The American Educational Research Journal had several interesting, LONG articles and I boiled them down to their essence.

I hope the new school year is shaping up well for you!

All the best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“Researchers say that the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives – combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every e-mail message – can deplete and demoralize you.”
Paul Hemp (see item #1)

“Ringing phones and e-mail alerts lower I.Q.s by 10 points.”
Paul Hemp (ibid.)

“Morale is a collective sense of friendliness, enthusiasm, and trust among staff members. They like each other, like their jobs, and help each other. They are proud of their school and feel a sense of accomplishment in their jobs… A healthy school is one in which harmony pervades relationships among students, teachers, and administrators as the organization directs its energies toward its mission. Healthy schools are high-achieving schools.”
Wayne Hoy and Anita Woolfolk in “Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy and the
Organizational Health of Schools” in Elementary School Journal, March 1993

“There has never been a better time to be a language teacher.”
Claire Kew and Arlene White (see item #7)

“Never do anything for students that they are thoroughly capable of doing for themselves.”
Fred Jones in Tools for Teachers, 2000
 

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1. Advice from the Business World on Handling E-mail

In this Harvard Business Review article, editor Paul Hemp offers advice on dealing with the distinctly modern dilemma – information overload. The problem started with Guttenberg’s moveable type, he says, and has worsened exponentially with subsequent communication technologies: “With the information floodgates open, content rushes at us in countless formats: Text messages and Twitter tweets on our cell phones. Facebook friend alerts and voice mail… Instant messages and direct-marketing sales pitches… Not to mention the ultimate killer app: e-mail…”
Researchers say that one-third of e-mail is considered unnecessary and (says Hemp) “the stress of not being able to process information as fast as it arrives – combined with the personal and social expectation that, say, you will answer every e-mail message – can deplete and demoralize you.” It can also addict you. A 2008 survey of e-mail users found that 60 percent checked e-mail in the bathroom and 15 percent had done so in church. Eleven percent had hidden from a spouse or loved one the fact that they were checking e-mail. The survey also found that 26 percent of e-mail users have considered implementing “e-mail bankruptcy” – deleting all messages and starting fresh.
All this can result in what author Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention” among today’s knowledge workers, some of whom notice “e-mail apnea” – jerky, uneven breathing as they tackle their e-mail. Children of addicted adults can become “BlackBerry orphans” desperately fighting to regain their parents’ attention (one child reportedly flushed a BlackBerry down the toilet). The impact on productivity has been documented. “Ringing phones and e-mail alerts lower I.Q. by 10 points,” reports Hemp – twice as much as smoking marijuana. One study found that when people are interrupted by an e-mail and then succumb to the temptation to look at other e-mails, surf the Net, etc., it’s 24 minutes before they refocus on what they were doing. What suffers most in this kind of highly distracted environment is creative thinking, demanding work, and decisiveness.
In a sidebar, Hemp summarizes the collective wisdom of time-management experts on how to deal with e-mail overload:
- Turn off automatic notification of incoming e-mail. E-mail is not a telephone!
- Establish specific times during the day when you can focus completely on checking and taking action on messages, and use that time to deal thoroughly with what’s come in.
- Don’t waste time sorting e-mails into folders or labeling them “unread” (one exception might be an “urgent action” folder, which needs to be checked religiously). If you have access to an inbox search engine, use it to do some preliminary sorting.
- If you know you can’t respond to a message for several days, acknowledge receipt with a quick e-mail giving a sense of when you’ll get to it.
- Establish common expectations on e-mail response-time with your main contacts (for example, within 24 hours).
- Make messages you send easy to digest by writing a clear subject line and starting the body of the e-mail with the key point – and keeping the message short (one rule of thumb is no more than five sentences). Use boldface headings, bullet points, and numbering to highlight action items.
- With very short messages, put the whole message in the subject line and end it with “eom” (end of message).
- Minimize back-and-forth by making a suggestion (“Should we meet at 10?”) rather than asking an open-ended question (“When should we meet?”).
- Minimize the use of “Reply to All” so you don’t burden colleagues with unnecessary e-mails (some companies have gone so far as to disable the Reply to All function on their e-mail systems).
- Finally, send fewer e-mails. Each e-mail message generates, on average, two responses – which you then have to read and deal with!

“Death by Information Overload” by Paul Hemp in Harvard Business Review, September 2009 (Vol. 87, #9, p. 82-89), no e-link available; Hemp is at phemp@harvardbusiness.org.

