In This Issue:

  1. Improving student engagement in high-school classrooms

  2. Using Twitter exit tickets

  3. Fake it till you make it?

  4. An English department deals with an unreasonable mandate

  5. Running an enjoyable and productive faculty retreat

  6. Why empathy is not always the best emotional tool

  7. Stepping up to deal with mediocre and ineffective performance

  8. Keys to high-quality instructional coaching

  9. What teachers and principals spend each year

10. Short items: (a) A listening-reading website; (b) An online homework help tool

 

Quotes of the Week

“Silence when performance disappoints prolongs pain, increases stress, and affirms mediocrity.”

            Dan Rockwell (see item #7)

 

“Student engagement in school is fundamental to positive educational and life outcomes, including learning, achievement, graduation, and persistence in higher education. By contrast, disengagement can be a precursor to negative outcomes, including low achievement, social and emotional withdrawal, and dropping out.”

            Kristy Cooper, Tara Kintz, and Andrew Miness (see item #1)

 

“The last thing any faculty member wants to do is attend an all-day retreat where it is basically a glorified, but painfully longer, faculty meeting. The same loud voices dominate the conversation and the same breakdowns occur over hot-button issues.”

            Rob Kramer (see item #5)

 

“[T]echnology should never be an add-on, technology for technology’s sake.”

            Carla Amaro-Jiménez, Holly Hungerford-Kresser, and Kathryn Pole (see item #2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Improving Student Engagement in High-School Classrooms

            “Student engagement in school is fundamental to positive educational and life outcomes, including learning, achievement, graduation, and persistence in higher education,” say Kristy Cooper, Tara Kintz, and Andrew Miness (Michigan State University) in this American Journal of Education article. “By contrast, disengagement can be a precursor to negative outcomes, including low achievement, social and emotional withdrawal, and dropping out.” What are the key variables in capturing and maintaining students’ engagement? To answer this question, Cooper, Kintz, and Miness worked for three years in a diverse suburban Texas high school that had made student engagement its main priority. Each year, the researchers surveyed the school’s 2,380 students on their perceptions of engagement and other classrooms factors, and also conducted PD sessions sharing research on engagement and helping teachers interpret their student survey data.

In preparation for their work in the school, Cooper, Kintz, and Miness synthesized research on factors that produce high student engagement in classrooms, starting with three broad categories:

-   Behavioral engagement – participating, staying on task, and completing assignments;

-   Emotional engagement – feeling happy, interested, and comfortable in class;

-   Cognitive engagement – exerting mental effort to learn.

-   Classroom climate – Students have a sense of belonging in a caring, structured learning environment with high, clear, and fair expectations.

-   Teacher support – In their relationships with teachers, students form an emotional connection to the teacher and content.

-   Academic rigor – There is an academic tone, high cognitive demand, and students are pushed to work hard.

-   Lively teaching and active learning – Students have opportunities to learn in groups and work on projects that have real-life relevance.

-   Efficacy – Students feel competent and have a degree of autonomy in the classroom.

None of this is new to most educators, which made the researchers wonder why some classrooms still have low student engagement. Perhaps, they speculated, “the problem rests in getting necessary information to teachers, framing that information in actionable steps for increasing engagement, and finding way to penetrate teachers’ existing belief systems so that new information impacts teachers’ practice.”

In the Texas school, that’s where the student surveys and PD sessions came in. Cooper, Kintz, and Miness surveyed all students in November of each year (2011, 2012, and 2013) and shared the results with teachers at a February PD session. Teachers got their results in a sealed envelope at the end of the meeting (the data were not given to administrators). Following each year’s PD session, the researchers conducted focus-group discussions with several groups of 5-8 teachers to assess their reactions to the survey and discuss what it told them about student engagement in their classrooms. Teachers weren’t asked to divulge their personal student-survey results; rather, the discussion focused on classroom engagement research and possible changes in their instructional practices.

