in “College, Poetry, and Purpose” by Frank Bruni in The New York
Times, February 18, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1B4Mz5I
“Teachers frequently have an imprecise understanding of what their teaching looks like until they see a video recording of their class.”
Jim Knight, Marti Elford, Michael Hock, Devona Dunekack, Barbara Bradley, Donald
Deshler, and David Knight in “3 Steps to Great Coaching” in Journal of Staff
Development, February 2015 (Vol. 36, #1, p. 10-18), www.learningforward.org
“[T]oo often, professional learning community time turns into ‘social hour,’ coaching is viewed as administrative monitoring, and lesson observation is superficial.”
Stephen Sawchuk (see item #1)
“When your work is intertwined with notions of your value as a person, you’re pretty much screwed.”
Rachel Toor in “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Writers” in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2015, http://bit.ly/17pXfQi
In this Education Week article, Stephen Sawchuk reports on a recent Boston Consulting Group study that reveals stark differences in how job-embedded professional development is seen by teachers on the one hand and principals and district PD leaders on the other. (About $18 billion is spent on professional development in K-12 schools each year.) “It’s not that training options like coaching, lesson observation, and professional learning communities, in which groups of teachers plan together, aren’t good ideas,” says Sawchuk. “The problem appears to lie in the execution of such activities – too often, professional learning community time turns into ‘social hour,’ coaching is viewed as administrative monitoring, and lesson observation is superficial.”
Researchers surveyed 1,300 teachers, principals, PD directors, and providers and reported these findings:
• Teachers’ net satisfaction with various PD activities:
In this introductory page to an issue of Journal of Staff Development devoted to coaching, the editors provide a teacher’s-eye view of the best attributes of a coaching relationship:
“The level of collaboration demanded by modern teaching is unprecedented,” says Kentucky high-school teacher Paul Barnwell in this Education Week article. “[I]f we don’t deliberately forge personal connections and strengthen relationships within our school buildings, then we are handicapping our efforts to reach, mentor, and educate all our students.” Here are his suggestions for overcoming the tendency to hunker down:
• Give without strings attached. For example, one of Barnwell’s colleagues was fighting a nasty cold and asked him to cover her fifth-period class a couple of times, and he did so without expecting a quid pro quo. “In our personal and professional lives, dealing with people who always expect something in return isn’t a way to build sustainable or authentic relationships,” he says.
• Talk, don’t e-mail. “The more time you spend in front of a screen, the less time you have to say hello, ask questions, and build relationships,” says Barnwell. “The more e-mail you send, the more messages you must check and reply to.” He makes a point of walking down the hall and making personal contact, or at least picking up the phone.
• Follow your colleagues on social media. This can spark personal and professional conversations, says Barnwell. He’s set up a Twitter list in his school that allows people to take the pulse of opinions and ideas throughout the building.
• Make interdisciplinary connections. Barnwell recently reached out to the functional mental disabilities teachers in his school to get their students involved in his digital media elective. “My interactions with the FMD teachers and students have been some of my favorite, most meaningful interactions at my school,” he says.
• Laugh. “Yes, our work is important and incredibly difficult,” sighs Barnwell. “I know the feeing of having a furrowed brow and tension building up in my neck and shoulders after a particularly trying day.” Smiling, cracking a joke, sharing joy are vital to making the job sustainable.
• Be humble. “I’m in the midst of my 11th year teaching,” says Barnwell, “and one of my current classes is the most difficult I’ve ever had in terms of student engagement, promoting positive behavior, and attendance issues.” It makes all the difference if he can reach out to colleagues who don’t have an aura of knowing it all.
• Expand your circles. Barnwell confesses that it’s easy for him to limit his professional conversations to his English III colleagues. He pushes himself to reach out to counselors, librarians, classroom aides, and others.
In this Journal of Staff Development article, Boston Public Schools educators Sara Zrike and Christine Connolly describe making a series of 20-minute visits to math classrooms in a K-8 school and noticing that teachers’ questions were often not engaging students in higher-level thinking. They also noticed that teachers were talking more than students, questions and answers happened in ping-pong fashion between teachers and students, there were few moments when students commented on each others’ thinking, and misconceptions were not used as learning opportunities. All this was a problem because the school was trying to bring math instruction up to Common Core levels.
