In This Issue:

1. A “bookend” approach to closing the achievement gap

2. A principal goes through a school day as a ninth grader

3. Should we set a two-hour limit on children’s daily screen time?

4. An Iowa high school shifts to standards-based grading

5. Does standards-based grading hurt students’ college chances?

6. Ideas for effective Tier 3 response to intervention

7. Why curate?

8. Short item: An interactive map of the spread of slavery in the U.S.

 

Quotes of the Week

“I want to go back. I want to go back to my kids. I want to go back to my classroom. I want to see the kids, I want to teach the kids – and that’s the bottom line.”

            Jim Gard, a math teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida, quoted

in “School Shootings Put Teachers in New Role as Human Shields” by Julie Turkewitz

in The New York Times, February 20, 2018, search at https://www.nytimes.com

 

“Young people are coming of age at a time when our nation is in the midst of a five-decade explosion in the rate of multiple, non-marital births – across all races and all states, especially to women and men at or under the age of twenty-four – that is seismically shifting family structures in a way that puts children at risk.”

            Ian Rowe (see item #1)

 

“As teachers and administrators, we make decisions all the time that we feel are in the best interests of students, but do we really know what it’s like to be a student in our own schools?”

            Paul Oberman (see item #2)

 

“You will get into college, but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to make sure you get through college.”

            An Iowa high-school administrator to students fretting over grades (see item #5)

 

“We should worry not when devices are out but when devices are used in ways that do not support the development of meaningful interests and expertise, or when ‘screen time’ is segregated from ‘off-screen time’ in ways that sever sustained transmedia endeavors or that disconnect us from meaningful relationships.”

Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler (see item #3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A “Bookend” Approach to Closing the Achievement Gap

            “Young people are coming of age at a time when our nation is in the midst of a five-decade explosion in the rate of multiple, non-marital births,” says New York City author/CMO leader Ian Rowe in this Education Gadfly article, “– across all races and all states, especially to women and men at or under the age of twenty-four – that is seismically shifting family structures in a way that puts children at risk.” Rowe describes two promising solutions:

            • Early intervention – There are significant positive downstream effects from home visits to support parents as they raise infants and toddlers. A model program is the Parent-Child Home Program, which deploys trained caseworkers to visit homes twice a week with a high-quality book or educational toy. They also engage children and caregivers in reading, conversation, and activities designed to stimulate parent-child interaction and promote the development of verbal, cognitive, and social-emotional skills that support school readiness and long-term success. Over its 50-year history, Parent-Child Home Program “graduates” are 50 percent more likely to be ready for kindergarten, score 2-½ times higher on an assessment of social-emotional skills than a control group, enter school performing 10 months above their chronological age, are 50 percent less likely to be referred to special education by third grade, outperform the state average on a third-grade state math test, and have 30 percent higher graduation rate than their SES peers.

            • Focused secondary-school support – Throughout K-12, but beginning most forcefully in eighth grade, schools need to explicitly teach self-regulation and impulse control and help students reframe how they think about the timing of their own family formation. Students need to enter high school, college, and young adulthood with a set of attitudes and behaviors, Rowe says, that are “more likely to prevent the creation of fragile families in the first place.” [In other articles, Rowe has stressed the “success sequence”: students graduating from high school, going to college or getting a decent job, getting married, and having children – in that order.]

 

“The Parable of the River: Bedtime Reading for the Education Reform (a.k.a. ‘Repair’) Community” by Ian Rowe in The Education Gadfly, February 21, 2018 (Vol. 18, #8),

http://bit.ly/2GKgsOK; Rowe can be reached at [email protected].

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2. A Principal Goes Through a School Day as a Ninth-Grader

            “As teachers and administrators, we make decisions all the time that we feel are in the best interests of students,” says Houston principal Paul Oberman in this article in HaYidion, “but do we really know what it’s like to be a student in our own schools?” He describes his experience going through a full day of classes as a student. “I dedicated myself to playing the student role completely,” says Oberman. “I took all scheduled quizzes and rushed to be on time to classes. The only thing I shirked was homework.”

The first class was history, Oberman’s weakest subject when he was in school, and he stumbled on three questions on the quiz and used the word “maybe” several times. Next came World Literature, where he encountered several unfamiliar vocabulary words and was at a disadvantage because he hadn’t seen a video the teacher had shown the day before. In Hebrew class, students worked on a 27-question worksheet that completely stumped him. “If this were truly a class for me day in and day out,” says Oberman, “I would have been overwhelmed and depressed, as I truly could not keep up. Granted this would not have been my placement, but certainly there are students who struggle in many of our classes who probably feel this way.”

