In This Issue:

1. Yo-Yo Ma on collaboration and praise

2. A unified framework for school leadership

3. Developing student self-regulation

4. Student motivation – what works

5. The snowball effect of inculcating intrinsic motivation in students

6. The impact of incoming achievement on teachers’ evaluations

7. Does a double dose of high-school algebra improve student results?

8. The efficacy of early college high schools

 

Quotes of the Week

“Ego management.”

            Yo-Yo Ma on the key to successful collaboration

 

“An important question for any school educator is whether his or her instruction will affect students’ learning and behavior outside the school environment.”

Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisarantis (see item #5)

 

“Teaching can be energizing yet tiresome, invigorating yet tedious, and high-stakes yet uncharted. Teachers experience these tensions on a daily basis but effective school leaders can mitigate them.”

            Dallas Hambrick Hitt and Pamela Tucker (see item #2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Yo-Yo Ma on Collaboration and Praise

            In this Harvard Business Review interview with Alison Beard, renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma reflects on early fame, collaboration, and childhood compliments. Some excerpts:

            • The key to fruitful collaboration – It can be summed up in two words, says Ma: “ego management.” When you think you’re right, “you have to move your brain to a more sponge-like state, as opposed to a judging one.” He’s learned to say, “If you think differently than I do, let me put myself in your shoes and see what’s successful according to you, and then you do the same for me.” Having heard each others’ approaches, a third way sometimes opens up where the two truths can coexist.

            • What to look for in a collaborator – “First I look for generosity,” says Ma. “Second, mutual respect and admiration. You might do something incredibly well, but if you’re a schmuck, it’s not a complicated decision.”

            • Handling childhood fame – “When I was a child,” says Ma, “people said things to me I wish they hadn’t: ‘You’re such a genius.’ That’s dangerous. The best approach is to have a healthy confidence but also the self-knowledge to ask, ‘What do I and don’t I do well?’ so that you can be the architect of your own life.”

 

“Life’s Work” – An Interview with Yo-Yo Ma by Alison Beard in Harvard Business Review, June 2016 (Vol. 94, #6, p. 120), https://hbr.org/2016/06/yo-yo-ma

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2. A Unified Framework for School Leadership

            In this article in Review of Educational Research, Dallas Hambrick Hitt and Pamela Tucker (University of Virginia) present a synthesis of research on the key school leadership factors. “Teaching can be energizing yet tiresome, invigorating yet tedious, and high-stakes yet uncharted,” say Hitt and Tucker. “Teachers experience these tensions on a daily basis but effective school leaders can mitigate them. They are responsible for supporting teachers in the quest to educate all children from all types of backgrounds, with various learning styles, and with other assorted, and very real, strengths and limitations… [T]he efforts of leaders and teachers are intertwined in the pursuit of increased student achievement.”

Hitt and Tucker point out that leadership isn’t just the province of the school principal; it’s “exercised through relationships between and among individuals” (Leithwood, 2012), including administrators, teachers, parents, and community partners, influencing and mobilizing others in pursuit of student achievement. Here is their synthesis of five domains of school leadership:

• Establishing and conveying the vision:

-   Creating, articulating, and stewarding shared mission and vision;

-   Implementing vision by setting goals and performance expectations;

-   Modeling aspirational and ethical practices;

-   Communicating broadly the state of the vision;

-   Promoting use of data for continual improvement;

-   Tending to external accountability.

• Facilitating a high-quality learning experience for students:

-   Maintaining safety and orderliness;

-   Personalizing the environment to reflect students’ backgrounds;

-   Developing and monitoring the curricular program to ensure that all students have the opportunity to learn at high levels; aligning curriculum, instruction, and assessment;

-   Developing and monitoring the instructional program through frequent classroom visits, feedback to teachers, and protecting instructional time from interruptions and intrusions;

-   Developing and monitoring the assessment program so data are used to continuously improve instruction and consider necessary programmatic changes.

