In This Issue:

1. Do schools teach the full range of skills needed for adult success?

2. Thomas Guskey on planning PD with the goal in mind

3. Weekly before-school professional learning in North Dakota

4. Orchestrating “productive struggle” in math classes

5. How can we help struggling students build strong vocabularies?

6. Creativity as the core of a 21^st-century curriculum

7. Bullying hotspots in schools

8. Integrating movement into academic classrooms

9. Short items: How good is your knowledge of some key U.S. statistics?

 

Quotes of the Week

“Knowing our destination provides the basis for determining the effectiveness of our efforts.”

            Thomas Guskey (see item #2)

 

“If we want to break the multi-generational cycle of entrenched poverty and income inequality, we must ensure the next two generations – the children in K-12 schools today and their children – understand the mechanisms that will lead to upward mobility. There is a sequence – education, work, marriage, children (after the age of twenty-one), in that order – that many of us in our personal lives have chosen to follow because we know it gives us and our children the greatest likelihood to lead the lives of our choosing. We cannot deprive our students of the very knowledge that, if they followed this same series of life choices, they would have a 98 percent probability to advance out of poverty and a real shot toward middle-class success and beyond.”

            Ian Rowe in “How the Emergence of the White Underclass Could Improve Education

            for All” in The Education Gadfly, April 12, 2017, http://bit.ly/2pa5oWz

 

“[O]nly about one-third of American teenagers leave the K-12 system ready to succeed in postsecondary education. Another third go to college unprepared, where they hit the brick wall of remedial coursework, and many of them – including almost all of the low-income students – drop out. That amounts to more than a million kids a year seeing their dreams dashed before they are old enough to legally drink a beer.”

            Michael Petrilli in “Schools Should Tell Parents Whether Their Middle Schoolers Are

on Track for College” in The Education Gadfly, April 12, 2017, http://bit.ly/2omM3wt

 

“The easiest and least effective way to address professional development is to provide one-size-fits-all professional learning opportunities, which means only a portion of attendees finds it valuable.”

Michael McNeff (see item #3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Do Schools Teach the Full Range of Skills Needed for Adult Success?

            In this Kappan article, James Nehring and Stacy Szczesiul (University of Massachusetts/Lowell) and Megin Charner-Laird (Salem State University) share a synthesis of the skills they believe adults need for successful lives:

Cognitive skills:

-   Recall

-   Application

-   Analysis

-   Evaluation

-   Creative thinking

Interpersonal skills:

-   Communication

-   Cooperation

-   Empathy

-   Trust building

-   Service orientation

-   Conflict resolution

-   Negotiation

-   Responsibility

-   Assertiveness

-   Advocacy

Intrapersonal skills:

-   Flexibility

-   Adaptability

-   Appreciation of diversity

-   Valuing learning

-   Cultural appreciation

-   Curiosity

-   Forethought

-   Self-regulation

-   Self-monitoring

-   Self-evaluation

Some regard these as “21^st-century skills,” but Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul believe these have been the keys to life success well before the current century.

How many of these do schools teach? Just three, say the authors, even in schools where students get high state test scores: application, recall, and (sometimes) analysis. Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul reached this conclusion by asking teachers in nine high-performing Massachusetts schools to submit all instructional artifacts for a single week – worksheets, project descriptions, rubrics, quizzes, tests, homework assignments, and more. “Analyzing the nearly 2,000 instructional tasks embedded in these materials,” they say, “we found that recall and application topped the list, with analysis a distant third and only occasional demands for evaluation and creative thinking…” The interpersonal and intrapersonal skills almost never showed up.