Over the three years, student engagement (as measured on a 5-4-3-2-1 scale) improved slightly, from 3.52 to 3.84. The percent of students who reported being highly engaged went from 17% to 31%, those saying they were moderately engaged decreased from 33% to 22%, and those who said they were slightly engaged dropped from 10% to 6%. Since there were several initiatives being implemented in the school (including Schlechty’s Working on the Work), it was hard to pinpoint which factors were most important.

The researchers analyzed transcripts of all the focus-groups to compare the responses of teachers whose students rated them high and low on engagement. The differences were quite striking. High-engagement teachers were:

-   Much more open to information from the PD sessions and student surveys and much more likely to integrate it into their practice;

-   More likely to notice students’ level of engagement on their faces and modify classroom strategies or make sure troubled students saw a counselor;

-   More likely to tune into students’ outside-of-school problems and address them in class or in private conversations;

-   More likely to prioritize the Texas curriculum standards and work to make them engaging;

-   More reflective about instruction, open-minded, inquisitive, and adaptive, with a stronger sense of agency. “There are things you can do to change engagement,” said one teacher. “It’s not just luck, or happenstance.”

By contrast, teachers who were rated lower on engagement by their students were:

-   More likely to see survey results as confirming what they already believed rather than sparking reflection;

-   Less likely to see students’ responses as providing guidance for improving their teaching;

-   More removed, abstract, and theoretical when talking about their teaching, using phrases like “teachers should do” rather than “I do”;

-   More likely to feel overwhelmed by the Texas curriculum standards and see them as impossible to get through and engage students;

-   Lacking in a sense of agency about being able to change and improve student engagement, often ascribing students’ lack of engagement to negative factors outside the school or just the way students were. “There’s a pattern in the family, you know,” said one teacher. “Brother dropped out. Now younger brother’s gonna say, ‘Look, why should I care?’… How do you teach this kid?” Another teacher said, “The motivation for education comes from the home.”

The researchers drew several major conclusions from their intervention and analysis of the data:

            First, all teachers in the study said they believed student engagement was important in their classrooms. They heard the administration’s emphasis on engagement loud and clear and at least gave lip service to the issue.

Second, despite the availability of student survey data and the three PD sessions on engagement, there was almost no change in the level of student engagement in different teachers’ classrooms – that is, teachers whose students reported high engagement at the beginning of the study were still rated high on engagement three years later, and teachers whose students rated them lower in engagement were still that way at the end. “These consistencies,” say Cooper, Kintz, and Miness, “suggest that broad increases in engagement are unlikely to come from the type of PD and survey data we used alone.” This might have been because the administrators in the Texas school presented the PD and survey results without requiring teachers to make changes in their classrooms, perhaps believing that the information by itself was enough to spark improvements.

            Third, there was a striking difference in how high-engagement and low-engagement teachers used the information they received in the PD and surveys. “High-engagement teachers,” say the authors, “certainly encountered the same obstacles as low-engagement teachers (such as those from the accountability system and students’ lives outside school), but they persisted in facing these challenges and believed they could increase engagement. By contrast, low-engagement teachers were more likely to view obstacles as insurmountable and to feel unable to engage students who faced those obstacles, despite the teachers’ desire to do so.”

            Fourth, what distinguished the two groups was teachers’ sense of agency. High-engagement teachers clearly had a growth mindset, believing they could change and their students could change. Low-engagement teachers had a fixed mindset – much more fatalistic about the way people are and will be.

            Fifth, Cooper, Kintz, and Miness believe it’s possible to change teachers’ sense of agency through a somewhat different intervention. While some teachers are naturally inclined to use information from PD and student surveys to fine-tune their teaching, others need more personalized support and direction through one-on-one coaching or collaborative groups. The researchers also believe PD should explicitly address mindsets and agency, using the work of Carol Dweck and others to address teachers’ thinking and nudge them into a more reflective, adaptive approach to their students. Finally, supervisors and instructional support staff should get teachers to try different approaches, notice students’ reactions, and develop a sense that they can actually change results.

 

“Reflectiveness, Adaptivity, and Support: How Teacher Agency Promotes Student Engagement” by Kristy Cooper, Tara Kintz, and Andrew Miness in American Journal of Education, November 2016 (Vol. 123, #1, p. 109-136),

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/688168; Cooper can be reached at [email protected].

