Two of this week's quotes come from a searing New Yorker article on New York City's "rubber room." It's not the kind of piece I summarize in the Memo, but if you have time, I highly recommend that you read it.

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

My best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
President Barack Obama in a March 2009 speech, quoted in “The Rubber Room: The
Battle over New York City’s Worst Teachers” by Steven Brill in The New Yorker,
Aug. 31, 2009, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill?yrail

“Any human-resources professional will tell you that rating only 1.8 percent of any workforce unsatisfactory is ridiculous. If you look at the upper quartile and the lower quartile, you know that those people are not interchangeable.”
Dan Weisberg of the New Teacher Project, quoted in the article above

“Over the course of their careers, teachers should have opportunities to take on more complex assignments that don’t necessarily take them out of the classroom. And they should be compensated for taking on expanded roles…”
Laura Vargas (see item #7))

“Only by understanding how we’re seen can we make sure we’re sending the right signals.”
Sam Gosling (see item #1)

“I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own.”
A Georgia middle-school student after reading a Toni Morrison novel (see item #3)

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1. Why People Misunderstand Us

In this thoughtful Psychology Today article, University of Texas/Austin psychologist Sam Gosling explores why we sometimes see ourselves differently than others do. “Part of the discrepancy arises because the outsider’s perspective affords information you yourself miss,” says Gosling, “like the fact that it looks like you’re scowling when you’re listening, or that you talk over other people… In some areas, we know ourselves better than others do. But in other areas, we’re so biased by our need to see ourselves in a good light that we become strangers to ourselves… Only by understanding how we’re seen can we make sure we’re sending the right signals.”
Gosling suggests four categories for sorting what’s known and unknown about a person:
• Bright spots – Things that are clear to the person and to others, for example, political views or being very talkative. There are few mysteries and misperceptions on this one.
• Hidden spots – Things unknown to the person and to others, for example, a man’s fierce ambition being driven by the need to disprove his parents’ belief that he would never amount to anything. These usually remain a mystery to everyone.
• Personal spots – Things known only to the person, for example, getting anxious in crowds (sweaty palms and elevated heartbeat). We tend to overestimate the extent to which other people can “read” our internal state – this has been called the “illusion of transparency” – and we also overestimate how much others notice and evaluate about us – the “spotlight effect.” Simine Vazire of Washington University explains, “If you’re quiet at a party, people don’t know if it’s because you’re arrogant and you think you’re better than everyone else or because you’re shy and don’t know how to talk to people. But you know, because you know your thoughts and feelings.” What’s hardest for others to scope out is what’s going on inside our heads: anxiety, optimism, pessimism, daydreaming, how happy we are.
• Blind spots – Even though we’ve known ourselves our whole lives, we’re biased in how we see our intelligence, honesty, attractiveness, and body language. “When it comes to traits that matter to our self-esteem,” says Gosling, “we tend to have positive delusions – meaning on these dimensions, others see us more accurately than we see ourselves… You rarely get to participate in gossip sessions about yourself, and you have only limited access to how people react to you and what they say.” This is especially true when people have negative opinions of us, since they tend to shy away from giving us feedback on those. What’s interesting is that we often have the information needed to make more accurate judgments – but don’t use it. For example, people aren’t good at judging how long a romantic relationship will last, but when asked how satisfied they are with the relationship, the answer correlates closely with how long it will endure. Friends are also good at predicting the life of a romance.
Personal spots and blind spots give rise to situations where people misunderstand us, for example, seeing us as cold and unfriendly when we’re feeling shy, or flirtatious when we’re trying to be friendly, or depressed when we’re just weary. “Being misunderstood is largely a problem of lack of information,” says Gosling, “not communicating effectively with people around you through your words and body language… You may know you’re less reckless than you used to be, more talkative than your friends, and less productive than you might wish. But such information about your past, your friends, and your wishes is not easily accessible to others.”
This kind of misunderstanding happens less often to people who are extroverted, warm, consistent, and emotionally stable. These traits are known as “amplifiers” because they make the person an open book and enhance the expression of other traits. “Blirtatiousness” – the tendency to respond quickly and effusively to others – is another trait that makes it easy to read a person. Introverted people need to work harder to avoid misperceptions and misunderstanding.
One strategy for them, says Gosling, is to say and do more. “Even introverts can train themselves to communicate more through their words – telling people directly what they like and how they feel.” To do this effectively, we need to have a more accurate sense of how other people see us. Sometimes we stumble across information – overhearing a conversation or receiving a forwarded e-mail intended for others. But most of the time we don’t know, and not knowing has consequences. “Almost every decision others make about you, from promotions to friendships to marriages, is based on how people see you,” says Gosling. “So even if you never learn what you’re really like, learning how others perceive you is a worthwhile goal.”
A second strategy is to ask others directly about their perceptions of us. “You’ll need to get feedback from multiple people,” says Gosling, “your friends, coworkers, family, and if you can, your enemies.” Anonymity is important; the Facebook application Honesty Box and YouJustGetMe are ways to do this. Watching a videotape of yourself (participating in a meeting, for example) is another way to see yourself through others’ eyes.
Gosling concludes with a sidebar on the most frequently misunderstood personality types:
• The shy extrovert – Some people who love being around others are anxious among strangers, and are misunderstood as cold, aloof, and stuck-up – especially if they are attractive. The best strategy for shy extroverts is challenging the mistakes they know people will make, for example, saying “If I seem unfriendly, it’s not because I don’t like you; it’s because I’m shy.”
• The bubbly introvert – Some outwardly lively, vivacious, cheerful people are actually desperate for time by themselves. “Having good social skills isn’t the same thing as wanting to be around people all the time,” says Gosling. The best strategy for bubbly introverts is to turn down some invitations to preserve enough solitary time.
• The accidental flirt – These people want to be friendly but come across as friendly. They need to dial back the touching and eye contact, says Gosling, and mention a significant other.