In Biology, he worked with a group preparing a presentation on photosynthesis and cellular respiration and felt he wasn’t making enough of a contribution. In Algebra II, the teacher gave a quiz and Oberman checked and rechecked his work; since math was his strongest subject, he didn’t want to embarrass himself by making a mistake.

What did he learn from his day as a student? Realizing, of course, that the principal’s presence in each classroom somewhat changed the dynamic, Oberman still believes he got a realistic picture of what was going on. His big takeaways:

• Moving from class to class and staying focused through each lesson was hard work. In one class, Oberman caught himself falling asleep during a quiz, and when he got home that day, he conked out at 7:30 p.m. And that was just one day. “I didn’t have to repeat the experience the next day, and the day after, and the day after that,” he says. “My grades didn’t count or make an impact on my college acceptance or Israel program choice. I did not have any difficult social situations with my classmates, nor did I have any teachers I thought might hate me. Still, it was an exhausting day and made me appreciate what our students go through on a daily basis.”

• The clear implication: teachers need to get students actively participating in discussions, working in groups, as well as standing up, stretching, and moving from time to time.

• However, in group work, not all students pull their weight. “[I]t was apparent that some people exercised leadership and others just sat there,” says Oberman. “It is probably wise to have a component of individual assessment included in the evaluation.”

• “It’s nice to have one subject you feel really good about,” he says, “especially if there is another subject that makes you feel clueless.” He realized that many students have one or more classes in which they struggle, and unlike adults in many challenging areas of their lives, students don’t have the ability to opt out.

• Cell phone policies were inconsistent; he noticed a clear advantage in classes where teachers had students put their phones in a specific location at the start of the lesson.

• In terms of classroom management, there was a big difference between teachers who let the bell dismiss students rather than being in control of when a class ended. But when teachers kept their students past the bell, they set them up for being chastised for being late for the next class.

• Quick feedback was “so helpful,” says Oberman. He loved it when the history teacher texted him that afternoon with the news that he got 85% on the quiz: “Since the questions were still fresh in my mind, I could review the material in order to provide stronger answers next time.”

• Oberman got lots of positive feedback on this day from students, teachers, and parents. People appreciated the fact that he’d devoted a full day to being in classes. One comment: “You understand because you were in classes that day…” This reinforced his belief “that almost everything of consequence in a school happens in our classrooms. As head of school, I need to prioritize classroom time, and I need to hear regularly from students about their experiences. Students’ perceptions are their reality.”

• Being there for a full class for each teacher, and moving from one instructional style to another, gave him much better insights into teachers’ effectiveness than quick classroom walkthroughs.

Oberman plans to encourage teachers to go through the same experience and share their reactions in a faculty meeting. “I think we will all be a little bit humbled and have much to learn from this shared experience.”

 

“Humility” by Paul Oberman in HaYidion, Winter 2018 (p. 36-39),

https://prizmah.org/humility; Oberman can be reached at [email protected].

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3. Should We Set a Two-Hour Limit on Children’s Daily Screen Time?

            In this article in Teachers College Record, Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler (University of California/Irvine) say that since 1999, the idea that children should have no more than two hours of screen time a day (zero time for children under two) has been regarded as “a good parenting commandment writ in stone, with schools, pediatricians, social workers, teachers, and clergy alike admonishing parents to protect their children from harmful media exposure.” Among the reputed results of too much screen time: aggression, poor social skills, obesity, and stunted literacy skills.

            This scary advice notwithstanding, the two-hour limit is widely ignored. On average, children 8-18 years old spend about 7.5 hours on their devices every day (more like 11 if we factor in multitasking); primary-grade children are glued to their screens 3 hours a day; toddlers about 2 hours; and 0-1-year-olds one hour a day. Horrors!

But Squire and Steinkuehler question whether this is necessarily a bad thing. To be worried about these statistics, they say, is to “ignore the activity engaged in, its nature, and its quality, and black-box them into the singular, deceptively simple variable, ‘screen time.’” There’s a difference between spending an hour and a half on a mindless flashcard game versus building a redstone circuit in Minecraft; between reading a digital book versus rewriting a book you read last week. Strictly limiting screen time, say the authors, is “as counterproductive as cutting off a child from reading or writing a paragraph of text midsentence based on word count.”