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2. Using Twitter Exit Tickets

In this Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy article, Carla Amaro-Jiménez, Holly Hungerford-Kresser, and Kathryn Pole (University of Texas/Arlington) describe the use of Twitter for exit tickets in a college education course for prospective teachers. There are some of the ways exit tickets have been used in recent years:

-   A way for students to debrief what they have learned at the end of a class;

-   A formative assessment for the teacher to make sure students are learning what they’re supposed to be learning;

-   A way of providing feedback to students;

-   A quick report on what students find important;

-   An opportunity for students to think about how they learned, what they need to find out next, and how they’ll use what they have learned;

-   A way of checking on common misunderstandings and misconceptions;

-   A way to inform teaching practice by homing in on successful teaching moments and seeing what needs to be retaught.

Students in courses taught by Amaro-Jiménez had been submitting sticky-note exit tickets for several years, but she recently switched to Twitter. Students are required to submit a TwExT (as she dubbed them) by 11:59 p.m. the day of each class (although some students start sending them during the actual class), and the exit tickets count as part of their course participation grade.

            The authors were very taken by the power of Twitter exit tickets. “Using Twitter to reinvent a non-digital best practice ultimately gave a more careful understanding of student learning as it was happening,” they say, “provided a model of effective teaching practice, and helped ensure that students’ voices were heard even in large classes.” Using Twitter rather than sticky-note exit tickets made it much easier to read through students’ responses and also created a lively interchange between individual students and the professor and among each other (they could read each others’ tweets).

What Amaro-Jiménez liked best was getting immediate feedback from students, responding on the spot in some cases, and putting their ideas and suggestions to work in the very next class. She often made a point of reading a tweet out loud at the beginning of the next class – even the quietest students knew they were being heard, sometimes by the whole class. At times, she altered the course content and even the readings as a result of a tweet. Students were quick to make connections between class learnings and what they would do when they would teach their own classes.

Students also highlighted misconceptions and extrapolated what they were learning in ways that served as wake-up calls for fellow students, especially when dispelling common myths and misconceptions about working with English language learners and their families. It was also clear from the TwExTs if students were actively engaged in the class and its broader content. Finally, the tweets on each class (organized in chronological order by TweetDeck), allowed the professor to respond immediately after class to the most urgent questions or cries for help (she said this was a “game changer” in handling a large class).

These were some of the prompts to which students in the course could respond in their TwExTs:

-   Why is this week’s content relevant or important to you?

-   How is what you learned today similar to or different from what we covered last week?

-   What would this idea look like if implemented in the classroom?

-   What is one topic you’d like to learn more about?

-   How did this week’s lesson benefit you personally, professionally, or academically?

-   What is one question you would ask the author about what we read today?

 

“Teaching with a Technological Twist: Exit Tickets via Twitter in Literacy Classrooms” by Carla Amaro-Jiménez, Holly Hungerford-Kresser, and Kathryn Pole in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, November/December 2016 (Vol. 60, #3, p. 305-313), http://bit.ly/2gcBdrM; the authors can be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

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3. Fake It Till You Make It?

            In this Harvard Business Review article, Rebecca Knight suggests strategies for boosting our confidence when we’re beset by “imposter syndrome” (lots of people experience this) and feel we’re in over our heads:

            • Frame it as an opportunity. “The more you focus on what’s scary about the new team you’re leading or the project you’re steering, the more intimidated you’ll feel,” says Knight. Instead, focus on what’s new and exciting and remind yourself that it’s not categorically different from things you’ve done before – just a little different and you need to scale up.

            • Think incrementally. Rather than setting grandiose goals – as we do with New Year’s resolutions – think about small, incremental improvements – for example, “In today’s meeting, I’m going to make sure everyone on the team feels heard.” Think of goals as a moving target, constantly being set, met, and reset.

            • Watch and learn. Watch how those you admire use humor, pose questions, use silence, intervene, influence others, and come across as charismatic and self-assured. Borrow bits and pieces that fit your style.

