In This Issue:

1. What makes a team effective?

2. A new perspective on closing the achievement gap

3. Project-based learning 101

4. A school network experiments with high tech and student choice

5. Opening up a daily 40-minute block in a North Carolina high school

6. How to hold onto high-quality new teachers

7. The effect of reading about the struggles of accomplished scientists

 

Quotes of the Week

“We are raising a generation that will have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, for every minute of their life, so clearly education needs to change to accommodate that.”

            A parent in a high-tech California alternative school (see item #3)

 

“Kids should be spending less time practicing calculating by hand today than fifty years ago, because today everyone walks around with a calculator. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to do math – I shouldn’t have to whip out my phone to figure out if someone gave me the correct change.”  

            Max Ventilla (ibid.)

 

“For a culture of originality to flourish, employees must feel free to contribute their wildest ideas… Without some degree of tolerance in the organization for bad ideas, conformity will begin to rear its ugly head. Ultimately, listening to a wider range of insights than you normally hear is the key to promoting great original thinking. If at first you don’t succeed, you’ll know you’re aiming high enough.”

            Adam Grant in “How to Build a Culture of Originality” in Harvard Business Review,

March 2016 (Vol. 94, #3, p. 86-94), http://bit.ly/1M3aR1Z

 

“As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well. But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”

            Anita Woolley (quoted in item #1)

 

“The hypothesis is that the conventional school system is inadvertently structured in a way that fosters disengagement, thereby reducing effort, which depresses achievement and grades, causing demoralization, which further reduces engagement and achievement.”  

            Stuart Yeh (see item #2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. What Makes a Team Effective?

            In this New York Times Magazine article, Charles Duhigg reports on Google’s three-year study of why some teams are more effective than others. Project Aristotle, as it was dubbed, found that some team characteristics that seemed intuitively important – members sharing interests and hobbies, having similar educational backgrounds, socializing after hours – didn’t correlate with team success. “We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,” says Abeer Dubey, a Google analyst. “We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.”

            Then Project Aristotle began looking at group norms – the culture of unwritten rules that guide people when they collaborate – and hit pay dirt. It turned out that two group norms were shared by virtually all of Google’s most effective teams:

-   Equal air time – In teams that got the best results, members participated roughly the same amount during meetings. “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,” said Google researcher Anita Woolley. “But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”

-   Interpersonal sensitivity – Effective team members had the ability to intuit how colleagues felt by their tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues. The members of less-effective teams were less tuned in to their teammates’ feelings.

These characteristics help create psychological safety – a team culture in which individuals have “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up,” says Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied high-functioning groups. “It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

            Having identified these key team traits, Google executives faced the challenge of spreading them to all teams. “You can tell people to take turns during a conversation and to listen to one another more,” says Duhigg. “You can instruct employees to be sensitive to how their colleagues feel and to notice when someone seems upset.” But people are busy, and some of the most hard-working and goal-oriented team members are skeptical about what they may regard as fuzzy social science. The Project Aristotle team started doing presentations on their findings within Google.

After one of the first talks, a mid-level manager named Matt Sakaguchi approached the researchers and volunteered to try the concepts in his team. In the ten months he’d been in charge, things seemed to be going reasonably well, although there was one popular member who talked too much in meetings. When Sakaguchi broached the idea of taking part in the Aristotle project, his colleagues were skeptical, but they filled out a survey put together by the researchers. The results troubled Sakaguchi, because he hadn’t picked up on several key concerns, including that people were unclear on the team’s role and didn’t have a sense of how their work fit into the overall Google mission. They gathered for an off-site retreat to look at the results and see if they could be used to improve group dynamics.

Sakaguchi started off by asking everyone to share something about themselves. He went first, telling his colleagues that he had Stage 4 cancer. This was stunning news. “To have Matt stand there and tell us that he’s sick and he’s not going to get better, and, you know, what that means,” said one of his colleagues. “It was a really hard, really special moment.” As they went around the table, others shared important personal information – a breakup, health issues, personal challenges. When they looked at the survey results, people found it easier to speak honestly about things that had been on their minds, and the team adopted two new norms: Sakaguchi would help them see how their work fit into the bigger picture, and people would work harder to notice if someone on the team was feeling excluded or down.

“There was nothing in the survey that instructed Sakaguchi to share his illness with the group,” says Duhigg. “There was nothing in Project Aristotle’s research that said that getting people to open up about their struggles was critical to discussing a group’s norms. But to Sakaguchi, it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related. The behaviors that create psychological safety – conversational turn-taking and empathy – are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.”