• Building professional capacity:

-   Selecting faculty and staff for the right fit;

-   Providing individualized consideration in matching colleagues with learning opportunities;

-   Building trusting relationships;

-   Providing opportunities to learn for the whole faculty, including leaders;

-   Supporting, buffering, and recognizing staff;

-   Engendering responsibility for promoting learning;

-   Creating communities of practice.

• Creating a supportive organization for learning:

-   Acquiring and allocating resources strategically for mission and vision;

-   Considering context to maximize organizational functioning;

-   Building collaborative processes for decision-making;

-   Sharing and distributing leadership;

-   Tending to and building on diversity;

-   Maintaining ambitious, high expectations and standards;

-   Strengthening and optimizing school culture.

• Connecting with external partners:

-   Building productive relationships with families and external partners in the community;

-   Engaging families and community in collaborative processes to strengthen student learning;

-   Anchoring schools in the community.

 

“Systematic Review of Key Leader Practices Found to Influence Student Achievement: A Unified Framework” by Dallas Hambrick Hitt and Pamela Tucker in Review of Educational Research, June 2016 (Vol. 86, #2, p. 531-569), available for purchase at

http://rer.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/11/12/0034654315614911.abstract; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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3. Developing Student Self-Regulation

            In this article in Teaching Exceptional Children, Lori Korinek and Sharon deFur (College of William and Mary) tackle the skills of self-regulation – how students manage, monitor, and assess their social and academic behaviors. “These skills,” say Korinek and deFur, “help students engage in behaviors such as attending, participating, following directions, organizing, managing materials and time, and completing assignments – behaviors associated with increased academic and social performance across a variety of subjects and school levels.” When students don’t master self-regulation – all too common among those with disabilities – they are at increased risk of underachieving, being absent from school, having strained relationships with peers and adults, and dropping out. Here are some teacher practices that develop self-regulation in all students, especially those with disabilities:

• Organize the classroom. A variety of visual prompts will support greater student independence and self-direction – for example, pictures and words to label and explain materials, directions, and classroom routines; timers to signal the beginning and end of activities; notebooks, binders, planners, calendars, and folders to help students organize their work; breaking down complex projects into bite-size chunks; and the teacher modeling organizational tools.

• Establish expectations, rules, and routines. Clarity in this area is an essential foundation for student self-regulation, say Korinek and deFur. “Expectations and routines should be modeled, practiced with feedback, consistently enforced, and reinforced multiple times until they become standard operating procedures for students,” they say. Catching students being good is more effective than punishing students for breaking rules.

• Use checklists. These are especially helpful for breaking down complex tasks and visually guiding students through the steps needed to complete activities. A sample morning routine checklist:

-   Backpack in cubby or locker.

-   Take out materials – binder, books, pencil, paper.

-   Copy assignments.

-   Complete warm-up.

A sample calm-down checklist:

-   Breathe deeply.

-   Quiet voice.

-   Count to ten.

-   Hands and feet to self.

• Give students choice and voice. It’s important to have regular opportunities for students to make decisions about materials and activities and add their opinions to how the class is conducted – “Would you prefer this or that?” These are stepping-stones to self-regulation. “A teacher mindset of developing self-regulation strategies with students (not for them or providing to them) increases the likelihood that students will have the opportunities, practice, and appropriate levels of support they require to become more responsible and independent over time,” say the authors.

• Model self-regulation language and skills. This may involve teacher “think-alouds” , verbal prompts, and specific feedback to help students work toward greater independence.

• Set goals. This can start with class-wide goals with student input, followed by individual student goals – problems completed, sentences written, less time with transitions, homework submitted. “Gradually, more responsibility for monitoring is shifted to students with periodic teacher checks for accuracy,” say the authors.

• Use strategic questions. Teachers can frame their questions to prompt self-regulatory behaviors before, during, and after tasks. Asking rather than telling develops independence. Here are some questions to prompt self-regulation:

-   What needs to be done? What is your goal?

-   How will you do it? What are the steps?

-   What do you do first? Next?

-   How would you rate your performance?

-   What parts went well? What helped you?

