Marshall Memo 579
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
March 23, 2015
1. David Brooks on key skills for the 21st century
2. A company rethinks performance evaluation
3. Rebutting spurious arguments against the Common Core
4. Text complexity versus Lexile levels
5. Effective use of on-the-spot (a.k.a. formative) assessments
6. Shifting the way fractions are taught in fourth grade
7. Should students be able to stand up during class?
8. Short item: Math resources website
“It is utopian to think that most American children will master the Common Core standards immediately. It’s defeatist to think that schools can’t do anything to help their students make progress toward that lofty objective. And it’s disingenuous to take either of these extreme positions in this debate.”
Michael Petrilli in “Eva et al. Flunk the Fairness Test” in The Education Gadfly, March
18, 2015 (Vol. 15, #11), http://edexcellence.net/articles/eva-et-al-flunk-the-fairness-test
“If a leader checks in less often than once a week, the team member’s priorities may become vague and aspirational, and the leader can’t be helpful – and the conversation will shift from coaching for near-term work to giving feedback about past performance.”
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall (see item #2)
“Children know what they know. They bring what they bring. Our job is not to wish that students knew more or knew differently. Our job is to turn students’ individual knowledge – and the collective range of knowledge the whole class brings – into a curricular strength, rather than to regard it as an instructional inconvenience. We can do that only if we hold high expectations for all students, convey great respect for the knowledge, language, and culture each brings to the classroom, and offer support in helping each student achieve those high expectations.”
Eric Cooper (National Urban Alliance for Effective Education) and David Pearson
(University of California/Berkeley) in a letter to Education Week, March 18, 2015,
responding to a letter in a previous issue on the impact of poverty www.edweek.org
“As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too,” says David Brooks in this New York Times column, “and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged.” He gives several examples:
• Herding cats – Doug Lemov has catalogued the “micro-gestures” of especially effective teachers in his book, Teach Like a Champion 2.0 (Jossey-Bass, 2015). “The master of cat herding,” says Brooks, “senses when attention is about to wander, knows how fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that surely is relevant beyond education.”
• Social courage – In today’s loosely networked world, this has particular value – the ability to go to a conference, meet a variety of people, invite six of them to lunch afterward, and form long-term friendships with four of them. “People with social courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in conversation – willing to listen 70 percent of the time,” says Brooks. “They build not just contacts but actual friendships by engaging people on multiple levels.”
• Capturing amorphous trends with a clarifying label – People with this skill can “look at a complex situation, grasp the gist and clarify it by naming what is going on,” says Brooks. He quotes Oswald Chambers: “The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”
• Making nonhuman things intuitive to humans – This is what Steve Jobs did so well.
• Purpose provision – “Many people go through life overwhelmed by options, afraid of closing off opportunities,” says Brooks. But a few have fully cultivated moral passions that can help others choose the one thing they should dedicate themselves to.”
• The ability to simultaneously hold two opposed ideas in mind – “For some reason,” says Brooks, “I am continually running across people who believe this is the ability their employees and bosses need right now.”
• Cross-class expertise – “In a world divided along class, ethnic, and economic grounds,” says Brooks, “some people are culturally multilingual. They can operate in an insular social niche while seeing it from the vantage point of an outsider.”
“Reinventing Performance Management” by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in Harvard Business Review, April 2015 (Vol. 93, #4, p. 40-50),
https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management
In this Education Gadfly article, literacy guru Tim Shanahan (University of Illinois/ Chicago) advises candidates running for the U.S. presidency to steer clear of the following arguments being made by some opponents of the Common Core:
• Previous educational standards were better. Not true, says Shanahan: “Parents who are paying for remedial college classes or employers who are struggling to hire high-school graduates with basic skills may become particularly testy over this argument.”
• Teachers weren’t involved in writing the Common Core. Actually, many teachers worked on the standards, says Shanahan. The real issue is their quality, which be believes is sound.
• They promote theories of evolution and global warming. No, he says, since the new standards don’t cover science, history, or current events.
• The Common Core isn’t research-based. Standards are aspirational goals, says Shanahan. “Standards aren’t teaching methods; they aren’t approaches to instruction. When the critics say that some states should have tried these out first to find out if they’re any good, it’s like saying that some states should aim for 4 percent unemployment and others for 8 percent – so that we can know whether we want people to find jobs.”
• They require too much testing. State standards and testing have been in place for the last 20 years, he says, and Common Core doesn’t represent a major change.
• They are the reason for all the test prep. “Test prep, though unsavory, has nothing to do with Common Core,” says Shanahan. Reducing test prep is a separate issue – and an important one.
• Publishers are making money from them. There’s no question that government programs lead to the purchase of goods and services, he says – that’s true of the U.S. armed forces, Medicare, and Social Security. The issue is the quality of those goods and services.
• The U.S. Constitution bans national curricula. True, the Constitution leaves education to the states. The Common Core is voluntary and there’s no constitutional barrier to the federal government creating incentives for states to choose standards and hold schools accountable.
