I have the February issue of Educational Leadership, which looks great, but I'm still holding off on summarizing articles because of the continuing copyright disagreement with ASCD.

All the best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“When classroom lessons and experiments are carefully scripted in advance, students miss the opportunity to orient themselves intellectually to new spaces. They become good at following directions but less skilled at moving effectively through the fluid, ambiguous spaces where real problems, issues, and new ideas are forged.”
Pat Clifford and Susan Marinucci (see item #1)

“The aim of liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them find ways to reorient themselves.”
A Harvard faculty committee on the purpose of education, quoted by David Brooks in
his New York Times column, “What Life Asks of Us”, Jan. 27, 2009 (p. A29)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/opinion/27brooks.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=What%20Life%20Asks%20of%20Us,%20David%20Brooks&st=cse

“This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.”
Maria Kefalas (see item #6)

“Punishment has rarely changed student behavior… It isn’t possible to punish students into wanting to stay in school and strive for academic achievement.”
Randy Spark in “Doing Discipline Differently” in Principal Leadership, January 2009
 

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1. A Spontaneous Fifth-Grade Inquiry Project

In this intriguing Harvard Educational Review article, Galileo Educational Network researchers Pat Clifford and Susan Marinucci describe how a science inquiry project blossomed in a fifth-grade classroom in Canada when students returned from the 2004-05 winter break full of curiosity about the massive tsunami that had just struck Indonesia and the surrounding area. Why are Canadian soldiers delivering desalinization equipment to the survivors? students wanted to know. Why can’t people drink salt water?
The teacher picked up on their curiosity and spent hours tracking down information about a Johns Hopkins University scientist who, a newspaper article said, had invented a way to purify water in one step using a new powder (PUR) and a simple filter (a T-shirt would do). Students were fascinated. If adding one substance to water would contaminate it, why would adding another substance purify it? And would adding PUR take out the salt?
The class had a project that students and their teacher genuinely cared about and they began to work together to get a sample of the PUR powder from the scientist and get to the bottom of their questions about salt water. The teacher became a learner alongside students and revealed an important lesson: sometimes the teacher doesn’t know all the answers, and sometimes you have to reach out to the broader world to find important information. The teacher didn’t know what to expect. “When a question is real and when people take it up in serious ways, they must be prepared for the unexpected,” say Clifford and Marinucci. That’s challenging for teachers who are used to being in control of their classrooms and working toward set objectives and pre-written tests, projects, and reports.
The desalinization/PUR project led students to think like chemists, even to the point of borrowing equipment from the local high school. They explored condensation, changing states of matter, suspension, precipitation, dissolution, chemical reactions, and the crystalline structure of salt. They learned that human blood is an aqueous saline solution and humans can tolerate only so much additional salt. In the end, students found out that PUR powder didn’t remove salt from sea water; it only removed bacteria and other contaminants through filtration. They explored other questions: Why does water become contaminated after a natural disaster? How clean is clean enough? How is water in the local community purified, and how clean is it? When and how does E. coli make its way into water systems and what can be done about that? Why do people in this city, with one of the cleanest water supplies in North America, pay more for a liter of bottled water than for a liter of gasoline?
The scientist at Johns Hopkins responded and sent an envelope with samples of PUR powder. To students’ consternation, Homeland Security had opened the envelope with a neat five-centimeter incision to see if it contained a dangerous substance. “Hey! Someone opened our stuff!” cried one student.
“In genuine inquiry,” comment Clifford and Marinucci, “the topic itself matters far less than the attitude kids and teachers take toward it. If they are moved to ask why, to wonder who thinks otherwise, to explore what other strange things just might be connected to this one little problem, then they are in an inquiry space… Whether provoked by the world itself or by something intriguing you didn’t even know you could be interested in, the end result of the arrival of a great question is the same: both students and teachers get hooked and can’t let go.” The authors contrast this kind of “public” inquiry to the usual classroom testing dynamic, where each student has to show mastery individually, without help from others. “Genuine inquiries demand that understanding develops in a public space in which each person’s abilities, interests, perspectives, and talents help move everyone else’s thinking forward,” they say. “It is a knowledge-building space in which ideas are at the center, and each individual has commitment to producing the collective, evolving understanding.”
The authors contrast this fervid, all-class process to conventional classroom “inquiry” – what’s been called the Initiation, Response, Evaluation (IRE) cycle. The teacher asks a question, a student is chosen to answer, and the teacher decides whether the answer is right or wrong. Some teachers try questioning in a way that will elicit higher-order thinking, give extra wait-time for a reluctant student to answer, or redirect the question if a student gives only part of the answer (“Can anyone expand on that?”). But Clifford and Marinucci say this dynamic has real limitations. Students know that the teacher knows the answer to every question. “The question is not posed as an invitation to investigate further,” they say. “It’s a test.” Students respond quickly and are evaluated on the spot. Most classroom questioning is aimed at checking for information recall and seeing if students are paying attention. That’s not real inquiry.
Clifford and Marinucci are clearly impressed with this teacher’s ability to seize a teachable moment and create a genuinely open-ended, highly involving inquiry project. “When classroom lessons and experiments are carefully scripted in advance,” they write, “students miss the opportunity to orient themselves intellectually to new spaces. They become good at following directions but less skilled at moving effectively through the fluid, ambiguous spaces where real problems, issues, and new ideas are forged. Inquiry demands an orientation to what matters: What, as far as we can tell, is crucial? What’s just noise? How can we tell the difference?”
As this project unfolded, the teacher was asked by a colleague, “So where exactly does desalinization fit into the grade 5 curriculum?” It wasn’t there explicitly (and PUR powder certainly wasn’t, since it had just been invented). But the teacher was able to justify the unit using Alberta’s curriculum requirements in inquiry and classroom chemistry, including this item: “General Outcome 5-7: Students will describe the properties of various household liquids and solids and interpret their interactions.” As she responded to the unexpected questions after the tsunami, she was on solid ground – blessedly free of two common misconceptions about curriculum: that district curriculum expectations set the ceiling, not the floor, for student understanding; and that textbooks are the curriculum.
Clifford and Marinucci hammer the point home, saying that “textbooks and teacher manuals are not a prescription for what can emerge in a classroom. Grade 2 students become immersed in ancient Mayan ruins; learners debate the causes of homelessness; a class uses the myth of Atlantis to explore questions arising from the construction of the Palm Islands in Dubai; the need to make a film version of Frankenstein erupts in the middle of a science study.” When teachers encounter moments like these and ask, “Is it in the curriculum?”, the authors suggest they should look at the curriculum and find a legitimate way to make it happen.