To take a closer look, the researchers visited three of the schools that were especially focused on 21^st-century skills, observed 22 classrooms, spoke to focus groups of teachers, and interviewed school leaders. Same conclusion – although there were a few exceptions. Most teachers presented students with complex content, but the tasks students were asked to perform were simple recall and application – for example, in an AP U.S. government class, students answered recall-level questions about democracy, party identification, Democrat, Republican, blue state, red state, and purple state and named factors that would predict a person’s party affiliation. Many teachers assigned tasks with complex instructions and procedures, but little higher-level thinking was required of students – for example, in an elective history class for juniors and seniors, the teacher transitioned students to the next textbook chapter, delivering material at a breathtaking pace: chapter classifications, videos, articles, learning objectives, learning targets, learning outcomes, essential questions, a guiding question, a project, online quizzes, self-pacing, corrections, and the requirement that students score 100% on all quizzes. This was all quite daunting, even for students paying close attention, but the intellectual demand was strictly recall.

However, in a few classrooms, students were being taught the full range of cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills. In a 10^th-grade honors humanities class, for example, students were asked to invent questions to guide their study of Western imperialism in China (having just finished a unit on the colonization of Africa). Guided by the teacher, students brainstormed possible questions, decided which were most important, and edited questions until the questions were intellectually stimulating and open-ended. Some results: Why did countries want to imperialize China? How did the Chinese succumb to imperialism? How was Chinese culture disrupted by imperialism? As the class proceeded, it was apparent that this teacher was working on virtually all of the adult skills.

What was going on in the classrooms that were providing a much higher level of instruction than the rest of the school? Here’s what Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul concluded:

• It was the teacher, not the subject. This level of intellectual and affective demand cropped up in different subjects, grades, and classes with different student achievement levels. The variable was the teacher.

• Teachers taught disciplinary knowledge across all three domains. These outliers managed to weave rigorous instruction of content across the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal domains, putting to rest the notion that content- and skill-focused instruction precludes higher-order thinking – and vice-versa.

•  Teachers were attuned to the social-emotional dynamics of their students. These exceptional instructors created “a harmonious environment,” say the researchers, “demonstrating an understanding that doing so is a prerequisite to academic learning.”

• Teachers adapted their teaching to the moment. They “continuously adjusted their teaching in subtle ways as they sensed changes in tone and climate.”

• Teachers had a wide repertoire of effective moves. And they used them with “stunning fluency and density,” say Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul. “Watching any of these teachers was like watching a virtuoso soloist perform with a symphony orchestra. The expert work of these teachers demonstrates that to teach well – that is, to teach a deep and broad range of skills while also addressing disciplinary knowledge – requires intelligence and years of practice.”

• Instruction was tied to complex assessments. Often designed by the teachers themselves, these checks for understanding stood in contrast to the test-prep oriented assessments in other classrooms.

• Teachers built strong relationships with students. They showed a powerful desire to connect with pupils as people as well as scholars.

What does all this mean? First, Nehring, Charner-Laird, and Szczesiul suggest that schools need complex, high-level assessments to make all classrooms accountable for teaching the full range of adult skills. Second, “excellence requires highly skilled teachers with finely tuned radar and improvisational ability.” And third, “good teaching is about caring relationships, a parental affection that gives and receives, that honors the fundamentally human nature of our work as educators. In an era of big data, we would be well to remember that all our work is ultimately about a single child.”

 

“What Real High Performance Looks Like” by James Nehring, Megin Charner-Laird, and Stacy Szczesiul in Phi Delta Kappan, April 2017 (Vol. 78, #7, p. 38-42), www.kappanmagazine.org; Nehring can be reached at [email protected].

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2. Thomas Guskey on Planning PD With the Goal in Mind

            In this article in The Learning Professional, Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) stresses the importance of professional development starting with clear outcomes. And what might those be? “In education, getting better generally means having a more positive influence on the learning of our students and helping more students learn well,” says Guskey. “Knowing our destination provides the basis for determining the effectiveness of our efforts.”

            Some principals and teachers are unsure of their ability to conduct an authoritative assessment of professional development and would rather leave that to outside experts. But Guskey believes that assessing PD is a relatively simple process; schools just need to answer three essential questions:

-   What student learning outcomes do we aim to accomplish?

