Marshall Memo 710
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
November 6, 2017
1. Key insights on studying, remembering, and learning
2. Getting good writing from middle-school students
3. Best practices for addressing social, emotional, and behavioral issues
4. What to do when students talk when they’re not supposed to talk
5. How frequently should special-needs students’ reading be assessed?
6. Fifteen websites with leveled texts
“One of the things they don’t teach us in our education courses, is just how freaking much students talk, and how hard it can be to quiet them down in order to get anything accomplished.”
Jennifer Gonzalez (see item #4)
“Anytime you can give a reminder before misbehavior, it’s a good thing. Anytime you give a reminder after you see misbehavior, it’s a bad thing. You should be holding students accountable, but be preemptive whenever you can.”
Michael Linsin (quoted in ibid.)
“What classroom teachers want, deserve, and need is in-the-classroom support from staff skilled in behavior management.”
Nathan Levenson (see item #3)
“Never read a student’s first draft.”
Dominic Carrillo (see item #2)
“Self-testing is one of the strongest study techniques there is. Old-fashioned flashcards work fine; so does a friend, work colleague, or classmate putting you through the paces.”
Benedict Carey (see item #1)
In an appendix to his 2013 book, How We Learn, Benedict Carey answers eleven essential questions that sum up the main insights he presents in the book:
• How important is routine, like having a dedicated study area? Not at all, says Carey. “The more environments in which you rehearse, the sharper and more lasting the memory of that material becomes… That is, knowledge becomes increasingly independent of surroundings the more changes you make.” Most people learn better by studying in different locations, using different methods, at different times of the day, constantly changing the way they store material in memory.
• Is there an optimal amount of time to study or practice? “More important than how long you study is how you distribute the study time you have,” says Carey. Ideally, break up study time into chunks over two or three days, each time reengaging with the material, retrieving it, and re-storing it in memory – “an active mental step that reliably improves memory.”
• How much does it help to review notes from a class or lesson? Very little, he says. Looking over highlighted material is one of the least effective ways to study; the same goes for verbatim copying. That’s because both are fairly passive and don’t engage the brain in the kind of work that will make learning sink in. What’s more, passive review can cause what cognitive scientists call the “fluency illusion” – unwarranted confidence that you’ll remember it for good.
• Is cramming a bad idea? Now always. It’s okay if you’re behind and have no choice. But the downside is that you won’t remember much after the test or performance. That’s because the brain sharpens memories only after a little forgetting has taken place.
• So what does work? “Self-testing is one of the strongest study techniques there is,” says Carey. “Old-fashioned flashcards work fine; so does a friend, work colleague, or classmate putting you through the paces.” So does reciting a passage from memory, or explaining a concept to yourself or a friend. Testing yourself (or being tested) does two things: it forces you to retrieve information from memory, and it gives you immediate feedback if you couldn’t remember it so you know what you don’t know and need to work on some more.
• What’s the most common reason for bombing a test after what felt like careful preparation? It’s the fluency illusion – the erroneous belief “that you ‘knew’ something well just because it seemed so self-evident at the time you studied it,” says Carey. Several passive, ineffective study methods feed this illusion:
• How does sleep affect learning? The deep sleep that occurs in the first half of the night is most important for consolidating and retaining hard facts – names, dates, formulas, concepts. So if you need to remember that kind of information, Carey recommends going to bed at your regular time to maximize deep sleep. But the kind of sleep we have in the early morning hours helps consolidate motor skills and creative thinking. If you need to perform creatively, whether it’s in math, science, writing, or music, you might stay up later and sleep in to maximize the effects of the second kind of sleep.
• How about improving performance on longer-term creative projects? The proven method for a big, complicated project like a term paper is getting started as early as possible, chunking the work, and spreading it out over time. Doing this “activates the project in your mind,” says Carey, “and you’ll begin to see and hear all sorts of things in your daily life that are relevant. You’ll also be more tuned into what you think about those random, incoming clues.”
• Are distractions from smartphones and social media a bad thing? Not unless you’re trying to give continuous focus to a lecture or some other sequential, connected learning experience. When you’re struggling to solve a problem, “a short study break – five, ten, twenty minutes to check in on Facebook, respond to a few e-mails, check sports scores – is the most effective technique learning scientists know of…” says Carey. “Distracting yourself from the task at hand allows you to let go of mistaken assumptions, reexamine the clues in a new way, and come back fresh.” Your brain will keep working on the problem offline, without your fixated, unproductive focus, and you’ll often have fresh insights when you return to it.
• Can “freeing up the inner slacker” really be called a legitimate learning strategy? If by this we mean “appreciating learning as a restless, piecemeal, subconscious, and somewhat sneaky process that occurs all the time – not just when you’re sitting at a desk, face pressed into a book – then it’s the best strategy there is,” says Carey.