-   What was difficult? What would you change?

-   What is your goal for next time?

• Provide positive feedback. It should be immediate, frequent, specific, and enthusiastic – “You remembered to use  your quiet voice in group today.” “You finished more problems than last time. Well done!” As students progress, praise can shift from specific behaviors to recognizing students’ increased independence and self-direction.

Korinek and deFur recommend that teachers assess their current practices in light of this list, identify areas for improvement, set goals, and monitor progress.

 

“Supporting Student Self-Regulation to Access the General Education Curriculum” by Lori Korinek and Sharon deFur in Teaching Exceptional Children, May/June 2016 (Vol. 48, #5, p. 232-242), http://bit.ly/1qYouLj; Korinek can be reached at [email protected].

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4. Student Motivation – What Works

            In this article in Review of Educational Research, Rory Lazowski (James Madison University) and Chris Hulleman (University of Virginia) draw on scores of studies to present 17 frameworks of how students can be positively and negatively motivated in school:

-   Achievement emotions – Emotional experiences in school emanating from students’ perceptions of control and value for academics.

-   Anxiety – Worrying about the consequences of performance, which undermines working memory and outcomes;

-   Happiness – An overriding emotional sense of wellbeing;

-   Achievement goal – Students’ goals for engaging in an activity shape how they approach, experience, and react to achievement situations;

-   Attribution – Students’ explanations for success or failure influence subsequent achievement behavior;

-   Expectancy-value – Student motivation is determined most proximally by success expectations and perceived task value;

-   Goal-setting – Specific, difficult task goals produce higher commitment and performance than vague goals that are easy to attain;

-   Implicit theories of intelligence – Students’ beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed (i.e., entity mindset) or is malleable (i.e., incremental mindset) influence goal striving, persistence, and performance;

-   Interest – The development and deepening of interest in specific topics and academics is influenced by situational and individual difference factors;

-   Need for achievement – The importance of mastery, high achievement, and besting others to reach one’s full potential;

-   Possible selves – Students’ conceptions of what they might become (both desired and feared) serve as incentives for future behavior and a way to evaluate current behavior;

-   Self-affirmation – Students who perceive that they are in danger of confirming a stereotype about their group experience increased anxiety and reductions in performance;

-   Self-confrontation – Students’ perceptions that their behaviors and values differ from their self-concept motivate change;

-   Self-determination – Satisfying students’ three core needs (autonomy, relatedness, and competence) is essential for promoting motivation and well-being;

-   Self-efficacy – Students’ perceptions that they can successfully complete the specific tasks and activities required for learning promote learning outcomes;

-   Social belongingness – The degree to which students perceive they belong and are connected to others can influence their learning outcomes;

-   Transformative experience – Reframing the learning experience as an application of the content in a way that enhances everyday value.

Lazowski and Hulleman found that all of these interventions had a significant impact on student motivation – the average effect size was 0.49 – and that the differences among them were not large.

“If we cannot make inferences about relative importance and potency among theories and intervention,” they ask, “then what can we conclude?” First, that psychologists and researchers should be “emboldened by the fact that their ideas, played out through interventions, can have a meaningful change on educational outcomes.” Second, that motivation can be a key mechanism for enhancing student learning outcomes. And third, that field research is constantly improving: “Rather than providing hypotheses about what should work,” say Lazowski and Hulleman, “intervention studies provide evidence of what can work… By strengthening the reciprocal relationship between theory, research, and practice, field interventions bolster practical validity arguments integrating psychological theories into the mainstream of educational practice.”

What’s more, they conclude, psychological interventions are efficient and cost-effective compared to comprehensive school-reform models, and their effect size is considerably better than the average 0.11 for those models. “In fact,” say the authors, “most of the motivational interventions in our review cost little or no money to implement (e.g., the self-affirmation intervention and utility value interventions cost nothing more than the time to deliver them to students via computer or paper-and-pencil), and can be implemented across content areas and contexts.” Of course teachers and administrators need training and guidance, which points to the importance of researchers and practitioners working closely together.