“Mixed Signals” by Sam Gosling in Psychology Today, September/October 2009 (Vol. 42, #5, p. 62-71), http://www.psychologytoday.com/magazine

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2. Procrastination – the Triumph of Impulsivity Over Future Benefits

In this Psychology Today article, Steven Kotler reports that until recently, there was no clear winner in the debate over why people put things off. Perfectionism? Anxiety? Adolescent rebelliousness? Self-handicapping caused by fear of failure? Thrill-seeking (I do my best work under pressure)? However, a recent meta-analysis by Piers Steel of the University of Calgary may have resolved the issue. Whether we procrastinate, says Steel, depends on the interaction of four factors:
- E – the expectation or confidence that we will be successful at a given task;
- V – the value of the task; how much fun it is now and what it means to us long-term;
- D – our ability to delay gratification;
- I – our impulsiveness.
Steel combined these variables into an equation, with U standing for Utility: U = E x V/I x D, in other words, our likeliness to procrastinate depends on our confidence multiplied by the fun/importance of the task, divided by how badly we need the reward for finishing, multiplied by how easily we are distracted. “The largest number in the equation is always going to be impulsivity,” says Steel. “There’s a huge correlation between procrastination and impulsivity.” He believes this is because human brains evolved to respond to immediate stimuli in hunter-gatherer days when “food was hard to come by, meat kept for three days, and danger lurked around every corner.”
“Under these circumstances,” says Kotler, “a third piece of chocolate cake now trumps a trim figure 10 years down the road. E-mail, voicemail, video-on-demand, Web surfing, and the like.” This is not a good formula for buckling down to work! Canadian psychologist Thomas Pychyl adds one more element: “Our self-regulation fails because we’re not able to manage our emotions. We give in to feeling good.”
Taking all this into account, Pychyl has the following suggestions for combating procrastination:
• Make future goals vivid. “Time travel” to form concrete mental images of the future, imagining the completion of our task as if it were happening in the present.
• Short-term gain, long-term pain. When a task makes us feel anxious and overwhelmed, the tendency is to seek immediate emotional relief, give in to feeling good, and put off the task till tomorrow. It’s important to realize that we can have negative emotions without acting on them. “Acknowledge the negative emotions, but get started anyway,” advises Pychyl. “Progress on a goal provides the motivation for another step forward. Just get started; the negative emotions will pass.”
• Reduce uncertainty. We’re less likely to tackle unstructured, vague projects about which we are unsure and lack confidence.
• Reduce distractions. “Shut off your e-mail, isolate yourself as much as you can, and make sure the environment around you is working to strengthen your willpower and focus,” says Pychyl.
• Make the most of your willpower. It’s like a muscle, says Pychyl – our willpower can get tired, and when it does, we lose our ability to regulate our behavior. “One immediate method to strengthen your resolve… is to remind yourself of your values,” he says. “This process of self-affirmation bolsters our flagging reserves of willpower.” Meditation can also help us calm down and focus.

