In This Issue:

  1. Curriculum: what’s intended, what’s taught, and what’s learned

  2. Making effective use of in-class checks for understanding

  3. “Storyboarding” a historical event

  4. Making science a curiosity-provoking adventure

  5. Cellphones and students’ attention span

  6. How to be receptive to the other person during a disagreement

  7. Four ways to make professional reading a habit

  8. What happens when parents read daily to their kindergarten children

  9. Thomas Guskey on two false premises on grading

10. Audio interviews with U.S. workers

11. Recommended nonfiction books for children

 

Quotes of the Week

“It’s not that students can’t pay attention, but rather that they more readily choose not to.” 

            Daniel Willingham (see item #5)

 

“Since we don’t have our Chromebooks in front of our face, most people now interact with their, like, peers and stuff.”

            A 13-year-old student in a Kansas middle school, quoted in “Beyond Phones, Schools 

Rethink Tech in Class” by Natasha Singer in The New York Times, April 2, 2026

 

“We should be designing experiences where students are encouraged to grapple with surprise, celebrate when their predictions don’t match reality, and see revision as a natural part of learning.”

            Thomas McKenna (see item #4)

 

“The role of the teacher must evolve from ‘sage on the stage,’ delivering knowledge from one head to the next, to something more like a coach or learning architect – someone whose focus is on building relationships, modeling critical thinking, facilitating collaboration and debate, and helping students develop the human skills (motivation, teamwork, conflict resolution) that AI cannot replace and that students will need more than ever in an AI-powered world.” 

            Stefan Bauschard in “AI Ends Knowledge Scarcity – Now the Classroom’s Greatest 

Asset Is Human Interaction” in AI x Higher Ed, March 29, 2026

 

“Here is the uncomfortable truth we rarely say out loud: a shocking amount of school leadership is not about students. It is about adults. Conflict. Morale. Ego. Performance concerns. Professional jealousy. Resistance to change. Documentation. Confidentiality. Rumors. Burnout. And at some point in their career, most principals will face something more serious: a staff member who crosses a boundary, violates a policy, or makes a decision that lands in the news… Students are the moral center of the work, but adults are the operational reality.” 

            Megan Booth in “We’re Not Preparing Principals for the Real Job of School 

Leadership” in Education Week, March 27, 2026

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Curriculum: What’s Intended, What’s Taught, and What’s Learned 

            In this article in Education Gadfly, Robert Pondiscio salutes the current interest in high-quality instructional materials (HQIM), especially the emphasis on building knowledge. He cautions, however, that buying a good curriculum package or textbook is necessary but not sufficient. “You have to look at what it asks students to do all day,” he says. “Are students reading rich, content-heavy texts and grappling with ideas that build over time? Are lessons organized around coherent topics that accumulate knowledge, rather than disconnected skills practice? Do classroom tasks reflect what we know about how learning works – retrieval, attention to meaning, and sustained engagement with content – rather than superficial activities?”

            Even if all those elements are in in the package, says Pondiscio, there’s still the fact that many teachers use curriculum materials selectively, feeling free to customize, adapt, supplement, skip, and replace lessons with low-quality material from Share My Lesson or Teachers Pay Teachers. “We have not yet built a system that reliably delivers any curriculum as intended,” he says. And that is hugely consequential because what students learn is the result of what they are really doing in classrooms.

            Focusing on the quality of published curriculum, says Pondiscio, is “a bit like trying to infer children’s diet and nutrition by walking the aisles of a grocery store. The availability of healthy food is encouraging and tells you something about what is possible. It tells you very little about what children are actually eating.” 

            The result of all the freelancing is variation, he says: “From state to state, within districts, even across the hallway in a single school, you can encounter entirely different instructional experiences. In one, students may be reading a complex text and grappling with ideas. In the other, they may be completing activities only loosely connected to the core content. Both teachers are, technically, using the same curriculum, but in practice they have diverged.” 