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2. How Distributed Leadership Affects Student Achievement

In this American Educational Research Journal article, professors Ronald Heck and Philip Hallinger report on a 4-year study of 195 elementary schools that was designed to see if distributed leadership had an impact on students’ math achievement. The researchers looked at three aspects of distributed leadership:
- Collaborative decision-making on educational improvement;
- Encouraging participation of staff and students in school governance and shared staff accountability for student learning;
- Involving stakeholders in evaluating the school’s academic development.
The study found that increases in these three factors produced improvements in a school’s academic capacity, namely:
- Emphasis on standards and implementation;
- Vision and goals clearly communicated to staff, parents, and students;
- Clear standards for student behavior, with effective follow-up on infractions;
- Effective staff evaluation and professional development so that teachers were instructionally competent and committed to the school’s purpose.
The study found that leadership and academic capacity were mutually reinforcing. In other words, say Heck and Hallinger, “in settings where people perceive stronger distributed leadership, schools appear better able to improve their academic capacity. Similarly, where academic capacity is perceived to be stronger at one point in time, this appears to be advantageous to the development of stronger leadership over time.”
The bottom line: improvements in the two mutually reinforcing areas – distributed leadership and building academic capacity – brought about significant gains in students’ math achievement. An increase of one standard deviation in academic capacity was associated with math achievement growth of almost 40 percent.
Heck and Hallinger report a slight advantage in the schools where principals were in place for an extended period of time. But they believe their study points away from the “heroic principal” model of school improvement and suggests an intriguing synergy between distributed leadership and academic capacity that leads to improved school climate and significant gains in student achievement.

“Assessing the Contribution of Distributed Leadership to School Improvement and Growth in Math Achievement” by Ronald Heck and Philip Hallinger in American Educational Research Journal, September 2009 (Vol. 46, #3, p. 659-689), no e-link available; Heck can be reached at rheck@hawaii.edu and Hallinger at Hallinger@gmail.com.

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3. What’s Most Important As Teachers Decide Where to Teach?

In this American Educational Research Journal article, Stanford professor Eileen Lai Horng reports that about 500,000 U.S. teachers leave their schools each year. About 16 percent of them are retiring, and the remainder move to a different school or leave the profession. Whatever the reason that teachers leave, vacancies affect students, and the burden falls disproportionately on low-income, minority, and low-achieving students, whose schools have much higher turnover than schools in more advantaged communities. The result of this dynamic, says Horng, is that experienced, high-quality teachers are unequally distributed among different types of schools. Poor, non-white, and low-achieving students are much more likely to have inexperienced and less-expert teachers.
To explore this phenomenon, Horng conducted a survey of 531 teachers in a California school district to find what’s most important when teachers decide where to teach – and when to leave. Her elaborate study yielded the following hierarchy of average importance for choosing a teaching position, from most to least important:
- School facilities
- Administrator support
- Class size
- Commute time
- Additional salary
- Resources for students
- Input on schoolwide decisions
- Student socio-economic status
- Student ethnicity
Horng draws the following conclusions from the data:
• Having clean and safe facilities, strong administrative support, and small class sizes are very important to teachers.
• Salary is not as important to teachers as working conditions, but more important than student characteristics.
• Working conditions are more powerful determinants of where teachers choose to work than student demographics. These two are hard to disentangle since there is a high correlation between inadequate working conditions and schools with greater concentrations of low-SES, minority students, but Horng believes that working conditions are more important. In other words, given the right working conditions, idealistic young teachers will choose to work in high-poverty, high-minority schools.
• Male and female teachers have slightly different preferences for workplace conditions, but generally, teachers’ preferences are more similar than dissimilar.
• Latino teachers are more likely to want to teach low-income students, students of color, and low-performing students compared to other teachers.

“Teacher Tradeoffs: Disentangling Teachers’ Preferences for Working Conditions and Student Demographics” by Eileen Lai Horng in American Educational Research Journal, September 2009 (Vol. 46, #3, p. 690-717), no e-link available; Horng is at ehorng@stanford.edu.