“Testing the Waters: Three Elements of Classroom Inquiry” by Pat Clifford and Susan Marinucci in Harvard Educational Review, Winter 2008 (Vol. 78, #4, p. 675-688), no e-link available
 

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2. Important Caveats on Classroom “Clickers”

Several letters in last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education took issue with a December 5, 2008 CHE critique of classroom “clickers” (wireless audience response devices to get real-time feedback on student understanding). Clickers, says Stephanie Chasteen of the University of Colorado/Boulder, “offer an easy, cost-effective way to engage students in the material by (1) asking students a question that’s challenging, but not too hard; (2) giving them adequate time to discuss the question with their neighbors before they give their final vote; and (3) asking students to explain their answers, including why the wrong answers are wrong.” She cites studies showing an increase in student learning in clicker classes compared with traditional lectures, but says that the learning boost actually comes from actively discussing classroom content with other students before “voting” with the clickers. Just asking quiz-like questions with clickers doesn’t achieve the full benefit.
“Obviously, teachers don’t need clickers in order to ask students thoughtful questions and have them discuss the answers with each other,” says Chasteen. “But clicker technology itself provides several key benefits that promote active engagement.”
- They require every student in the class to focus on a question and commit to an answer.
- They give students the protection of anonymity; how many would raise their hands for a different answer when most of their classmates had chosen another one?
- Once students have heard the correct answer in a traditional call-on-one-student format, their own reasoning process is short-circuited. Retroactively deciding that you would have answered correctly is not nearly as rigorous as deciding on your own answer first.
- The graphic display of the whole class’s responses gives real-time, systematic information to the teacher and students on the thought processes that are going on in the class and the true level of student understanding. This makes immediate correction, elucidation, and reinforcement possible in a way that just won’t happen when students raise their hands for correct and incorrect responses.

