In This Issue:

1. Resilience

2. How to help effective teachers stay in love with the classroom

3. Executive function and academic achievement

4. The discipline of cutting the length of a piece of writing

5. Fine-tuning student perception surveys

6. Getting students talking to each other about math

7. Common Core – stayin’ alive!

8. The new ESEA legislation and reading instruction

9. Short item: A mapping tool

 

Quotes of the Week

“Researchers increasingly recognize that promoting mathematical learning requires teachers to engage students in ‘productive struggle,’ where students expend effort to make sense of mathematics and figure out something that is not immediately apparent.”

            Megan Franke et al. (see item #6)

 

“You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to ‘find the main idea,’ ‘make inferences,’ and ‘compare and contrast.’ You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.”

            Robert Pondiscio (see item #8)

 

“Annual reading tests have practically required schools and teachers to forsake the patient, long-term investment in knowledge and vocabulary that builds strong readers, critical thinkers, and problem solvers.”

            Robert Pondiscio (ibid.)

 

“Successful teachers can sometimes get bored with being successful. Stagnation leads to burnout. Burnout leads to teachers leaving.”

            Scott Sterling (see item #2)

 

“Human beings are more resilient than we’d earlier thought. Many people bounce back from hard knocks and experience surges of post-traumatic growth.”

            David Brooks (see item #1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Resilience

            “Human beings are more resilient than we’d earlier thought,” says David Brooks in this New York Times column. “Many people bounce back from hard knocks and experience surges of post-traumatic growth.” Only about 13 percent of 9/11 first responders experienced post-traumatic stress in the six months that followed, and society-wide, at least three-quarters of people who experience a life-threatening or violent event emerge without a stress disorder. And even those who experience PTSD are likely to recover and rebuild their lives. “These are the people you sometimes meet who have experienced the worst in life but still radiate love and joy,” says Brooks, and lists what researchers believe are the key factors:

            • Unconditional love – “The people who survive and rebound from trauma frequently had an early caregiver who pumped unshakable love into them,” he says, “and that built a rock of inner security they could stand on for the rest of their lives.”

            • Positive beliefs about themselves – “These people are often deluded in good ways about their own abilities, but completely realistic about their situations,” says Brooks. They have “an optimist’s faith in their own abilities to control the future. But they have no illusions about the world around them. They accept what they have lost quickly. They see problems clearly. They work hard. Work is the reliable cure for sorrow.”

            • Storytelling – Traumatic events disrupt a person’s self-narrative, and some people wallow in dark ruminations about the past. But survivors are able to write a new story “that imagines a life better than before,” he says. “Book 1 is life before the event. Book 2 is the event that shattered the old story. But Book 3 is reintegration, a reframing new story that incorporates what happened and then points to a more virtuous and meaningful life than the one before… The stories super survivors tell have two big themes: optimism and altruism.”

 

“The Tales of the Super Survivors” by David Brooks in The New York Times, November 24, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/opinion/tales-of-the-super-survivors.html?_r=0

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2. How to Help Effective Teachers Stay in Love with the Classroom

            In this Education Week article, Scott Sterling says that after five years teaching middle school in a high-poverty district in Florida, he felt burned out and left the classroom. He misses the relationships with students and the feeling of making a difference in their lives, and offers five suggestions for what school leaders can do if they want to keep their best teachers from suffering a similar fate:

            • Orchestrate staff bonding and collaboration. Teacher collegiality shouldn’t be based on random friendships and cliques, says Sterling. Grade-level, subject-area, and cross-curricular meetings need to be built into the schedule, and agendas should focus on planning units and lessons and examining student learning results, not administrative matters (which should be handled in e-mails and memos).

            • Provide high-quality professional development. “Rah-rah speeches and deep dives into neurological research might be entertaining or even engaging,” says Sterling, “but they rarely translate into a difference in the classroom.” Better to ask teachers what will be helpful and organize truly relevant PD, some of it led by colleagues.

            • Give staff members a voice in schoolwide affairs. “Set aside some time, either during a faculty meeting or at a separate gathering, to have a constructive conversation about how the school is working for everyone,” he suggests. To prevent the conversation from being hijacked by a minority of negative staff members, conduct a survey beforehand that gives the whole faculty a chance to choose from a range of possible issues.

            • Challenge teachers within their success zone. “Successful teachers can sometimes get bored with being successful,” says Sterling. “Stagnation leads to burnout. Burnout leads to teachers leaving.” But it’s not always a good idea to assign these teachers to very challenging students or give them a radically different schedule, he says. Better to encourage pre-burnout teachers to try a new curriculum or a classroom practice at the edge of their comfort zone.