-   What evidence will tell us if we met the goal? (ideally more than one source of data)

-   What unintended consequences might occur, positive or negative?

On the first, learning outcomes can be academic and/or behavioral – for example, students’ reading levels, perceptions of teachers, and sense of self-efficacy (disaggregated by gender, race/ethnicity, language experience, etc.). On the second, teachers generally prefer classroom assessments, observations, assignments, in-class performance, and portfolios over standardized test scores, so they can track progress and make modifications in real time. An example of an unintended consequence: an initiative that boosts student performance in ELA takes time away from science instruction, causing a decline in that subject. “Looking beyond the intended goals to the broader array of possible outcomes is an important aspect of evaluation and vital to judging effectiveness,” says Guskey.

            When teachers look at assessment results, it’s rarely helpful to compare student performance with state or national averages. What sparks robust discussions in PLCs is looking at variations in students’ responses to individual items on common assessments and writing prompts. Ideally, teachers generate, administer, and score their own assessments so they have ownership of the curriculum planning and assessment process. Guskey gives an example of a teacher team looking at a tally-graph item analysis of students’ responses on a common interim assessment with 15 questions. The teachers have the following insights:

-   All students answered two of the items correctly. This could mean the material measured by these items was taught especially well by every teacher on the team – but it could also mean that the test items were worded in a way that made the correct answers so obvious that students had no difficulty getting them right. The team needs to look at those test items to decide.

-   Most students did well on six other test items, probably indicating effective teaching practices had been used by all members of the team. Only a few students need additional help in those areas.

-   On one test item, many students’ in Ms. Baxter’s class had difficulty, but virtually all students in the other two teachers’ classes did well. Baxter reaches out to her colleagues for ideas on better teaching strategies in this area.

-   On another item, Baxter’s students did much better than students in the other two classes – an opportunity for her to share a new strategy she had discovered.

-   On three test items, students in all three classes did poorly. “When this occurs,” says Guskey, “teachers need to seek solutions outside of their individual experiences and expertise.” They might get ideas from an instructional coach, colleagues in other schools, a district specialist, research, or an online resource.

“The primary purpose of this collaborative data analysis,” says Guskey, “is to guide these teachers’ professional learning experiences so they can improve the quality of their instruction and help all students learn well.”

            Successful PLC collaboration depends on a number of factors, most important among them the active participation and clear support of school administrators – for starters, common meeting time, help with data crunching, instructional materials, and technology. Teacher teams may very well need seminars, coaching, and facilitation to conduct rigorous and productive PLC meetings.

One additional cautionary note: PLCs tend to jump into “debating new ideas, techniques, innovations, programs, and instructional issues,” says Guskey. “While these are important issues, we must remember that they are means to an important end that must be determined first. Our journey always begins by deciding our destination… Ninety percent of essential questions in any evaluation are addressed in the planning process, before the journey begins.”

 

“Where Do You Want to Get To?” by Thomas Guskey in The Learning Professional, April 2017 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 32-37), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2ohWuSL; Guskey can be reached at [email protected].

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3. Weekly Before-School Professional Learning in North Dakota

            “The easiest and least effective way to address professional development is to provide one-size-fits-all professional learning opportunities, which means only a portion of attendees finds it valuable,” says North Dakota superintendent Michael McNeff in this article in The Learning Professional, “If the learning does not apply, then how will teachers change their practices for the better?” In his district, the school day begins later every Wednesday morning, giving schools 60 minutes of fresh-energy PD time that is almost never interrupted by vacations or extracurricular activities. (Families can still drop off their children at the regular time; in one school, about 100 students read and chat in the library under the supervision of paraprofessionals.)

            For teachers, most of the Wednesday PD time is devoted to unpacking standards, developing assessments, defining mastery, mapping out units, planning interventions and enrichment, and looking at student learning results. Each PLC is responsible for setting a learning goal (for example, improving student engagement), reading a book and several articles, deciding between two options – visiting another school or taking part in their school’s peer observation program – and reflecting in writing on what they learned and implemented.