In another letter, Douglas Duncan, also at the University of Colorado/Boulder, emphasizes the importance of using clickers in conjunction with peer discussions and giving students a clear understanding of what clickers are all about. “When instructors ask low-level memorization questions and don’t explain why they are using clickers, students call them dumb and worthless,” he writes. “…When instructors use clickers as part of peer instruction and explain to students that they will attend class more, work harder, learn more, and be rewarded for that, peer instruction and clickers produce learning gains… There is over 10 years’ experience and much published research on the effect of having students discuss challenging conceptual questions during a lecture rather than simply listening and taking notes. The results are unequivocal: Students with active minds learn significantly more...”
What about students holding up colored cards, a low-tech way of accomplishing the same display of student understanding as clickers? Duncan says that cards are better than a show of hands or no student feedback at all, but his students report that the accountability provided by clickers greatly increases their participation. Not that all students are in love with clickers. One said, “…as a matter of fact, I hate them.” But the same student said they were helpful in improving learning and grades.

“A ‘Strong Case’ Exists for Classroom Clickers” – letters to the editor in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 30, 2009 (Vol. LV, #21, p. A30), no e-link available
 

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3. New Consequences for Misbehaving High-School Students

In this Principal Leadership article, Minnesota high-school administrators Dion Harriman and Christina Pierre describe how frustrated they had become with misbehaving students playing the detention and suspension game – getting referred by teachers, not showing up for detentions, getting caught, and serving suspensions that amounted to vacations from school. This behavior pattern resulted in “a staggering loss of instructional time for the most at-risk learners,” say Harriman and Pierre, “not to mention the hours of wasted time that staff members spent following up on detentions that students don’t serve.”
Four years ago, the school hit upon an alternative: misbehaving students would be barred from passing through the halls between classes and eating lunch in the cafeteria – essentially “no recess” for secondary students. Because of the value adolescents place on peer contact, the No Passing Plan was highly effective, especially for students who were disruptive in the hallways, chronically late, or bullied other students. Here’s how it works:
- An administrator meets with the misbehaving student early in the school day to explain the plan and get the student to sign a behavioral expectation contract.
- Each teacher dismisses No Passing students two minutes early from class.
- During the two minutes, No Passing students go to their lockers, use the bathroom, and report to their next class.
- While other students move to their next class and socialize during the 10-minute breaks between blocks, No Passing students are required to work quietly in their next class. Each teacher writes on the behavior contract whether the student arrived on time and spent passing time in their classroom.
- No Passing students eat lunch in the office and at the end of the day submit their completed behavior contract.
- Students who don’t comply with the plan get additional consequences for insubordination, which might include a hall supervisor arriving two minutes before the end of each class to escort the student.
Originally, the school had No Passing students report to a time-out room, where they sat quietly during passing time, then reported to their next class. But the time-out room became an alternative socializing spot, and showing up late for the next class felt too much like a privilege, even a badge of honor, for misbehaving students. So the school began having No Passing students report straight to their next class, where they could be supervised by one of their teachers. This worked much better.

“Logical Consequences: Using Passing Times to Prevent Misbehavior” by Dion Harriman and Christina Pierre in Principal Leadership (High School Edition), January 2009 (Vol. 9, #5, p. 37-39), free e-link for NASSP members only. The authors can be reached at ddharr@wbl.whitebear.k12.mn.us and ckpier@wbl.whitebear.k12.mn.us.
 