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4. Effective Ways to Communicate with Parents

In this Responsive Classroom Newsletter article (condensed in Education Digest), Carol Davis and Alice Yang suggest ways for teachers to stay in touch with their students’ families during the year:
• Positive-news phone calls – When parents get a call from a teacher, most assume it’s bad news, so making regular good-news calls is a winning strategy. Minneapolis primary-grade teacher Jeremy Nellis asks parents at the beginning of each year for the best time to call, and then starts a rotation of brief calls, updating parents on good things their children are doing. “If you decide to phone parents,” say Davis and Yang, “remember that whether you call every few weeks or every few months, spontaneously or according to a schedule, what matters most is the positive nature of the contact.”
• Periodic postcards – An alternative approach is buying a supply of postcards, having students address them to their parents, and sending them when there’s good news to share.
• Occasional e-mails – This medium isn’t appropriate for serious or confidential items, and not all parents have access to e-mail or appreciate getting electronic messages from teachers. But for those who do, not-too-frequent e-mails can be helpful, combined with other ways of communicating.
• A class newsletter – A weekly or bi-weekly paper bulletin sent home with students is a tried-and-true communication channel. One way to enrich it is including a section with a series of “Ask me about…” questions that parents can use to quiz their children about what they have been learning. This gets students to review important material, clues parents in on the curriculum, and initiates good parent-child conversations. “Ask me” also gets the teacher to think through the most important learning of the preceding week.
• “Exit passes” – Each day, or one day a week, students fill out a half-page sheet of paper with a choice of conversation prompts like “Today I was proud that I…” and take the sheet home to share with parents.
• Work folders – On a chosen day each week (Davis and Yang suggest Thursday), students take home a folder of work with a bright-colored sheet inside with a note from the teacher (“Crystal worked hard on her chapter book this week”). Parents can write a response (“Can you suggest some fun ways to practice multiplication with Jesse at home?”) and/or sign off.
• Pluses and a wish – Instead of a teacher note, students might fill out a form in their folder with quick reflections on the week’s work – two things they did well and one area for improvement. The teacher can add pluses and a wish, and so can parents after looking through the folder.
Davis and Yang close with some overall guidelines for teachers on the art of handling regular contact with parents:
- Jot observation notes on students during the week and draw on them to communicate with parents.
- Start small so you won’t get overwhelmed and quit, maybe contacting just a few parents at first.
- Work on finding positive things to say about all students, even the most challenging. Students don’t need to be perfect to earn a compliment from their teacher.
- Keep telling parents that you’re open to hearing from them about how to make things better for their children.

“Keeping in Touch with Families All Year Long” by Carol Davis and Alice Yang in Responsive Classroom Newsletter (#21, April 2009), condensed in Education Digest, September 2009 (Vol. 75, #1, p. 61-64); the complete article is available at
http://www.responsiveclassroom.org/newsletter/21_2nl_3.html

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5. A Balance of Rigor and Play in Kindergarten

In this report (condensed in Education Digest), Alliance for Childhood directors Edward Miller and Joan Almon say that many kindergarten students are getting too much test preparation and not enough unstructured time. The result is increased anger, aggression, and behavior problems. “Kindergarteners are now under great pressure to meet inappropriate expectations,” say Miller and Almon, “including academic standards that until recently were reserved for first grade. At the same time, they are being denied the benefits of play – a major stress reliever.”
But play isn’t just a matter of relieving stress, say the authors. It’s what children need to develop 21st-century skills. “How can we expect our children to thrive in the imagination economy of the future if we deny them the opportunity for play and creativity in kindergarten?” they ask.
Miller and Almon clarify that they are not advocating laissez-faire classrooms without active adult support and supervision. They believe there is a middle ground between chaos and a didactic, highly structured, teacher-dominated, scripted classroom that squashes children’s playfulness and creativity. “Kindergarteners need a balance of child-initiated play in the presence of engaged teachers and more focused experiential learning guided by teachers,” say Miller and Almon. Here are their main suggestions:
- Eliminate learning objectives that are developmentally inappropriate for kindergarten.
- Instead of standardized tests, which the authors say are prone to serious errors when given to children under eight, teachers should use observational and curriculum-embedded assessments.
- Make kindergarten classrooms rich in child-initiated activities so kids can explore the world through play – under the watchful eye of their teachers.
- Include focused learning objectives in these playful classrooms, with teachers guiding children’s development with rich, experiential activities.
- Give primary-grade teachers first-rate preparation in how to promote balanced development in their students and nurture children’s innate love of learning.