“Escape Artists” by Steven Kotler in Psychology Today, September/October 2009 (Vol. 42, #5, p. 72-79) http://www.psychologytoday.com/magazine

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3. A Georgia Teacher Takes the Plunge for Reading Workshop

In this front-page New York Times story, Motoko Rich reports on a teacher’s decision to begin using “reading workshop” to teach literature in her Georgia middle school. Lorrie McNeill was inspired by a 2008 Nancy Atwell workshop she attended in a school in Maine – and deeply troubled that her low-income students were so rigidly supervised and had so few choices. “It makes me sad that my students can’t have this every day,” she said, comparing them with the Maine students with whom Atwell was working. “These children are so fortunate.”
During the 2008-09 school year, McNeill stopped teaching all-class novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Diary of Anne Frank, The Giver, and Huckleberry Finn, and got her students choosing from an array of books in her newly purchased classroom library – books like James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, several novels by Walter Dean Myers and Sarah Dessen, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. McNeill began classes with a discussion of a poem (for example, Mother and Son by Langston Hughes was used to explore the concepts of allegory and foreshadowing), gave sales pitches for books, had her students select what interested them, allotted 30 minutes for independent reading, had students discuss books individually with her and their classmates, and had them keep detailed journals about their reading (“I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own,” wrote one student after reading Morrison’s book).
Critics of reading workshop say the all-class-novel approach exposes all students to high-quality literature, draws out the themes in a classic novel, allows for the study of the craft of writing at its best, builds a shared literary culture among students, and prepares them for standardized tests. It’s very hard for a teacher to keep up with a roomful of children reading different books, say the critics, and students in these classrooms are deprived of the insights that come from all-class discussions and exposure to a common body of knowledge and literary classics that students would not choose on their own. “What child is going to pick up Moby-Dick?” asks NYU professor Diane Ravitch. “Kids will pick things that are trendy and popular. But that’s what you should do in your free time.”
But reading workshop advocates say the class-novel approach forces many students to read books that are above their current reading level and subjects students to books that bore them. Better to let students choose books that can help build a lifetime love of reading, they say. Some researchers, including John Guthrie, formerly of the University of Maryland, point to studies on the benefits of choice. Catherine Snow of the Harvard Graduate School of Education says that if the goal is creating lifelong readers, letting students choose makes perfect sense. “As adults,” she says, “as good readers, we don’t all read the same thing, and we revel in our idiosyncrasies as adult readers, so kids should have some of the same freedom.” Some educators advocate a hybrid approach – requiring a few classics for all-class discussion and giving students choices for additional reading.
In O’Neill’s classroom, some students started the year choosing books that were too easy, and she prodded them to make more challenging and interesting picks. One student who thought Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was too challenging ended up writing an enthusiastic six-page entry about it in her journal. Students who had written very little the year before went on for pages and pages about their books. After reading It’s Kind of a Funny Story, a novel by Ned Vizzini about a depressed teen who ends up in a psychiatric ward, one girl said, “After reading this book, I have decided that I want to be a psychologist. I think people that are labeled ‘crazy’ aren’t crazy at all; they just see the world differently than others. They don’t really know how to express it correctly so nobody else knows how to accept it so they lock them away in a psych ward.” As the year progressed, McNeill was encouraged. “I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” she says, “whereas when I do To Kill a Mockingbird, I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”
O’Neill’s rookie year with reading workshop was not without its disappointments. One student plagiarized a journal entry (without even bothering to remove “Horn Book, starred review” from the printout he pasted into his notebook) and was required to start all over. Several students, mostly boys, stubbornly refused to read books beyond their comfort level. Some students had difficulty writing journal entries even about the low-level books they were reading. In English department meetings, O’Neill’s fellow teachers listened politely to her enthusiasm for reading workshop but kept teaching literature the old way. One suggested that O’Neill was able to make the method work only because she was teaching “gifted” students.
But in May of 2009, McNeill was vindicated: on state tests, 15 of her 18 eighth graders scored at the highest level (as seventh graders, only four had done so). Eight of her 13 seventh graders scored at the highest level. One girl’s parent said, “She never really just read herself for enjoyment until she took your class.” O’Neill boxed up To Kill a Mockingbird and other class novels (except for a few copies for her class library) and made a firm commitment to reading workshop.

