Marshall Memo 1094
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
June 30, 2025
1. Shaping the U.S. history curriculum in a contentious time
2. Understanding young children’s emotional mindset
3. Zaretta Hammond on harnessing students’ curiosity
4. Getting students fully engaged in the feedback process
5. Regrets about smartphones and social media – and proposed solutions
6. Giving schools more control over negative social media
7. Ways to call out cellphone rudeness
8. Daily independent reading time
9. Children’s books about birds
10. Short items: (a) Multiple layers of cousins explained;
(c) Cognitive biases visually displayed
“Since the dawn of the television age, parents have struggled to limit or guide their children’s screen time.”
Jonathan Haidt, Will Johnson, and Zach Rausch (see item #5)
“To understand our own culture in the age of A.I., we will need high-level math classes and deep study of literature and linguistics. It might be that the crucial insight a student needs will come from a course on Don Quixote – as quixotic as that may sound.”
Leif Weatherby in “A.I. Is Coming for the Coders Who Made It” in The New York
Times, June 8, 2025
“Many undergraduates have rendered themselves into passive appendages of digital algorithms. Can you imagine putting your trust, much less your life savings or your health, in the hands of professionals with claims of knowledge that they don’t actually possess?”
Bill Blunden in a letter to The New York Times, June 19, 2025
”The goal wasn’t to catch students misusing AI. The goal was to redesign assessments so that student thinking remained visible, even when AI was in the room.”
Anna Bernstein in “How AI Pushed Us to Rethink Assessment,” ASCD, June 24, 2025
“If you want to know what you think about a topic, write about it. Writing has a way of ruthlessly exposing unclear thoughts and imprecision. This is part of what is lost by ChatGPT, the mistaken belief that the spat-out string of words in a reasonable order is the only goal, when it’s often the cognitive act of producing the string of words that matters most.”
Brian Klaas in “The Death of the Student Essay – and the Future of Cognition” in
The Garden of Forking Paths, June 19, 2025
“After a career working to develop expertise, countless hours teaching, and my best attempts to instill a love of learning in young minds, I had been reduced to the citation police. Worse, it means that my ability to assess students – a precursor to helping them improve – is completely kneecapped, as though a doctor is asked to diagnose a patient while not knowing whether the blood from the test came from their body or someone else’s.”
Brian Klaas (ibid.)
“In management, it’s impossible to make everyone happy – particularly if you are serious about doing what you think is right.”
Edward Hallowell in “Who Do They Think You Are?” in Finding the Heart of the
Child: Essays on Children, Families, and Schools (1997)
In this article in Time, James Kloppenberg (Harvard University) pushes back on the recent assertion that the U.S. history curriculum has been rewritten in a way that replaces “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” That’s not correct, he says, but it is true that since the 1960s, the curriculum has moved beyond the previous emphasis on America’s heroic achievements on the world stage to a more nuanced and balanced narrative.
“Historians have been asking different questions and probing other dimensions of our past,” says Kloppenberg. “Combining old and new methods, including the discovery of previously unknown sources and the use of statistical analysis, historians digging in the archives have uncovered solid evidence concerning the expansion of freedom for many Americans and the denial of freedom for many others. The experiences of enslaved Africans, women, Indigenous people, ordinary soldiers, owners of small businesses, and countless other Americans have emerged from a generation’s painstaking research into a new light.”
The revised curriculum is entirely compatible with telling the story of the nation’s myriad accomplishments and being “a flag-waving patriot with an abiding love of the U.S.,” as Kloppenberg describes himself. “But to see American history as simply a narrative of heroism would be a lie unbecoming of a great nation,” he says. “Telling Americans only those parts of our complicated history consistent with preconceived notions of American grandeur is unacceptable to everyone who cherishes our nation and its history.”
But aren’t historical facts just facts? It’s not that simple, says Koppenberg. “From the almost infinite array of information historical actors leave behind them, historians put together interpretations consistent with recognized rules of evidence and reasoning.” There are heated debates about those interpretations in peer-reviewed journals, and what emerges needs to be backed up by facts and documentation. “Although entitled to their opinions,” he says, “historians are never entitled to their own facts.”