            Pondiscio is not saying teachers should “shut up and teach the script.” If adaptations are “grounded in evidence, aligned to the curriculum’s sequence, and responsive to student needs,” that’s part of good teaching. “But the default assumption too often runs in the opposite direction,” he says: “that the curriculum is suspect and that professional judgment necessitates modifying or replacing it. A healthier norm would reverse that presumption – treating the curriculum as sound unless there is a clear, evidence-based reason to depart from it.” 

            Customizing curriculum does have a cost: the time it takes teachers to do it. When he was a teacher in New York City, Pondiscio remembers spending 20 to 30 hours a week “cobbling together lessons from scratch or searching for materials to ‘engage’ students, differentiate instruction, or teach content-neutral ‘skills and strategies.’” In retrospect, he says, “those hours would have been far better spent studying student work, refining my delivery, or communicating with families.” Truly good curriculum materials should liberate teachers from reinventing the wheel, “allowing them to focus on the parts of the job that matter most and that, unlike curriculum creation, only they can do.” 

            There is another force at work: teachers who believe high-quality, on-grade-level curriculum materials are too difficult for their students and water them down or don’t use them. “That’s not irrational or merely low expectations,” says Pondiscio. “Teachers are responding to classrooms where many students are below grade level and where the supports to bridge the gap are weak or incoherent… The onus is on publishers to include pre-unit diagnostic quizzes throughout the curriculum and on schools to use those results to design effective academic interventions.” 

            In sum, says Pondiscio. we are winning the intellectual debate about curriculum – there’s a growing consensus on what constitutes high-quality material. But the operational part is still a work in progress: bringing into synch “what is intended, what is designed, what is taught, and what students actually experience.” A curriculum that really works, he concludes, is when “materials are used with coherence and purpose, leadership is aligned, expectations are shared, professional development reinforces the curriculum rather than introducing competing priorities or initiatives, and teachers treat curriculum as a foundation rather than a suggestion.” 

 

“The Limits of High-Quality Curriculum Evaluation” by Robert Pondiscio in Education Gadfly, April 2, 2026; Pondiscio can be reached at [email protected]. 

 

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2. Making Effective Use of In-Class Checks for Understanding

            In this article in Kappan, Starr Sackstein (Mastery Portfolio) advises a middle-school teacher on the effective use of checks for understanding – for example, exit tickets, quick quizzes, hinge questions, whiteboards, thumbs, polls. The challenge is that it’s sometimes hard to discern students’ level of understanding because: 

-   They misunderstand directions.

-   They know it but can’t yet explain it.

-   They guess correctly without understanding.

-   They rush.

-   They copy.

So how can checks for understanding be more useful? Sackstein has seven suggestions:

            • Make the question precise. Ask yourself, What decision am I going to make based on student responses? Some pointers:

-   Ask about one specific skill, not the whole lesson.

-   Have the question match the exact thinking you’re looking for (not just vocabulary recognition).

-   Ask a question to which responses can be assessed in under two minutes. 

• Quickly sort students’ responses into three buckets. This allows you to look for trends and instructional next steps:

-   Ready to move on – Students have mastered the target skill with minimal errors.

-   Almost there – Just minor fixes needed: students have the right idea but there are small misconceptions, a missing step, or imprecise reasoning.

-   Not yet – There’s a major gap, an incorrect concept, a lack of strategy, confusion about the prompt, or no attempt. 

“This approach keeps you from overreacting to simple errors,” says Sackstein. It also helps you avoid reteaching the whole lesson when only a third of students need a tune-up.”

            • Look for error patterns. “The fastest way to become confident in interpreting data,” she says, “is to stop treating each wrong answer as a separate issue and start treating them as symptoms.” Ask yourself:

-   Are students making the same mistake in the same place?

-   Are mistakes scattered and random?

-   Are high-performing students missing it too?

If 60-70 percent of students are making similar errors, it’s time to re-teach. If 20-30 percent are confused, group students and zero in on those who are confused. If everyone got it wrong, reframe the question and teach it differently. 

            • Build a menu of moves. “You don’t need a new intervention for each result,” says Sackstein. “You need six to 10 go-to responses you can apply repeatedly and that students can learn as readily.” For example:

-   Error analysis framed by a sentence starter: I think the mistake happened when…

-   The teacher models three ways to solve the problem and students compare.