            • Use bold and expansive body language. In surprising ways, the way we carry ourselves has a direct impact on self-confidence. Take long strides, walk with your chest held high, sit up straight, and carry yourself in ways that convey power, poise, and healthy pride. When you do this, says Amy Cuddy, “You feel less guarded, more optimistic, more focused on goals, and more likely to take a stand.” [See Memo 492 for a summary of an article by Cuddy.]

            • Use self-talk. Don’t be overly daunted or scared, and don’t beat yourself up for feeling like an imposter; it’s normal to feel nervous about a professional challenge.

            • Recognize when faking it won’t work. If the challenge you’re confronting is way beyond your skillset, or if the time-frame is absolutely unrealistic, using the above tactics may not be a good idea. If the task is too much, speak up!

 

“How to Fake It When You’re Not Feeling Confident” by Rebecca Knight in Harvard Business Review, June 7, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-to-fake-it-when-youre-not-feeling-confident

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4. An English Department Deals with an Unreasonable Mandate

            In this English Journal article, Shana Hartman (Gardner-Webb University) describes the reaction of Abigail, an accomplished English teacher, when her school’s administration abruptly required teachers to submit lesson objectives and activities for each day for the remainder of the school year. Abigail and her colleagues were accustomed to being left alone by the administration and were outraged by what they saw as a top-down, micromanaging mandate – objectives had to come from the state’s standard course of study and fit into a tiny box in a standard Microsoft Outlook calendar. Why this sudden demand of teachers? The school hadn’t met its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals for three years, and the principal was preparing for a district audit. Apparently the theory was that by asking teachers to plan their lessons in advance, instruction would improve and the schools would make AYP – or at least the school wouldn’t get in trouble with the central office.

            Abigail had been teaching for 20 years, was National Board certified, had Advanced Placement certification, served as department chair, was a member of a curriculum development team, trained and mentored fellow teachers, and had been named Teacher of the Year in 2000. She was generally on board with the school’s mission of preparing students to do well on standardized tests and be successful after graduation. How would she respond to what she and her colleagues saw as a “silly and unreasonable” mandate?

“I often don’t know what I’m going to be doing the next day,” said Abigail, “much less a month from now.” She and her English department colleagues believed each lesson plan should be shaped by how students did on the previous day’s teaching and assessments. In addition, they believed English was different from other subjects, with each lesson addressing multiple curriculum objectives, unlike the step-by-step curriculum in math and science. In short, the English teachers strongly disagreed with the administrative mandate and didn’t believe it was the best way to improve student achievement – or a good use of their time.

The teachers decided to comply – but on their own terms. They divvied up the work by grade level and had each teacher “fill out” the calendars for one or two months, then photocopied the sheets for teachers at each grade level and submitted what appeared to be a complete calendar of plans to administration. If challenged for not teaching a particular lesson on schedule, teachers planned to boldly say, “We’re not on it.”

“In this moment,” says Hartman, “Abigail and the other English teachers in the department seemed to close the figurative doors of their classrooms in an effort to assert their agency as teachers, though in secret… doing what many teachers do: faked it for their administrative audience outside the classroom and did what they wanted as teachers inside the classroom… They subverted the intent of central administration without publicly or professionally resisting the institution.” In the jargon of sociologists, working around authority in this manner is “counterhegemonic.”

But Hartman considers this a missed opportunity: “I wonder if there was space for these teachers to assert their agency more directly and openly as important stakeholders in the institution of school… This group of empowered teachers could have requested a meeting with their administration, discussed their process for planning lessons and how the calendar mandate did not fit into that process, and perhaps come up with a creative alternative. Instead, Abigail and her colleagues tried to enforce their agency by faking the planning calendars as an act of rejection; however, the rejection happens among themselves, behind closed doors. Why not speak back to the calendar mandate, become visible agents for their classrooms, and open the doors for all to see?”

[The shape of a win-win compromise might have been curriculum unit plans with clear knowledge, skill, and understanding objectives, assessments planned in advance, and Essential Questions on each classroom wall. Within this public framework, administrators might have been comfortable letting teachers plan individual lessons day by day, responding to students’ work and misunderstandings in real time, but always with the end in sight.  K.M.]

