Marshall Memo 728
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
March 19, 2018
2. The persistence of tracking as an example of the research/practice gap
3. Pushing back on test prep in elementary literacy classrooms
4. Designing a high-quality system of assessments
5. Why students should not use a checklist to assess websites
6. Effective mentoring of new teachers
“Why has education research done so little to blunt inequality and exclusion?”
Jeannie Oakes (see item #2)
“When you learn about successful principals, you keep coming back to the character traits they embody and spread: energy, trustworthiness, honesty, optimism, determination… In other words, they are high-energy types constantly circulating through the building, offering feedback, setting standards, applying social glue… We went through a period when we believed you could change institutions without first changing the character of the people in them. But we were wrong. Social transformation follows personal transformation.”
David Brooks in “Good Leaders Make Good Schools” in The New York Times, March
13, 2018, http://nyti.ms/2DEDaG6
“We have to acknowledge that kids are going to challenge authority; that’s sort of their job.
We have to respond with developmentally appropriate, purposeful actions – so [kids] are held accountable in a way that helps them learn and grow, as opposed to just learning that they should continually buck authority, or that compliance is the only way to be in good graces with adults.”
Cami Anderson in “Sparking a School Discipline Revolution” by Amanda Kocon in a
TNTP interview, excerpted in Education Digest, March 2018 (Vol. 83, #7, p. 16-21);
Anderson’s Discipline Revolution Project is at http://disciplinerevolutionproject.org.
“Physically placing master teachers, highly effective teachers, or coaches in central locations where they are closer to – and more likely to cross paths with – their colleagues would increase the probability that these individuals interact with and influence others.”
James Spillane and Matthew Shirrell in “The Schoolhouse Network” in Education
Next, Spring 2018 (Vol. 18, #2, p. 68-73), http://bit.ly/2ALer17; Spillane can be
reached at j-spillane@northwestern.edu.
“It’s not enough to read books about it; you need to feel it.”
Jakob Hetzelein, a history teacher in Germany, quoted in “Tours of Nazi Camps to
Curb Creeping Hate” by Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times, March 12, 2018,
In this article in Phi Delta Kappan, Guy Claxton (King’s College/London) uses the metaphor of a river to describe three levels of learning:
“Why has education research done so little to blunt inequality and exclusion?” asks Jeannie Oakes (University of California/Los Angeles) in this article in Educational Researcher (drawn from her 2016 AERA presidential address). “Three decades of struggling with this problem have opened my eyes to the fact that moving from research to equitable, inclusive policy and practice faces particular challenges that limit the impact of our research.” Oakes points to solid research on the efficacy of adequate funding, access to high-quality teaching, challenging curriculum, student-centered and culturally relevant instruction, increased learning time, bilingual instruction, health and social supports, integrated schools, and doing away with tracking. But implementing these key findings has been uneven at best. Detracking is a case in point.
Earlier in her career, Oakes and others did groundbreaking research showing that tracking was an ineffective strategy, especially for students in the lower tracks, and for children of color, who disproportionately wind up in the lower tracks. Oakes and her colleagues found that in schools that did away with tracking:
“Public Scholarship: Education Research for a Diverse Democracy” by Jeannie Oakes in Educational Researcher, March 2018 (Vol. 47, #2, p. 91-104), http://bit.ly/2DERGgU; Oakes can be reached at oakes@ucla.edu.
“The Dangers of Test Preparation: What Students Learn (and Don’t Learn) About Reading Comprehension from Test-Centric Literacy Instruction” by Dennis Davis and Nermin Vehabovic in The Reading Teacher, March/April 2018 (Vol. 71, #5, p. 579-588),
https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/trtr.1641; the authors can be reached at ddavis6@ncsu.edu and nvehabo@ncsu.edu.
“No single assessment or piece of student work can provide educators, students, parents, and the public with information about what students know and can do,” say a group of 19 education organizations and assessment experts in this paper, crafted by Kathryn Young (Education Counsel) and Lexi Barrett and Rebecca E. Wolfe (Jobs for the Future). The monograph synthesizes research from numerous sources into ten qualities that a system of assessments should ideally contain:
In this article in Phi Delta Kappan, Joel Breakstone, Sarah McGrew, Mark Smith, Teresa Ortega, and Sam Wineburg (Stanford University) critique the widely used checklist approach to assessing the reliability of an unknown website. They applied the popular CRAAP Test (from the Meriam Library at California State University) to check out The Employment Policies Institute’s website, www.minimumwage.com:
“Why We Need a New Approach to Teaching Digital Literacy” by Joel Breakstone, Sarah McGrew, Mark Smith, Teresa Ortega, and Sam Wineburg in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2018 (Vol. 99, #6, p. 27-31), www.kappanmagazine.org; the authors can be reached at breakstone@stanford.edu, smcgrew@stanford.edu, msmith4@stanford.edu, teortega@stanford.edu, and wineburg@stanford.edu. See a related article from Stanford researchers in Marshall Memo 660.
In this article in Phi Delta Kappan, Nina Weisling (Cardinal Stritch University) and Wendy Gardiner (Pacific Lutheran University) observe that not all mentoring programs for new teachers are working well. They offer these suggestions for supports, structures, and resources that the most effective mentoring programs have in place:
• Set clear expectations. Principals need to make several key decisions up front: Will mentors and mentees have a say in choosing each other? Will matches be made with an eye to content and/or grade level? Will mentors have an evaluative role? When and where will mentors and mentees meet, and how frequently? Clarifying these and other issues is important to setting up mentoring relationships for success.
• Maximize co-teaching and close support. Weisling and Gardiner believe the conventional mentoring model – creating lesson plans, gathering data during a lesson, analyzing student work, viewing and discussing a classroom video, on-the-fly conversations about challenges and successes – doesn’t take full advantage of a veteran teacher’s potential. More powerful, they believe, are:
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About the Marshall Memo
Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and other educators 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, writer, and consultant 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). Every week there’s a podcast and HTMI version as well.
Individual subscriptions are $50 for a year. Rates decline steeply for multiple readers within the same organization. See the website for these rates and how to pay by check, credit card, or purchase order.
Website:
If you go to http://www.marshallmemo.com you will find detailed information on:
• How to subscribe or renew
• A detailed rationale for the Marshall Memo
• Publications (with a count of articles from each)
• Article selection criteria
• Topics (with a count of articles from each)
• Headlines for all issues
• Reader opinions
• About Kim Marshall (including links to articles)
• A free sample issue
Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:
• The current issue (in Word or PDF)
• All back issues (Word and PDF) and podcasts
• An easily searchable archive of all articles so far
• The “classic” articles from all 14 years
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
Reading Research Quarterly
Responsive Classroom Newsletter
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
School Administrator
School Library Journal
Social Education
Social Studies and the Young Learner
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