Marshall Memo 660

A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education

November 7, 2016

 

 


In This Issue:

  1. Five ideas from recent gender research

  2. Fate control 101

  3. What should high-school seniors make of all those college rankings?

  4. High-school reading difficulties conflated with behavior problems

  5. Do new Common Core reading tests measure content knowledge?

  6. Building students’ savvy at navigating the Internet

  7. World language students create a class blog

  8. Conquering the grading beast

  9. Improvising to bring computer access to all students

10. Short item: Teaching resources website

 

Quotes of the Week

“Dropped in the middle of the forest, hikers know they can’t divine their way out by looking at the ground. They use a compass. Similarly, fact-checkers use the vast resources of the Internet to determine where information is coming from before they read it.”

            Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew (see item #6)

 

“To be truly literate in the Information Age, our students need to understand how to frame a worthwhile question and then go out and find worthwhile answers.”

            Laura Sexton in “Ask New Questions: Inquiry as the New Literacy” in The Language

            Educator, October/November 2016 (Vol. 11, #4, p. 29-31), no e-link available

 

“The Internet is like a small town, and what you do will come back to you.”

            David Hill in “Inside the New Standards for Kids and Screen Time” by Markham Heid 

in Time Magazine, November 7, 2016 (p. 15-16), available for purchase at

http://bit.ly/2f8c29J

 

“Digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies on the Internet.”

            Cornell University’s definition, quoted in “Blogging to Build Digital Literacy and

Community Awareness” (item #7), full text at https://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu

 

“The interaction between a student and an institution is not the same as the interaction between a student and a refrigerator.”

            Willard Dix, expressing skepticism about college rankings (see item #3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Five Ideas from Recent Gender Research

(Originally titled “Gender Insights Coming to Your Classroom”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, David Sadker (American University) and Melissa Koch (Anita Borg Institute) share insights on gender equity:

            • Stereotype threat is powerful but malleable. “No one is immune from stereotype threat,” say Sadker and Koch. “Each of us holds an image of some group (gender, racial, ethnic, religious, economic class, and so on) that we believe has knowledge or ability superior to ours.” When girls face challenging academic work in science, math, and technology, the stereotype about male superiority can cause them to underperform. A study of college students found that simply telling some women, “this mathematics test has not shown any gender differences in performance or mathematical ability” neutralized stereotype threat; those women outperformed women who were told it was a test of math ability. The experimental group also did better than the men who took the test. Another study of students taking an AP calculus test revealed these differences:

-   Girls who were asked to mark their gender before the test scored an average of 12.5

-   Girls who were asked to mark their gender after the test scored an average of 15

-   Boys who were asked to mark their gender before the test scored an average of 16.5

-   Boys who were asked to mark their gender after the test scored an average of 14.

These studies show that it’s possible to inoculate students from stereotype threat by careful use of language. It’s also helpful to talk explicitly with students about stereotype threat.

            • Cognitive research has debunked many myths about male-female brain differences. Studies have shown there are few educationally relevant gender differences. “In fact,” say Sadker and Koch, “greater educational differences exist within the genders than between the genders.” The differences that emerge in schools are usually the result of socialization – for example, boys have more experience with Legos, baseball, and video games, and that enhances spatial skills that are helpful in physics, trigonometry, and engineering. “The more we repeat something and use that portion of the brain,” say Sadker and Koch, “the more prominent that neural pathway becomes… We are not the victims of our brain; we are its architects.” The opposite can be true if a student shies away from a subject that seems difficult or doesn’t conform to a gender stereotype. Explicitly teaching these findings to students can liberate them to develop in all areas.

            • We can make technology careers more accessible to girls. A 2011 report found that only 20 percent of female college freshmen said they intended to major in a STEM field compared to 50 percent of young men. Fewer than 20 percent of the students who took the 2013 AP computer science exam were women. These numbers change when girls get more access to computers at home and at school, see positive role models in STEM fields, and are in classrooms with more relevant, collaborative pedagogy.

            • Single-gender classrooms may not be the answer. Citing troubling statistics on achievement and discipline problems experienced by boys of color, Sadker and Koch express skepticism about the efficacy of all-male classrooms. Not only are the academic benefits unclear, they say, but “As a nation with a history of racial segregation, the United States cannot be naïve about the potential psychological, academic, and social dangers of gender separation… Given recent insights into neuroplasticity, we may be strengthening gender stereotypes and limiting options for all our students.” They call for better research on the benefits and risks of single-gender classrooms.