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4. A New York High School’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T Plan

In this Principal Leadership article, New York City dean Matthew Guldin describes how his grade 6-12 school in the Lower East Size launched its Respect! Campaign, producing significant improvements in school discipline and culture. The first step was having students and staff brainstorm and agree on the do’s and don’ts of respect in three categories: student to student, student to teacher, and teacher to student. Students started by agreeing on criteria in small groups within advisory classes, then negotiated agreement for the whole class, then for the grade, and eventually, in a town-hall meeting, for the whole school. Teachers added items that students had left out, and the result was a robust, specific, schoolwide set of lists that made clear, once and for all, what respect looked like.
The school made the campaign come alive by having students and teachers evaluate their present behavior in light of the guidelines. Students and staff chose three areas where they were doing well and three where they could use improvement and shared them in advisory classes. Teachers were a little nervous about exposing their weaknesses to students, but were heartened by students’ response – and by students’ evaluations of their respect level. “Knowing that the teachers have to listen to us listening to them, makes us feel more respected from the jump,” said a senior. During the year, there were periodic meetings called “Rating Your Week” in which students and teachers scored themselves on their progress – or lack of progress – toward their respect goals. Teachers suggested specific techniques (anger management, for example) and referred students for counseling if needed. School leaders looked at data from different grades and decided what areas needed targeted interventions – for example, getting sixth graders to stop “play hitting” in the halls and putting a stop to ninth graders’ inappropriate sexual comments or class cutting. Teachers set goals for themselves, for example, listening to both sides of a story and not yelling at students when frustrated.
Leaders also orchestrated discussions of schoolwide concerns, for example, the widespread use of the “N-word” by students. The whole school discussed the issue in advisories, saw a multimedia presentation, watched skits, music, dance, spoken-word performances, and a panel discussion. Many students ended up signing a pledge to refrain from using the N-word, and staff estimated that its use dropped by 50 percent.
Guldin believes that the Respect! Campaign had a major impact on the culture of the school. “For one, teachers are talking with their students, not at them,” he says. “This factor, in and of itself, has helped students mature and staff members grow professionally.” Discipline problems were reduced, attendance increased, teaching improved, and test scores jumped.

“Please Respect Me!” by Matthew Guldin in Principal Leadership, January 2009 (Vol. 9, #5, p. 24-27), no e-link available; the author can be reached at matthewg@eschs.org.
 

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5. Alcohol and Drug Use, Abuse, and Dependence: What Schools Can Do

In this Principal Leadership article, Texas State University/San Marcos psychology professor Jon Lasser and counseling professor Eric Schmidt write, “Drug and alcohol use among adolescents is a significant and serious problem.” Over 25 percent of high-school students report that they have had more than five alcoholic drinks within a few hours, and almost 40 percent say they have used marijuana at least once. While schools can’t do everything, say the authors, they can play an important role in education, prevention, and intervention, and they should coordinate with community service providers.
Lasser and Schmidt are careful to point out that just because students have used alcohol and drugs doesn’t mean they need treatment. They suggest that principals, counselors, social workers, and psychologists informally assess students, treating each case as unique, to see which tier the student is at:
• Use – Students may be one-time experimenters, or dabble in alcohol and/or drugs in ways that do not pose dangers to health or safety. However, there is always the danger of arrest, and the statistical likelihood that one-time use makes it more likely that a student will use substances in the future.
• Abuse – This includes binge drinking and regular marijuana use, which interfere with a student’s functioning, relationships, and education and heightens the possibility of arrest, sickness, psychological damage, and dependency.
• Dependency – Students who come to physically or psychologically “need” alcohol and/or drugs require larger and larger doses to feel “high” and have withdrawal symptoms when they are not taking the substance. They need comprehensive treatment, outpatient counseling, and possibly inpatient detoxification.
Wanting to be more independent, trying new roles and identities, imitating peers, and defying authority are all part of adolescence. The question is when students cross the line into harmful and even life-threatening activities, and school personnel are ideally positioned to pick up the warning signs. Working with parents (“the antidrug” is how public health campaigns characterize effective families), relatives, friends, pastors, psychologists, or counselors, these are some questions school personnel might ask students and families in assessing a situation:
- When did the drug or alcohol use start?
- How often does the student use drugs or alcohol?
- Does the student view it as a problem?
- Does the family see it as a problem?
- What’s the impact on the student’s schoolwork, job, and social life?
- Is there a need for support or intervention?
Warning signs include:
- Secrecy about activities and possessions;
- Excessive mood swings or violent outbursts;
- Declines in grades and schoolwork;
- Use of products like incense that mask odors;
- Increased borrowing, or stealing.
Lasser and Schmidt advise principals to:
- Conduct a realistic assessment of the scope of substance use and abuse among students;
- Involve parents and conduct awareness sessions;
- Conduct ongoing substance education and intervention;
- Establish effective school discipline codes, codes of conduct, and policies concerning substances.
- Tap resources, including:
• Evidence-based principles:
http://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/prevent/evidence_based_eng.html
• Strengthening Families Program: For Families and Youth:
http://www.strengtheningfamilies.org/html/programs_1999/14_SFP10-14.html
• Creating Lasting Family Connections:
http://www.strengtheningfamilies.org/html/programs_1999/16_CLFC.html
• Start Taking Alcohol Risks Seriously (STARS):
http://casat.unr.edu/bestpractices/view.php?program=113
• Positive Action: http://nrepp.samhsa.gov/programfulldetails.asp?program_id=110