-   A practice set targeted to the misconception.

-   A mini reassessment exit slip after feedback.

• Pre-plan your pivot points. “It’s always good to have a few ready plans and pivots to ensure you are making the most of class time,” she says. “If the data say X, I’ll do Y.” For example:

-   If most students are almost there, I’ll do a 4-minute reteach with a new example and two practice problems.

-   If more than 30 percent are confused, I’ll pull a small group tomorrow during warm-up.

-   If most are ready to move on, I’ll skip the extra practice and move to application. 

If a plan is just not working, Sackstein says abandon it and rethink the lesson. 

            • Confirm you’re interpreting the data correctly. Checks for understanding are a signal, not the final verdict on student mastery. You might ask two students to explain their reasoning out loud, allowing you to see if it’s a misconception or a misreading of directions. You could follow up with a hinge question the next day

            • Make feedback the bridge between data and instruction. “Data only change learning when students do something with it,” says Sackstein. “This is why it’s essential to not just give feedback but to allow students time to do something with it.” Some possibilities:

-   Name the pattern: A lot of us mixed up ___ and ___. That’s normal.

-   Show an example of a correct and a common incorrect answer.

-   Have students revise: fix one problem, rewrite the sentence, add one justification.

-   Collect a second, smaller check for understanding.

“Even five minutes of structured revision can turn checks for understanding into actual growth,” she says, “without needing an entire reteach day.”

 

“Checking for Understanding: What to Do with Data” by Starr Sackstein in Kappan, Spring 2026 (Vol. 107, #5-6, pp. 69-71); Sackstein can be reached at [email protected].

 

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3. “Storyboarding” a Historical Event

            In this 4QM Teaching article, high-school teacher/authors Gary Shiffman and Jonathan Bassett suggest a way to tackle the first of four questions they suggest that history teachers ask:

-   What happened?

-   Why then and there?

-   What were they thinking?

-   What do we think?

The first question requires that students study the historical event in question (for example, the Salem witch trials) and be able to give an accurate and coherent narrative of key events, dates, and personalities.

            This should be pretty straightforward, thought Shiffman and Bassett at first, but they found that most students, when asked to tell the story of what happened, just listed events. “No actors, no intentions, no causal connections,” they say. “More-knowledgeable students provided longer lists. All were equally boring.” There had to be a way to get students to dig deeper, understand better, and get more intrigued with the content.

            Over time, Shiffman and Bassett hit upon a strategy: storyboarding. Students study the content and then each student folds a piece of paper to create four quadrants. Working in small groups, students think through how the story unfolds, chunk it into four parts, and decide on a brief descriptive title and a date range for each box. Then each student illustrates the main action of the box on their own storyboard (here’s an example from a U.S. history course).

            Shiffman and Bassett found that when students use this format to create a narrative of a historical topic, a lot is accomplished:

-   Students practice and consolidate what they just read about (or watched a video on).

-   Students decide where to begin and end their version of the story.

-   They also have to decide how to divide events into four coherent parts.

-   That involves determining a sequence, what’s most important, and what can be left out.

-   Students need to come up with a title and dates for each quadrant.

-   At this stage, a formative assessment can happen, with students making needed tweaks.

-   Each student then has to capture the narrative of each segment in an illustration. 

-   All this gives students practice in narration, one of the key skills of social studies. 

“As students work in their groups,” say Shiffman and Bassett, “they typically check their notes and correct one another. Sometimes they call the teacher over to settle a dispute. Often they’ll settle it themselves.” Students then present their storyboards via a document camera, hear reactions from their classmates, and all students get plenty of review of key facts, dates, and historical actors. 

“Students can get good at narration pretty quickly,” conclude the authors. “When they do, they feel great. And since they’re now telling stories rather than reciting arid lists, listening and responding become relatively effortless… Besides improving memory, stimulating thinking, and creating opportunities for feedback, metacognition, and skillful practice… it’s terrifically good fun.” 

[Storyboarding can also be used with groups of three students standing up at erasable whiteboards sharing a marker, a la Building Thinking Classrooms.  K.M.]