            • Gender is not binary. Transgender students are asserting their rights, but in some schools this is a hot issue – a number of states are suing the U.S. Department of Justice over its ruling on school bathrooms. Sadker and Koch advise thinking of gender on a spectrum, and say that in the coming years, the issue of gender identity “will touch the heart of instruction, influencing teacher language, the curriculum, and school practices and policies, much as the fundamental concept of gender bias did almost half a century ago.”

 

“Gender Insights Coming to Your Classroom” by David Sadker and Melissa Koch in Educational Leadership, November 2016 (Vol. 74, #3, p. 62-68), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2edC3W5; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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2. Fate Control 101        

(Originally titled “Flip the Switch on Fate Control”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, Bryan Goodwin (McREL International) notes that a little-known segment of the 1966 Coleman Report said that a single “student attitude factor” had a stronger relationship to achievement than all the school factors combined. The Coleman researchers got this insight from questions they asked students, among them:

-   When I try, somebody or something stops me.

-   Luck is more important than work.

-   People like me don’t have much of a chance.

Non-white students were more likely to agree with these statements, but those who disagreed – who felt they could control their destinies – did much better in school than white students who were fatalistic.

            Subsequent research has found that students’ “locus of control” falls along a continuum from believing they can shape future outcomes to believing that what happens to them is shaped by forces beyond their control. There’s a strong correlation with school achievement, with internal locus of control counteracting the detrimental effects of stereotype threat. A 2012 meta-analysis found that feeling in control of one’s fate, along with academic self-efficacy and goal orientation, accounted for 20 percent of the differences in the grade-point averages of university students.

            What’s disturbing, Goodwin reports, is that the percent of college students with a fatalistic mindset has increased over the last 40 years. This may come from increased cynicism about the American Dream and a sense that large organizations, unpredictable outside forces (terrorism), and genetic endowments are more powerful than our own will.

            But it’s possible to help students, especially those living in adverse conditions, to switch from a fatalistic to a more positive mindset. Goodwin summarizes some research findings:

-   Small wins – Giving students opportunities to set and achieve limited goals helps them link effort with results, which nurtures a more internal locus of control.

-   Providing students with “proximal” learning goals (like completing six pages of work each class) helps them achieve at higher levels than more distant goals or no goals at all, and also helps them develop fate control and the ability to overcome challenges with effort.

 

“Flip the Script on Fate Control” by Bryan Goodwin in Educational Leadership, November

2016 (Vol. 74, #3, p. 83-84), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2fJ6Vi4; Goodwin can be reached at [email protected].

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3. What Should High-School Seniors Make of All Those College Rankings?

            In this New York Times column, Frank Bruni says he’s frustrated with the dozens of college ratings out there and has some guidance for high-school seniors as they figure out which colleges they should apply to. Bruni likes this quote from Willard Dix, a long-time observer of the college admissions process: “You can slice and dice it any way you like, but this isn’t like Consumer Reports, which tests something to see if it does or doesn’t work. The interaction between a student and an institution is not the same as the interaction between a student and a refrigerator.”

            Those who publish college rankings base them on objective data about each institution, but they also make value judgments about what’s most important. For potential applicants to make smart choices, it’s vital to read the fine print and look at exactly what’s being measured – for example:

-   Some rankings assign more weight to the selectiveness of a school and the academic background of incoming students, on the theory that high-achieving peers matter.

-   Some rankings look at the diversity of the student body, a variable that might affect the quality of campus life and the opinions represented in classroom discussions.

-   Washington Monthly’s rankings look at socioeconomic diversity, along with whether a school is an agent of social mobility and has a commitment to community service.

-   One ranking (from the Heterodox Academy) looks at schools’ ideological diversity.

-   Some rankings try to measure how current students evaluate their college experience.

-   Some look at how much money graduates make, although that might have more to do with incoming students’ innate gifts, childhood opportunities, and their parents’ income.

-   One ranking tries to calculate a school’s “value added” by analyzing whether its graduates achieve more than their backgrounds might predict; this method put Colgate, Washington and Lee, Clarkson, and Manhattan College in the top ten, above any Ivy.

-   And then there’s ScholarMatcher, an interactive tool that shows students from families with incomes less than $50,000 which schools are most likely to be affordable.

