In This Issue:

  1. A tribute to Dolly Parton

  2. Being clear about how we use the word “triggered”

  3. What do students want in history and civics discussions?

  4. Look-fors in social studies classrooms

  5. A theory of action to improve the impact of instructional coaching

  6. Timothy Shanahan on close reading

  7. The risks of pushing young prodigies to excel in one area

  8. Sleepless in the principalship

  9. Are you a helicopter parent? A self-assessment

10. Contemporary words from The Odyssey

 

Quotes of the Week

“We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust our sails.”

            Dolly Parton (see item #1 for more quotes)

 

“It is frequently beneficial to students to give them the opportunity to grapple with problems and ideas that they are not immediately going to be able to answer easily or smoothly.”

            Isobel Stevenson in Coaching Letter #241, August 24, 2026

 

“Proponents of artificial intelligence have promised that, by removing certain elements of the craft of writing, students can concentrate on making their work more polished and their ideas more clearly defined. That is a dangerous ruse. To see what a student has learned, look at the moment when they struggle to begin – and then transcend that struggle to create something genuinely surprising. That’s the moment the full force of the writer’s mind takes possession of the process. When we eliminate the possibility of writing badly or incoherently, we eliminate writing’s greatest satisfaction: the feeling that we have stepped outside ourselves and are watching our own words fall together in the right order. What I describe sounds like a state of grace, but it’s also a furious act of intellection and expression undertaken with only one’s study and wits to guide them.”

            Walt Hunter in “The Blue Book Is Back. Thank God” in The Atlantic, September 2026

            (Vol. 338, #3, pp. 11-13)

 

“For every Richard Williams (father of Venus and Serena), there are many intense parents who turn their child off to the thing they want them to be great at.”

            Alexander Puutio (see item #7) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A Tribute to Dolly Parton

            Dolly Parton died last week at 80. The New York Times obituary began with this sentence: “Dolly Parton, a rags-to-rhinestones daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music and beyond with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals, died on Tuesday in Nashville.” One of Parton’s enduring legacies was donating more than 300 million books to children through her Imagination Library. Some memorable quotes:

-   There’s nothing that makes me happier than writing a song.

-   When I started writing these songs, my mom was real impressed with how I could write, writing these songs at such an early age. And she would say, ‘Oh honey, go get that guitar. I want you to sing them.’ And she’d say to people, ‘I want you to hear this song this little thing wrote.’ And so I thought, Ooh, I’m getting a whole lot of attention now! So, I think that kind of encouraged it. But also, I loved the sound of that music. I loved the sound of the instruments. I loved being able to create something, and it gave me a little space, and a little world of my own that I could just live in, and be creative in.

-   Now I know we had no money but I was rich as I could be in my coat of many colors that Momma made for me.

-   We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust our sails.

-   My look is really based on a country girl’s idea of glam. I wasn’t naturally pretty, so I make the most of everything I’ve got.

-   I look so totally artificial, but I’ve always been the simplest person in the world.

-   If I’m remembered for 100 years from now, I hope it will be not for looks but for books.

-   I’m a feminine girl. I’m a workin’ girl. I think we all should be treated with respect. And if we do a good job, we should get paid for it. So I’m all about that.

-       I just want everybody to be treated good. 

-       I know and love them all, and I do not judge… That's who they are. They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton. 

-   I always count my blessings, more than I count my money. I don’t work for money, never did. It was the art, it was the job. I loved the work. And I’ve done well, and I’m thankful for it.

-   I think it’s important for everyone to do their share to help their fellow man. I get paid more attention than maybe some others that are doing more than me.

-   I think that if I am smart in business, it’s just that I’m smart about who I am. I know what I can, can’t, will, and won’t do, and if I have to be strict about that, I will.

-   Do not confuse dreams with wishes. There is a difference. Dreams are where you visualize yourself being successful at what’s important to you to accomplish. Now, dreams build convictions because you work hard to pay the price to make sure that they come true. Wishes are hoping good things will happen to you, but there’s no fire in your gut that causes you to put everything forth to overcome all the obstacles. So you have to dream more, and never, ever, ever, ever blame somebody else if it doesn’t happen. That is your department.