 

“Motivation Interventions in Education: A Meta-Analytic Review” by Rory Lazowski and Chris Hulleman in Review of Educational Research, June 2016 (Vol. 86, #2, p. 602-640), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1UpywQ3; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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5. The Snowball Effect of Inculcating Intrinsic Motivation in Students

            “An important question for any school educator is whether his or her instruction will affect students’ learning and behavior outside the school environment,” say Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisarantis (Curtin University, Australia) in this article in Review of Educational Research. What this means, they say, is graduates making good choices “in multiple contexts, in the absence of external pressure, and when alternatives are available.” There are three propositions in what they call the trans-contextual model of autonomous motivation:

• Proposition 1: Perceived support for autonomous motivation predicts autonomous motivation in schools. At the heart of this is teachers working to make students less and less dependent on external regulation, activating their intrinsic motivation, and fulfilling students’ most basic psychological needs – for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

• Proposition 2: Autonomous motivation toward activities in school predicts autonomous motivation toward similar activities in an out-of-school context. For example, if students see the inherent value of physical education in school, they are more likely to engage in leisure-time physical activities after they graduate.

• Proposition 3: Autonomous motivation in an out-of-school context predicts seeking out similar behaviors in the future and being fully engaged in them. The three key variables in downstream behavior, say Hagger and Chatzisarantis, are: “attitudes, which reflect an individual’s beliefs that engaging in a future behavior will lead to desirable outcomes; subjective norms, reflecting beliefs that the behavior is consistent with the perceived desires of significant others; and perceived behavioral control, which reflects an individual’s belief that he or she has the capacity and personal resources to successfully pursue the behavior.”

 

“The Trans-Contextual Model of Autonomous Motivation in Education: Conceptual and Empirical Issues and Meta-Analysis” by Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisarantis in Review of Educational Research, June 2016 (Vol. 86, #2, p. 360-407), http://bit.ly/25wCmiJ; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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6. The Impact of Incoming Achievement on Teachers’ Evaluations

            In this article in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Matthew Steinberg (University of Pennsylvania) and Rachel Garrett (American Institutes for Research) use data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study to question the validity of Danielson rubric scores given to teachers after classroom observations. Steinberg and Garrett found that “the incoming achievement of a teacher’s students significantly and substantively influences observation-based measures of teacher performance. Indeed, teachers working with higher-achieving students tend to receive higher performance ratings, above and beyond that which might be attributable to aspects of teacher quality that are fixed over time.” This was true of teacher ratings in these areas:

-   ELA teachers communicating with students (Danielson 3a);

-   ELA teachers engaging students in learning (3c);

-   Math teachers establishing a culture for learning (2b);

-   Subject-matter specialist teachers (versus generalists who taught several subjects).

Students’ entering achievement levels were not related to teachers’ ratings in these areas:

-   ELA teachers’ questioning techniques (3b);

-   ELA teachers’ use of assessment to drive instruction (3d);

-   Math teachers in areas other than 2b.

In short, the tendency of teachers with higher-performing students to get higher rubric scores was most pronounced in classroom management and climate-setting and less pronounced with specific instructional skills like questioning and the use of assessments.

Steinberg and Garrett also found that better-performing teachers were often assigned to work with higher-achieving students. This raises additional questions on the validity of Danielson scores as measures of the true instructional ability of teachers working with higher- and lower-achieving students.

            “High-stakes accountability systems aim to produce more information about teacher performance for the purposes of improving classroom instruction and satisfying the accountability objective of newly developed teacher-evaluation systems,” conclude Steinberg and Garrett, “– identifying, remediating, and, if necessary, removing underperforming teachers from the classroom. However, when information about teacher performance does not reflect a teacher’s practice but rather the students to whom the teacher is assigned, such systems are at risk of misidentifying and mislabeling teacher performance. The misidentification of teachers’ performance level has real implications for personnel decisions and fundamentally calls into question an evaluation system’s ability to effectively and equitably improve, reward, and sanction teachers.”