“Students Get New Reading Assignment: Pick Books You Like” by Motoko Rich in the New York Times, Aug. 30, 2009 (p. 1, 18, 19)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/books/30reading.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Students%20Get%20New%20Reading%20Assignment&st=cse

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4. Ten Ways to Get Students Involved

In this Edutopia article, consultant Tristan de Frondeville presents ten ways to maximize student engagement:
• Start with an effective warm-up. One strategy is to have students work in teams of three finding all the mistakes in material you’ve written on the board or projected on a screen. When students are finished, ask the team that signals it’s found the most mistakes to describe them, with other teams chiming in with disagreements and additions.
• Use movement. For primary-grade students, this might be hand-clapping and foot-stomping to accompany a chanted verse or a set of math facts. For middle grades, you can model a rhythm with finger-snapping and hand-clapping, which students echo back, challenging them to pay attention and follow your lead. For high-school students (or any level), offer a seventh-inning stretch or the cross crawl (marching in place, raising knees high, reaching across to touch the left knee with the right hand, then vice-versa).
• Explicitly teach collaboration. “Doing project learning and other team-based work without prior training can lead to lots of dead time,” says de Frondeville. One way to prevent this is to give students practice working as a team, for example, creating teams, giving each one a pair of scissors, two sheets of paper, ten paper clips, and a 10-inch piece of tape, and challenging them to build the tallest free-standing tower they can in twenty minutes – and then debriefing.
• Use quickwrites. To settle kids down after active teamwork or recapture their attention when things are dragging, have students do a quick journal-writing assignment. Primary-grade students might answer questions like: What was most interesting about ----? What was most confusing? What was boring about ----? What did ---- make you think of in your life? Middle-grade students might respond to: Summarize what you have heard. Predict an exam or quiz question I could ask you on this material. Defend one of the positions taken during the discussion we just had. To avoid getting overwhelmed correcting quickwrites, de Frondeville recommends having students mark in green one particular piece of writing they want you to be sure to read.
• Demand attention for instructions. Be sure students are totally focused when you give directions, says de Frondeville, and simulate the routine five times at the beginning of the year. KIPP schools drill students on their SSLANT expectations and expect total compliance: Smile, Sit up, Listen, Ask if you have a question, Nod when you understand, and Track the speaker.
• Cold call. To keep all students on their toes, write each student’s name on a Popsicle stick and pull one from a cup each time you ask a question. De Frondeville adds that for the “fairness cup” to work, there must be a range of questions and a class climate in which students feel they can take risks without fear of being put down or teased.
• Make every student think. Regularly pose questions to which every student must come up with at least one answer (for example, How many ways can you figure out 54 – 17?), and then use a silent method (fingers on chest, for example) for students to let you know how many they’ve come up with.
• Avoid dead-time by using activities that require minimal supervision. For example, have students do a quick-write or pair up and quiz each other on vocabulary words while you pass out papers, handle an unexpected visitor, or work with students who didn’t do their homework.
• Shift between all-class, small-group, and individual teaching formats. For example, prepare students for a new topic by having them pair up, share their prior knowledge, and come up with four questions they have about the subject. Shift from lecture to quick-write, have students pair-share with a classmate, and then come together for a full-class discussion.
• Reduce dependency. One way is the rule of “Ask three before me” – students are expected to get help from all the members of their team before turning to you. If a student asks a question, this rule can be reinforced by asking if another person on the team knows the answer.