Bruni’s opinion: “For almost every well-intentioned measurement, there’s either a fundamental shortcoming or possible glitch.” For example, does post-college income necessarily correlate with contentment and success? Are students’ assessment of a college influenced by self-congratulatory puffery at the most prestigious colleges? And there’s a big missing piece in the rankings, says Jonathan Rothwell of the Gallup organization: “They don’t measure learning outcomes, and it seems to me that that’s probably the chief goal of higher education: to teach people.”

            Another missing factor is captured by the experience of Janet Napolitano, who went to Santa Clara University in California because it was her father’s alma mater and because California seemed cool to a girl who had grown up in New Mexico. She studied hard and was the school’s first female valedictorian. “You get out of it what you put into it,” she says.

Bruni agrees on the critical importance of students’ “commitment, curiosity, and daring” when they enter college and concludes that “an obsession with rankings obscures and invariably minimizes this essential truth. I guess the same does apply to a refrigerator, but only if you’re talking about the condiments.”

 

“The Chaos of College Rankings” by Frank Bruni in The New York Times, October 30, 2016,

http://nyti.ms/2et7s2I

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4. High-School Reading Difficulties Conflated with Behavior Problems

            In this American Educational Research Journal article, Julie Learned (State University of New York/Albany) reports on what she found when she shadowed eight 9th-graders in a low-SES high school for large parts of a school year. The students, all of whom were identified as struggling readers and behavior problems in the school’s RTI program (“behavior kids, you know, the Tier 2 and 3 students,” said one educator), navigated and resisted this positioning with “perseverance, creativity, and wit,” says Learned. All the students demonstrated proficient or improving reading skills at some point, and they were also astute about how the school functioned and could be improved. When teachers taught substantive literacy material in their content areas, departed from the required curriculum to meet students’ needs, and used restorative classroom management approaches, the struggling students made progress. But most of the time, students’ literacy deficits were not successfully addressed, and by spring only four of the students were regularly attending school.

What happened? “By shadowing struggling readers across their school days,” says Learned, “I found evidence for a culture of compliance among intervention and low-track classrooms, which contributed to the systemic nature of deficit labeling and its self-reinforcing effects… The notion that struggling readers are difficult or ‘bad kids’ is prominent among high schools… Teachers appeared to be positioned to understand learning challenges as problems of behavior and motivation, and they reported feeling compelled to engage punitive practices (e.g., ‘It’s not like I want to kick kids out.’)… [Y]ouths were constructed as low skilled and deviant, and disproportionate disciplinary action limited their access to instruction and school social life… Students’ loss of motivation and desire to avoid school, or their suspension and expulsion from school, were produced not by inherent deficits but by the contexts of school that positioned them as problems.”

How could the school better serve these students? Learned doubts the accuracy of the school’s RTI literacy assessments (very little progress showed up during the year) and faults most of the teachers for not picking up on and exploiting the moments when students were engaged and “getting it.” But the teachers and administrators seemed to be trapped in a belief system that pegged these students as poor readers and discipline problems before the year even began. What followed was a self-reinforcing cycle in which students didn’t make progress and eventually gave up.

“The cultural and linguistic knowledge and practices that all students bring to bear in school are strengths and should be viewed as such,” concludes Learned. “Involving teachers in research about ‘struggling’ learners can facilitate the deconstruction of deficit conceptions by helping teachers see when they have misrecognized students’ skills or behaviors.” She also believes we need to take a look at how RTI “may be giving rise to new labels that exacerbate such positioning.”

 

“‘The Behavior Kids’: Examining the Conflation of Youth Reading Difficulty and Behavior Problem Positioning Among School Institutional Contexts” by Julie Learned in American Educational Research Journal, October 2016 (Vol. 53, #5, p. 1271-1309),

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1116484; Learned can be reached at [email protected].

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5. Do New Common Core Reading Tests Measure Content Knowledge?

            In this Education Gadfly article, Ruth Wattenberg reports on her analysis of publicly released test items in the reading tests developed by PARCC and Smarter Balanced for grades 3, 5, and 8. Her goal was to see if they “reflect and reward Common Core’s call to build broad knowledge.” Her fear was that the new tests, like their predecessors, assess generic reading skills (main idea, author’s intent, etc.), which will continue to discourage schools from spending instructional time on science, social studies, and the arts.