“What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google,” Duhigg concludes, “is that no one wants to put on a ‘work face’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘psychologically safe,’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency… The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.”

 

“Group Study: What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times Magazine, February 28, 2016, http://nyti.ms/1UNhi09

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2. A New Perspective on Closing the Achievement Gap

            In this Teachers College Record article, Stuart Yeh (University of Minnesota) says that some theories on the racial/economic achievement gap in U.S. schools don’t fully explain its causes:

-   Negative psychology – Low-performing minority students’ perceived loss of control over their academic performance and low academic self-efficacy create a self-reinforcing downward spiral as they become increasingly discouraged and disengaged.

-   Factors before school entry – Differences in early parenting, along with other sociocultural and socioeconomic factors, contribute to initial differences in academic achievement (including a significant vocabulary gap) that are magnified as minority children move through the grades, creating increasingly low achievement.

-   Oppositional peer culture – Schoolmates who derogate hard-working black students who “act white” drag down their aspirations and sap their effort.

-   School quality – Some studies have found that once entering differences and other variables are controlled for, the divergence in achievement of statistically similar white and minority students as they move through the grades can only be explained by the quality of their schools.

-   Teacher quality – Proponents of value-added measures claim they can identify teachers who are less effective with their students and are contributing to the achievement gap.

None of these theories provide a comprehensive explanation of the gap, says Yeh – nor do they point to a credible strategy for solving the problem.

Yeh proposes a new theory. “This model,” he says, “posits that there is something about the interaction between disadvantaged minority students and schools that interferes with the learning process.” He believes there are two “ubiquitous features of conventional school environments” that trigger and reinforce the psychological factors noted above, augment the disadvantages with which minority students enter school, and feed the peer pressures to disengage from schooling – all of which creates a self-reinforcing downward spiral of achievement. The two features are:

-   Students being given work that is too difficult for their current academic level;

-   Students getting low grades on their work rather than frequent, individualized, objective feedback.

“The hypothesis,” say Yeh, “is that the conventional school system is inadvertently structured in a way that fosters disengagement, thereby reducing effort, which depresses achievement and grades, causing demoralization, which further reduces engagement and achievement.” The process kicks in around third grade, when struggling students begin to view themselves as intellectually inferior because their grades are lower than their classmates’, contributing to decreased self-efficacy and increasing passivity; it accelerates in middle school, at which point low grades strongly correlate with eventually dropping out.

Too-difficult work and lack of frequent feedback also affect low-achieving white and Asian students, but these factors are much more damaging to low-income black and Latino students who enter school with such significant disadvantages and have to contend with other psychological factors.

            What is to be done? Yeh’s theory is that by flipping the two pernicious factors, schools can turn the downward spiral into a virtuous upward cycle of achievement. That involves:

-   Adjusting task difficulty for low-performing students to an appropriate level of challenge so that if they apply effective effort, they will be successful.

-   Rapid performance feedback with respect to a standard, not other students.

Teachers who implement these two steps “report that students enjoy school work, enjoy learning, and exert more effort,” says Yeh, “which increases their achievement and improves their self-esteem and engagement even further, in a virtuous cycle.” He cites positive research on two programs using this approach – Reading Assessment and Math Assessment – and reports on a systematic study comparing different interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap – charter schools, voucher programs, an additional year of school, various high-quality pre-school programs, full-day kindergarten, class size reduction, value-added assessment, summer school, teacher salary incentives, teacher experience, teacher PD, longer school day, computer instruction, tutoring, and school reform. Rapid assessment is dramatically more successful at raising student achievement than any of the others. That’s because the other initiatives, says Yeh, fail to address “the dysfunctional task structure and lack of performance feedback that is embedded in the conventional model of schooling.” Other factors can certainly play a role, but by far the most powerful and cost-effective intervention is to adjust task difficulty and provide students with prompt, objective feedback on their efforts.

            “According to this view,” Yeh concludes, “teachers have been laboring in a system that is inadvertently structured in a way that undermines the sense of control, self-efficacy, engagement, and achievement of low-achieving students. This view suggests that it may be more productive to equip all teachers with the technology and support required to individualize task difficulty and provide rapid performance feedback…”

 

“Two Models of Learning and Achievement: An Explanation for the Achievement Gap?” by Stuart Yeh in Teachers College Record, December 2015 (Vol. 117, #12, p. 1-48), no free e-link; Yeh can be reached at [email protected].

