Quotes of the Week

“Today more than ever, students need guidance to turn the Web’s deluge of information into meaningful knowledge.”
Douglas Reeves (see item #8)

“If we wait long enough, either the teacher will give us the answer or the period will be over.”
A Philadelphia high-school student on why she doesn’t answer questions (see item #7)

“One of the most pivotal skills for a student who wishes to succeed in the academic arena is the ability to fail well… Failure can and should be the key impetus for success.”
Leah Blatt Glasser (see item #6)

“Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend… We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”
Anne Lamott (quoted in item #6)

“[M]ost experienced teachers have learned through trial and error that no particular teaching approach, no matter how successful its champions say it is, yields desired outcomes with all students, all the time.”
Larry Cuban (see item #4)

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1. Five Lessons on Using Data

(Originally titled “Taking Data to Heart”)
In this Educational Leadership article, University of West Georgia education dean Kim Metcalf reflects on the lessons he learned battling high blood pressure while heading up the research department in a school district:
• Lesson 1: We tend to embrace data that support what we believe and criticize data that don’t. When the doctor took Metcalf’s blood pressure in his office, it was higher than when Metcalf took it himself at home. Guess which reading he preferred. In his school district, two underperforming schools cited research on how smaller classes would be a better intervention than students being able to choose other schools. Metcalf’s comment: We should be “as critical of research that supports our convictions as of research that contradicts them.”
• Lesson 2: We tend to downplay inaccuracies in favorable data and play up errors in unfavorable data. This was true of the different blood-pressure readings taken in Metcalf’s home versus the doctor’s office. It was also true of the scores on teacher-written assessments teachers gave at their schools (on which students did quite well) versus the state tests (on which students did less well).
• Lesson 3: It’s easier to focus on what we do than on the bottom line. In the case of his blood pressure, Metcalf told the doctor all the things he was doing right – no red meat, lots of fish, climbing stairs rather than taking the elevator, etc. But the result was virtually no improvement in blood pressure or cholesterol levels. The parallel in schools is writing long lists of activities in school improvement plans and losing sight of whether they affect student achievement. Talking about results is scarier because it involves taking responsibility for whether activities work.
• Lesson 4: Data can help. Metcalf describes how he started keeping a food diary and undermined its effectiveness by manipulating the data – he didn’t record second helpings and larger portions. Data can be used well, manipulated, or avoided, he says. Some educators rail against NCLB-mandated annual testing. In fact, says Metcalf, there’s nothing wrong with testing per se. “[W]e would probably all agree that we are not as successful as we would like to be in educating students from poor families or students with special needs,” he says. “Unfortunately, we’re most likely to disregard the data when they force us to acknowledge harsh realities that we’d rather not see – yet acknowledging these realities has the greatest potential to guide us toward improving our practices.”
• Lesson 5: Sometimes doing what is most effective isn’t worth what we have to give up. Metcalf describes how at first he followed only one part of the doctor’s regimen – medication – and it made no difference. Then he did everything – medication, no alcohol, red meat, or dairy products, exercising two hours a day – and the results were terrific. But he loved meat, martinis, and cheese too much to keep it up. So he and his doctor tried different combinations, watched the data, and arrived at a tailored intervention – exercise and medication – that got the desired results.
Metcalf describes a district with low reading achievement that added extra instructional time and raised its scores from 30 to 75 percent passing – but suffered declines in math and science. They met their narrow goal – but lost ground in important areas.
What’s needed, Metcalf concludes, is the “informed and honest use of the data, which can prevent us from leaving to chance the future of the students we teach.”

“Taking Data to Heart” by Kim Metcalf in Educational Leadership, December 2008/January 2009 (Vol. 66, #4, online only); Metcalf is at kmetcalf@westga.edu; the article is available at
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec08/vol66/num04/toc.aspx;

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2. Active Recall – The Key to Remembering

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article with strong applicability to K-12 schools, David Glenn says the advice teachers give students on how to study for an exam is not the best: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look them up. Make an outline. Re-read each chapter. This time-honored approach is missing a vital ingredient that research has proved to be far more effective: active recall. The way to apply this when studying alone is to:
- Read carefully.
- Put the book aside and hide your notes.
- Recall everything you can.
- Write it down or say it out loud.
- Evaluate how accurately you remembered the original material.
- Go back and repeat the process for parts you didn’t remember well.