            Squire and Steinkuehler unpack the notion of screen time by studying the way a seven-year-old boy named Walt uses a popular video game, Madden NFL. The conclusions of their case study:

• A digital device is not a silo. It’s not “sequestered from the everyday life of children and parents because the boundary between them and off-screen is radically porous,” say the researchers. “In Walt’s case, for example, his screen time activity of Madden grew out of an interest in off-screen football in real grass with an actual pigskin ball and his actual father, but his off-screen understanding of the game, the plays, even his own body, is very much mediated and shaped by his on-screen gameplay.”

• Screen time can create social capital. We do not, say Squire and Steinkuehler, “divide our world up into pencil work versus computer keyboard work versus touchscreen tablet work, nor do kids. Instead, we divide our world into coherent (albeit transmedia) systems of meaning – preparing for a graduate course, planning a wedding, or, as in this case study, playing football… Football is a crucial site of male bonding for Walt, and he trades his knowledge and skill in the domain for social and material capital in different contexts – convincing his father to take him back to the football card store for additional purchases, for example, or gaining popularity among his peer group at school for his ability to beat others at their invented card game.”

• Screen time is part of a much broader context. When asked about his hobbies, Walt responds, “football,” not “playing Madden.” The time he spends playing the video game spans a “complex ecosystem of videogame consoles, iPads, televisions, card decks, notepads, novels, and playgrounds,” say Squire and Steinkuehler. “These myriad activities constitute Walt’s engagement in American football. Screen time is thoroughly entangled with corporeal time, and there is no single or stable material or social context in which it resides… To carve Walt’s ‘football’ at the joints of digital versus analog is to ignore the sense that he makes of his activity and fetishize our own.”

• Screen activity lets a child develop interests independent of parental control. “Screen time also allows [Walt] to accrue social capital within his social network,” say the researchers, “and he is a more complex, differentiated person as a result of his screen time. One could even argue that, at times, Walt is even more connected with his family and community as a result of screen time through co-viewing and co-play.”

• Not all screen time is the same, just as not all off-screen time is the same. Time spent on devices can be dead time, fostering isolation and anomie, or it can be enriching and intensely social. The key is the content and its links to personal relationships and the wider world of ideas and content. “We should worry not when devices are out,” say Squire and Steinkuehler, “but when devices are used in ways that do not support the development of meaningful interests and expertise, or when ‘screen time’ is segregated from ‘off-screen time’ in ways that sever sustained transmedia endeavors or that disconnect us from meaningful relationships.”

• The two-hour-a-day limit is not a good idea. It risks robbing young people of the more-robust forms of media use on which they thrive. Walt would really resent strict time limits, which would diminish the richness of his experiences playing Madden. The best advice for his parents, and other parents who worry about their children’s screen time? Engage with your children in their media use rather than taking a disciplinary/regulatory approach; monitor the quality of their interaction with media; watch your own media use and the messages it sends to children; and make sure all media serve to connect rather than isolate.

 

“The Problem with Screen Time” by Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler in Teachers College Record, December 2017 (Vol. 119, #12, p. 1-24), available for purchase at

http://www.tcrecord.org/ExecSummary.asp?contentid=22163; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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4. An Iowa High School Shifts to Standards-Based Grading

            In this article in School Administrator, Iowa district leader Matt Townsley describes how his high school gradually adopted standards-based grading. Teachers shifted from giving students grades on homework assignments, projects, and class tests to monitoring and posting students’ current level of mastery on course standards. (At the end of each reporting period, these were converted to letter grades.) The school moved to standards-based grading for three reasons:

            • To communicate students’ current level of learning – The best way of explaining this to students and parents was with the analogy of how a band instructor gives feedback to a flute player: “Rhythm could be better, but you’re exceptional at hitting high notes.” Clearly this is a better way to affirm and improve performance than a letter or percentage grade.

            • To eliminate the influence of practice work on students’ final grades – What really matters is mastery at the end of a unit or course, not on the formative assignments, some of which may not have gone that well. An athletic analogy is apt: some of a football team’s scrimmages may have been less than stellar, but it’s game scores that count. Teachers using standards-based grading keep track of homework and other assignments, as well as student absences, but the key feedback for students and parents is final mastery of content and skills.

            • To give students multiple opportunities to demonstrate understanding – Students learn at different rates and find some parts of any curriculum unit more difficult than others. Standards-based grading keeps students’ and parents’ eyes on the ball: mastery of content, which sometimes requires several attempts and some stumbles along the way.