“Your Attention, Please!” by Tristan de Frondeville in Edutopia, September 2009 (Vol. 5, #4, p. 42-43), http://www.edutopia.org/magazine.

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5. A Cautionary Note on Two-Way Bilingual Classes

In this thought-provoking article in TESOL Quarterly, University of Texas/Austin professor Deborah Palmer explores a tricky topic: the tendency of middle-class white students to dominate classroom discourse in dual-language immersion programs. Two-way bilingual schools seek to teach both languages (usually Spanish and English) to all students, helping minority language speakers maintain their primary language while learning English and offering an enrichment “foreign” language experience to English-speaking students in the same classroom. “Is it possible to accomplish both goals at once,” asks Palmer, “or will teacher and program inevitably end up serving the needs of dominant English-speaking children first?” The second outcome is most likely when (as is often the case) English speakers come from highly educated middle-class families and Spanish speakers come mostly from working-class immigrant families.
After closely observing a second-grade classroom for a full school year, Palmer concludes that “middle-class English-speaking students appeared to vie for the floor, to push for attention, and to assert their status as English speakers, or as middle-class children. At times, they dominated the discourse and drew the teacher’s attention away from other students; they made themselves and their needs difficult to ignore. They appeared to play a role in encouraging the use of more English both in and out of the classroom.” This tilted the classroom away from Spanish learning and detracted from Spanish-dominant classmates’ opportunities to engage with class material.
The teachers who worked with the class handled this dynamic differently, Palmer observes; a science teacher who taught multiple classrooms within the school had an especially hard time balancing participation. “It appears that if a teacher is aware and proactive in confronting English dominance head-on and teaching children to interact appropriately in diverse multilingual academic settings,” says Palmer, “this can help tip the balance toward more positive and less negative impacts. Teachers must be consciously aware of the role that power can play in classroom talk. Even as they work to develop the bilingual competencies of all their students, they must remember to scaffold their language appropriately throughout the day. During English instruction, this means never ignoring the needs of Spanish-speaking students and actively enforcing equitable linguistic exchanges. During Spanish instruction, this likewise means giving the English speakers the help they require without watering down instruction. It means finding ways to offer Spanish speakers the space and guidance to show their skills as learners and knowers in the classroom. These are not easy feats. But if teachers do not attempt them, bilingual classrooms that include English-dominant students may be at risk of teaching language-minority students that they are second-class citizens whose needs are subordinated to dominant-English speakers. If teachers can achieve them, these same students have the best chance to join their English-speaking peers to become learners and leaders and build a multilingual, multicultural future.”