In this article in AMLE Magazine, teacher/author Dominic Carrillo describes how he gets high-quality writing from his middle-school students:
• An authentic audience – Carrillo has found that students are highly motivated by publishing their letters, essays, or short books online, potentially read by thousands. Students are skeptical at first, but not after Carrillo shows them samples from previous classes. One student wrote an open letter to anyone contemplating suicide and heard back from a young woman who said the letter helped her decide not to take her own life. Carrillo’s most recent project was having students choose an influential public figure and write him or her a persuasive letter. “The idea was that if Donald Trump or Miley Cyrus didn’t actually read their letters,” says Carrillo, “then at least an online audience would get the message.”
• Wide reading – Students start by reading models of effective writing in the genre they’ve chosen: for short stories, Hemingway, Chekhov, Shirley Jackson; for memoirs, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, Malala, and Malcolm X. Carrillo also has students look at writing by students in previous years and his own published writing (he’s the author of a young adult novel). Students spend several days taking a critical look at these exemplars, discussing story elements, the author’s voice, theme, intention, characters, organization, and any other applicable Common Core standards. Some key questions: How will reading this make my writing better? Which author will I use as a model? What will my voice, theme, and organization be? How will it come across to my audience?
• Imperfect first drafts – “I recommend dedicating a full class period to discussing bad first drafts,” says Carrillo. He opens by asking students to pair-share about what makes writing so difficult and then has them read an Anne Lamott essay on terrible first drafts (it contains some profanity and might need to be redacted). Students grasp that being a good writer is not an innate gift, their writing won’t be perfect at first, all writing benefits from criticism, and they need to stop overthinking and put pen to paper.
• Helpful feedback – Once students have produced first drafts, Carrillo has them sit in a large circle and establishes what Ron Berger calls a “culture of critique.” General feedback (“Good story, I liked it”) isn’t helpful. Nor is rude and hurtful feedback (“Boring” “That sucked”). To model helpful, specific comments, Carrillo shows a six-minute video about a first grader’s efforts to draw a butterfly, “Critique and Feedback, The Story of Austin’s Butterfly” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOSiU42P8Gc. “Ultimately,” says Carrillo, “students see the value of quality feedback and are ready to critique knowing that the end goal is to create excellent, publishable writing… Whole-class peer critique goes from being a dreaded and uncomfortable idea to a purposeful and valued part of the process.” Over two or more class periods, students read their writing aloud (or have the teacher read anonymous submissions) and classmates offer comments and suggestions.
• The peer editing funnel – A guiding principle that Carrillo learned early in his teaching career was, Never read a student’s first draft. Before the teacher sees student writing, it should be edited and refined based on peer feedback and reflection:
“Authentic Audience, Wonderful Writing” by Dominic Carrillo in AMLE Magazine, October 2017 (Vol. 5, #4, p. 25-28), no free e-link; Carrillo is at [email protected].
In this article in District Management Journal, Nathan Levenson says principals and teachers he works with are reporting an increase in the number of students coming to school with significant social, emotional, and behavioral problems. When these needs are not addressed, they create disruptions in classrooms, undermine learning, and put great stress on educators, contributing to teacher and administrator attrition.
Districts across the country are investing in curriculum, programs, and additional staff to address these issues, and some are getting a much bigger bang for their buck than others. What’s the difference? Levenson and his colleagues conducted a thorough investigation and came up with ten practices that maximize the impact of existing staff, focus on prevention, and get the most from outside expertise:
Make best use of the talent, expertise, and time of current staff:
Before investing in additional staff, says Levenson, “schools and districts can first take steps to ensure that teachers, psychologists, social workers, behaviorists, counselors, and others are able to effectively use their talents and time to do the most good for the most children.” The biggest challenges are paperwork and meetings. The most effective schools:
• Streamline meetings and paperwork to increase time with students. The average social worker is with students 32 percent of the school week, but some manage to spend 66 percent of their time with students. Similarly, most school psychologists spend 14 percent of their time counseling students, but some spend more than 30 percent. It can take 3.5 days to complete a special-education evaluation, but some psychologists need only 1.5 days.
Levenson and his colleagues have analyzed every step educators take creating an IEP and attending meetings. The most efficient schools set targets for boosting student contact time and reducing non-student hours in several ways:
Focus on prevention:
• Identify and manage behavioral triggers. Levenson tells the story of a first grader in a suburban school who periodically screamed ugly insults at his teacher, threw scissors and other objects, and ran out of the classroom. The boy’s teacher and principal had disciplined the boy numerous times and worked with his parents, and had reached their limit. They demanded that this student be removed from the school and sent to an out-of-district placement. But the superintendent brought in a behavioral specialist who observed the boy and figured out that he exploded when he felt embarrassed – even when the embarrassment was subtle, like being given a hint to answer a question. Once the teacher understood the trigger and adjusted her approach, the boy improved dramatically and was able to be successful in the district.
