Marshall Memo 826
A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education
March 2, 2020
1. Teaching social studies in troubled times
2. “Compassionate directness” in the workplace
3. Firing 101
5. Can administrators observe classrooms without being disruptive?
6. Who’s doing the work here? Ideas on the correcting workload
7. Who is best qualified to evaluate curriculum materials?
8. Ideas for individual student reading conferences
9. Getting more value from “turn and talk”
10. Do teachers plateau after their first few years?
11. Short items: (a) The Smithsonian online
“Waking up a teenager at 7 a.m. is like waking up an adult at 4 a.m.”
Scott Carrell (University of California/Davis), quoted in “Making Smarter Use of
Time” by Alyson Klein in Education Week, February 26, 2020
“If you compare the effects of your phone to eating properly or sleeping or smoking, it’s not even close.”
Jeff Hancock (Stanford Social Media Lab), quoted in “The Menace of Screen Time
Could Be More of a Mirage” by Nathaniel Popper in The New York Times,
January 18, 2020, https://nyti.ms/38hnuYq
“Once a day, have a conversation where you mostly listen. Don’t underestimate the power of your silence.”
Arianna Huffington (see item #2)
“If someone is surprised at being fired, it’s a sign that you’ve failed not in the termination conversation but in your evaluation and review process.”
Joel Peterson (see item #3)
“Under the tyranny of coverage, social studies is made boring and robbed of its capacity to make sense of an uncomfortable past, a chaotic present, and an inchoate future.”
Tina Lane Heafner (see item #1)
“It’s not enough to teach. We have to make sure the kids learn.”
Justin Minkel (see item #8)
“Agency, Advocacy, Activism: Action for Social Studies” by Tina Lane Heafner in Social Education, January/February 2020 (Vol. 84, #1, pp. 4-12), https://bit.ly/32GpbxH; Heafner can be reached at [email protected].
In this New York Times article, Arianna Huffington (Thrive Global) describes the methods of giving critical feedback in two different organizations:
“How can you fire someone in a fair and decent way?” asks Joel Peterson (Stanford University Graduate School of Business, chairman of JetBlue) in this article in Harvard Business Review. Drawing on his experience terminating “many dozens of people” and his work as a leadership professor, Peterson suggests these do’s and don’ts:
• Don’t wait for a “firing offense.” Bosses are often too compassionate, repeatedly giving underperforming colleagues one more chance and procrastinating over the final decision with wishful thinking and worries that a firing will hurt morale. “Document the smaller, quieter moments of underperformance and establish a trend line,” Peterson advises. “Try coaching, training, and other methods to fix the problem. But recognize when someone has become a ‘net drainer,’ whose performance and attitude are infecting the rest of the team. When that situation can’t be fixed quickly, it’s time to act.”
• Don’t hesitate to fire friends and family members. “Good leaders separate the personal from the professional,” says Peterson. “They clearly and frequently communicate to any friends and family members on their team that they cannot provide protection should those people underperform.”
• Don’t ambush people. “If someone is surprised at being fired, it’s a sign that you’ve failed not in the termination conversation but in your evaluation and review process,” he says. Frequent, honest feedback lays the groundwork, and if things are not going well, a structured improvement plan (with plenty of support) puts the person on notice.
• Prepare and practice. “Before entering a termination discussion,” says Peterson, “I engage in a series of self-talk exercises designed to reinforce the necessity of the action and put myself in the right mindset… I also remind myself that as a manager, I deserve some of the blame for the person’s failure, owing to poor hiring or coaching.” Just before the meeting, it’s helpful to role-play the conversation with a trusted colleague.
• Don’t pass the buck. There’s a natural tendency to avoid personal responsibility, says Peterson, but even if the decision to dismiss was a collective decision by the leadership team, the person doing the dismissing must accept full responsibility.
• Don’t hand off the dirty work. “No one likes to fire people,” says Peterson. But he believes that having someone else handle difficult conversations is unwise: “Eventually the whole organization will pick up on your inability to face tough issues.” That said, it’s a good idea to consult with HR people; they can advise on how to handle the dismissal, and you may want them to sit in on the meeting.
• Deliver the key message within the first 30 seconds. Delaying the punch line and trying to use humor or commiseration “invites misunderstanding and awkwardness,” says Peterson. “It also gets in the way of moving promptly to next steps – organizing the departure in a way that is most helpful to the employee and least disruptive to the organization.”
• Don’t overexplain. “A termination meeting is a time to communicate a decision,” he says, “not to debate it, defend it, or negotiate it.” Be clear and succinct and don’t allow yourself to be drawn into details. Again, there should have been fair warning of what was coming in coaching, feedback, and an improvement plan.
• Be human but strategic. “As they deal with their own emotions,” says Peterson, “bosses must recognize the difference between empathy and compassion (which are useful in this context) and sympathy or sorrow (which can be counterproductive).” The person being fired often has strong emotions, and the way the dismissal is handled will have consequences in future interactions with the person – and among the person’s supporters within the organization.