In this article in Psychology Today, therapist/writer Evan Shopper says kids often don’t make sense, and that’s because their behavior is driven by unarticulated emotions. Shopper describes seven aspects of young children’s mindset that are helpful for adults who love and care for them:
• Needing connection – Feeling close to a parent or other caregiver is essential to healthy development, and a good connection includes attunement – a two-way street of understanding. “When parents get what’s going on inside their child and respond accordingly,” says Shopper, “their child feels safe, nurtured, and valued. In turn, kids respond by wanting to emulate, imitate, and learn from their parent.”
• Feeling small – Not being as big as adults constantly reinforces being less powerful, says Shopper, “living in a world of giants who make and enforce the rules.” Kids may respond by making others feel small and trying to be in control in other ways.
• Feeling swamped – “The world is big, fast, and complicated,” says Shopper. “How can a child not feel overwhelmed?” They may cope by shutting down, exploding, crying, isolating, having a tantrum, hiding, or focusing intensely on one thing. What matters at moments like this is the child’s gradually acquired ability to deal with complexity and their caregivers staying connected.
• Seeing only black and white – Young children aren’t cognitively developed enough to see complexity, so they tend to make sweeping generalizations to understand the confusing world around them. For example, a child is scared of getting a shot and might say doctors hurt kids and the parent is on the doctor’s side.
• Idealizing the parent – Children need caregivers to be competent, reliable, and in control – I’ve got this, you’re okay. Given kids’ black-and-white worldview, says Shopper, “to perceive a parent as flawed could mean the world is broken, directionless, and unsafe – like a plane without a pilot! Kids will twist themselves into knots to maintain their parents’ good image.”
• Being egocentric – This leads kids to assume that others feel the same way they do and believe they affect events around them – for example, thinking they caused a beautiful day for a family picnic, or that they are the cause of their parents’ divorce.
• Avoiding shame – When corrected by an adult, kids may conclude it’s them, not their behavior, that’s at fault. “In this way,” says Shopper, “shame can enter a child’s self-narrative, affecting their self-esteem.” Given all-or-nothing thinking and the tendency to idealize parents, kids may conclude they’re not worthy of a parent’s love.
Shopper’s message to parents: “The next time your child acts up, ask yourself what’s at the root of it. You’ll likely find that one or more of these qualities is at play. If you know which one is prompting the behavior, you can name it, bringing it into the open where you and your child can talk about what’s going on inside their mind. Ultimately, when kids get help processing their emotions, their challenging behaviors decrease or disappear.”
(Originally titled “Teaching for Curiosity”)
“Curiosity is the launchpad for learning,” says researcher/author/teacher Zaretta Hammond in Educational Leadership. “Curiosity not only fuels engagement but also activates the cognitive processes that support deeper understanding and long-term retention.” As students pursue what they’re curious about, says Hammond, there are surprises, disappointments, and frustrations, and the need for support and guidance – including through the judicious use of technology. “Over time,” she says, “curious students become adventurous learners – willing to persist through confusion or frustration in pursuit of meaningful answers to their questions.”
Hammond suggests five strategies that teachers can use to spark and sustain curiosity in their curriculum units:
• Invite students to grapple with essential questions. These get at the big ideas of the curriculum, are relevant to students’ lives, don’t have just one correct answer, provoke thought and debate, and enlist higher-order thinking.
• Encourage exploration with thinking routines. Hammond suggests two strategies from Harvard’s Project Zero: have students focus on an area of curiosity, linger over the details, and see what’s most interesting; encourage students to explore the architecture and connections of a system, an object, or a process and organize and categorize its elements.
• Cultivate the habit of noticing and naming. Students can be prompted with questions like, Did someone notice…? What kind of ____ is this? What is surprising or confusing you? and think about the best vocabulary.
• Help students widen their aperture and “make the familiar strange.” Have them look at familiar things in new ways and challenge assumptions about what they think they understand. For example, Why are certain behaviors considered “normal”? How are certain processes handled differently in other cultures? How do the media shape how we look at social issues?
• Embrace mistakes, detours, and false starts as part of curiosity learning. “Too often,” says Hammond, “we don’t build a culture of errors in our classrooms that encourage students to push through setbacks or recognize that what looks like a mistake could be offering some new information. Part of being curious means being willing to get your hands dirty, being vulnerable as a learner, and failing forward.” Give students space to talk about what confuses them, destigmatize errors, and help them as they sort things out.