            The result? “I found that the reading passages of both PARCC’s and SBAC’s third-grade assessments are content-rich and contain challenging vocabulary,” says Wattenberg. “The knowledge and vocabulary that are embedded in these passages range across astronomy; human and physical geography; cultural adaptation; units of measurement; space travel; biological, physical, and evolutionary processes; manufacturing processes such as logging and papermaking; and a heavy dose of animal characteristics and habitats.” The sample passages also contained challenging vocabulary: rodent, species, markings, nocturnal, Asia, tassels, gorge, tundra, survival, intestine, adapted, torpid, teeming, caribou, dramatically, heritage, vanished, formula, chemicals, bleached, graphite, slates, crystallizes, chunky, space station, spacecraft, orbits, planets, space, and Antarctica.

            Wattenberg’s study of fifth-grade released items revealed a similarly rich array of content and vocabulary, including the experience of immigration; the role of lighthouses in seagoing cultures; human impact on sea animals; the process that promotes crickets’ chirping; Renaissance Italy and the Leaning Tower of Pisa; evolution and animal behavior; and more. And in eighth grade, released items drew on knowledge of the invention process; the workings of the telegraph and phonograph; sound waves; the basics of business and commerce, including patents, ventures, and entrepreneurs; the meaning of radicalism; Ansel Adams and the art of photography; and terms like finance minister, Federal Reserve Bank, inflation, taxes, and more.

            The bottom line: “Preparing students to score well on these tests,” says Wattenberg, “requires systematically and deliberately exposing them to and instructing them in a rich, broad curriculum of science, history, geography, and the arts, starting at the earliest grades and continuing through every grade. Happily, this is the same kind of curriculum that will prepare them well for their middle and high school classes in social studies and science.”

In other words, the PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments are tests of knowledge, not just skills.

 

“A Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Is the Best Prep for Common Core Reading Tests” by Ruth Wattenberg in The Education Gadfly, November 2, 2016, http://bit.ly/2fq0Dz1; for more detail, see the full study, “Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments,” available at http://bit.ly/2fsLjTI.

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6. Building Students’ Savvy at Navigating the Internet

            How good are today’s young “digital natives” at finding the answer to a factual question online? ask Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew (Stanford University) in this Education Week article. “True, many of our kids can flit between Facebook and Twitter while uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend,” they say. “But when it comes to using the Internet to get to the bottom of things, Junior’s no better than the rest of us. Often he’s worse.”

Why? Because all too many kids naively look at the top-ranked website and aren’t good at spotting the difference between reliable websites and fringe groups that cleverly disguise their real agenda. In studies conducted at Stanford, middle-school students didn’t distinguish between a news story and an advertisement, high-school students took a one-sided chart from a political action committee at face value, and college students credulously accepted as reliable a .org website that popped up at the top of the pile. In a study at Northwestern University, report Wineburg and McGrew, students “ignored the sponsoring organization and the article’s author, blindly trusting the search engine to put the most reliable results first.”

In another study, 25 Stanford undergraduates were asked to spend 10 minutes comparing the trustworthiness of the American Academy of Pediatrics website and that of the American College of Pediatricians. Students were told they could click on links, Google information, or do anything else to arrive at their judgment. More than half of students rated the second website “more reliable,” and even those who preferred the first treated the two organizations as equals. One student said, “They are both from academies or institutions that deal with this stuff every day.”

The students utterly failed to uncover a major difference between the groups. The American Academy of Pediatricians was established in 1930, has 66,000 members, and publishes the journal Pediatrics, while the American College of Pediatricians broke with the first organization in 2002 over its stance on adoption by same-sex couples, believes that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia, and has been labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. Why didn’t the Stanford students figure this out? Because, say Wineburg and McGrew, “they spent most of their time reading the articles on each organization’s site. But masking true intentions and ownership on the web has grown so sophisticated that to rely on the same set of skills one uses for print reading is naïve. Parsing digital information before one knows if a site can be trusted is a colossal waste of time and energy.”

What strategies do expert fact-checkers use that might be helpful to the rest of us? Here are three pointers:

Don’t rely on the order of search results. It’s a misconception to think Google rank-orders sites by reliability. Savvy readers scroll down to the bottom of the search results page and make an informed decision about where to click first.

Read laterally. If you land on an unfamiliar site, leave it and explore others, open a new tab, or Google the name of the organization or its president. “Dropped in the middle of the forest, hikers know they can’t divine their way out  by looking at the ground,” say Wineburg and McGrew. “They use a compass. Similarly, fact-checkers use the vast resources of the Internet to determine where information is coming from before they read it.”

Don’t rely on a website’s “About” information. “If a site can masquerade as a nonpartisan think tank when funded by corporate interests and created by a Washington public relations firm, it can surely pull the wool over our eyes with a concocted ‘About’ page,”
 say Wineburg and McGrew.