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2. Being Clear About How We Use the Word “Triggered”

            In this New York Times article, Melinda Wenner Moyer says that when people say something triggered them, it could be anything from an everyday annoyance to remembering a traumatic event in their past. “These events vary so much that the word trigger has lost much of its meaning,” says Moyer. “While the term is rooted in trauma psychology, the way it’s applied clinically does not always align with how it’s commonly used.” She describes these possibilities, drawing on the advice of several experts: 

            • For people who have experienced trauma, a word, a smell, a sound, or a situation can prompt flashbacks, leading them to re-experience the event with extraordinary vividness. This leads people to avoid the triggers, which can make things worse by creating anxiety. Psychologists and counselors sometimes use exposure therapy, having patients recount traumatic experiences in a safe setting and learn to stop associating triggers with immediate danger, ultimately getting to the point where avoiding them is no longer necessary.

            • Triggered can be used to describe bothersome experiences – for example, foods in crinkly bags, Spaghettios, or the smell of body wax. There’s a big difference between ordinary challenges and something that triggers a clinical reaction, says Moyer. “Using triggered to describe negative everyday experiences may also cause people to misinterpret discomfort as danger. They may start to think that bothersome experiences… are harmful, rather than seeing them as opportunities for learning and growth.” 

            • Using triggers to avoid experiencing discomfort may harm relationships, says psychologist Yael Schonbrun. When people say they’re being triggered during an argument, that might “function as an emergency brake,” she says, ending what might have been a helpful dialogue. 

            • Trigger warnings are used in classrooms to avoid potentially distressing material – for example, allowing students to absent themselves so they don’t have to watch a particular scene in a movie or read a chapter in a book. But this practice, says Moyer, “can also reinforce avoidance and anxiety.” 

            • The word triggered can be used sarcastically or dismissively – “Oh, you’re just triggered” – to minimize a person’s legitimate negative reaction to a comment or action. “It’s basically a way of saying your response is a ‘you problem’,” says psychologist Rachel Needle, “a sign of weakness or oversensitivity, rather than acknowledging that something genuinely hurtful was said or done.” 

            Given these ways of interpreting the word, what should people do or say when they hear the word triggered? The best thing, says psychologist Lisa Damour, is to say, “Tell me more about that.” This helps people reflect on their experiences and use more-specific words or phrases to describe what they’re feeling. Responding to this prompt, they might say something like, “That really frustrated me,” or “That reminded me of something difficult that happened in the past.” Getting into the details helps people understand their actual feelings and what they need in the moment.

 

“Are You ‘Triggered’ or Just Upset?” by Melinda Wenner Moyer in The New York Times, June 23, 2026

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3. What Do Students Want in History and Civics Classroom Discussions?

            Running a good classroom discussion is “challenging work,” say Andrew Schiera (University of Colorado/Boulder) and Andrew del Calvo (Rutgers University) in this article in Social Education, especially on controversial topics. They share suggestions from a diverse group of high-school students on how social studies teachers can make discussions lively, engaging, and safe:

            • A big question – The focus of discussion needs to be open-ended, students said, not pointed toward a single correct answer or a binary agree/disagree choice. Students liked being asked to formulate an initial opinion and then modify it in light of evidence and contrary opinions. In short, say Schiera and del Calvo, students appreciated “an authentic, shared problem space so that they could inquire deeply, individually, and collectively.” 

            • Facilitation – Students wanted teachers to provoke discussion with questions and follow-up comments that sparked deeper thinking. They also appreciated teachers clarifying when things got confusing and refocusing when students were straying from the topic or “going back and forth on the same stuff.” 

            • Multiple perspectives – Students said they wanted to hear all sides of historical and civics debates, perhaps engaging in small-group discussions to elicit and understand different points of view. But students cautioned against “both-sides-ism” and hoped that clear moral choices could emerge from discussions. 