“Crisis in Kindergarten: Why Children Need Play in School” by Edward Miller and Joan Almon in Education Digest, September 2009 (Vol. 75, #1, p. 42-45). This is a condensation of the 2009 report of the same name prepared by the Alliance for Childhood, which is available at
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/kindergarten_report.pdf

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6. Which Is Best for ELLs, an English or a Spanish Reading Intervention?

In this American Educational Research Journal article, a team of six researchers looked at the achievement of 215 second-grade ELL students who had received a very intensive supplementary reading intervention a year earlier in first grade – some in Spanish and some in English. The special reading instruction experienced by students was characterized by:
- Explicit instruction in core reading skills;
- Systematic scaffolding to control for task difficulty;
- Individual and small-group instruction;
- Modeling;
- Teaching when and where to apply strategies;
- Ongoing and systematic feedback;
- Ongoing progress monitoring.
The purpose of the study was to find out whether the extra instruction still “stuck” after a year and whether getting the extra help in Spanish or English made a difference. The answers were yes and no: the positive effects from the intensive first-grade intervention were evident a year later (without additional help in second grade); and students in both the Spanish and English intervention groups benefited almost identically. It appears that the nature of the reading intervention (see the list above) is more important than the language in which it is conducted.
There is one caveat: although these students made significant gains in reading comprehension as a result of the first-grade intervention, their achievement was still not within the average range for second graders. As these students progress through school, say the authors, they will be required to read more and will have to grapple with additional amounts of inferential, expository, and narrative text, and it’s predictable that they will have difficulty. “Clearly, interventions that have a more significant impact on comprehension and broader language outcomes are desirable,” conclude the authors.

“One-Year Follow-Up Outcomes of Spanish and English Interventions for English Language Learners at Risk for Reading Problems” by Paul Cirino, Sharon Vaughn, Sylvia Linan-Thompson, Elsa Cardena-Hagan, Jack Fletcher, and David Francis in American Educational Research Journal, September 2009 (Vol. 46, #3, p. 744-781), no e-link available; Cirino can be reached at pcirino@uh.edu.

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7. Effective Use of Comics in World-Language Classrooms

“There has never been a better time to be a language teacher,” say Salisbury University professors Claire Kew and Arlene White in this article in The Language Teacher. They cite abundant, high-quality curriculum materials in a variety of media and tout a resource that is underused by many teachers, they say: comic books (a.k.a. graphic novels). They especially recommend the Tintin series (22 full-length adventures available in 91 languages) and the Asterix series (33 adventures in more than 100 languages). Kew and White suggest the following ways to use these and other high-quality comic books:
• Developing and reinforcing communication skills – Students can work in small groups to describe and answer questions on what’s happening frame by frame, take the role of a character, detail the sequence of events and cause and effect, and communicate with classmates in the target language.
• Teaching vocabulary and grammar in context – Students at different levels can answer questions on events, characters, and verb tenses.
• Teaching culture – “Comic books abound with cultural lessons waiting to be explored,” say Kew and White, both about the countries in which the adventures take place and European attitudes toward some of the places Tintin and Asterix visit.
• Teaching history – Both the Tintin and the Asterix books can be used to explore eras in history and the biases of the authors.
• Teaching geography – All but one of the Tintin books place the hero and his friends in different parts of the world – Peru, Scotland, Congo, Soviet Union, Tibet, the South Pacific, etc.
• Teaching reading strategies – The comic-book format, with information coming in bite-size chunks with plenty of illustrations, is less overwhelming to students and provides plenty of context clues. The fermata – dramatic pauses at the end of each page in a comic-book adventure – can be used to teach how an author chunks the story and builds suspense.
• Introducing literary analysis – Comic adventures use the same conventions as novels – exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement – and these can be used to introduce students to these elements in novels. Comics are also rich in similes and metaphors, onomatopoeia and symbolia, and character development.
• Providing fun and motivation and building students’ confidence – Comics engage students and provide a welcome change of pace.
As a follow-up to reading graphic novels in another language, students might create their own comics using websites Strip Generator – http://www.stripgenerator.com – and Comic Creator – http://www.readwritethink.org/MATERIALS/COMIC.
Kew and White also list websites with links to comic-book material in several other languages:
• German – Fix and Foxi by Rolf Kauka: http://www.kauka.de and the Goethe Institute in Stockholm: http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/com/enindex.htm.
• Spanish – Quino’s Mafalda, an Argentine comic: http://www.quino.com.ar , also http://www.patoruzu-web.com.ar.
• Japanese – Manga Museum: http://www.kyotomm.jp/HP/international/english.