 “None of this is rocket science,” conclude the authors. “But it’s often not taught in school. In fact, some schools have special filters that direct students to already vetted sites, effectively creating a generation of bubble children who never develop the immunities needed to ward off the toxins that float across their Facebook feeds, where students most often get their news. This approach protects young people from the real world rather than preparing them to deal with it.”

 

“What Students Don’t Know About Fact-Checking” by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew in Education Week, November 2, 2016 (Vol. 36, #11, p. 22), www.edweek.org

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7. World Language Students Create a Class Blog

            In this article in The Language Educator, Grant Gearhart (Armstrong State University) says that blogging is “a powerful multimedia tool for promoting cultural connections with communities beyond the classroom… The very act of publishing a blog post embodies the goal of creating original content for a specific audience, but it does so through a widely accessible digital portal. As a result, the teacher ceases to be the definitive backstop for the author’s message, meaning the student will have to think more deeply about the writing, thus enhancing the overall authorial experience.” Blogging in a second language is especially helpful in getting students to consider how readers other than their teacher see their writing. The result: they work harder at catching errors and expressing themselves in the best possible way.

            Gearhart got his college Spanish class going on a blog and was thrilled by the result; students took over and he became the “guide on the side” quite early in the process. “Soon,” he says, “the students imagined the blog as something more than just a website for a class; they began to see it as a bridge between what they were learning in class and what was happening on our campus and in our community.” Promoted on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the site became a place where other students could publish their writing. You can check out their mission-driven blog, “Building the Hispanic Voice at Armstrong,” at www.unydosarmstrong.wordpress.com.

Here are Gearhart’s suggestions for starting a class blog at the middle or high school level:

-   Choose a theme or identify a particular audience for the blog.

-   Decide on a platform – perhaps WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly, or Blogger.com.

-   Identify roles and teams, organizing students by their strengths.

-   In a large class, consider breaking it into teams and having each one do its own blog.

-   Have everyone contribute some content – an essay, photo, interview, or something else.

-   Focus on marketing, spreading the word to potential readers.

How should students’ work on the blog be evaluated? Gearhart employed the same rubric he used for grading compositions and projects, explaining to students what needed to be polished or changed to reach a broader audience. Sometimes he graded blog posts and students made immediate changes. Other times he got students critiquing each others’ work. For younger students, he suggests breaking the project into smaller chunks and giving feedback at each stage.

 

“Blogging to Build Digital Literacy and Community Awareness” by Grant Gearhart in The Language Educator, October/November 2016 (Vol. 11, #4, p. 36-39), no e-link available

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8. Conquering the Grading Beast

            In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez confesses that in her third year of teaching, she was confronted with a weekend of nothing but grading – worksheets, quizzes, make-up work, and essays. As she prepared to grade the worksheets, she remembered that they were from three weeks ago and no students had asked about them: “I stood, gathered that pile of worksheets and the ones from my four other classes, walked over to the recycling bin, and dropped them in. One hundred and twenty papers, gone in an instant. Yes, I still graded the other stuff: the quizzes, the essays… but those worksheets were no longer my problem. I felt kind of guilty. But mostly I felt free.”

            Gonzalez suggests 20 ways of avoiding this scenario and giving students feedback more efficiently and effectively:

• Don’t grade everything:

-   Pick just one. Students do several similar assignments, keep them in a folder, and then choose the one that best represents their achievement to turn in for a grade.

-   Spot-check items. Let students know that for some assignments, you’ll check for completion and then choose just a few items to grade for correctness.

-   Spot-check students. Scan everyone’s work for completion and then choose 4-5 students for close grading, making sure everyone gets this treatment over time.

-   Emphasize practice and feedback. Get students thinking about their work as opportunities to get better and talk about feedback versus grades.

-   Batch score with holistic homework rubrics. Put student work into batches and give students a holistic 4-3-2-1 score on accuracy, completeness, punctuality, and neatness.

• Get students involved:

-   Grade papers as a class. When students finish a task, go over the answers with students grading their own papers – instant feedback and questions.

-   Give away the answers. When students are finished with an assignment, distribute an answer key – the goal becomes figuring out how to get correct answers and being able to explain how you got there.

-   Set up answer stations for tests and quizzes. The answer key and a colored marking pen is positioned in a corner of the classroom and students go there when they’re finished. Of course the teacher double-checks for accuracy.