(Originally titled “Feedback That Matters”)
In this Educational Leadership article, high-school ELA department chair Alexis Wiggins describes three strategies for boosting the power of feedback and student reflection:
• Revision-based assessment – Wiggins prints the standards she wants students to reach on the left side of a feedback sheet and gives each student one of three provisional grades on what they submit: Publishable (for written work) or Professional (for presentation work); Revisable; or Redo. Then on the right-hand side she writes specific, actionable, and practical comments on why the student got the grade. Students can choose to do multiple revisions to improve their grade to the top level (which is an A on a standard report card).
Wiggins reports that this system has been very popular with students and enthusiastically adopted by her ELA colleagues. The best part, she says, is that “students actually read and incorporate our feedback because there is a timely, actionable way to use it to improve their grade. Students independently monitor their own progress and set goals.” There’s also much more student-teacher dialogue along the way. Since the advent of ChatGPT, students hand-write their revisions in class (students with accommodations use laptops with locked-down browsers), and teachers assess the best essay for the student’s final grade.
• AI-based feedback – Some of the new chatbots “are very good at supplementing teacher feedback,” says Wiggins. Her school has adopted MagicSchool, which doesn’t allow students’ work to be used to train the bot and lets teachers monitor students’ input and searches. Wiggins has been astonished with the quality of individualized feedback students get from the Writing Tutor feature, which she has primed with specific look-fors and instructions. “Students are getting two teachers for the price of one,” she says. “As a bonus, they are also learning how to engage with AI in novel, productive ways, something that is of growing importance for college and career readiness.”
• Student surveys to model using feedback – The first time Wiggins gave an anonymous survey to a high-school class earlier in her career (typed so comments couldn’t be traced back to individual students), she was expecting mostly good feedback from the bright, eager students with whom she had great rapport. In addition to positive comments, students said she sometimes played favorites, wasn’t teaching enough grammar, and the reading load was overwhelming. The comments really got Wiggins thinking – for example, how could she make every student feel like a favorite? “Their feedback,” she says, “made me a better, more inclusive teacher.” Now she gives a survey every quarter and discusses the feedback in detail with each class. “Walking through the feedback itself is an act of learning how to give and take feedback,” says Wiggins, “for me and my students.”
“Since the dawn of the television age, parents have struggled to limit or guide their children’s screen time,” say Jonathan Haidt (New York University), Will Johnson (Harris Poll), and Zach Rausch (NYU) in this New York Timesarticle. But with the arrival of smartphones and social media, used by teens an average of five hours a day, many parents are throwing up their hands. Those who try to hold out getting their children phones hear the plaintive cry, “But I’m the only one!”
Last year, a Harris poll showed that many teens, despite being glued to TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and other apps, have regrets about the whole business. GenZ members in their twenties said they would do things differently if they could time-travel back: 30 percent believed they got smartphones too young, 34 percent said the same for access to social media, and 45 percent said that if and when they had children, they wouldn’t allow them to have smartphones before high school.
More recently, Haidt, Johnson, and Rausch conducted a poll of 1,013 parents with children under 18. Parents expressed feelings of regret and entrapment about giving phones and social media access too early, and supported new policies and norms to protect their children from online harm.
Interestingly, from 2000 to 2015, when many kids were getting flip phones, parents were optimistic. Teens could stay in touch and phones were crucial to social movements in the U.S. and abroad. “A common belief at the time was that being a so-called digital native would give children an advantage in the new world taking shape around us,” say Haidt, Johnson, and Rausch. “It was only in the late 2010s that a deep unease began to arise as it became increasingly clear that children who grew up with smartphones and social media were not better adapted. In fact, they were becoming more anxious, depressed, isolated, sedentary, and unable to focus.”
One of the questions in the parent poll: When I think about my child’s experience growing up, I wish ____ had never been invented. Her is the rank order, with phones and social media in red:
Haidt, Johnson, and Rausch propose four social norms for helping parents resist the everyone else is doing itlament from their teens. “It’s hard for any one parent or school to act alone,” they say, “but when families and schools act together, change becomes possible. These norms are meant to reinforce one another, and when combined, they offer a road map for reclaiming a heathier and more-joyful childhood.”
• Delay giving kids smartphones until high school. The poll found that two-thirds of parents wanted to wait until at least age 14 for smartphones.
• Delay social media access till 16. This age was favored by a whopping 73 percent of parents in the poll.
• Ban cellphones from bell to bell in schools. This includes lunch and recess; 63 percent of parents supported this policy.