            “Teachers need autonomy and personalized learning to grow,” concludes McNeff. “We believe we have found the right combination of freedom and accountability within our professional learning plan… When teams of teachers are given time to research best practices, observe other teachers, and reflect on what they’ve learned, they grow professionally.”

 

“Let’s Focus on Quality of Instruction Rather Than Quantity” by Michael McNeff in The Learning Professional, April 2017 (Vol. 38, #2, p. 12-14), http://bit.ly/2o1R5z2; McNeff can be reached at [email protected].

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4. Orchestrating “Productive Struggle” in Math Classes

“When a teacher models and provides direct instruction at the start of a lesson, it rarely enables students to explore mathematical tasks or engage in productive struggle,” says Drew Polly (University of North Carolina/Charlotte) in this article in Teaching Children Mathematics. However, the so-called Gradual Release lesson plan is deeply embedded in U.S. pedagogical culture: the teacher models how to solve a problem (I do), then goes over the problem with the whole class (We do), and finally gets students working independently (You do).

But researchers have found that if students grapple with a task before the teacher explains and models it (and receive appropriate follow-up), they’re more engaged and learn better. Perhaps shifting to this approach would solve what Polly identifies as one of our biggest math achievement problems: “students consistently struggle with how to approach, set up, solve, and reason about cognitively demanding mathematics tasks.”

There’s a caveat: the struggle-first lesson plan may not be appropriate for students with certain learning needs. That suggests a flexible approach in which students who need direct instruction get it when needed. Polly details the 5E approach, in which students spend most of a lesson exploring mathematical tasks with limited support from the teacher, and some students get individual or small-group support:

-   Engage – The class is given a math task or activity.

-   Explore – Students have time to work on the task with their partner or a small group, with the teacher giving only instructions and circulating, sometimes posing questions to support students’ exploration.

-   Explain – The class comes together to discuss the problem and how different students solved it. The teacher facilitates the discussion, perhaps choosing a main focus based on what was observed during the work time, and provides direct instruction as needed.

-   Elaborate/extend – For the rest of the class, the teacher gets students working on activities, math games, and small-group activities that deepen understanding of the concept and zeros in on students who seem confused or off track.

-   Evaluate – Students solve a final task or participate in a discussion of concepts, allowing the teacher to assess learning and plan for future lessons.

 

“Supporting Opportunities for Productive Struggle: Implications for Planning Mathematics Lessons” by Drew Polly in Teaching Children Mathematics, April 2017 (Vol. 23, #8, p. 454-457), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2pJ2jc7; Polly is at [email protected].

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5. How Can We Help Struggling Students Build Strong Vocabularies?

            “[T]he size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of his or her reading comprehension,” say Tanya Wright (Michigan State University/East Lansing) and Gina Cervetti ((University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Reading Research Quarterly. “Despite the consistency of this predictive relationship, there is evidence that schooling has a limited impact on students’ vocabulary development.” Students who enter school knowing fewer words are likely to continue with relatively small vocabularies and struggle with text comprehension throughout school. Students who start with larger vocabularies, on the other hand, have broader general knowledge, need to spend less time accessing memory of words (which frees up working memory to grasp the meaning of a text), read and enjoy their reading more, and build stronger vocabularies – a reciprocal relationship that tends to widen the achievement gap.

Are there ways to turn around these discouraging findings? Wright and Cervetti reviewed 36 studies of the impact of vocabulary instruction on reading comprehension and found:

            • Teaching word meanings almost always improved comprehension of texts containing the words taught.

• Teaching word meanings doesn’t seem to improve comprehension of texts that don’t contain the target words.

            • Instruction involving students in some active processing was more effective than dictionary and definition work at improving comprehension of texts containing the words taught. One caveat: researchers don’t know how much active processing is enough.

            • Teaching one or two strategies (e.g., context clues or morphology) for solving word meanings doesn’t seem to improve generalized reading comprehension.