• Be generous. The boss should work to get a decent severance package for the person being fired, including financial severance, professional outplacement help, and a plan for providing references. The person should have a fair chance to start over.
[Peterson’s focus is on non-unionized personnel in a corporate setting. School leaders need to be attentive to applicable contracts, collective bargaining agreements, and laws. K.M.]
In this article in Teaching Tolerance, Philadelphia high-school teachers Clarice Brazas and Charlie McGeehan (she is black, he is white) share what they learned about antiracism work when they interviewed teachers around the U.S.
• Teachers of color do a disproportionate share of supporting students of color. While black and brown teachers often form bonds with students who look like them, one theme in the interviews was resentment among those teachers that their white colleagues weren’t pulling their weight – and often sent troubled students to their black and brown colleagues.
• Educators of color are expected to take on antiracist work and manage white fragility. “One refrain we heard again and again,” say Brazas and McGeehan, “was that white educators, even those who see themselves as committed to equity, frequently consider antiracist work something outside their responsibility.” Many expected teachers of color to do the heavy lifting in classrooms and in faculty meetings, PD sessions, and other venues. “Educators we spoke with stressed the need for white colleagues to own their discomfort, find places to process their growth that don’t rely on educators of color, and avoid justifying hurtful comments.”
• Educators of color are sometimes driven out. Brazas and McGeehan heard stories of administrators retaliating against those who took on antiracist work in their classrooms and beyond.
• White educators can work to manage white fragility in themselves and among colleagues. One Boston teacher told of a thoughtful and constructive reaction from a white supervisor who was confronted by three black subordinates about a tense supervisory situation. “OK, so what do I need to do to fix this?” she said, and worked to learn and grow and get better at discussing race more directly.
• White colleagues can work to ensure that labor is evenly distributed in their schools. For example, at their Philadelphia high school, Brazos and McGeehan say there’s an advisory structure that matches each student with a caring adult for all four years, with twice-a-day advisory group meetings. “This structure,” they say, “means that the responsibility of supporting our students is shared and ensures that teachers of color are not required to do this work on their own time.”
• White colleagues must educate themselves about race and racism. Here are some suggestions gleaned from the interviews:
In this article in Edutopia, Long Island (NY) assistant principal Andrew Canlé says an administrator entering a classroom can interrupt instruction and change the dynamic. The teacher may be thrown off stride and the students may tighten up, concentrating on impressing the observer. “This is a big problem,” says Canlé. “The administrator can’t be sure what students know because they’re not getting an accurate look at the classroom learning environment.” His suggestions:
• Check in with students outside the classroom. Informal chats in the hallways, at recess, and in the cafeteria can be surprisingly informative, especially with questions like, “What have you learned so far today that you didn’t know yesterday?” This can be taken to another level by the 10 x 2 strategy: picking a student and making a point of having a two-minute chat with him or her every day for two weeks.
• Build trust with faculty. Through their actions, administrators need to convince teachers that classroom visits aren’t a “gotcha” but part of a low-key process of noticing and affirming effective practices and coaching for continuous improvement. The best way to build trust and learn about students and instruction, says Canlé, is “frequent, one-on-one conversations with teachers.”
• Have teachers appoint classroom greeters. On a rotating basis, one student has the job of getting up when a visitor enters the classroom and saying, “Hi, my name is ----. Welcome to our class. Today we’re learning about -----. Would you like to have a seat?”
“Implementing these ideas can help administrators get an accurate sense of what students are learning with minimal disruptions when they visit classrooms,” says Canlé. “And that can help administrators build strong relationships with students and faculty, and transform the overall culture within a school.”
“Getting an Accurate Assessment of Student Learning” by Andrew Canlé in Edutopia, February 26, 2020, https://edut.to/2PFS0Vu; Canlé can be reached at [email protected].
In this Education Gadfly article, Michael Goldstein (Match Education) comments on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s article on the “bazaar” of online classroom materials (December 2019, summarized in Marshall Memo 816). First of all, says Goldstein, are supposedly high-quality published curriculum materials truly effective? “The top-down approach to assigning expertly-designed-and-validated curriculum hasn’t yet worked in real life,” he says. “If the stuff we say is ‘good’ doesn’t actually drive student achievement, we should be really careful about saying somebody else’sstuff isn’t good. Individual teachers may not know the data about a particular curriculum, but they do know that lots of ‘highly-rated things’ have failed in their personal experience.”
Second, teachers have different criteria in mind when they look for materials online. Engaging their students may be top of mind, or filling instructional gaps in adopted curriculum materials, or meeting the needs of high- and low-achieving students. Those are the things that teachers are “shopping” for.
Third, Fordham criticized some widely downloaded online materials for not having “clear directions.” Goldstein guesses that the thousands of teachers who have downloaded these very popular materials already have a workable set of directions in their heads, so a lack of explicit instructions wasn’t a problem.