 

“How to Tell a Story Back” by Gary Shiffman and Jonathan Bassett in 4QM Teaching, April 3, 2026; the authors can be reached at [email protected]. Here’s a brief video in which they describe their approach. 

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4. Making Science a Curiosity-Provoking Adventure

(Originally titled “Sensemaking in Science”)

            In this article in Educational Leadership, Thomas McKenna (Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education) says that somewhere between young children’s boundless curiosity (kids’ questions about a large mushroom they discovered on the playground) and high-school science labs, kids stop asking Why? and start asking, Will this be on the test? How can science teachers keep students’ curiosity alive? 

McKenna believes this can happen by using fewer worksheets and curated materials and instead orchestrating authentic, hands-on sensemaking experiences. “The real world doesn’t come with step-by-step instructions,” he says. “We should be designing experiences where students are encouraged to grapple with surprise, celebrate when their predictions don’t match reality, and see revision as a natural part of learning.” He has ten suggestions for orchestrating such experiences:

• Start units with something puzzling – for example, looking at a beetle that plays dead when it’s threatened. “Give them space to wonder before you start teaching,” says McKenna. 

• Ask students, What does this remind you of? “This elevates questions,” he says, “and validates diverse backgrounds as sources of expertise.” 

• Use guided questions instead of direct answers. “Resist the urge to immediately explain.” Ask, What makes you think that?

• Create investigation boards where students collect evidence and post observations and questions over time, making their thinking visible. 

• Celebrate unexpected results. Embrace mistakes and false starts, asking questions like, How might we revise our thinking?

• Design labs that mirror authentic scientific practice. “Present problems to solve rather than steps to follow,” says McKenna. 

• Carve out time for students to share and critique ideas, with norms for respectfully challenging one another’s reasoning and building on classmates’ thinking.

• Connect to real-world scientists and applications, inviting in community members who use science in their work.

• Honor students as experts, with different students contributing different strengths so they see that expertise comes in many forms. 

• Make revision a normal part of learning, showing how scientists revise their thinking when they find new evidence. 

 

“Sensemaking in Science” by Thomas McKenna in Educational Leadership, April 2026 (Vol. 83, #7, pp. 48-53); McKenna can be reached at [email protected]. 

 

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5. Cellphones and Students’ Attention Span

            In this article in American Educator, Daniel Willingham (University of Virgina) asks whether the time young people are spending on digital devices is making them more distractable. His surprising conclusion: spending hours a day on phones and tablets hasn’t eroded students’ attention span; they still have the ability to pay attention when they want to. What’s changed is their willingness to focus on things they consider less interesting than YouTube videos and high-energy exchanges on TikTok and other social media channels. 

“It’s not that students can’t pay attention, but rather that they more readily choose not to,” says Willingham. “Digital devices prompt students to more readily conclude they are bored because all nondigital activities are unconsciously compared to entertainment on their phone, and the phone always seems more attractive.” 

            Another way of stating the problem: with the advent of seductively engaging digital entertainment and content, there’s been a decline in the willingness to defer gratification for rewards that are less immediate. With schoolwork, says Willingham, rewards include “the satisfaction of understanding the content, the pride of receiving a good grade, or avoiding the disapproval of teachers or family members” – not to mention longer-term outcomes like being prepared for college and careers. The trade-off is between how much students value the rewards and how long they’re willing to wait for them. 

            If it’s true that kids’ distractibility is a learned behavior, can it be unlearned? With a bell-to-bell cellphone ban during the school day, will the unavailability of digital stimuli for the whole school day reset students’ threshold for what is “boring”? Can teachers then recapture kids’ attention with high-quality curriculum, discussions, and tasks?

 

“Do Today’s Kids Have Reduced Attention Spans?” by Daniel Willingham in American Educator, Spring 2026 (Vol. 50, #1, pp. 12-16); Willingham is at [email protected]. 