“Thinking Outside the Bubble by Adding Comic Books to Your Language Curriculum” by Claire Kew and Arlene White in The Language Educator, August 2009 (Vol. 4, #4, p. 49-53), no e-link available

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8. Eight First-Rate New Children’s Books

In this Reading Today feature, Illinois children’s librarian (and Horn Book reviewer) Susan Dove Lempke recommends these new books:
• Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic, 2009), age 12 and up – The second book in a trilogy, this one features a strong young woman enmeshed in a corrupt and crumbling society that sends her on a victory tour after she wins an athletic competition.
• Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, 2009), age 6-10 – This picture book is not for preschoolers, says Lempke. “It’s a little spooky, a little creepy, and funny, too, as a man tells a young girl about his hair.”
• The Frogs and Toads All Sang by Arnold Lobel and Adrianne Lobel (HarperCollins, 2009), ages 3-6 – Arnold Lobel died in 1987, but this book, written before the Frog and Toad series and illustrated with his daughter’s help, has just been published.
• Hook by Ed Young (Neal Porter/Roaring Book, 2009), ages 4-8 – A young Native American boy finds an egg and puts it under a chicken, and the chick that emerges is something quite unexpected – an eagle!
• Minifred Goes to School by Mordicai Gerstein (HarperCollins, 2009) – A quirky tale about a very unusual family sending its beloved kitten to school. Minifred refuses to behave as she’s expected to.
• Amelia Bedelia’s First Day of School by Herman Parish (Greenwillow, 2009), ages 5-8 – The original Amelia Bedelia author’s nephew envisions Amelia as a child going to school for the first time, and making all kinds of mistakes.
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (Holt, 2009), ages 10-14 – Calpurnia is the only girl in a 1899 Texas family of seven, and this fictional account tells of her relationship with her grandfather as he shares his passion for science and with her mother, who tries to teach her the skills she believes a young lady should have.
• The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo (Candlewick, 2009), ages 8-12 – A “deeply moving novel,” says Lempke, about an orphan boy, an elephant, a countess, a beggar and his dog, a stonecutter, and other intertwined characters.

“Surprise! Life’s an Adventure. Read All About It!” by Susan Dove Lempke in Reading Today, August/September 2009 (Vol. 27, #1, p. 24), no e-link available

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9. Short Items: a. Teacher collaboration website; b. RTI websites; c. World languages websites;

a. Teacher collaboration website – Better Lesson is a new website aimed at making it easier for teachers to share curriculum and ideas. Similar to Facebook, each user has his or her own profile (with general information, courses taught, and curriculum overviews), can join groups and networks, and can “colleague” others and then keep up through a news feed. Teachers can upload their 180-day curriculum, showing their supplies, texts, related lessons, and exchange digital files including video, audio, and images. Members have a rating chart to show how many people have downloaded each lesson plan, do key-word searches to find information on specific topics, and click “add to my curriculum.” There’s also a state standards tagging tool so teachers can tag and search for files that use specific standards.
Better Lesson’s business plan is “freemium” – offering free services while charging for advanced or special features. It’s still in beta and adding ten select schools to build up content and get feedback this year. Check it out at http://www.betterlesson.org .

b. RTI websites – The National Center on Learning Disabilities and several other groups have set up the Response to Intervention Action Network to support RTI in schools:
http://www.rtinetwork.org. In addition, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs has created the National Center on Response to Intervention with evaluations of specific products and tools: http://www.rti4success.org.

Spotted in “A Rapid Response” by Joetta Sack-Min in American School Board Journal, September 2009 (Vol. 196, #9, p. 37-39)

c. World languages websites – The UCLA Language Materials Project has launched a new resource for elementary and secondary teachers of less-commonly taught world languages, complete with lesson plans and other materials: http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/K-12.
• Jeopardy creator – This free website allows teachers to create a customized Jeopardy template: http://jeopardylabs.com.
• African languages – The African Language Materials Archive focuses on the languages of Africa: http://alma.matrix.msu.edu.
• The e-Arabic Learning Portal is a reference and access point for learning Arabic:
http://www.e-arabic.com.
• The news in Latin – Current news stories and features in clear and accurate Latin:
http://www.scorpiomartianus.com.

Spotted in Web Watch in The Language Educator, August 2009 (Vol. 4, #4, p. 54-55)
 

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