            • Find opportunities for district-wide impact. Some successful teachers want to move on to district-level or school-leadership positions, but many want to stay in the classroom. Smart district leaders find ways for these teachers to have broader impact and get the recognition they deserve – perhaps leading district webinars, temporary coaching assignments, or short-term interventions helping teachers at another school. “Coaching from district personnel is one thing,” says Sterling. “Coaching from a mentor-teacher who is still in the classroom every day is quite another.”

 

“Extinguishing a Burnout: Actionable Ideas to Keep Teachers Engaged in Their Careers” by Scott Sterling in Education Week, December 2, 2015 (Vol. 35, #13, p. 28), www.edweek.org

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3. Executive Function and Academic Achievement

            In this article in the Review of Educational Research, Robin Jacob (University of Michigan) and Julia Parkinson (American Institutes for Research) report on their meta-analysis of the link between executive function and student achievement. Executive function involves working memory, attention control, attention shifting, and response inhibition. Specifically, it is a person’s ability to:

-   Prioritize and sequence behavior – for example, putting on pants before putting on shoes;

-   Inhibit dominant or familiar responses – for example, raising a hand rather than just blurting out an answer in class;

-   Maintain task-relevant information in mind – for example, remembering the teacher’s request to put on coats before going outside;

-   Resist distractions – for example, listening to the teacher rather than watching children outside on the playground;

-   Switch between tasks – for example, shifting between collecting information for a research report and organizing the information into an outline;

-   Use information to make decisions – for example, which history class to take, of the four being offered;

-   Create abstract rules and handle novel situations – this is a skill used in many math problems.

The link between executive function and school achievement seems self-evident, say Jacob and Parkinson: “As a result, scholars and practitioners have expressed considerable enthusiasm regarding school-based interventions that target executive function, hypothesizing that an explicit focus on developing executive functioning skills in school could yield substantial gains in student achievement.”

            But is there a causal link between the two? That is, if we are able to improve students’ executive function skills, will their academic achievement go up? “Executive function could simply be a proxy for other background characteristics of the child,” say Jacob and Parkinson, “such as socioeconomic status or a parent’s level of education, each of which is highly correlated with both achievement and executive function.”

            The authors’ extensive meta-analysis of research on this subject came to three conclusions:

            • There is a moderately strong correlation between executive function and academic achievement, both at one point in time and as a predictor of future performance. The correlation is present for both reading and math achievement.

            • This is true for all K-12 age groups, different subcomponents of executive function, and different ways of measuring it.

            • There is limited evidence of a causal link between executive function and academic achievement. This is true of several programs designed to develop executive function, including Tools of the Mind, Head Start REDI, the Chicago School Readiness Program, Red Light, Purple Light, and computerized attention training. “The few random assignment studies that rigorously evaluate interventions designed to impact executive function,” say Jacob and Parkinson, “provide some evidence that executive function can be influenced by interventions (most of the studies we reviewed showed some positive impacts on measures of executive function) but provide no compelling evidence that impacts on executive function lead to increases in academic achievement. Although several interventions found positive impact on achievement, these studies all involve interventions designed to influence executive function and achievement simultaneously, and as a result there is no way to determine if changes in executive function led to observed increases in achievement.”

More research is needed to develop and fine-tune school programs that will drive achievement and can be taken to scale, the authors conclude.

“The Potential for School-Based Interventions That Target Executive Function to Improve Academic Achievement: A Review” by Robin Jacob and Julia Parkinson in Review of Educational Research, December 2015 (Vol. 85, #4, p. 512-552), http://bit.ly/1TwEHzV; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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4. The Discipline of Cutting the Length of a Piece of Writing

            In this New Yorker article, John McPhee tells what he’s learned over the years from editors who’ve asked him to cut down the length of his drafts. The most brutal process was when he was a writer at Time Magazine. After working on an article for four days and having it approved by the editors, writers were asked by the Makeup department to “green” a specific number of lines from the galleys (mark them with a green pencil) so the article would fit into the limited space in that week’s issue – “Green 5” or “Green 8” or “Green 15,” came the last-minute demands from Makeup. “Groan as much as you liked,” says McPhee, “you had to green nearly all your pieces, and greening was a craft in itself – studying your completed and approved product, your ‘finished’ piece, to see what could be left out.”

            Calvin Trillin was a colleague of McPhee’s at Time and remembers the process fondly. It was “a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle,” he says. “I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story – a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact – was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten percent of it.”