“Substance Use, Abuse, and Dependency in Adolescence” by Jon Lasser and Eric Schmidt in Principal Leadership, January 2009 (Vol. 9, #5, p. 12-15), no e-link available
 

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6. What’s Really Going On with Teenage Sex?

In this New York Times health column, Tara Parker-Pope refutes the common belief that teenagers in the U.S. are sexually out of control, randomly “hooking up”, and sailing without a moral compass. In fact, recent studies show that teenagers are becoming more cautious and conservative and the virginity rate among college students is surprisingly high:
- The percent of high-school students who say they have had sex dropped from 54.1 percent to 47.8 percent (1991 to 2007).
- The percent of 15-17 year-old girls who say they have had sex dropped from 38 percent to 30 percent (1995 to 2002).
- The percent of 15-17 year-old boys who say they have had sex dropped from 43 percent to 31 percent (1995 to 2002).
- The number of teens under 15 who say they have had sex dropped from 20 percent for boys and girls to 15 percent for boys and 13 percent for girls (1995 to 2002).
The recent, modest uptick in teenage pregnancies, says Parker-Pope, reflects changes in contraceptive use and not changes in sexual behavior. The long-term trend is that the teen pregnancy rate has declined, and teenage abortion rates have also fallen in recent years.
“For teens, sex requires time and lack of supervision,” says St. Joseph’s University/ Philadelphia sociology professor Maria Kefalas. “This whole moral panic thing misses the point, because research suggests kids who don’t use contraception tend to be kids who are feeling lost and disconnected and not doing well.” Teens who have more parental supervision, live in two-parent households, and are doing well in school are more likely to delay sex until their late teens – or beyond.

“The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity” by Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2009 (p. D6)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27well.html?scp=1&sq=The%20Myth%20of%20Rampant%20Teenage%20Promiscuity&st=cse
 

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7. Broadening School Accountability

In this Education Week article, researcher Richard Rothstein bemoans the narrow focus of NCLB tests and makes the case for assessing a broader range of cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge and skills. He harkens back to early versions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which assessed students’ cooperative problem-solving skills and tapped students’ understanding of key civics questions. For example, there was a NAEP question (for teenagers) on whether someone should be permitted to say on television that “Russia is better than the United States”, that “some races of people are better than others”, or that “it is not necessary to believe in God.” Only a small percentage of students gave the correct answer: the Constitution permits all three statements.
Early NAEP tests also asked 17-year-olds what they should do if, when visiting a friend, they noticed that her 6-month-old baby had bruises (the correct answer was to suggest that your friend call her baby’s doctor; incorrect responses included “ignore the bruises because they are none of your business”). A second question asked what should be done if, in a follow-up visit to the same friend, the baby still had bruises and you became suspicious that your friend might have hurt the baby. The correct response was “call the local child-health agency and report your suspicions.”
Acknowledging that including such questions in accountability tests would be challenging, Rothstein says it would be worthwhile because “incentives would shift. National reporting of low scores on the civil liberties questions, for example, would spur demands that schools do a better job on citizenship; then, the incentive to drop cooperative learning in favor of test prep in math and reading would diminish.”