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3. Project-Based Learning 101

(Originally titled “It’s a Project-Based World”)

            “When students engage in project-based learning over the course of their time in school,” says John Larmer (Buck Institute for Education) in this article in Educational Leadership, “there’s an accumulating effect. They feel empowered. They see that they can make a difference.” In addition, they’re more likely to acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed for college and career success. Here is how Larmer sees the key elements of project-based learning, carefully planned and skillfully managed by the teacher:

            • A challenging problem or question – It should be novel, complex, and open-ended. Students assess what’s required and, with guidance from their teacher, find the resources they need to complete the task.

            • Sustained inquiry – Students are challenged to work on the project over a period of days or weeks.

            • Authenticity – As much as possible, projects expose students to the outside world in all its complexity. “They understand what it’s like to meet real deadlines, not the arbitrary ones typically set by teachers but the ones they had to meet because people were counting on them,” says Larmer. “They learn how to behave, make eye contact, and dress appropriately.”

            • Student voice and choice – Students take responsibility for a series of tasks and make decisions on how to proceed. “They troubleshoot problems and often find themselves in situations that stretch them,” says Larmer, “such as when they interview an expert, use new tech tools, or propose solutions for a community problem to an audience of adults.”

            • Reflection – Teams of students engage in projects that involve ongoing analysis on how they’re doing.

            • Critique and revision – As students work, they fine-tune their process and product. “Sometimes their ideas fail, and they have to return to the drawing board,” says Larmer.

            • Public product – The students conclude their project by demonstrating what they have learned to an adult audience.

            Larmer gives three examples of successful projects conducted by students at different grade levels:

-   Fifth graders researched brain cancer, conducted a fund-raiser, and contributed $1,300 to a children’s hospital.

-   High-school economics students researched home ownership in their community and, working with a local bank, conducted a community education event to inform parents and local residents of the benefits of home ownership.

-   Ninth-grade science students studied local water quality, produced a video, and wrote a class book based on their findings. They also contacted state officials and successfully proposed an adopt-a-shoreline program to improve a local lake.

Larmer closes with four ways that project-based learning can go off the rails and not fulfill its potential:

-   Mistake #1: Using materials that aren’t truly project-based; beware of PBL-lite!

-   Mistake #2: Providing inadequate training and support for teachers; one-shot workshops are not enough.

-   Mistake #3: Over-using projects in the curriculum; basic skills can still be taught in a more conventional format.

-   Mistake #4: Implementing project-based learning on an ad hoc basis; to get the long-term effect, students need to engage in high-quality projects on a regular basis through their school years.

 

“It’s a Project-Based World” by John Larmer in Educational Leadership, March 2016 (Vol.

73, #6, p. 66-70), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1QZNyHB; Larmer can be reached at [email protected]; further resources are available at www.bie.org.

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4. A School Network Experiments with High Tech and Student Choice

            In this New Yorker article, Rebecca Mead reports on the AltSchool initiative – a group of small private schools around the U.S. that hope to disrupt conventional paradigms of schooling. Founded by Google veteran Max Ventilla, 35, AltSchools encourage students to dive into topics they’re passionate about, with teachers tracking everything they do using classroom video cameras and elaborate K-8 databases. The schools make a point of shaping diverse student bodies by giving scholarships to students whose parents can’t afford the $30,000-a-year tuition.

Ventilla is a critic of the conventional K-12 curriculum. “Kids should be spending less time practicing calculating by hand today than fifty years ago,” he says, “because today everyone walks around with a calculator. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to do math – I shouldn’t have to whip out my phone to figure out if someone gave me the correct change. But you should shift the emphasis to what is relatively easier, or what is relatively more important… If the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now – well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.” A parent at the Palo Alto AltSchool agreed. “I believe education needs to change,” he said, “not just in our little micro-school here but all over the world. We are raising a generation that will have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, for every minute of their life, so clearly education needs to change to accommodate that.”

AltSchools are unconventional but also, in a sense, utilitarian – the workplace of the future will demand individuality, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. Ventilla is committed to using technology where it’s most efficient. In a meeting of AltSchool educators, Kimberly Johnson, the organization’s head of product success and training, said, “Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it.”

The organization has invested heavily in high-tech applications that give teachers continuous feedback on their students’ progress. Mead visited several AltSchools and noted that with math, tech tools were “quite good” at measuring student learning, but with literacy, there were limits. “A digital platform that embeds interactive vocabulary assessments and comprehension tests in literacy texts may guide young readers to ‘just right’ books,” she says, “and may give teachers insight into their students’ reading stamina and their progression from one ‘Lexile level’ – a measure of literacy – to another. It may even achieve the elusive goal of encouraging reluctant readers to become enthusiastic ones… But, at least for now, no literacy tool can tell whether a reader laughed at ‘The Mouse and the Motorcycle’ or wept over ‘The Fault in Our Stars.’ Nor can an app weigh the value of those moments when a reader looks up from the digital page and stares into space. To a computer measuring keystrokes, a student zoning out because he’s bored is indistinguishable from one who is moved by her book to imagine a world of her own.”