McPhee found the process so helpful that he’s made it a regular part of the college writing classes he teaches. Students are given nine or ten prose passages and asked to “green” a specific number of lines from each. Here are some of the passages he’s used:

-   32 lines from Joseph Conrad – “going up that river… like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world…” Green 3

-   20 lines from Thomas McGuane’s ode to the tarpon as grand piano – Green 3

-   9 lines of Irving Stone’s passionate declaration of his love of stone – Green 1

-   25 lines of Philip Roth’s character Lonoff describing the writing process – Green 3

-   Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (all 25 lines) – Green 3

-   A choice of students’ own pieces – Green ten percent.

“The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed,” says McPhee. “Easier with some writers than with others. It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train – or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics or plant pathology, not to mention size. Do not do violence to the author’s tone, manner, nature, style, thumbprint.”

            McPhee’s college writing course is titled Creative Nonfiction, and here’s his description of what’s involved in this genre, where parsimony of words is so important: “The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your prose, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the piece (does it get up and walk around on its own?), the extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material…”

 

“Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out” by John McPhee in The New Yorker, September 14, 2015 (p. 42-49), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/omission

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5. Fine-Tuning Student Perception Surveys

            In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Dan Berrett reports on the pros and cons of college students evaluating their instructors. Having students fill out questionnaires at the end of a course is not an effective way “to encourage, guide, or document teaching that leads to improved student learning outcomes,” says Stanford professor Carl Wieman (a Nobel laureate) in a recent issue of Change Magazine. Why? Four concerns have surfaced:

-   Poorly designed questions – For example, many surveys ask students about things they’re not in a position to know (Is your instructor knowledgeable about course content?).

-   Process versus outcomes – Surveys measure student satisfaction versus whether they actually learned; the relationship between the two may be tenuous at best.

-   Unfairness – Students sometimes don’t remember key aspects of a course and rate instructors inaccurately.

-   Misuse of survey results – Instructors and administrators take numerical averages as numerical gospel, obsessing over small differences in ratings, for example, 4.3 versus 4.4.

[See Marshall Memo 589 for an article on problems with high-stakes use of student surveys.]

Ken Ryalls of the nonprofit IDEA Center in Missouri believes surveys can be effective tools for improving teaching and learning if the quality of questions is improved and the surveys are part of a broader strategy. “We’re the first ones to say that student ratings are overemphasized,” he says, and advocates looking at survey results in conjunction with peer observations and instructors’ self-reflection. Carl Wieman believes the best way to measure classroom effectiveness is having instructors submit  an inventory of the research-based teaching practices they used.

Despite his concerns, Ryalls still believes surveys contain valuable information – after all, students spend more time than anyone else with their instructors. “What drives me crazy,” he says, “is this notion that students don’t know what they’re talking about. Student voice matters.” The IDEA Center has developed questions that are being used in hundreds of colleges and universities, and Ryalls believes the results are helping instructors reflect on and continuously improve their practice. One key feature in IDEA student surveys is that instructors can include questions about the extent to which their specific course objectives were achieved. (For more on the Center, see http://ideaedu.org.)

 

 

“Can Student Course Evaluation Be Redeemed?” by Dan Berrett in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2015 (Vol. LXII, #14, p. 9), no free e-link available

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6. Getting Students Talking to Each Other About Math

            In this Elementary School Journal article, Megan Franke, Angela Turrou, Noreen Webb, Jacqueline Wong, Nami Shin, and Cecilia Fernandez (University of California/Los Angeles) and Marsha Ing (University of California/Riverside) examine ways to get students to engage with each others’ mathematical ideas. “Researchers increasingly recognize,” say the authors, “that promoting mathematical learning requires teachers to engage students in ‘productive struggle,’ where students expend effort to make sense of mathematics and figure out something that is not immediately apparent. One way students can productively struggle with the mathematics is through their communication with others – both through explaining one’s own thought processes (e.g., reasoning about mathematical concepts and how to solve problems) and discussing other students’ reasoning process.”

            This sounds good in theory, but implementing it in classrooms is not a simple matter. It’s relatively straightforward to get students talking about math problems, say Franke and her colleagues, but getting classrooms to the level of “productive struggle” is quite challenging. Here is a continuum of students’ degree of engagement with other students’ ideas, from low to high:

-   Saying “I agree” or “I disagree” with an idea that was shared.

-   Pointing to the strategy that most closely resembles their own strategy.

-   Repeating the details of what a student shared.