“Middle-Class English Speakers in a Two-Way Immersion Bilingual Classroom: ‘Everybody Should Be Listening to Jonathan Right Now…’” by Deborah Palmer in TESOL Quarterly, June 2009 (Vol. 43, #2, p. 177-202), no e-link available

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6. Making Civics Education Stick

Two-thirds of Americans are unable to name all three branches of the U.S. government, reports Mary Ann Zehr in this Education Week article. Only 32 percent of high-school seniors scored Proficient or Advanced on the 2006 NAEP civics test, and in 2009, a mere 3.5 percent of Arizona high school students passed a citizenship test designed for immigrants to the U.S. Were things better in the past? “Some people start with the story line ‘Back in the day we used to do civics and now we don’t,’” says Peter Levine, a Tufts University civics expert, “and it’s not really true.” Civics courses have been a fixture in the curriculum for more than 80 years, but for some reason, students aren’t retaining key information.
Is the problem that insufficient time is being devoted to civics education? Some educators blame No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on reading and math for reduced emphasis on history and civics, but Zehr reports that cutbacks were occurring before NCLB. Lack of materials don’t appear to be the problem, since Congress funds textbooks and professional development every year, sometimes overriding the President’s cuts. Then why are many Americans so ignorant about basic civics concepts? “If you ask thoughtful people, ‘Shouldn’t schools prepare students to be thoughtful participants in democracy?,’ everyone thinks so,” says Lee Arbetman of Street Law, a Maryland-based organization promoting civics education, “but we haven’t connected the dots.”
The real problem appears to be the instructional methods used in civics courses. Some educators are casting about for ways to jazz up the subject, including the use of technology (computer games and websites) and celebrities promoting civics education, including Richard Dreyfuss, former U.S. Senator Bob Graham, and former Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter. O’Connor recently made a pitch on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart for interactive games about the judicial system – see http://www.ourcourts.org. “As a member of the U.S. Supreme Court,” she said, “I was very much aware of criticisms of judges by some members of Congress and state legislators – expression by some people that judges were just secular, activist humanists who were trying to impose their will on the people… If people don’t know the system of government we have, about the three branches of government and what citizens are expected to do, we won’t succeed.”

“Celebrities Lend Weight to Promote Civics Education” by Mary Ann Zehr in Education Week, Aug. 26, 2009 (Vol. 29, #1, p. 8), article available to subscribers only; to see Justice O’Connor on The Daily Show, go to http://www.edweek.org/go/civics (free registration required).

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7. The Impact of Good Teaching

In this ASCD INFObrief article, Laura Varlas quotes three arresting statistics on good teaching:
- Students who have highly effective teachers for three years in a row will score 50 percentile points higher on achievement tests than students who have the least effective teachers three years in a row (Sanders and Rivers, 1996).
- Giving a class of disadvantaged students five consecutive years of instruction by highly effective teachers could close the achievement gap between those students and privileged peers (Hanushek, Kain, O’Brien, and Rivkin, 2005).
- The odds of a child being assigned highly effective teachers five years in a row are one in 17,000 (Walsh, 2007).
Vargas goes on to make the case for improved professional development and a career ladder for teachers. “Over the course of their careers,” she writes, “teachers should have opportunities to take on more complex assignments that don’t necessarily take them out of the classroom. And they should be compensated for taking on expanded roles…”
In a sidebar within this article, Vargas suggests criteria for teacher evaluation systems, including:
- Evaluation should “differentiate levels of performance, tightly align feedback with professional development, and demonstrate that teacher performance is validated by student performance.”
- “Teacher evaluations should have meaningful summative (quality assurance) and formative (professional development) functions.”
- “Evaluation systems should drive effective instruction, not just measure it.”

“Highly Effective Teachers” and “Using Teacher Evaluations to Drive Effective Instruction” in ASCD INFObrief, September 2009 (Vol. 15, #3, p. 2-3),
http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/infobrief/vol15/issue3/toc.aspx.

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8. Short items: a) Hans Rosling does it again; b) Five videos on classroom management

a. Hans Rosling Does It Again – Here is another in a series of TED lectures by Swedish professor Hans Rosling making use of a dynamic PowerPoint presentation.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state.html

b. Five videos on Classroom Management – Check out these video clips of favorite classroom management techniques: http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-management-video.

“Your Attention, Please!” by Tristan de Frondeville in Edutopia, September 2009 (Vol. 5, #4, p. 42-43), http://www.edutopia.org/magazine.

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