In one school visit, Mead picked up on another glitch in the AltSchool approach. Two girls in a grade 2-3 class found lots of photos of seals on Google Images for their project. “But the same search term called up a news photo of the corpse of a porpoise, its blood blossoming in the water after being rent almost in half by a seal attack,” says Mead. “It also called up an image in which the head of Seal, the singer, had been Photoshopped into a sea lion’s body – an object of much fascination to the students. To the extent that this exercise was preparing them for the workplace of the future, it was also dispiritingly familiar from the workplace of the present, where the rabbit holes of the Internet offer perpetual temptation.”

Mead quotes Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) on another concern: “People are very focused on the algorithm. But equally important is the quality of the materials” – the clarity of the math questions and the worthiness of the readings being presented on students’ computer screens. Willingham also notes that teachers in high-tech classrooms often have to prepare two lesson plans – one that uses the technology and one for when the technology breaks down.

In another school visit, Mead noticed a troubling downside of student choice. “A look around the classrooms confirmed that for some children the ability to follow their own passions reaped rich dividends,” she says. In a combined kindergarten/first-grade class, two children were involved in complicated long-term projects. A 7-year-old had built a large cardboard model of Fort Sumter and written a storybook about Paul Revere. Another student was immersed in a physics experiment for which he had built two types of catapult made out of tongue depressors and tape and was gathering data on their effectiveness. But other classmates were involved in less-demanding activities – making primitive catapults with Jenga blocks, putting stickers on paper while chatting with each other, working with clay, or wearing headphones and doing word and number games on tablets. The quiet immersion of this last group, says Mead, “would be recognizable to any parent who has ever bought herself a moment’s peace from the demands of interacting with her child by opening Angry Birds on her phone.”

AltSchools staff engage in frequent “hackathons” in which they work to find solutions to problems identified by teachers. Mead observed one meeting in which the tech experts presented their response to an earlier request from teachers that they have the ability to bookmark particular moments in the video footage being created all the time so they could quickly access it later in the day. The tech wizards proudly presented their solution: all teachers had to do was pat twice on a smartphone in their pocket and that moment would be marked on the day’s video stream. “There were cheers around the room as the developers explained how they had filtered the data so that the jostling motions of a teacher walking upstairs, say, would not show up as a bookmark,” reports Mead. “From the back of the room, a woman spoke up: ‘Did you test it with a female?’ Many participants laughed. ‘I’m serious,’ the questioner went on. ‘A lot of our teachers are females, and they carry phones in different places.’ The members of the bookmark team, all of whom were male, looked deflated. In coming up with their apparently elegant solution, they had not visualized a female teacher slapping her bottom to activate a phone tucked in her back pocket.”

Back to the drawing board to modify the solution, which is very much part of the AltSchool ethos – keep experimenting, “fail fast, fail forward,” and keep getting better.

 

“Learn Different: Silicon Valley Disrupts Education” by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, March 7, 2016 (Vol. XCII, #34, p. 36-45), http://bit.ly/1StYbI9

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5. Opening Up a Daily 40-Minute Block in a North Carolina High School

            In this article in Principal Leadership, North Carolina educators Chris Bennett and Chris Blanton describe the challenge that a 1,075-student high school faced trying to provide tutorials, remediation, and other interventions for struggling students, many of whom were not available after school because they took part in after-school activities or needed to catch a bus home. The school’s response is Bulldog Block, a 40-minute intervention period within the school day, from 12:52 to 1:32 each day. Bennett and Blanton say that the block has been responsible for boosting academic achievement in the school, putting it in the top tier in the district.

Here’s how it works. Students with D or F grades are required to attend tutoring or catch-up classes (these students made up 12-18 percent of the study body) while the remainder of students choose from a variety of activities:

-   Tutorial help for students with marginal grades;

-   Small-group support for students in demanding courses to solidify concepts;

-   Teacher-led review sessions;

-   AP class meetings outside a lab setting;

-   Advanced Placement Week once a year in which teachers discuss the expectations in AP courses;

-   Meetings with counselors;

-   Clubs and study groups meeting in the media center, cafeteria, and open classrooms;

-   School-based enterprises run by occupational students, including advertising, keeping track of money, and the Exceptional Children’s Program;

-   Intramural sports in the gym;

-   Chatting in the hall or a common area.