            This high school made the transition to standards-based grading one step at a time. In 2008, a small group of teachers participated in a 10-week after-school study group on effective grading practices and started to implement some components of standards-based grading. In 2011-12, district administrators did a thorough study of this approach, and the early adopters provided informal support to colleagues who were ready to make the shift. After a year of professional reading and presentations to the school board and a community forum, 82 percent of teachers were either using the new system or ready to take the plunge, and the school board unanimously approved a two-year implementation timeline: year one included just-in-time professional support for teachers new to implementation, and year two was full implementation in all courses. District leaders made regular reports to the school board and developed an implementation guide for newly hired teachers.

            Some parents pushed back on standards-based grading, says Townsley, mostly based on these misconceptions:

            • Grading this way will hurt students’ college chances. Administrators pointed out that the grades sent to colleges were conventional letter grades based on students’ mastery of the subject matter. Okay, said parents, but what about some neighboring schools that inflated students’ final grades with homework and classroom assignments? True, said administrators, but under standards-based grading, students get more feedback and opportunities to improve their grades throughout each marking period. The bottom line: in every year that standards-based grading has been used, students from this high school were admitted to college at expected levels.

            • This isn’t how things work in the real world. Actually, there are plenty of post-school situations where people have multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery – for example, drivers’ tests, nursing exams, and bar exams.

            Townsley says the district has continued to tweak the system over the last five years, including retrofitting electronic grade books to accommodate standards updates rather than homework, assignments, and tests.

 

“Mastery-Minded Grading in Secondary Schools” by Matt Townsley in School Administrator, February 2018 (Vol. 75, #2, p. 16-21), http://mctownsley.net/mastery-minded-grading-in-secondary-schools/; Townsley can be reached at [email protected].

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5. Does Standards-Based Grading Hurt Students’ College Chances?

            In this article in School Administrator, Thomas Buckmiller and Randal Peters (Drake University) address the concern voiced by some parents that students in schools using innovative grading practices won’t get fair and equitable consideration from selective colleges. Buckmiller and Peters interviewed admissions officers at two large state universities, one midsized state university, and one midsized private university (all in the Midwest) and came away with the following insights:

            • Letter grades and transcripts based on standards are acceptable, even preferable. For years, universities have been frustrated with high schools’ grade inflation, inaccurate portrayals of student performance, grades that mush together academic and behavioral information, and the resulting need to provide remediation to significant numbers of admitted students. There’s real appreciation for high schools that clearly delineate standards and distinguish between different strands of information on student achievement and conduct. The one caveat is that admissions officers prefer letter grades to any other grading metric.

            • Colleges are working to ensure equitable treatment for students with non-traditional grades. They’re already dealing with home-schooled students and an increasing number of students without class rankings. As more applicants submit non-traditional grades, colleges will adjust their formulas and try to be fair. They’ll also give more weight to standardized test scores with these students. High schools’ college counselors are key middlepeople in making sure colleges understand the grades and other information being submitted.

            • For college admissions personnel, efficiency and accuracy are key. They’re handling thousands of applications with limited staff and need concise, objective information that will tell them if each applicant can make it in their college. “The worst thing we can do,” said one official, “is admit them when they don’t have the skills to be successful. It’s on our shoulders when they’re… dropping out and walking away with debt.” What’s most helpful is accurate, non-inflated information on achievement and, separately, objective information on students’ attendance, work ethic, and perseverance.

            One high-school administrator summed it up well in a statement to students: “You will get into college, but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to make sure you get through college.”

 

“Getting a Fair Shot?” by Thomas Buckmiller and Randal Peters in School Administrator, February 2018 (Vol. 75, #2, p. 22-25),

http://my.aasa.org/AASA/Resources/SAMag/2018/Feb18/Buckmiller.aspx; Buckmiller can be reached at [email protected].

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6. Ideas for Effective Tier 3 Response to Intervention

            In this article in Teaching Exceptional Children, Lynn Fuchs, Douglas Fuchs, and Amelia Malone (Vanderbilt University) suggest seven principles for choosing and evaluating Tier 3 interventions when a student’s needs haven’t been met at Tier 2:

            • Strength – What is the track record of the intervention for students with the specific needs in each situation?

            • Dosage – Is this the appropriate instructional group size, number of minutes for each session, and number of sessions each week?

            • Alignment – Does this program address the student’s academic and skill deficits, dovetail with grade-appropriate curriculum standards and rigor level, and avoid spending time on skills the student has already mastered?

            • Transfer – Does the intervention help the student apply skills in other formats and contexts and see connections between mastered and related skills? “Transfer is a major obstacle for students with severe learning problems,” say the authors, “and research shows the benefits of explicit transfer instruction.”