            • Participation – Students had seen too many discussions involving “mostly just like three people,” and asked teachers to ensure broad and equitable participation, including: having students sit in a circle; establishing and monitoring air-time norms; inviting new voices; cold-calling; using thumb polls; and assigning participation grades. At the same time, students recognized that there were times when an intense dialogue should be allowed to continue, not cutting it off and letting others take the discussion off track. 

            • The teacher’s role – Students suggested that teachers go beyond mere facilitation, encouraging them to chime in as co-inquirers – without dominating the discussion or conveying that their opinion was correct. Students were aware that a teacher being too opinionated or seeming to push a political agenda could spark parental outrage. 

            • Psychological safety – Students mentioned several ways to ensure that discussions felt emotionally comfortable while being intellectually open: setting norms about respectful engagement; thoughtfully introducing difficult topics; reassuring students about fear of saying something “wrong;” allowing students time to think; not trying to orchestrate a single conclusion; not interrupting and shutting students down; and using small-group turn-and-talk when appropriate.

            • Connecting past, present, and lived experience – Students appreciated delving into primary-source material but wanted historical events to be connected to the present day and their own lived experience. “Overall,” say Schiera and del Calvo, “students wanted discussions that connected historical inquiry to contemporary life while providing enough structure to help them navigate those connections in meaningful ways.” 

 

“‘Setting the Conversation on Fire’: What Youth Want from Social Studies Conversations” by Andrew Schiera and Andrew del Calvo in Social Education, September 2026 (Vol. 90, #4, pp. 216-220); the authors are at [email protected] and [email protected].

 

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4. Look-fors in Social Studies Classrooms

            In this article in Social Education, Abby Reisman (University of Pennsylvania), Timothy Patterson (Temple University), and Lightning Peter Jay (University of Colorado/ Boulder) share their Social Studies Discourse Instrument (SSDI). “We present it,” they say, “to support teacher self-reflection and professional development, because a shared language for instruction can help teachers make more-informed classroom decisions.” 

The instrument has three domains: what teachers should do as they lead classroom discussions, what students should be doing during discussions, and what social studies learning indicators to look for. The goal of this non-evaluative tool is to help teachers, students, colleagues, and instructional coaches go beyond comments about “amazing contributions” and “awesome engagement” to a more in-depth understanding of what worked and what could be improved. The details:

• Teacher moves:

-   Asking – posing open-ended questions;

-   Pressing – pushing students to offer elaborated claims with reasons or evidence;

-   Linking – connecting multiple students’ comments.

• Student moves:

-   Explaining – using claims and reasoning to present ideas;

-   Co-constructing – building on each other’s contributions;

-   Critiquing – respectfully challenging classmates’ ideas.

• Indicators of social studies learning:

-   Content – addressing material they have studied; making claims or posing relevant questions; making connections to social studies themes; showing a grasp of complexity and nuance; and avoiding significant errors.

-   Source scrutiny – commenting on sources; questioning their origins, authorship, and trustworthiness; suggesting alternative sources of knowledge; and acknowledging the limits of trying to reconstruct events in the past from the available documentary evidence;

-   Empathic imagination – envisioning the experiences, emotions, and agency of historical actors, and seeing similarities and differences with their own experiences and those of others;

-   Informed ethical action – making frequent comments that connect their ethical evaluations to future actions, and proposing future actions, both hypothetical and within their own control.

 

“What Should We Listen for in Social Studies Discussions?” by Abby Reisman, Timothy Patterson, and Lightning Peter Jay in Social Education, September 2026 (Vol. 90, #4, pp. 221-226); the authors can be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. 

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5. A Theory of Action to Improve the Impact of Instructional Coaching

            In this article in Elementary School Journal, Lynsey Gibbons and James Hiebert (University of Delaware) and Kelly McKie (Nipissing University) say that for the last five decades, U.S. school districts have invested heavily in instructional coaching, spending as much as $9,500 per teacher. “This high level of investment should reap big rewards,” say the authors, “but to this point, it has not.” Clearly, schools can’t afford to continue investing in initiatives that don’t produce results.