“Getting Accountability Right” by Richard Rothstein in Education Week, Jan. 28, 2009 (Vol. 28, #19, p. 36, 26) http://www.edweek.org
 

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8. “Response to Intervention” at the High-School Level

In this Education Week article, Christina Samuels describes how a few Colorado high schools are using “response to intervention” (RTI) to identify students having difficulty with subject matter and deliver timely, intensive help in a tutoring center – often without the need for special-education services. The initiative has led one school to focus on the quality of initial instruction: “We have to make sure that these kids… aren’t just suffering from instructional lapses,” says Jeremy Koselak, one of the leaders of the school’s effort. Frequent assessment of student learning is a key feature of RTI, and staff have also wondered about what tests are showing about students’ skills. “I do wonder if they’re getting better at the test, or if they’re actually getting better at reading,” says Margaret Chumbley, a literacy-resource teacher.
In another Colorado high school working with RTI, teachers have noticed the similarity with the “professional learning community” work in which they’ve been engaged for several years, inspired by Richard DuFour and his colleagues. “It doesn’t feel brand-new to me,” said Jill Martin, the school’s principal. “It feels like how I’ve always thought about teaching kids. It’s the same good instincts that you used as a teacher, you use with RTI. So those questions, what do we want kids to learn, and how do we know that they’ve learned it, were questions we were asking teachers to do every day.” The school has created an “opportunity center” where students can get the special interventions they need.

“High Schools Try Out RTI” by Christina Samuels in Education Week, Jan. 28, 2009 (Vol. 28, #19, p. 20-22) http://www.edweek.org
 

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9. Two Books on Intelligence

In this Chronicle of Higher Education review of two recent books (What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith Stanovich, and Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count by Richard Nisbett), Kacie Glenn starts with the thesis of the first book. IQ tests measure important mental abilities, says Stanovich, but they don’t capture some key mental functions, including judicious decision making, sensible prioritizing of goals, and the ability to weigh evidence thoughtfully. This explains why supposedly smart people do foolish things. Rather than seeing these aberrations as disabilities, he says we should lay the blame on the limitations of intelligence tests and work to make them better. As long as we continue to worship IQ tests that don’t assess rational thought processes, he says, we will continue to misjudge our own and others’ cognitive abilities.
In the second book, Richard Nisbett notes that until very recently, it was commonly believed that intelligence was mostly innate. Not so! A variety of social, cultural, and economic factors can significantly affect a child’s IQ. It turns out that twin and adoption studies supposedly proving the heritability of intelligence were distorted by the fact that twins raised separately are usually nurtured by parents of quite similar socioeconomic status, and adopted children are raised by well-off, caring families – both of which make the impact of the environment seem smaller than it really is. The quality of parenting makes a big difference – 12 to 18 IQ points, according to Nisbett – and school factors are also significant, including class size, teaching experience and skill, and the use of instructional technologies such as word processing. Nisbett believes that “intellectual capital” is a more useful concept than IQ, and says it is fostered by “stimulation and support for exploration and achievement in the home, the neighborhood, and the schools.”

“Irrational Intelligence” and “Getting Smarter” by Kacie Glenn in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 30, 2009 (Vol. LV, #21, p. B18), no e-link available
 

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10. A New Idea for Classroom Seating

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Steve Bushong reports on a professor’s experiment with having students sit on stability (exercise) balls instead of chairs in his Grand Valley State University classes. John Kilbourne found that students who sat on the balls were more enthusiastic and focused. “When they’re bobbing up and down, they’re riveted, they’re paying attention, they’re looking at what’s going on,” he said. Of the 52 students who volunteered to sit on stability balls in his classes, 51 said they preferred that kind of seating and wanted it in their other classes. Students said they were better able to concentrate, take notes, and maintain upright posture using the balls, which require the lower-body and core muscles to be engaged. One student said sitting on the ball “kind of wakes your brain back up and you can get back on track and follow the lesson.”

“Keeping Students on the Ball” by Steven Bushong in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 30, 2009 (Vol. LV, #21, p. A5), no e-link available
 

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