-   Explaining another student’s strategy after it was written on the board.

-   Adding further detail to another student’s strategy.

-   Providing a correction to an problematic portion of a student’s solution.

-   Proposing an alternative solution and explaining how it differs from the idea already posed.

-   Co-constructing a solution with another student.

The researchers observed a number of teacher “invitations” designed to elicit higher-level mathematical discourse:

-   Asking a student to explain someone else’s solution – “Joey, can you explain what Natalia did?”

-   Discussing differences between solutions – “Let’s look again at what Dylan said. Dylan said it is a whole number. Stella, do you want to respond to that, given what you said to start with?”

-   Making a suggestion to another student about his or her idea – “What is he going to have to do with that set of numbers, with 387? What does he have to do, Grayson?”

-   Connecting students’ ideas to other’ ideas – “Joaquin, can you see what Enrique is doing or what Natalia is doing and see if it looks like yours? Or if it’s different?”

-   Getting a student to create a solution with another student – “Griffin, why don’t you sit down and work on the problem together with Easton?”

-   Using a solution that was shared by another student – “See how Paige counted? Could you take this problem and count like her?”

As they observed classrooms in a California elementary school, Franke and her colleagues noticed three challenges that teachers faced as they tried to orchestrate good mathematical discussions:

-   Students sometimes seemed unable to engage with each others’ ideas.

-   Students sometimes provided little or no detail about others’ thinking;

-   At times, students provided details but didn’t address the mathematical ideas underlying other students’ strategies.

In other words, say the researchers, “just inviting students to engage with others will not guarantee that students will, in fact, engage with each other, nor necessarily engage in ways that are supportive of mathematical learning.”

When discussions fizzled, there were big differences in how teachers reacted. Some provided their own solution. Some moved on to another topic. But some teachers had a broader repertoire of in-the-moment strategies: probes (pressing students to engage further); scaffolding (providing some information or clarification); and positioning (interacting with students in ways that acknowledge the students’ connection with the math idea being discussed – for example, “What Aaron’s saying is that four-fourths is a whole, or one. That’s what he says. What do you say to that?”). These teacher moves, say the authors, “require not only pedagogical skill and knowledge, but also pedagogical content knowledge and mathematical content knowledge, and well as identities as teachers who see each of their students as capable. We need to better understand how teachers draw on their knowledge and identities as they make their in-the-moment decisions.”

“We never saw a teacher use the same series of support moves more than once,” say the researchers, “even in response to the same kinds of challenges. This implies that the teacher support moves were not a set of fully planned actions that could be applied repeatedly in the same way, but rather served as a repertoire of pedagogical moves that teachers drew upon in the moment. Our findings resonate with those of previous researchers and suggest that understanding the teacher moves that support student thinking requires looking beyond the first move a teacher makes and toward how teachers extend their interactions with students to support opportunities for productive struggle.” This involves a sophisticated knowledge that takes into account the student, the math, and the context – something teachers develop with years of experience, interaction with colleagues, and high-quality professional development.

            The researchers close with a description of what happens when classroom mathematics discussions are at their best: “Teachers learn about content, about the development of student thinking, about their students as mathematics learners and people, and about how to support their students. The students, while learning mathematical content, learn how to listen to one another, how to ask a question that moves the mathematics forward, and how to position their ideas in relation to others’ ideas. The interaction among the teacher and students supports students to learn to persevere as they communicate with each other and productively struggle to understand and articulate each others’ ideas.”

 

“Student Engagement with Others’ Mathematical Ideas: The Role of Teacher Invitation and Support Moves” by Megan Franke, Angela Turrou, Noreen Webb, Marsha Ing, Jacqueline Wong, Nami Shin, and Cecilia Fernandez in The Elementary School Journal, September 2015 (Vol. 116, #1, p. 126-148), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1NezQjd

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7. Common Core – Stayin’ Alive!

            In this Education Gadfly article, Michael Petrilli takes note of pushback on CCSS and asks, “Just how fragile is the Common Core effort today? Is a death watch warranted?” To find out, he takes the initiative’s five big goals one by one:

            • Goal #1: Dramatically improving states’ ELA and math standards – Common Core standards are “vast improvements” over what was in place in most states, says Petrilli: they are aligned to rigorous research; explicit about the quality and complexity of reading, writing, and math students should be doing each year; ambitious in aiming for college and career readiness by high-school graduation; and relatively free of jargon. Of the vast majority of states that initially adopted Common Core, only Oklahoma and South Carolina have dropped out. Other states that are engaging in revisions have made only cosmetic changes – in many cases improvements to the original standards.

