Marshall Memo 1019
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
January 15, 2024
1. How to be a caring boss and not burn out
2. A three-step approach to eliminating student cellphone use in schools
3. Heterogenous high-school courses with an honors option
4. An “inside-out” approach to schoolwide discipline problems
5. What is science – and why should students care?
6. Recommended tech tools for teachers
7. Award-winning nonfiction children’s books
“MLK's lesson is clear: The arc of the moral universe bends not from gravity but from the gravitas of our collective struggle to improve our communities, our society, and our world. The arc of the moral universe does not passively bend; it is actively bent. We bend it.”
Chika Okafor in “The Arc of the Moral Universe Doesn’t Bend Itself”
in The Boston Sunday Globe, January 14, 2024
“What has tended to happen in American public schooling with poor kids, and particularly with poor kids of color, is that when they haven’t learned, the variables are poverty, the lack of parenting, difficult community circumstances, socioeconomic status, and on and on and on. And interestingly enough it never circled back to the teacher or the school. And therefore it let us off the hook.”
Anthony Alvarado, former New York City schools chancellor, who died last week at 81; click here for a January 10, 2024 New York Times obituary.
“There is always the question, can the octopus so enmesh you that there will always be an arm around you, tugging you from the direction you want to go. The octopus is the system, the bureaucracy. I’ll walk around with a pair of shears in my back pocket. Whenever I see a tentacle, I’ll take it out.”
Anthony Alvarado when he was appointed New York City chancellor in 1983
“To teach children effectively, you must teach teachers effectively – and constantly – about how to teach children effectively.”
Anthony Alvarado
“Start off your cabinet meetings with a quick ‘Hope or Humor’ story. Someone from the team shares a quick student story that instills hope or focuses on a humorous event. Although this might seem insignificant, it sets the mood for the meeting and refocuses everyone on why we do what we do as educators.”
Howard Carlson, quoted in School Administrator, January 2024 (Vol. 81, #1, p. 7)
“Depression is a treatable medical illness.”
Karen Swartz, Johns Hopkins University Mood Disorders Center, in “Universal
Depression Education in High Schools” in School Administrator, January 2024 (Vol.
81, #1, pp. 20-23); Swartz can be reached at [email protected].
“If you want to improve reading, improve writing, because when you read, that’s what you do, but when you write, you read and write. If you do only one, you’ll pay the price for not doing both…”
Allen Berger (Miami University, Ohio), in a New York Times letter, January 11, 2024
“The term ‘balanced literacy’ should be used in today’s teaching to mean love of and exposure to literature, but with the phonics element intact.”
Daina Schuman (ibid.)
“Learning takes effort and sustained attention. Unfortunately, dopamine hits of social media have trained students to flee effort in search of easy, cheap entertainment.”
Daniel Buck (see item #2)
“The role of oral, live, public speaking assignments is going to increase.”
Jeffrey Schnapp on the impact of ChatGPT and other large language models on
the classroom, quoted in “AI in the Academy” by Jonathan Shaw in Harvard
Magazine, November/December 2023
“One way of looking at this might be that, for 42 years, I’ve been making small regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”
Chesley Sullenberger in an interview with Katie Couric shortly after he landed his
airliner in the Hudson River, saving everyone on board, in “The Good News About Bad
Airplane Safety Incidents” by Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times, Jan. 11, 2024
“The goal [of National Transportation Safety Board post-accident investigations] is to identify the problem to make future errors less likely. This encourages people to be frank, in stark contrast with liability-driven cultures that encourage people to hide their errors and the authorities to seek scapegoats rather than solutions… If something has gone wrong, the reason will be identified and fixed.”
Zeynep Tufekci (ibid.)
In this Harvard Business Review article, Jamil Zaki (Stanford University) says today’s employees – especially Millennials and Gen Zers – “don’t merely hope for empathy from their leaders – they demand it.” That puts a lot of pressure on conscientious bosses. “When you adopt empathy in the workplace,” says Zaki, “you expose yourself to the emotional ups and downs of everyone you manage – a welter of joy, anxiety, anger, self-doubt, fear, confusion, exuberance, jealousy, sadness, disappointment, and more.”
“I feel like I’m never enough,” said one executive. “Anything going wrong with them means I’ve failed.”
In the caring professions – doctors, nurses, teachers, and their managers – compassion fatigue is an occupational hazard. Zaki suggests three strategies for sustainable empathy:
• Physician, heal thyself. He once shadowed a doctor for six hours and realized that she hadn’t eaten, had a drink of water, sat down, or used the bathroom all day. This kind of behavior has been called “martyr mentality,” and some empathetic managers wear it like a badge of honor, absorbing the stress that others are suffering. “If I have any little piece of energy left at the end of the day,” one executive told Zaki, “then I didn’t do all I could.”
This mentality “harms your ability to truly be there for your people,” he says. “Stress numbs you to others’ concerns, makes it harder to see the world through their eyes, and may even make you more aggressive… When you let yourself burn out, you deny everyone else the best version of yourself.”
The antidote is “self-compassion” – taking care of yourself so you can care for others. Key steps:
In this Education Gadfly article, Daniel Buck says that in schools that are permissive about cellphone use, “children develop habits of inattention. They’re talking to friends while watching videos; they’re watching teachers while they have music in their ears; they’re completing math problems with a few rounds of Candy Crush between sets, or reading a book with their phone on their desk. Learning takes effort and sustained attention. Unfortunately, dopamine hits of social media have trained students to flee effort in search of easy, cheap entertainment.”