• After school, get kids involved in alternative activities. Ideally, this involves more independent, free play and responsibility in the real world. Again, parents support this goal – 40 percent of parents of kids 6-12 and 47 percent of parents of teens.
“With tech companies eagerly filling our children’s lives – and their classrooms – with more new and untested technologies,” conclude Haidt, Johnson, and Rausch, “it is becoming that much more urgent for parents to speak up and for legislatures to act… The goal of these reforms isn’t just to limit screens. It’s much bigger than that. The goal is to restore childhood.”
(Originally titled “Giving Schools More Control Over Social Media”)
In this Educational Leadership article, Richard Culatta (CEO of ISTE+ASCD) says he was upset at the way students at his children’s school were using social media to share videos of student fights, spread personal rumors, and impersonate teachers, students, or the school itself. “These types of accounts can create a negative environment for students, staff, and administrators,” says Culatta. “Beyond targeting individuals, they fuel distractions that can ripple through the entire school, affecting students who aren’t even on social media.”
This year, it got personal: Culatta’s teenage son was targeted. A report was filed with the social media company but the account was not removed. The principal and other students complained and still no response. Culatta contacted other schools in the area and heard similar frustration and a sense of helplessness about controlling negative content on social media.
So he contacted Meta, the company that owns Instagram. Probably because of his position, a team at Meta responded and offered to explore solutions. After more discussion, a pilot program was launched to give school leaders a more direct role in managing social media content. A group of schools tested a version of Instagram that allowed partner middle and high schools to identify and report inappropriate or disruptive posts, get real-time responses, and have negative content taken down before it causes significant harm and grows into a major distraction. Participating schools also briefed students on norms for healthy social media use and digital citizenship.
“The pilot results were remarkable,” says Culatta, “with schools reporting a significant reduction in harmful content and improved digital culture.” Based on these results, Instagram is expanding the program to all U.S. middle and high schools. As of March 2025, any verified secondary school can qualify to participate in the Instagram School Partnership Program, with significantly more control over potentially harmful content. “When combined with setting effective digital use norms and teaching digital citizenship skills to students,” says Culatta, “this program empowers school leaders to create an uplifting and engaging digital community.”
Instagram is only one social media platform, Culatta cautions, and there’s still too much harmful content out there. He’s pushing for TikTok, Snapchat, and other social media companies to follow suit and provide schools with the tools they need to protect students and their communities.
“Giving Schools More Control Over Social Media” by Richard Culatta in Educational Leadership, Summer 2025 (Vol. 82, #9, pp. 46-47)
“5 Things to Say to Someone Who Won’t Get Off Their Phone” by Angela Haupt in Time, July 7, 2025 (Vol. 206, #1-2, p. 18)
In this Cult of Pedagogy article, veteran high-school English teacher Dan Tricarico says he’s always wanted to share his love of reading with students. He loves author Kate DiCamillo’s statement: “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.”
But in the digital age, there seems to be less and less interest in reading for pleasure – or even for school assignments. Tricarico’s solution: students read silently at the beginning of every class. He knows this isn’t a new idea – USSR, DEAR, and other iterations have been around for decades. But he has put his own spin on the process; his logistics:
“Dusting Off an Old Practice to Make Reading Fun Again” by Dan Tricarico in Cult of Pedagogy, June 22, 2025
a. Common Myths Debunked – In Information Is Beautiful, David McCandless pushes back on 70 widely espoused beliefs, including the need to drink eight glasses of water a day, we only use 10 percent of our brains, photographic memory, fishes’ limited memory, lie detectors, Einstein failed math, the five second rule dropping food, and Napoleon’s height.
b. Multiple Layers of Cousins Explained – This simple graphic shows relationships starting from first cousin to third cousin twice removed.
c. Cognitive Biases Visually Displayed – This extraordinary infographic by Buston Benson and John Manoogian III displays more than 200 cognitive biases related to managing too much information, not enough meaning, the need to act fast, and what to remember.
© Copyright 2025 Marshall Memo LLC, all rights reserved; permission is granted to clip and share individual article summaries with colleagues for educational purposes, being sure to include the author/publication citation and mention that it’s a Marshall Memo summary.
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 early Tuesday (there are 50 issues a year). Every week there’s a podcast and HTMI version. Artificial intelligence is not used.
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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
Ed Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
English Journal
Exceptional Children
Harvard Business Review
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
Language Magazine
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