 

“Cultivating Teacher Agency: How Teachers Persist in the Face of School Mandates” by Shana Hartman in English Journal, November 2016 (Vol. 106, #2, p. 16-21), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2h88KW0; Hartman can be reached at [email protected].

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5. Running an Enjoyable and Productive Faculty Retreat

            In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Rob Kramer (University of North Carolina) lists the characteristics of faculty retreats that are useful, even inspiring:

            • Keep the process open. Educators are often put off by corporate-sounding terms like “strategic planning.” Better to invite broad participation and give people choices using a process like Open Space, says Kramer: set general goals, poll participants on possible topics, give them freedom to attend sessions on their preferred topics, and use data from each to decide on goals. People are more likely to throw themselves into implementing initiatives they choose.

            • Do the necessary pre-work. Kramer was asked to run a retreat to redesign a department’s curriculum and realized that lots of preliminary work had to happen first. Leaders laid the groundwork by launching a curriculum redesign committee, generating reports on key issues, running focus groups to hear from the entire faculty on what was working and what wasn’t with the current curriculum, and regularly updating everyone on progress. “By the time we reached the actual retreat,” says Kramer, “the department had been thinking about, analyzing, and discussing possible curricular changes for seven or eight months. At the retreat itself, conversations moved productively, and those that veered off course were redirected. Because of all the advance groundwork, faculty were able to focus on the great goal – to select a new curriculum model – instead of being distracted by any potential personal agendas or intellectual infighting.”

            • Mix it up. “The last thing any faculty member wants to do is attend an all-day retreat where it is basically a glorified, but painfully longer, faculty meeting. The same loud voices dominate the conversation and the same breakdowns occur over hot-button issues.” For starters, locate the retreat at a beautiful, off-site location with time built in to enjoy the food and scenery. Then plan a mix of activities, discussion groups, and ways of participating so the substance of the retreat will be engaging and productive and even people who arrive in a skeptical, exhausted frame of mind enjoy themselves and get a lot done.

 

“Making a Good Retreat” by Rob Kramer in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2016 (Vol. LXIII, #15, p. A31), no e-link available; see Memo 654 for an article by Kramer on the negative side of retreats.

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6. Why Empathy Is Not Always the Best Emotional Tool

            Everyone is in favor of empathy, says Tom Bartlett in The Chronicle of Higher Education. That’s because they assume it’s “an unalloyed good, like sunshine or cake or free valet parking.” So it must be bad if we aren’t feeling the pain of our fellow humans. Nonsense, says Paul Bloom in his new book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (Ecco, 2016). Bloom believes that when it comes to helping people in distress, our emotions often get in the way, leading us to respond impulsively rather than thinking through a better long-term solution. We focus on the boy who’s fallen down a well rather than thousands of children dying of malnutrition. Here are a few quotes from Bloom’s interview with Bartlett:

            • How compassion differs from empathy – “Empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, feeling what they feel, their sadness or their rage and being drawn to that,” says Bloom. “Compassion is caring for people, being concerned about them, but not feeling their pain. Just loving them.” He argues that we’ll do a better job helping others if we make an emotional connection but avoid the vicarious suffering.

            • Reactions to his argument – “People assume if I’m against empathy I must be some kind of psychopath,” says Bloom. But he argues that “if you want to be a moral person, empathy is the wrong way to do it.”

            • How writing the book has changed him – “In some way, the book has been self-therapy because I think I’m overly empathetic, and I’ve made some bad choices due to empathy,” says Bloom. “I’ve started to give more to charity and think harder about where I give. I try not to do it in an emotional rush, but to think about what could provide the most help. I’ve learned that I should distrust my emotional reactions.”

 

“Empathy, Schmempathy: Paul Bloom on Why We Should Feel Less” by Tom Bartlett in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2016 (Vol. LXIII, #15, p. B2), no e-link available

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7. Stepping Up to Deal with Mediocre and Ineffective Performance

            “Failure to bring up disappointing performance is cruel, not compassionate,” says Dan Rockwell in this article in Leadership Freak. “Silence when performance disappoints prolongs pain, increases stress, and affirms mediocrity… More of the same isn’t acceptable when people perform below their potential.”