• Common Core violates states’ rights. “The states, being sovereign entities, have the authority to coordinate with each other as much as they choose,” says Shanahan. And they have the right to adopt or take a pass on Common Core.
• These are President Obama’s standards. Although candidate Obama supported higher standards and accountability testing in 2008 and his Department of Education has created incentives to adopt Common Core and funded test-development efforts, the standards themselves were developed without federal support or involvement.
“When do we need to read text closely?” asks author/consultant Stephanie Harvey in this article in Reading Today. When it’s complex. “To comprehend complex text,” she says, “readers need to slow down, consider what they know, ask questions, annotate, synthesize, think inferentially, and reread for clarification.” But Harvey cautions against using Lexile levels as the main criterion and forcing students to read too-difficult texts that aren’t conducive to good comprehension instruction. She cites several telling examples:
In this Edutopia article, Vicki Davis describes a telling moment as she taught binary numbers to her students (adding ones and zeroes like a computer). This topic looks harder than it is, says Davis, and she’s found that if she teaches students to count by binary numbers, they usually get it. After a few minutes of this, two students piped up, “We’ve got this, it’s easy. Can we move on?” Davis checked with the rest of the class: “Do you have this?” They all vigorously nodded their heads in assent.
“My teacher instinct said that everyone knew it,” says Davis, “but I decided to experiment. So I wrote a problem on the board. Students were already logged into Socrative, and a box opened on their screens. Each student typed in his or her answer to the problem. They clicked enter, and all their answers appeared on my screen beside the name of each student.” Davis was shocked to see that only two students had the correct answer – the two students who had impatiently asked her to move on. Not one of the students who confidently nodded that they understood was able to answer the problem correctly.
Davis retaught the concept, had students try another problem in Socrative, and the results improved a little. She worked another slightly different problem and checked in, and more students got it. Ten minutes later, the entire class had mastered binary numbers.
Is this checking-for-understanding and reteaching process too time-consuming to be a realistic option, given the pressure to cover the curriculum? Not at all, says Davis: “It didn’t take me longer to teach binary numbers. You see, I don’t move past binary numbers until all of my students are scoring 90 percent or higher. And as a result of this experience, I taught binary numbers and all of the accompanying standards in three days instead of my usual five, and no one had to come for after-school tutoring.”
The key, she says, is an anonymous all-class assessment system that allows the teacher to see what’s really going on in students’ minds without “the embarrassment of public hand-raising.” She recommends the following real-time checking-for-understanding systems:
“Moving Beyond Brownies and Pizza” by Daniel Freeman and Theresa Jorgensen in Teaching Children Mathematics, March 2015 (Vol. 21, #7, p. 412-420), http://bit.ly/1GMJCGU for NCTM members; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
[See Memo 494 for a related article on fractions teaching as key to success in algebra.]
In this Edutopia article, Canadian teacher Alana Guinane and six of her middle-school students describe how they did research on the unhealthy consequences of being sedentary for long periods of time. “Our school is set up for sitting,” they say: “the benches in the cafeteria, the rows of desks and ‘seating arrangements’ in the classrooms, the chairs lined up in front of each computer in the lab, the couches in the library. We are expected to sit for basically every class except for gym.” Students wondered how they could be more physically active in school without undermining classroom management.
After some discussion, one of Guinane’s classes decided to conduct a one-month experiment in which students would be allowed to stand up during lessons, discussions, and work time. Ground rules included making reasonable decisions on where to stand and not obstructing anyone’s view or distracting classmates. Students made a variety of choices: some athletes wanted to remain seated to rest up for vigorous activity later in the day. A girl with Type One diabetes stood as a way to regulate her blood sugar.
The amateur researchers collected data on how students felt physically, mentally, and emotionally. At the end of the month, many students reported that standing up improved their focus during long lessons. There was the additional benefit of being in natural light as they perched on windowsills and counters. And having a choice of sitting or standing was a definite plus, versus the routine of conforming to teachers’ requests to sit down.
But perching on windowsills and counters and writing on clipboards was not conducive to the best posture, which led students to explore the idea of waist-high stand-up desks. It turned out that a parent had experience building low-cost cardboard furniture, and after getting the go-ahead from the principal, students worked with this parent and fabricated three tables, each of which could accommodate 3-4 students and were perfect for doing stand-up work (see photos in the article link below). All of Guinane’s students now have the option of standing up and report very positive results, and they have become ambassadors for the idea in other classes at their school.
a. Math resources website – In this article in Teaching Children Mathematics, Holly Henderson Pinter recommends the YouCubed website http://www.youcubed.org, which has a rich variety of free resources. Topics include mindset, number sense, depth not speed, and math apps.
© Copyright 2015 Marshall Memo LLC
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).
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.com you 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 count of articles from each)
• Headlines for all issues
• Reader opinions (with results of an annual survey)
• About Kim Marshall (including links to articles)
• A free sample issue
Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:
• The current issue (in Word or PDF)
• All back issues (also in Word and PDF)
• A database of all articles to date, searchable
by topic, title, author, source, level, etc.
• A collection of “classic” articles from all 11 years
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