 

“Classroom Composition and Measured Teacher Performance: What Do Teacher Observation Scores Really Measure?” by Matthew Steinberg and Rachel Garrett in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2016 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 293-317), available for purchase at

http://bit.ly/1U7HnTE; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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7. Does a Double Dose of High-School Algebra Improve Student Results?

            In this Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis article, Takako Nomi (Saint Louis University) and Stephen Raudenbush (University of Chicago) report on their study of “Double-Dose Algebra” in the Chicago Public Schools. Launched in 2003, this initiative required all students who scored below the 50^th percentile on their 8^th-grade math test to take two math classes in 9^th grade: regular algebra and a remedial class designed to catch them up on pre-algebra skills. (Students above the cut-off took a “single-dose” algebra course.) Nomi and Raudenbush point out that there were really three things going on in Chicago’s high schools: (a) doubling the math time for low-achieving students, (b) grouping students with lower math achievement with relatively low-skill peers; and (c) grouping higher-achieving students with relatively high-skill peers.

Some schools, however, didn’t group students as homogeneously as others – they put double-dose students into algebra classes with single-dose students. This created a natural experiment among Chicago’s 60 neighborhood high schools and allowed Nomi and Raudenbush to study the differential impact of increased math time and class composition. Here’s what they found for double-dose students whose incoming scores were close to the median:

-   If they were in heterogeneously grouped classrooms, students made significant gains in algebra test scores.

-   If they were in homogenously grouped classrooms with low-skill peers, students made very small gains or none at all.

However, students in classes with low-skill classmates received higher algebra course grades. Why? It could be the result of what Nomi and Raudenbush call the “fish-pond effect” – these students benefited psychologically from outperforming their low-achieving peers. Or it could be that teachers had different expectations for students who were performing well in generally low-performing classes.

            Why did students in homogeneously grouped double-dose algebra classes have such disappointing achievement? Nomi and Raudenbush list some possible reasons:

-   The low prior skill level in the class constrained the pace and conceptual level of math instruction that the teacher could provide.

-   This would be particularly true if the teacher used whole-class instruction.

-   Teachers of low-achieving classes were less likely to engage in discussions and student-initiated activities.

-   Peers with low skills might become discouraged, display low motivation, and convey negative expectations for math learning that negatively affected classroom climate.

-   If students felt stigmatized by being in the class, their motivation might decline, leading to lower math achievement.

-   Principals often assigned comparatively inexperienced, low-skill teachers to low-achieving classrooms.

“The broad theoretical lesson in our study seems important,” conclude Nomi and Raudenbush: “Instructional time and class composition jointly shape learning opportunities and therefore influence the distribution of human capital during adolescence.”

 

“Making a Success of ‘Algebra for All’: The Impact of Extended Instructional Time and Classroom Peer Skill in Chicago” by Takako Nomi and Stephen Raudenbush in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2016 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 431-451), available for purchase at

http://epa.sagepub.com/content/38/2/431.full

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8. The Impact of Early College High Schools

            In this article in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Clarisse Haxton and seven colleagues from the American Institutes for Research report on their study of the track records of ten early college high schools. This model aims to offer students who are traditionally underrepresented in postsecondary education the chance to pursue a high-school diploma while earning college credits. The findings: students who were admitted to an early college high school (compared to a control group that was not) had significantly better high-school experiences (college credits earned, college-going culture, and instructor supports), college enrollment, and college degree attainment. The impact of attending an early college high school was stronger for minority and low-income students, as well as for students with higher levels of prior achievement. Being admitted to an early college high school, however, did not have a significant impact on high-school graduation.

 

“Longitudinal Findings from the Early College High School Initiative Impact Study” by Clarisse Haxton, Mengli Song, Kristina Zeiser, Andrea Berger, Lori Turk-Bicakci, Michael Garet, Joel Knudson, and Gur Hoshen in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, June 2016 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 410-430), available for purchase at

http://epa.sagepub.com/content/38/2/410.abstract?rss=1

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