The best thing is to intervene early, says Rockwell, “when pain is low and negative patterns haven’t congealed.” Some specific suggestions:

-   When things don’t seem right, consult with a trusted mentor and plan strategy.

-   Dig in when it’s easier to turn away.

-   Don’t allow one thing to be everything.

-   Build on what the person is doing successfully and work on stopping behaviors that aren’t working. “Success may be as simple as stopping what doesn’t work while continuing what does,” says Rockwell.

-   Some possible opening lines: I notice… What do you see?  How might you be selling yourself short?  If things continue as they are, where will you be next month?  What makes you believe things will be different next week?

 

“When Silence Is Painful, Not Golden” by Dan Rockwell in Leadership Freak, November 30, 2016, https://leadershipfreak.blog/2016/11/30/when-silence-is-painful-not-golden/

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8. Keys to High-Quality Instructional Coaching

            “We must give every teacher effective coaching,” say the authors of this white paper from University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning, Learning Forward, and Public Impact. “Whether teachers need help developing content and pedagogical knowledge in their subject, planning lessons and assessments, analyzing student progress and changing their instruction, applying new instructional strategies, personalizing learning for diverse students, or developing leadership skills, every teacher can benefit from effective coaching.” The authors suggest six pillars for on-the-job instructional coaching that makes a real difference:

-   System vision and commitment – This means giving it priority for funding and time.

-   Recruitment and selectivity – Choose coaches for their excellent track records as teachers and demonstrated beliefs and competencies to be skillful coaches.

-   Development and support – Commit the training and feedback needed for coaches to be successful day by day.

-   Shared responsibility – Coaches join with their coachees in being accountable for student learning.

-   Role definition – Clarify coaches’ roles, assign teachers to them thoughtfully, and give coaches and teachers the time they need to work successfully.

-   Compensation – Make coaching a well-paid role that attracts and retains the best.

 

“Coaching for Impact: Six Pillars to Create Coaching Roles That Achieve Their Potential to Improve Teaching and Learning” by Don Pemberton, Dorene Ross, Tracy Crow, Stephanie Hirsch, Bruce Joyce, Joellen Killion, Stephanie Dean, Bryan Hassel, Emily Ayscue Hassel, and Kendall King, a report from the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning, Learning Forward, and Public Impact, 2016

https://learningforward.org/docs/default-source/pdf/coaching-for-impact.pdf

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9. What Teachers and Principals Spend Each Year

            In this Education Week article, Madeline Will summarizes a recent Scholastic survey on out-of-pocket spending by teachers and principals aimed at filling gaps in their classrooms and schools. Teachers spend an average of $530 a year; for those in high-poverty schools, it’s $672. Items include: Classroom decorations (76% of teachers); supplies like notebooks, binders, pens, and pencils (74%); food and snacks for students (70%); supplies like tissues, hand sanitizer, band-aids (69%); cleaning supplies (65%); arts and crafts supplies (63%); books for the classroom, especially those that are culturally relevant (56%); lesson plans (43%); lab and project supplies (40%); workbooks and worksheets (38%); technology apps and software (33%); clothing for students (26%); guided reading materials (25%); and classroom magazines (19%). Principals spent an average of $683 a year, and in high-poverty schools, $1,014.

 

“How Educators Fill Classroom Equity Gaps” by Madeline Will in Education Week, November 30, 2016 (Vol. 36, #14, p. 5), www.edweek.org

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10. Short Items:

            a. A listening/reading website – The ListenWise site, https://listenwise.com, with free registration for teachers, has a plethora of resources in current events, ELA, science, and social studies, with prompts for listening, reading, discussing, and critical thinking.

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            b. An online homework help tool – ASSISTments, a free online homework help program developed by Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, www.assistments.org, did well in a study published in AERA Open. For more information, contact Neil Heffernan at

[email protected].

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