            • Having students actively monitor their understanding of vocabulary and having them use multiple, flexible strategies for solving word meanings “are promising areas for future research,” conclude Wright and Cervetti.

 

“A Systematic Review of Research on Vocabulary Instruction That Impacts Text Comprehension” by Tanya Wright and Gina Cervetti in Reading Research Quarterly, April/ May/June 2017 (Vol. 52, #2, p. 203-226), http://bit.ly/2pJVret; Wright can be reached at [email protected].

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6. Creativity As the Core of a 21^st-Century Curriculum

            In this Kappan article, artist/author Danny Gregory applauds the arguments made for the importance of art and music in schools: they improve motor, spatial, and language skills; they enhance peer collaboration; they strengthen ties to the community; they keep at-risk students in school and improve their chances of ultimately graduating from college; and students who have four years of art score 91 points higher on the SAT than students who don’t.

Nevertheless, Gregory’s experience is that a lot of art instruction is unimpressive: “In the lower grades, kids just have fun drawing and painting. They don’t really need much encouragement or instruction. In middle school, the majority start to lose their passion for making stuff and instead learn the price of making mistakes. All too often, art class becomes a gut, an opportunity for adolescents to screw around. By high school, they have been divided into a handful who are ‘artsy’ and may go on to art school and the vast majority who have no interest in art at all. In short, every child starts out with a natural interest in art, but for most it is slowly drained away until all that’s left is a handful of teens in eyeliner and black clothing whose parents worry they’ll never move out of the basement.”

Because art education is not fundamentally respected by most educators and district leaders, says Gregory, when hard economic times arrive, as they did after the 2008 recession, art budgets are among the first to get the axe – especially in low-income communities. As of 2015, only 26.2 percent of African-American students have access to art classes.

Gregory has a startling suggestion: take the “art” out of art education and replace it with creativity education. Why? Because creativity is something that almost everyone agrees is vital to success. “Nowadays,” says Gregory, “we all need to be creative in ways that we never did, or could, before. Solving problems, using tools, collaborating, expressing our ideas clearly, being entrepreneurial and resourceful – these are the skills that matter in the 21^st century, post-corporate labor market. Instead of being defensive about art, instead of talking about culture and self-expression, we have to focus on the power of creativity and the skills required to develop it. A great artist is also a problem solver, a presenter, an entrepreneur, a fabricator, and more.”

Gregory imagines a new arts curriculum in which creativity is a core theme, with all students learning a wide array of skills directly relevant to their futures:

-   How to communicate a concept through a sketch;

-   How to explore the world in a sketchbook;

-   How to generate ideas and solve real problems;

-   In theater, how to collaborate and powerfully present ideas and emotions;

-   In music, how to develop creative habits and teamwork, hone skills, compose, and improvise

-   How to come up with ideas, find inspiration, and borrow from the greats;

-   How to work effectively with others to test and improve ideas;

-   How to get ideas executed through a supply chain, presenting and marketing them;

-   How to use digital tools and remove the artificial divide between arts and science;

-   How to show that engineering and sculpture are related, how music and math mirror each other;

-   How to use Photoshop to communicate concepts;

-   How to shoot and cut videos, design presentations, and use social media intelligently;

-   How to write clearly “because it is the key to survival.”

Gregory acknowledges that a lot of this is already happening in some schools; he urges all schools to make creativity the core of the arts curriculum. “Don’t make black and white films about leaves reflected in puddles,” he says. “Make a video to promote adoption at the local animal shelter… Fill 100 sticky notes with 100 doodles of ways to raise consciousness about the environment or income inequality or water conservation. Stop making pinch pots; instead, build a 3-D printer and turn out artificial hands for homeless amputees… We need to make sure that the kids of today (who will need to be the creative problem solvers of tomorrow) realize their creative potential and have the tools to use it. That matters far more than football games and standardized test scores.”