Teachers who aren’t leading activities with students meet with their PLC or cover duty stations around the school.

            “When releasing more than 1,075 high-school students for a 40-minute block of time within the school day, planning must be precise,” say Bennett and Blanton. Here’s what they’ve learned from implementing Bulldog Block:

-   Consult with staff to solicit suggestions for fine-tuning the program.

-   Explain the program to students and parents and establish tiered consequences for students who “go rogue” during the block.

-   Post teachers around the building during the block to prevent students from leaving the campus, getting into trouble, or going into unauthorized areas.

-   Rotate content-area subjects for each day of the week so teachers in each subject get a fair opportunity to spend focused small-group time with students.

-   Phase in Bulldog Block options for ninth graders – they remain in a regular class for the opening weeks of school (rotating to a different subject each day) and then have increasing freedom to take advantage of all the block options.

 

“Bulldog Block: Creating Additional Time for Students” by Chris Bennett and Chris Blanton in Principal Leadership, March 2016 (Vol. 16, #7, p. 10-12), no free e-link available

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6. How to Hold Onto High-Quality New Teachers

            In this article in Principal Leadership, Mary Clement (Berry College) offers these tips for retaining rookie teachers, 41 percent of whom leave the profession within the first five years:

            • Hire capable, well-matched teachers. Detailed advertisements and postings are important to giving candidates a clear idea of each position, says Clement. She also recommends longer interviews with more candidates, enlisting experienced teachers to take part in interviews, and gathering information on candidates from multiple sources.

            • Provide continuous professional development. This should include induction that eases new teachers into the demands of the full job – orientation before classes begin, well-matched mentors through the first five years, and ongoing PD specific to rookies’ needs. “New teachers often feel completely overwhelmed with their duties,” says Clement, “and adding seminars may seem like more work, and stress, than help. If once a week is too often to meet, try monthly meetings, and ask the new teachers for input about times and dates.”

            • Use colleagues to provide feedback. Traditional “gotcha” teacher evaluation has rarely been helpful in supporting new teachers, says Clement. Trained mentors can provide non-evaluative feedback that really makes a difference, perhaps with a firewall between their observations and the formal evaluation process. Of course it’s important that incoming teachers know the district’s criteria for effective teaching and are familiar with how administrators will assess their work.

            • Understand millennials. “This generation of teachers wants to network and have input,” says Clement. Most have a strong preference for electronic interaction, and administrators and colleagues should meet young teachers where they are tech-wise and provide strong online resources.

            • Provide leadership opportunities. “While many new teachers are just surviving, others actively seek an avenue to truly make a difference,” says Clement. To find fulfillment in teaching and stay in the profession, they need to get involved in meaningful roles outside their classrooms. Some possibilities: speaking at induction ceremonies and serving on a welcome committee for the newest hires; leading book study groups; taking part in social service organizations on campus; and serving on curriculum committees.

“Five Easy Steps for Retaining Top Teachers” by Mary Clement in Principal Leadership, March 2016 (Vol. 16, #7, p. 18-19), no free e-link available

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7. The Effect of Reading About the Struggles of Accomplished Scientists

            In this Education Week article, Jaclyn Zubrzycki reports on a new study from Teachers College, Columbia University (published by the American Psychological Association) on how high-school students reacted to different accounts of scientists’ work. Three groups of grade 9 and 10 students read short accounts of the work of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Michael Faraday. Some students read texts that included details of the intellectual challenges each scientist faced (for example, Curie tried again with experiments that had failed). Some read texts that included details of personal challenges (Curie left her native Poland because at that time women weren’t allowed to attend school). And some stories focused only on accomplishments (Curie was fluent in five languages and won many awards).

            What did the researchers find? That students who read about scientists’ struggles, whether intellectual or personal, got better grades in science after reading the texts. The positive effect was most pronounced among students whose science grades were low before the experiment. Students who read only about accomplishments showed no difference in science achievement afterward. Another finding: both before and after reading the texts, students who had a “growth” mindset (effort, not innate talent, determines success) tended to do better in science classes than students with a “fixed” mindset.

 

“Study Finds Motivating Power of Tales of Scientists’ Struggles” by Jaclyn Zubrzycki in Education Week, February 24, 2016 (Vol. 35, #22, p. 5), www.edweek.org; the full study is entitled “Even Einstein Struggled: Effects of Learning About Great Scientists’ Struggles on High School Students’ Motivation to Learn Science” and can be downloaded at

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/02/famous-scientists-struggle.aspx

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