            • Goal #2: Significantly raising the quality of assessments – The jury is still out on this question, says Petrilli, since PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and other new tests have yet to be fully evaluated. (The Thomas B. Fordham Institute will release an analysis of all the major tests of Common Core standards in January.)

            • Goal #3: Aligning cut scores with college and career readiness so parents and educators know whether students are on track for success down the road – Petrilli believes major progress has been made on this goal, with every state but Ohio reporting proficiency rates much better aligned with NAEP scores – about 35-40 percent of high-school graduates prepared for college in reading and math. One concern, he says, is whether states are passing this information along to parents.

            • Goal #4: Dramatically improving classroom instruction – “This is really what it’s all about, right?” says Petrilli. “And yet this is by far the hardest to measure. We have very little evidence about whether teachers are aligning their instruction to the Common Core standards (what we know isn’t very promising, especially with respect to reading), whether it’s working, or whether students are learning more as a result.” Researchers need to get inside the “black box” of classrooms in the years ahead, he says.

            • Goal #5: Making interstate comparisons of performance more feasible – With the majority of states using their own assessments, and the rest choosing from several others, comparing student achievement will be difficult, says Petrilli. But he believes this is the least important of the goals since “we still have NAEP to make comparisons between states, and PISA and TIMSS to benchmark U.S. performance against the world.”

            “So there you have it,” Petrilli concludes. “The standards are still very much alive; cut scores are dramatically higher than ever; school-level comparability is largely a lost cause; and the quality of what matters the most – the tests and classroom instruction – remains mostly unknown at present. A mixed picture for sure, but hardly a description of a patient ready for life support.”

 

“A Common Core Check-Up: Not Dead Yet” by Michael Petrilli in The Education Gadfly, December 2, 2015 (Vol. 15, #47),

http://edexcellence.net/articles/a-common-core-check-up-not-dead-yet

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8. The New ESEA Legislation and Reading Instruction

            In this Education Gadfly article, Robert Pondiscio continues his campaign for a different emphasis in the reading curriculum, and sees hope in the revised ESEA bill that may soon become law. “If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want less of something, tax it,” quipped Ronald Reagan. “During the No Child Left Behind Era,” says Pondiscio, “test-driven accountability has too often stood Reagan’s maxim on its ear. Annual reading tests have practically required schools and teachers to forsake the patient, long-term investment in knowledge and vocabulary that builds strong readers, critical thinkers, and problem solvers. High-stakes accountability with annual tests that are not tied to course content (which reading tests are not) amounted to a tax on good things and a subsidy for bad practice: curriculum narrowing, test preparation, and more time spent on a ‘skills and strategies’ approach to learning that doesn’t serve children well.”

            Pondiscio believes that states, with the flexibility they’re about to be granted (along with a continued mandate for annual testing) need to think through the incentives in their curriculum and testing policies. “Does what you are about to do in the name of accountability tax or subsidize student knowledge across the curriculum?” he asks. “Does it incentivize adding more social studies, science, art, and music to the school day, or does it encourage schools to do less? The sooner schools see building knowledge across the curriculum as Job One in strengthening reading comprehension, the better… You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to ‘find the main idea,’ ‘make inferences,’ and ‘compare and contrast.’ You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.”

            The other part of the new ESEA that Pondiscio likes is the changed posture on teacher evaluation. “The best course is to abandon efforts to use tests to evaluate teachers – or, at the very least, stop using reading tests for those purposes,” he says. “The moment you attempt to evaluate teachers through reading tests, which are de facto tests of background knowledge, you’re taxing good teaching and subsidizing bad… There’s no incentive to build knowledge in a particular domain – plants, astronomy, colonial America, the Harlem Renaissance – since there’s no guarantee that those subjects will come up on the reading test this year, next year, or ever. But increasing breadth and depth of students’ domain knowledge is exactly how you build strong readers. States need to subsidize it – or at least stop taxing it.”

 

“ESEA and the Return of a Well-Rounded Curriculum” by Robert Pondiscio in The Education Gadfly, December 2, 2015 (Vol. 15, #47),

http://edexcellence.net/articles/esea-and-the-return-of-a-well-rounded-curriculum

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9. Short Item:

            A mapping tool – This new feature from National Geographic allows educators and students to customize one-page maps for downloading, e-mailing, printing, or sharing:

http://education.nationalgeographic.org/mapping/outline-map/

 

“MapMaker 1-Page Maps” from National Geographic, November 2015

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