            What explains the disappointing outcomes? Instructional coaching has “great potential” but is “complicated work,” say Gibbons, Hiebert, and McKie, and there have been numerous implementation problems. They propose a theory of action – “a blueprint that makes explicit the relationship between intentions and outcomes” – to clarify the purpose of instructional coaching, and ensure that initiatives are “purposefully designed and systematically implemented” so they live up to their potential.

            The ultimate goal of math instructional coaches is to improve students’ mathematical proficiency, say the authors, via the work of classroom teachers. Their theory of action involves clarifying the learning goals, learning opportunities, and learning activities of each layer of the system – students, teachers, and coaches – then showing how coaches improve the learning activities of teachers, and teachers, in turn, contribute to students’ learning opportunities. Here are the details, using the example of elementary math in one school district in which many teachers were implementing a new curriculum for the first time:

            • Student learning opportunities – The district set math proficiency goals including conceptual understanding, critical reasoning, and productive disposition.

            • Student learning activities – The curriculum – Bridges in Mathematics – involved several key elements: students struggling productively with key conceptual ideas to solve challenging problems; students noticing and making critical connections among those ideas; students expressing their thinking about the ideas and engaging with the thinking of others; and students engaging in practice to master the content.

            • Student learning activities – Guided by their teachers, students needed to engage in the Bridges curriculum, including math representations and classroom discussions.

            • Teacher learning goals – Implementing this ambitious curriculum, teachers needed to plan, implement, and reflect on their work to successfully develop students’ mathematical beliefs, skills, and knowledge. This meant being alert to parts of the curriculum that involved key ideas and knowledge, getting students to grapple with them and see connections among them, and getting students engaged with classmates’ thinking. 

            • Teachers’ learning opportunities – To teach Bridges lessons effectively, teachers needed to grapple with math ideas and knowledge themselves – seeing critical connections among the ideas, thinking them through with their colleagues, and practicing in authentic settings, ideally in their classrooms. 

            • Teachers’ learning activities – This is where the coaches played a crucial role, working with teachers in same-grade teams to plan and implement ambitious math lessons that teachers would implement. Lesson study was part of this process, with teachers designing lessons, watching each other teach, and refining the lessons. 

            • Coaches’ learning goals – Of course, coaches needed to know the Bridges curriculum across grades – the beliefs, skills, and knowledge that teachers needed to master, including the central idea that students are sense-makers who can struggle productively with how solve math problems. “Underlying these specific beliefs,” say Gibbons, Hiebert, and McKie, “coaches must also believe that part of their work is to support teachers’ inclination and ability to study and improve their own teaching, and part of it is to support teachers’ inclination to collaborate, problem solve, and co-construct knowledge about teaching students mathematics.” 

            • Coaches’ learning opportunities – Coaches needed to experience the same key concepts as teachers: grappling with key conceptual ideas and knowledge, seeing connections among them, expressing their own thinking about the ideas, and practicing the ideas with their colleagues in authentic settings. 

            • Coaches’ learning activities – District coach leaders played a key role, coaching coaches on how to guide teachers in clarifying learning goals, planning lessons, and reflecting on how they went. 

            Gibbons, Hiebert, and McKie conclude with three guiding principles for implementing their theory of action:

-   Begin with student learning goals – what students need to get better at doing – and build the theory step by step: learning opportunities, learning activities, and what teachers need to do to maximize student learning.

-   Set the stage for implementation – a high-quality curriculum, developing specific competencies in instructional coaches, carving out meeting time for teachers with colleagues and coaches (the authors suggest four all-day professional days during the school year), and engaging in lesson study cycles.

-   Continuously assess and revise the plan as each year progresses. 

 

“Theories of Action Needed to Guide Emerging Models for Professional Learning” by Lynsey Gibbons, James Hiebert, and Kelly McKie in Elementary School Journal, September 2026 (Vol. 127, #1, pp. 43-63); the authors can be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. 