Zrike and Connolly created a transcript of classroom math questions from their visits, asked teachers to read an article on question types, and devoted several grade-level meetings to this topic. At first, teachers were reluctant to look at the transcripts, fearing they would reveal ineffective instructional practices. But teachers’ names weren’t attached to the questions and the exercise of sorting them into two categories proved to be non-threatening and eye-opening. The two types mentioned in the article were “funneling” questions (leading to one right answer) and “focusing” questions (more open-ended and thought-provoking). Here are some examples of each:
Funneling:
Focusing:
“Teachers said they had no idea that they were asking so many funneling questions,” says Zrike, “and felt that it would be easy to make some of the same questions more focusing.” For example, the question, “Would 8/7 be more than a whole?” was rewritten as, “What does the fraction 8/7 tell us about the whole? How do you know?” Teachers went to work on crafting higher-level questions with a new consciousness of questioning rigor.
Classroom observations a few months later showed a marked improvement: “A majority of the questions asked by teachers probed students to explain how they solved a problem, why they solved it that way, and how do they know they problem-solved correctly,” says Connelly. “Often, teachers exhibited longer wait times, which is necessary when asking cognitively demanding questions requiring significant language in the answers.” In that spring’s state MCAS testing, the school showed a significant uptick in math and literacy scores.
(Originally titled “Calling Mulligan! Two Rules for Dynamic Discourse”)
In this article in Education Update, Lisa Arter (Southern Utah University) suggests two approaches to enhancing classroom or faculty discussions:
• Calling a mulligan – In sports, a mulligan is letting a mistake pass unnoticed or without consequences. In classrooms, mulligans are helpful for students who may be unwilling to risk making a contribution for fear that they’ll be criticized or feel stupid: a person can stop in mid-sentence, say “mulligan,” take a deep breath, and start over (or opt out of making a statement). “Speakers are more willing to engage in controversial discussions because they are allowed to take an immediate second shot at their statement,” says Arter. “Audience members listen more carefully to the entire statement because they realize a mulligan might be used at any moment.” Students may also see how mulligans can apply to their writing – they might get in the habit of looking at it again versus running a spell-check.
• The five Rs: respond, repeat, restate, rebut, and reinforce – When a student finishes responding to a question, the teacher tosses a Koosh ball to another student and says, “Repeat” and the student tries to reiterate what the first student said. The Koosh ball then returns to the first student, who is asked to “Restate” if the previous student didn’t capture his or her meaning. The Koosh ball then comes back to the teacher, who tosses it to another student and says, “Rebut” and that student has to either disagree or agree with the original response and give a reason. The Koosh ball then goes to another randomly selected student to “Reinforce” – this student has the option to support either the original response or the rebuttal with additional supporting evidence.
“When combined, these two methods have been extremely successful at increasing respectful student debate and limiting my involvement to the simple R commands,” says Arter. “Students listen more actively, speak more freely, and – as a bonus – apply the state-and-support scaffold to their academic writing.”
“Classroom-Based Formative Assessments – Guiding Teaching and Learning” by Francis (Skip) Fennell, Barbara Ann Swartz, Beth McCord Kobett, and Jonathan Wray, and “Did Students ‘Get’ It? Teachers Can Find Out Now!” by Robyn Silbey in Teaching Children Mathematics, February 2015 (Vol. 21, #6, p. 325-327), www.nctm.org; Swartz can be reached at [email protected], Silbey at [email protected].
In this Teaching Children Mathematics article, Ed Enns (Waterloo Region School District, Canada) suggests the following problem-solving challenge and invites teachers to try it with third or fourth graders and e-mail him with solutions, student work, and feedback.
Students work in pairs or triads supplied with a large piece of paper to record solutions, pens or markers, and (optionally) calculators. Here’s the problem (given to students after some introductory discussion of allowances):
“Which Is the Better Deal?” edited by Ed Enns in Teaching Children Mathematics, February 2015 (Vol. 21, #6, p. 328-330), www.nctm.org; Enns can be reached at [email protected].
“Guidance for Schools Selecting Anti-bullying Approaches: Translating Evidence-Based Strategies to Contemporary Implementation Realities” by Nadia Ansary, Maurice Elias, Michael Greene, and Stuart Green in Educational Researcher, January/February 2015 (Vol. 44, #1, p. 27-36), http://edr.sagepub.com/content/44/1/27.abstract; Ansary can be reached at [email protected].
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About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 44 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 64 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).
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• Publications (with a count of articles from each)
• Article selection criteria
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
ASCD SmartBrief/Public Education NewsBlast
Better: Evidence-Based Education
Center for Performance Assessment Newsletter
District Administration
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
Essential Teacher
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Education Letter
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Journal of Staff Development
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Middle School Journal
Perspectives
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Principal’s Research Review
Reading Research Quarterly
Reading Today
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Teacher
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children/Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The District Management Journal
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Learning Principal/Learning System/Tools for Schools
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time
Wharton Leadership Digest