            • Comprehensiveness – Does the intervention explicitly use key principles of learning, including: providing explanations in simple, direct language; modeling efficient solution strategies (versus expecting students to discover them on their own); checking to see if students have the necessary background knowledge and skills to be successful; providing enough practice for mastery; including systematic cumulative review; and gradually fading support as students become proficient?

            • Behavioral support – Does the intervention incorporate instruction and monitoring in self-regulation and executive function and include effective strategies to minimize unproductive behavior? “The goal,” say the authors, “is to encourage students with a history of academic failure to persevere through academic struggle and continue to work hard, aim high, and adopt a high standard of coherence, in which students are not satisfied with answers that do not make sense.”

            • Individualization – Does the program frequently collect progress-monitoring data and adjust instruction (teach-test-revise) in ways that address the student’s complex learning needs?

 

“The Taxonomy of Intervention Intensity” by Lynn Fuchs, Douglas Fuchs, and Amelia Malone in Teaching Exceptional Children, March/April 2018 (Vol. 50, #4, p. 194-202), http://bit.ly/2lfj4uX; Lynn Fuchs can be reached at [email protected].

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7. Why curate?

            In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez gives an example of being a “dumper” versus a “curator.” Imagine that you know a lot about sushi and an acquaintance on social media asks, “Have never tried sushi. Any advice?” You totally have advice! You send one link, then another, and end up sending a Google doc with eleven links to great articles on sushi. Bad news: your acquaintance may look at the first two links, but after that, she’s overwhelmed and gives up.

“And it’s a shame,” says Gonzalez, “because you have some really good stuff on that list. Especially the one in the right-hand column, second to last on the list. It’s funny. And practical. It’s like a real person helping the reader find a way to add sushi to her life. But your friend never read that one, because there was no way to sift it out from the others, no way to know what made it special, and like everyone else, your friend only has so many hours in the day. You just dumped too much on her at once. You were being a dumper.”

Too bad, since you were the perfect person to curate – to hand-select a few resources that would meet her needs and be manageable in a short amount of time.

“Whether you’re a teacher, an administrator, a librarian, a researcher,” says Gonzalez, “whatever you do, chances are you have information to share with other people, and developing your curation skills – both in terms of how much you offer and how you deliver it – is going to make that sharing a lot more effective.” She suggests some general principles, following college instructor Norm Eng’s precept: “Think of yourself less as a teacher and more as a designer of meaningful experiences.”

• Less is more. “When we dump a lot of information on a person at once, we are working against the brain,” says Gonzalez. We can take in only so much at once, and when we’re presented with too much information, we ignore some in order to process the rest. If stuff keeps coming in, we reach cognitive overload and shut down, and even simple information is blocked. A good museum exhibit does the opposite: it selects a small number of relevant objects and artifacts, carefully groups and arranges them, presents an introduction, and provides some context and commentary. We’re guided through, with the time and space to savor each part. In the technology industry, many of the same principles apply, under the heading of user experience design (UX).

• In schools, this applies to student-directed learning and libraries. The curation of lessons, materials, and displays is vital to helping students make good choices.

            • The same applies to communicating with parents and school and teacher websites. As the mother of three, Gonzalez says “an awful lot of skimming is happening.” Beware of information overload.

            • This is especially true when sharing research. Whether you’re sharing ideas on a new learning theory, delivering PD to a group of colleagues, or doing research as part of an action research project, narrowing the focus to just a few key items is vital.

            Gonzalez concludes with these curation guidelines for deciding what to share and how to share it most effectively:

-   Keep the best, lose the rest. Remember that the goal is for people to actually read and absorb what you’re sharing.

-   Chunk it. Break the collection into smaller subsets and give each one a heading.

-   Add your own introductions. Give your audience some context and explanation.

-   Use images to help make memorable distinctions and anchor memories.

-   Polish hyperlinks. Change long, cumbersome links to text that explains.

-   Always build in white space. This is vital to the user experience.

 

“Are You a Curator or a Dumper?” by Jennifer Gonzalez in Cult of Pedagogy, February 4, 2018, https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/curator-or-dumper/

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8. Short Items:

            a. An interactive map of the spread of slavery in the U.S. – This online map created by Lincoln Mullen (George Mason University) http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/slavery/ shows how slavery spread in the U.S. from 1790 to 1860. It’s also possible to zoom in on any county and view original U.S. Census data as well as data on free African Americans, other groups, and the total population.

 

Spotted in “How Did Slavery Shape My State? Using Inquiry to Explore Kentucky History” by Carly Muetterties and Jess Haney in Social Studies and the Young Learner, January/February 2018 (Vol. 30, #3, p. 20-25), no e-link available

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