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6. Timothy Shanahan on Close Reading

            In this online article, Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/Chicago) defines close reading as slowing down and making sense of a challenging, high-quality text – figuring it out and solving it like a problem. “The ‘figuring out’ is accomplished entirely by reading and discussing the text itself,” he says. “Teacher-provided information or textbook commentary is minimized. You want as little between the reader and the text as possible.” 

This often involves three readings of the text, each time with a different goal: trying to determine what it says, how it says it, and what it means:

-   First reading – What is the text all about? With a story, what’s the plot? With a science text, what are the key ideas and details?

-   Second reading – How does the text work? How did the author organize it? What literary devices were used? What word choices were made? What’s the quality of evidence? 

-   Third reading – What does the text mean? “How do I evaluate the quality of this work,” asks Shanahan, “aesthetically, substantively? How does this text connect to other texts I have read?” What is the author’s point and what does it say about my life, my world? 

Shanahan then addresses several frequently asked questions about close reading:

            • Should the teacher preview the text with students? Probably not, he says, because we want students to figure out the text – really think about it – as it’s read and re-read. Setting the purpose can be quite general, but don’t provide a lot of information up front, Shanahan advises. Only pre-teach vocabulary and background knowledge if it can’t be figured out or quickly provided during close reading. 

            • Should students annotate? As valuable as this can be, says Shanahan, “it is not a central pillar of close reading, and I think that its use has been overblown in lots of classrooms.” He believes reading closely should not get bogged down with note-taking, which can distract from engaging intellectually with the content and the author’s craft.

            • Should every text be read this way? Certainly not, says Shanahan. With some material, reading it once is fine – and students need to know how to get basic information the first time they read something. With other texts, the teacher might want to get students thinking about what else the author has written, comparing and contrasting. With science texts, two readings might be the right amount: once for the gist, the second to unpack dense technical information and graphics. Three-time close reading is for meaty literary or history texts that merit that level of attention. 

            • Will close reading improve students’ test scores? Shanahan isn’t aware of research that it does, but he believes close readings “may make students more aware of certain aspects of text and reading, and they may provide students with some useful tools for studying certain kinds of texts.” 

Standardized tests generally don’t assess these broader outcomes of literacy instruction. “I want students to see text as a unity,” says Shanahan, “that it carries meaning both in what it says and how it says it. I want them to be able to critically analyze why a text may be appealing or convincing – both so they can appreciate the power of text, but also so they can resist being manipulated. I don’t know whether practicing these activities will have a sufficient impact to guarantee those outcomes, but they are outcomes that I believe we should strive for. Hence, my embrace of close reading.”

 

“Should We Still Teach Close Reading?” by Timothy Shanahan in Shanahan on Reading, August 29, 2026; the author can be reached at [email protected]. 

 

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7. The Risks of Pushing Young Prodigies to Excel in One Area

            In this article in Psychology Today, Alexander Puutio reports on a study from Germany on the future trajectories of children who show early talent in music, chess, science, math, or athletics. Many parents, says Puutio, believe “success belongs to kids who commit young, specialize fast, and hone their chosen craft with relentless zeal.” But the study found this was not true. 

Only about 10 percent of children who were top performers achieve at the elite level as adults, the researchers found. Kids who did excel when they grew up shared three traits: early practice in several areas; less discipline-specific practice as kids; and slower, more-gradual progress in one area. The study suggests that a more-relaxed, broad-gauge approach to talent development is better – for these reasons:

• Children who focus early on one area may miss out on others in which they might be even more proficient. “Many people who specialize early never discover where they are best suited to thrive,” says Puutio.

• Exposure to a variety of tools, problems, and ways of thinking improves the ability to integrate ideas across domains – skills that compound over time.

• An eclectic approach reduces the risk of burnout, injury, motivational collapse, and missed opportunities. “For every Richard Williams (father of Venus and Serena),” says Puutio, “there are many intense parents who turn their child off to the thing they want them to be great at. Multidisciplinary engagement spreads those risks and keeps more paths open longer.” 

            His conclusion: “If we want more exceptional thinkers, creators, and leaders, we may need to stop asking people to decide who they are before they’ve had a chance to find out.” 