• Increase access to staff with expertise in behavior management. “Some teachers and special educators may have a knack for identifying triggers,” says Levenson, “but few have formal training.” It’s important for schools to have access to educators with this highly specialized and valuable skill. Districts should be on the lookout for opportunities to bring such people on board when vacancies occur. Effective behavior specialists will reduce severe problems and make it possible to economize on one-on-one paraprofessionals, shifting those funds to specialists and other resources. Levenson also recommends having a small, highly skilled district-wide team to do initial planning for the most challenging students and share insights and support across schools.
• Don’t let discipline policies create more discipline problems. A fair and comprehensive discipline code has these basic provisions:
Seek and support outside expertise:
• Nurture partnerships. Local mental health agencies, nonprofit counseling services, and universities can often provide social and emotional services at little or no cost, waiving co-pays and deductibles and billing students’ insurance for services. Levenson cites a 5,000-student district that was able to leverage over $1 million in counseling services a year for almost no cost. In addition, outside agencies might address areas in which the district doesn’t have in-house expertise – body image issues, alcohol and substance abuse, dealing with trauma, summer and school vacation coverage, and coaching district staff on best practices.
• Support and coordinate local partnerships. Small problems can become deal-breakers with external partners, says Levenson – for example, a counselor showing up at a school and finding that someone else is in the room he was scheduled to use. To get the most out of partnerships, says Levenson, schools need “a dedicated point person who has time to manage, communicate, and smooth over the inevitable bumps in the road.” Specifically:
In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez describes a typical scenario from her early years teaching middle-school students. She gave students a writing assignment and for a few seconds things were quiet. Then a student said she didn’t know what to write, and Gonzalez walked over to her desk to help. Two more hands went up – they were stuck as well. Before she got to them, a student closed his journal, finished already, and the two stuck students asked him what he wrote about. “The room needs to stay quiet so we can concentrate,” Gonzalez told them. Another student had a question and she squatted by her desk, and behind her, a conversation started between two other students. “Okay, people,” she said, louder this time. “Let’s keep it down.” Now it was a game. Someone needed to visit the pencil sharpener. And another person. More conversations. “And then I yelled,” says Gonzalez.
A common scenario? Gonzalez says she hears versions of it all the time from teachers. “One of the things they don’t teach us in our education courses,” she says, “is just how freaking much students talk, and how hard it can be to quiet them down in order to get anything accomplished.”
As she wrestled with this problem and consulted with experts, Gonzalez made two baseline assumptions: First, humans need to talk, and trying to impose silence over long periods of classroom time is a formula for trouble. But students at every grade level should be able to sit quietly while the teacher gives directions or teaches a directed lesson, and they should be able to sit quietly during independent work time. And there should be times when it’s okay for students to talk, work in groups, express themselves, move around, and have fun. All that strengthens classroom management.
Second, a big piece of classroom management is building good relationships with students. “If you haven’t taken the time to get to know them as individuals,” she says, “if you mispronounce their names, if you regularly use sarcasm or make them feel stupid for asking questions, then they aren’t going to want to behave well for you.”
Gonzalez’s next step was figuring out why she was having so much trouble getting students to work quietly. Michael Linsin, her go-to guru on classroom management, suggested there were two reasons:
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About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 48 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, consultant, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”
To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 60 carefully-chosen publications (see list to the right), sifts through more than a hundred articles each week, and selects 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, pulls out several striking quotes, provides e-links to full articles when available, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday evening (with occasional breaks; there are 50 issues a year).
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Core list of publications covered
Those read this week are underlined.
All Things PLC
American Educational Research Journal
American Educator
American Journal of Education
AMLE Magazine
ASCA School Counselor
ASCD SmartBrief
District Management Journal
Ed. Magazine
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
Educational Horizons
Educational Leadership
Elementary School Journal
English Journal
Essential Teacher
Exceptional Children
Go Teach
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Educational Review
Independent School
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)
Kappa Delta Pi Record
Knowledge Quest
Literacy Today
Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School
Middle School Journal
Peabody Journal of Education
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Principal’s Research Review
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Teacher
Teaching Children Mathematics
Teaching Exceptional Children
The Atlantic
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Journal of the Learning Sciences
The Language Educator
The Learning Professional (formerly Journal of Staff Development)
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Time Magazine