Finally, Goldstein compares Fordham and other expert evaluators of curriculum materials to Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews of movies. There’s an important distinction, he says: “The Rotten Tomatoes reviews are not written by people who read the script; they’ve watched the movie. Consumer Reports does not rate a car solely by sitting inside it or studying its specs. Yes, they do that. But they also (and more importantly) actually drive the car. Yet, typically, curriculum reviewers simply read lessons and imagine them in their mind’s eyes. That is a very difficult way to gauge what happens in real life when that lesson is taught…
“I would urge curriculum reviewers to rate curricula by watching several teachers actually use it… Then we’d have the chance for a ‘Tomatometer Expert’ who is more trusted by teachers, because the feedback would be grounded in real life outputs (how the class actually goes) rather than inputs.” This, Goldstein believes, would allow for a gradual, trial-and-error improvement of classroom materials, which would, in turn, lead to “huge gains for students.”
“My favorite moments with my students happen one-on-one,” says Arkansas teacher Justin Minkel on this article in Education Week Teacher. To make the most of reading conferences, he suggests the following:
• Prioritize quality over quantity. Trying to rush through the entire class each week is a mistake, says Minkel. His routine is doing two or three conferences a day, so some students are seen every other week.
• Read with struggling readers more often. “Being equitable with our time doesn’t mean allotting it identically to each student,” he says. Minkel’s emergent readers have conferences almost every day.
• Begin with a compliment. Reading aloud is a “vulnerable process for many children,” he says. “They tend to be more receptive to feedback on their reading abilities if we begin that feedback with one or two of their strengths.”
• Have the student try out a new skill on the spot. “Sometimes, even when they’re eagerly nodding their heads, our students have no idea how to go off and do what we just told them to do,” he says. “It’s not enough to teach. We have to make sure the kids learn.”
• Check for comprehension. Some students can read with 100 percent accuracy but not understand what they just read. Simple, low-key questions – What happened in this story? What did you learn from this book? – tell whether the student is doing the “critical, invisible work of reading – visualizing, connecting, inferring, predicting,” says Minkel. This is especially important for English learners, and for all students it builds the bridge from thinking to talking and then to writing.
• Immediately put observations to work. Reading conferences give teachers invaluable information about each student’s fluency, comprehension, and strategies for figuring out tricky words, and it’s a shame if the data wind up in a manila folder and aren’t used. Minkel believes in applying insights on the spot – grabbing a whiteboard and helping a student see how to turn the word moon into main and mean, or asking, What happened so far? “The time we spend gathering data is only useful if we actually use the data to make kids better readers,” he says.
• Teach the reader, not just the reading. Minkel suggests using one-on-one time with students to check in with them on the bigger picture: How’s our class going for you? Any problems? How’s your baby sister doing? “Taking that half-minute to ask how students are doing can convey that we care about them as human beings, not just as a collection of reading levels and test scores,” he says. “Over time, these little human moments can strengthen, reinforce, or repair the relationship at the heart of teaching.”
“Six Tips for Making the Most of One-on-One Reading Conferences” by Justin Minkel in Education Week Teacher, February 25, 2020, https://bit.ly/2PCU2FO
In this Forbes article, author Natalie Wexler describes what she often sees in classrooms when the teacher tells students to turn and talk about something just taught:
In this Journal of Professional Capital and Community paper, Anne Podolsky and Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford University) and Tara Kini (Learning Policy Institute) report on their analysis of 30 studies of the relationship between years of teaching experience and teachers’ impact on student learning. Their conclusions:
• While teachers’ effectiveness grows most rapidly in the first few years in the classroom, it continues to improve into their second and even third decade of their careers. “The effects of teaching experience on student achievement are significant,” say Podolsky, Darling-Hammond, and Kini. And the compounded effect of having several accomplished, experienced teachers in successive years can reduce the achievement gap for low-income students and students of color.
• Two factors are especially important to accelerating teachers’ growth: working in a supportive and collegial professional climate (the principal plays a key role), and teaching at the same grade level for several years.
• Experienced teachers have a positive impact when they work closely with and mentor less-experienced colleagues. Conversely, the worst-case scenario is schools with large proportions of inexperienced teachers. Unfortunately, these are often the highest-poverty schools.
“Taken as a whole,” conclude Podolsky, Darling-Hammond, and Kini, “the findings of this review suggest that investments in building an experienced, highly-collaborative teacher workforce focused on continual learning are most likely to result in greater student learning, while, at the same time, reducing teacher attrition… Of course, not all experience is educative: some highly experienced teachers are not particularly effective or have retired on the job, and some novice teachers are dynamic and effective. However, by and large, a more-experienced teaching workforce offers numerous benefits to students and schools.”
a. A video on resolving racially tense situations – Check out this Howard Stevenson TED Talk https://thelionsstory.org/resources, which is on the website of a new Philadelphia-based organization, The Lion’s Story.
b. Online access to the Smithsonian – This link https://www.si.edu/openaccess provides close to 3 million 2-D and 3-D images from the Smithsonian’s 19 museums.
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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 50 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 HTML version as well.
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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
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
Language Arts
Literacy Today (formerly Reading Today)
Mathematics Teacher
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