• Get more efficient:

-   Grade as they work. Move around the room putting a check by items that are correct and circling those that aren’t. When it’s time to correct, many items are already done.

-   Have students compile collected work. Students do all the work on repetitive “running” assignments on one paper (or a stapled set) so it can be graded all at once.

-   Grade one item at a time. Lay out assignments and grade item #1 on them all, then #2, and so on – much quicker and more efficient!

-   Mark, comment, record, and reflect separately. Go through the whole stack of papers marking just correct and incorrect answers, then go through jotting comments, again to record scores in your grade book, and once more to reflect on follow-up.

-   Shorthand your feedback. Develop symbols for frequently used comments like “run-on sentence” or “not clear.”

-   Automate your feedback. Develop a repertoire of phrases for student feedback.

• Get your files in order:

-   Set up a comprehensive paper and digital filing system. This includes curriculum materials, notes from faculty meetings, e-mails, and digital files.

-   Sort out online bookmarks. A social bookmarking tool like Diigo allows you to save, sort, highlight, and annotate online materials.

-   Set up IN and OUT folders or trays. Students should know where to put work that needs to be reviewed and where to get their graded work.

• When all else fails, just dig out:

-   Reward yourself. Break grading into chunks interspersed with small rewards like two minutes on Facebook or a chocolate kiss.

-   Get help. This might be from a student assistant or a family member (you always check students’ work for accuracy).

-   Have a catch-up day. Rather than taking a sick day or showing a movie, occasionally designate a day when students work independently organizing their binders, sorting out the files on their tablets or laptops, catching up on make-ups, doing homework, or reading silently while you catch up on grading.

 

“20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half” by Jennifer Gonzalez in The Cult of Pedagogy, 2014, www.cultofpedagogy.com; Gonzalez can be reached at [email protected].

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9. Improvising to Bring Computer Access to All Students

(Originally titled “Access: Let’s Get Creative”)

            In this Educational Leadership article, author/consultant Catlin Tucker suggests five ways to expand computer access to all students:

-   Google maps – Create a Google map of your community and drop pins in the locations with Wi-Fi, Internet access, or computers – the school, public libraries, coffee shops, community centers, etc. Each pin has information on available services and times.

-   Donors Choose – This website www.donorschoose.org allows public school teachers to design a project and request funding – anything from art supplies to Chromebooks.

-   Low-cost Internet and computer recycling programs – A variety of providers offer low-cost home Internet service – www.cheapinternet.com/low-income-internet is a helpful resource, as is www.FreeCycle.org.

-   Parent donations – Tucker suggests sending a “parent plea” home in case families have extra computer equipment they’re willing to loan or donate.

-   Redesigned lessons – “Even in classrooms with next to no hardware,” says Tucker, “just a handful of devices can transform engagement and lead to deeper learning.” For example, Station Rotation is a blended learning model that works in classrooms with a limited number of devices – students rotate through learning stations, one of which might involve online research, collaborative work using Google Apps, or asynchronous online discussions.

 

“Access: Let’s Get Creative” by Catlin Tucker in Educational Leadership, November 2016 (Vol. 74, #3, p. 87-88), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2eD55wI

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10. Short Item:

            Teaching resources website – Jennifer Gonzalez’s free website, The Cult of Pedagogy, www.cultofpedagogy.com has a wealth of helpful resources, including short videos on lesson design, inductive learning, jigsaw cooperative learning, reciprocal learning, rubrics, concept attainment, flipping, and more.

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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 45 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 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).

 

Subscriptions:

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

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Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:

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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

American School Board Journal

AMLE Magazine

ASCA School Counselor

ASCD SmartBrief

Communiqué

Ed. Magazine

Education Digest

Education Gadfly

Education Next

Education Update

Education Week

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Educational Horizons

Educational Leadership

Educational Researcher
Edutopia

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)

Journal of Staff Development

Kappa Delta Pi Record

Knowledge Quest

Literacy Today

Mathematics in the Middle School

Middle School Journal

Peabody Journal of Education

Phi Delta Kappan

Principal

Principal Leadership

Principal’s Research Review

Reading Research Quarterly

Responsive Classroom Newsletter

Rethinking Schools

Review of Educational Research

School Administrator

School Library Journal

Teacher

Teachers College Record

Teaching Children Mathematics

Teaching Exceptional Children

The Atlantic

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The District Management Journal

The Journal of the Learning Sciences

The Language Educator

The New York Times

The New Yorker

The Reading Teacher

Theory Into Practice

Time Magazine