 

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6. How to Be Receptive to the Other Person During a Disagreement

            In this Harvard Gazette article, Julia Minson (Harvard Kennedy School) shares an acronym that she and her students came up with for being receptive during a contentious conversation - H E A R:

            • Hedge your claims. No matter how right you think you are, recognize that there are exceptions to almost every rule and most issues are complex and multifaceted. “The goal,” says Minson, “is to show that you are engaged with the other person’s point of view, not that you have so completely rejected it as to have zero doubt about your own correctness.” Use words like sometimes, perhaps, possibly, most, and some. 

            • Emphasize agreement. In almost any argument, “Two people can find something to agree on,” says Minson. Use phrases like We both agree that…, I also want to… I share some of your concerns… to help highlight common ground and navigate disagreement together.

            • Acknowledge other perspectives. “In most disagreements,” she says, “people make their point quickly and repeatedly. They will often interrupt their counterpart to contradict their ideas, as if the opposing argument is an annoying stinging insect to be swatted out of the air as quickly as possible.” It’s important to slow down, take the time to restate the other person’s point of view, and use phrases like I understand that you really care about… Avoid the stock phrase, I hear you, but…

            • Reframe to the positive. This does double duty, says Minson, by reminding you to avoid negative words like can’t, don’t, won’t, and no and negative emotions like hate and terrible and adding positive words like great, like, andwin.

            Minson adds that it’s also helpful to avoid “reasoning” words like because, therefore, and explain, and words like just, simply, merely, and only.

            Keeping these in mind, Minson concludes, “enabled our research participants to express their point of view while being seen as more reasonable, thoughtful, and trustworthy, even when they were discussing some of the most inflammatory topics we could think of. It also led their counterparts to be willing to have additional conversations on these and other topics, opening the possibility of ongoing dialogue and problem-solving.

 

“Ways to Keep Talking – and Maybe Find a Way Forward – Amid Riven Times” by Julia Minson in The Harvard Gazette, March 24, 2026; Minson is at [email protected]. Her new book is How to Disagree Better(Penguin Random House, 2026).

 

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7. Four Ways to Make Professional Reading a Habit

(Originally titled “Yes, Principals Can Make Time to Read”)

In this ASCD online article, Jenn David-Lang (The Main Idea) suggests four ways school leaders can fit professional reading into their extremely busy weeks:

            • Stack the habit. “If you want a new habit to stick, it helps to do it right after another habit,” says David-Lang. For example, after dropping your daughter at soccer practice on Wednesday, do some professional reading in the car before driving home.

            • Make it obvious and easy. Print articles that look promising, put them in a brightly colored folder, carry it around, and have it handy if a meeting is delayed or you have some unproductive wait time during the day. 

            • Schedule it. For example, set aside 15 minutes at a predictably quiet part of the week (Friday morning 9:45-10:00?), go to a place where you’re less likely to be interrupted, and read. “Will this time occasionally get interrupted?” asks David-Lang. “Of course. But if it’s on your schedule for 36 weeks of the school year, you’ll end up reading a lot more than if you had never scheduled any reading time in the first place.” 

            • Join an accountability group. You’re more likely to read if you’re a member of a group that meets at a specific time and agrees on a topic and perhaps a specific article or book chapter. Plus, you’ll get more out of the reading discussing it with like-minded colleagues. 

            David-Lang suggests picking an approach works for you: “One strategy. One new habit. Then watch your professional reading grow.” 

 

“Yes, Principals Can Make Time to Read” by Jenn David-Lang in ASCD, April 2, 2026; David-Lang can be reached at [email protected].

 

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8. What Happens When Parents Read Daily to Their Kindergarten Children

            In this article in Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, Brooks Bowden and Johanna Bernard (University of Pennsylvania) and Rebecca Davis (MDRC) report on their study of a kindergarten home reading program in a large urban school district. Teachers sent books home each weekday night and parents signed a contract agreeing to read with their children. The nature of the experiment covered three important factors:

-   Sending books home leveled the playing field, with all children supplied with books.

-   All parents were told about the importance of reading with their children every day.

-   The books were aligned with content students were covering during the school day. 

What did the study find? Compared to a control group, more children read with their parents for more minutes each week, and by the end of the year, students’ literacy skills had improved significantly. The key factors were the amount of adult-child reading, the quality of the books read, and the alignment with classroom instruction.