Buck cites recent studies showing that banning cellphones in class boosts standardized test scores and end-of-course grades – adding the equivalent of an extra hour of instruction a week. Researchers have also found that keeping kids away from their phones during recess leads to a big increase in exercise and better attention back in class. When Buck visits school cafeterias that do and don’t ban cellphone use, he sees a dramatic difference. In the latter, students sit “shoulder to shoulder with their necks craned down, their faces faintly lit, occasionally leaning over to show their friend a funny meme or TikTok video but never glancing up.” In the former, students’ lunchrooms have a “healthy, boisterous energy.”
The research about improved learning makes sense, says Buck: “At the cognitive level, all new information enters our brains through our working memory, the doorway to long-term memory. If that doorway clogs up with Temple Run sneakily played between textbook pages or with emotional anticipation and consideration of that fateful buzz, telling a student that their crush just texted back, students cannot focus on class content, in which case they won’t learn much of it.”
With banning cellphones, says Buck, the devil is in the details. He suggests three guiding principles:
• The ban must be universal – It needs to apply to all classrooms. Teachers shouldn’t be put in the position of being the tough cop while others are cool and nice (“But Mr. Jones lets us use our phones!”)
• It must be enforced – If the policy is violated, the same consequence must occur everywhere in the school. Buck took a student’s phone away last year, only to watch the principal return it to the student a few hours later, violating the school’s policy that a parent must come pick it up. Some schools add a lunch detention to that consequence.
• PR – When a cellphone ban is launched, says Buck, it needs to be accompanied by an information campaign on the negative consequences of overdosing on screens. Students will resent not being able to use their phones, and parents will be annoyed at not being able to contact their kids during school hours and having to come to school to retrieve a confiscated phone – but kids and families are more likely to understand and support a ban if they’re fully informed.
In this Teachers College Record article, David Nurenberg (Milton Academy) and Liana Tuller (Charlestown High School, Boston) report on a 1,409-student suburban Massachusetts high school shifting from seven achievement-grouped courses in English, history, science, and math to heterogeneously grouped courses in which students could choose to take the class for honors credit while still working side-by-side with a diverse group of peers. This was during the 2020-21 school year, with Covid-19 remote instruction.
Nurenberg and Tuller were interested in whether the honors-option in this high school would solve what researchers have found to be perennial problems with tracking: less rigor and lower achievement for the lower tracks and mixed results for the upper tracks. Looking at achievement data, surveys, and interviews in the Massachusetts school, here’s what they found:
“Make Classrooms, Not Hallways, the Heart of Belonging” by Ronald James Jr. in ASCD online, January 9, 2024
In this Thinking Is Power article, Melanie Trecek-King (Massasoit Community College) bemoans the way science is taught in many classrooms: a fat textbook full of facts, memorizing them for exams, the “scientific method” involving experiments with a “right” answer, and many students wondering why they’re learning all this when they don’t plan on becoming scientists. The result: low levels of science literacy. “Too many science classes focus on whatscience knows instead of how it knows,” says Trecek-King, “leaving too many unable to spot claims that seem scientific but aren’t.”
This does students and society an injustice, she says. “Science is much more than a collection of facts – it’s a way of thinking. There’s no single ‘scientific method.’ There are many ways to do science. And most importantly, science isn’t just for scientists. In a world built by science, scientific literacy is essential for making wise decisions about everything from our health to how to vote.”
So what is science? Trecek-King lists five key facts and insights about science and why it matters so much:
In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez, Brandie Wright, Kim Darche, Marnie Diem, and Lucia Hassell recommend eight technology tools for educators:
• MagicSchool offers more than 50 different artificial intelligence-assisted tools to speed up teaching tasks like lesson planning, developing assessments, feedback, communication with parents, and generating IEPs.
• Diffit can take a few words on a topic (or a PDF or URL) and create a reading passage, change it to different levels of readability, generate vocabulary lists, discussion questions, and multiple-choice tests, and translate it into multiple languages.
• Eduaide can create guided notes, Jeopardy-style game questions, classroom icebreakers, e-mails for parents, a rubric, and more.
• Wix Tomorrow Classroom is a suite of resources that teaches secondary school students how to create their own websites. It includes lesson plans, activities, templates, and ways for teachers to monitor student work and give real-time feedback.
• Sembl includes high-interest math activities for elementary students, with tools for teachers to filter tasks and create personalized playlists. This is an excellent tool for teachers using Peter Liljedahl’s “Thinking Classrooms” approach [see Memos 976, 992, and 1013].
• Upschool offers free courses and learning materials to equip students with skills, inspiration, and support to solve real-world problems in their communities and globally. Many are aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
• Flaticon has free downloadable icons and stickers in various formats that can add visual support to learning materials, help students find what they’re looking for in the classroom and online, enhance their own digital products, and brand classroom resources.
• Dollar Street shows families around the world on a virtual street based on their income, with photos of their homes, possessions, and daily lives. “It’s like a global neighborhood,” say Gonzalez and colleagues, “helping us see similarities and differences across cultures and income levels. Use this resource to debunk stereotypes, build empathy, and develop global awareness.”
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About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and other educators very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 54 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, writer, and consultant 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). Every week there’s a podcast and HTMI version as well.
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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
• Article selection criteria
• Publications (with a count of articles from each)
• Topics (with a count of articles from each)
• Headlines for all issues
• Reader opinions
• About Kim Marshall (including links to articles)
• A free sample issue
Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:
• The current issue (in Word or PDF)
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
All Things PLC
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
ASCD SmartBrief
Cult of Pedagogy
District Management Journal
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
English Journal
Exceptional Children
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Ed (formerly Ed. Magazine)
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Kappan (Phi Delta Kappan)
Knowledge Quest
Language Arts
Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance)
Literacy Today (formerly Reading Today)
Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Principal
Principal Leadership
Psychology Today
Reading Research Quarterly
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Social Education
Social Studies and the Young Learner
Teaching Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Learning Professional (formerly Journal of Staff Development)
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time
Urban Education