 

“Everything You Need to Know About Early Talent” by Alexander Puutio in Psychology Today, September/October 2026 (Vol. 59, #5, p. 6)

 

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8. Sleepless in the Principalship

            In this article in Leadership Lenses, leadership coach Barry Kislowicz says that many school leaders and teachers (including himself when he was in schools) can’t sleep the night before the opening day of school. “There is a certain mix of energy, anxiety, and excitement that keeps you awake regardless of how much you need the rest,” he says.

            Shouldn’t that subside after years of working in schools? Shouldn’t we become more confident handling the beginning of the year? But beginning-of-the-year sleeplessness doesn’t seem to go away. What’s going on? Kislowicz believes he has the answer.

            “The school leaders I work with tell me that they chose this profession because it called them,” he says. “It might have been the desire to care for the youngest and most vulnerable children in our schools, the hope of improving some of the flaws in our educational system, or the goal of connecting teenagers with the beauty of knowledge and critical thinking. Whatever it was, there was a spark there which drew us to this work, and kept us here for years and even decades.” 

            During the school year, that spark can get buried by the daily work of dealing with students and colleagues and families, managing stakeholders, navigating conflicts, and just keeping up with e-mail and texts. “The work gets done,” he says, “often quite successfully, but our connection to what originally called us to this work can fade into the background.” 

            But during the summer, we step back, reflect, and think about the coming year. “We reconnect with our leadership teams, and dream about the coming year. As we do so, the spark often starts to rekindle, yet not fully,” says Kislowicz. “When the students finally return to the building, that something in us is re-awakened… The night before school is the one moment in the year when the power of the work we have chosen comes rushing back to us. While the students have not yet walked through the doors, we can sense their return. And with them, the power of what originally called us to this work comes back as well.”

            

“The Night Before School” by Barry Kislowicz in Leadership Lenses, August 31, 2026; Kislowicz can be reached at [email protected].

 

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9. Are You a Helicopter Parent? A Self-Assessment

            This article in Psychology Today has part of a 20-question parent quiz on how involved they are in their child’s academic and social life (for the full quiz, click the link below). Each item is scored 1-2-3-4-5 from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. Here are six questions:

-   I know all of my child’s homework assignments and deadlines.

-   It’s important for me to be able to know where my child is at all times.

-   My child and I have an equal responsibility to make them the strongest possible college applicant.

-   I keep track of all of my child’s grades online and have no plans to stop.

-   My child’s success or failure says a lot about me and my performance as a parent.

-   When my child isn’t getting along with a friend or classmate, I will call the other child’s parent to try to fix it.

Respondents score themselves on a scale: Relaxed Parent, Involved Parent, Hovering Parent, Helicopter Parent. 

 

“Are You a Helicopter Parent?” in Psychology Today, September/October 2026 (Vol. 59, #5, p. 7)

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10. Contemporary Words from The Odyssey

            In this article in Language Magazine, Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, says that The Odyssey, written nearly three thousand years ago, is the source of some words that are still part of the English language, including:

-   Mentor – from a character in The Odyssey who exemplifies the role of giving help and advice to a less-experienced and often younger person;

-   Siren song – now defined as “an alluring utterance or appeal, especially one that is seductive or deceptive,” from the temptresses who tried to lure Odysseus’s ship onto the rocks;

-   Cyclops – the one-eyed monster who menaced Odysseus and his men, now used to describe one-eyed crustaceans, one-lens cameras, single-source lights, and a character in the Marvel X-Men franchise;

-   Tantalize – its contemporary meaning is teasing or tormenting someone with a desirable object kept just out of reach – from Tantalus, a character in The Odyssey who is punished for a misdeed by being condemned to stand chin-deep in a pool of water with fruit trees above; when he tries to drink water, it recedes out of reach, and when he reaches up to pluck a fruit, the branches rise too high to grasp.

 

“The Odyssey of Words: Part 1” by Peter Sokolowski in Language Magazine, August 2026 (Vol. 26, #12, p. 8)

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