 

“Leveraging Home Reading to Strengthen Literacy Development: Applying Principal Stratification to Explore Efficacy Trial Effects” by Brooks Bowden, Johanna Bernard, and Rebecca Davis in Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, January-March 2026 (Vol. 19, #1, pp. 74-102); Bowden can be reached at [email protected]. 

 

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9. Thomas Guskey on Two False Premises About Grading

            In this Education Week article, Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) rebuts two common but incorrect ways of thinking about grading:

            • Grades are given to students. No, he says, grades are given for performance, “and because performance is always temporary, grades should also be temporary. With additional time, feedback, and practice, performance tends to improve.” 

            • Grades reflect who students are as learners and how well they can learn. I’m a B student. Incorrect, says Guskey: “Grades reflect where you are in your learning journey, and where is always temporary.” They answer the important question: How am I doing?

 

“Learning Is Dynamic. Grading Should Be, Too” by Thomas Guskey in Education Week, April 1, 2026; Guskey can be reached at [email protected].

 

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10. Audio Interviews with U.S. Workers

            In this article in Social Education, Andrew Decker provides links to a series of Library of Congress audio interviews with Americans in a wide variety of jobs, among them:

-   Luann Miller, grocery story cashier in Seattle, Washington

-   Barbara Miller Byrd, circus owner, Hugo, Oklahoma

-   Roberta Washington, architect, New York City

-   Henrietta Ivey, home health care provider, Detroit, Michigan

-   Dolores Fortuna, professional potter, Galena, Illinois

-   Thomas Sink, circus clown, Mead, Oklahoma

These interviews, 6-9 minutes long, are excerpts from longer talks about why each person got into this job and what it was like on a day-to-day basis.

 

“Using the America Works Podcast and Occupational Folklife Project to Personalize Economics in the Classroom” by Andrea Decker in Social Education, March/April 2026 (Vol. 90, #2, pp. 67-71)

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11. Recommended Nonfiction Books for Children

            In this Language Arts feature, Julia López-Robertson and six committee members announce the Orbis Pictus Award book for 2025, followed by recommended and honor titles:

-   Stealing Little Moon: The Legacy of the American Indian Boarding Schools by Dan SaSuWeh Jones

-   Yasmeen Lari, Green Architect: The True Story of Pakistan’s First Woman Architect by Marzieh Abbas, illustrated by Hoda Hadad

-   Urban Coyotes by Mary Kay Carson, photographs by Tom Uhlman

-   A Plate of Hope: The Inspiring Story of Chef José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen by Erin Frankel, illustrated by Paola Escobar

-   Wat Takes His Shot: The Life and Legacy of Basketball Hero Wataru Misaka by Cheryl Kim, illustrated by Nat Iwata

-   Daughter of the Light-Footed People: The Story of Indigenous Marathon Champion Lorena Ramirez by Belen Medina, illustrated by Natalia Rojas Castro

-   Listening to Trees: George Nakashima, Woodworker by Holly Thompson, illustrated by Toshiki Nakamura

-   Sleepy: Surprising Ways Animals Snooze by Jennifer Ward, illustrated by Robin Page

-   We Sing from the Heart: How the Slants Took Their Fight for Free Speech to the Supreme Court by Mia Wenjen, illustrated by Victor Bizar Gómez

-   Space: The Final Pooping Frontier by Annabeth Bondor-Stone and Connor White, illustrated by Lars Kenseth

-   Life After Whale: The Amazing Ecosystem of a Whale Fall by Lynn Brunelle, illustrated by Jason Chin

-   Race to the Truth: Borderlands and the Mexican American Story by David Dorado Romo

-   Ode to Grapefruit: How James Earl Jones Found His Voice by Kari Lavell, illustrated by Bryan Collier

-   Behold the Hummingbird by Suzanne Slade, illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez

 

“Orbis Pictus Award 2025” by Julia López-Robertson, Caryl Crowell, Jason Griffith, Janelle Mathis, Yoo Kyung Sung, Mellissa Summer Wells, and Becki Maldonado in Language Arts, November 2025 (Vol. 103, #2, pp. 126-131)

 

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