“Let’s Get Rid of Art Education in Schools” by Danny Gregory in Phi Delta Kappan, April 2017 (Vol. 98, #7, p. 21-22), www.kappanmagazine.org

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7. Bullying Hotspots in Schools

            In this article in Edutopia, Stephen Merrill reports on a new study from the National Center for Education Statistics on bullying among students 12-18 years old. A total of 21 percent of students said they had been bullied in the following ways: 13 percent made fun of, called names, or insulted; 12 percent subject of rumors; 5 percent pushed, shoved, tripped, or spat on; 4 percent threatened with harm; 5 percent purposefully excluded from activities; 2.5 percent told to do things they didn’t want to do; and 2 percent had their property purposefully destroyed. Girls reported more online harassment (16 percent) than boys (6 percent). These were the locations where students said the bullying occurred:

-   42 percent in hallways or stairwells (similar for boys and girls);

-   34 percent in classrooms (perhaps mainly during entry, transitions, and exit);

-   22 percent in cafeterias;

-   19 percent outside on school grounds;

-   12 percent online or by text;

-   10 percent on school buses;

-   9 percent in bathrooms/locker rooms.

“Whatever model of bullying prevention a school adopts,” says Merrill, “– however diverse the coalition summoned to take a stand against bullying – it makes sense to be mindful that hallways and stairwells, taken together, are nearly twice as likely to be the source of the problem as the cafeteria, playground, or buses and bathrooms. Supervision and vigilance in those fluid spaces between classes is likely to benefit vulnerable students disproportionately.”

 

“Anatomy of School Bullying” by Stephen Merrill in Edutopia, March 21, 2107,

http://edut.to/2otXSUL (with a link to the full study)

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8. Integrating Movement into Academic Classrooms   

            “Intuitively, many teachers have always known that physical activity plays an important role in student learning,” say Suzanne Lindt and Stacia Miller (Midwestern State University/Wichita Falls) in this Kappan article. Now the research is confirming those intuitions, showing how dance, gesture, and other forms of movement can improve motivation, engagement, and learning. In classroom experiments, Lindt and Miller have found that students in classrooms that integrated movement were “significantly more excited by, engaged in, and focused on the lessons” than they were with conventional teaching methods. The authors suggest five strategies with examples of each:

            • Dancing to memorize information – Doing a dance skip-counting numbers (5, 10, 15, 20…) to the “Macarena.”

            • Applying movement to assessments – To test knowledge of synonyms and antonyms, pairs of students jump straight up and down three times, then choose to land on either their right or left foot; if both land on the same foot, they must come up with synonyms for a word on the board; if they land on opposite feet, they must name antonyms.

            • Moving among stations – The teacher gives each group of students sets of fraction cards and they take turns moving to another group in search of equivalent fractions, bringing possible matches back to their group to see if they’re correct.

            • Forming lines, rows, or other groupings – Each student gets a card with a punctuation mark or a word and students silently arrange themselves to form a complete sentence.

            • Representing terms or ideas with actions – After reading a book about emotions, students stand and act out furious, satisfied, courageous, and other words.

 

“Movement and Learning in Elementary School” by Suzanne Lindt and Stacia Miller in Phi Delta Kappan, April 2017 (Vol. 98, #7, p. 21-22), www.kappanmagazine.org; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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9. Short Item:

            How good is your knowledge of some key U.S. statistics? – This interactive New York Times graphic https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/14/upshot/drug-overdose-epidemic-you-draw-it.html?hp&_r=0 asks us to extrapolate the trend from 1990 to the present in four areas:

-   U.S. car accident fatalities;

-   Gun fatalities;

-   H.I.V. fatalities;

-   Drug overdose fatalities.

Try it out. When you’ve drawn what you believe the trend will be for each one, click below and you’ll see a graph of the actual figures. This is some pretty powerful pedagogy, getting us to put what we believe to be true on the table first and then juxtaposing it with the facts.

 

“You Draw It?” by Josh Katz in The New York Times, April 14, 2017

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