The latest research evidence for this comes from Mark McDaniel at Washington University at St. Louis, who recently published articles in Contemporary Educational Psychology (January) and Psychological Science (April). McDaniel says the conventional approach to studying – reading and re-reading – feels intuitively right to most students, but it’s much less effective than active recall and gives students a false sense of confidence. Another psychologist, Jeffrey Karpicke of Purdue University, has written recently about students’ faulty ideas on how to study. “When you’ve got your chemistry book in front of you,” he says, “everything’s right there on the page, it’s all very familiar and fluent… But of course when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book’s not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning.”
Active recall hearkens back to decades of research, including SQ3R, a similar study technique touted in the 1946 book, Effective Study by Francis Robinson:
- Skim the material quickly to see what it’s about.
- Question yourself (without looking) to see if you recall the main points.
- Read each section with full concentration, looking for answers to the questions posed in headings.
- Recite or write down in your own words the main points in each segment without looking at the material.
- Review – at the end of the chapter, cover your notes and test yourself on the main points. If you don’t remember anything, go back and repeat the process for those segments.

In the academic community, there has been some skepticism about the active-recall approach, including that it’s outdated and promotes rote memorization that will detract from higher-order thinking. McDaniel totally disagrees. His research has shown that students who use active recall are more capable of forming a mental model and using the material to analyze, draw inferences, and solve problems. A certain amount of memorization is important, he says, because students need a knowledge base before they can engage in higher-order thinking. If they need to memorize material, they should use the most effective method.
[Note that Marshall Memo 189 has a closely related article on the efficacy of on-the-spot assessments for embedding material in memory.]

“Close the Book. Recall. Write It Down” by David Glenn in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 1, 2009 (Vol. LV, #34, p. A1, A8), no e-link available.

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3. Improving Teaching by Building and Sharing a Repository of Knowledge

There are three ways to improve teaching, say UCLA researchers James Stigler and Belinda Thompson in this Elementary School Journal article: (a) Recruiting and retaining more capable teachers who will implement teaching methods more skillfully – but this has limited impact since the methods they use aren’t generally superior to those used by average teachers;
(b) Improving the competence of teachers who are already in classrooms – but professional development doesn’t often carry over to the next generation of teachers; and (c) Making incremental and sustainable improvements in teaching methods and practices – improvements that can be passed along and built on over time.
All three approaches are worth pursuing, say Stigler and Thompson, but only the third, which is rarely discussed, has the potential to produce long-term improvements in teaching – if certain things happen:
- If we can find instructional innovations that really help students learn better and faster;
- If we can produce evidence to show that they work;
- If we can find a way to store the ideas in a knowledge base that new teachers can access;
- If we can find ways to communicate the innovations to teachers so they can actually use them in their classrooms;
- If teachers work in a professional environment that supports them in learning new methods;
- If a mechanism can be designed to allow teachers to share their own ideas and improvements with others.
That’s a lot of “ifs”, but if they can be orchestrated, the authors believe teaching will steadily improve through the decades.
• Why it’s difficult to change teaching – The problem is that changing the way teachers teach is really hard. Contemporary U.S. mathematics teaching, for example, is very similar to the way it was 100 years ago. “Standard practice” in classrooms is remarkably similar across a nation. “Cultural activities consist of routines that are learned implicitly, by participation, not by explicit training,” say Stigler and Thompson. “Teaching… has been described as a profession with a 13-year apprenticeship; teachers learn to teach… through participation in classroom routines from kindergarten through twelfth grade.” Common classroom practices are so embedded in the culture that they are largely invisible to insiders and only noticed by outsiders. They are kept in place by assumptions, beliefs, values, and political forces.
Teachers may try to adopt new ideas – the NCTM philosophy of math teaching, for example – but the authors share a folktale that illustrates what often happens. A woman in a small village was famous for her matzo ball soup. Others were jealous, but the woman kept the recipe a secret. One day, a neighbor peeked through the woman’s window as she made the soup and wrote down every step. Back at home, the neighbor set about replicating the famous recipe – but at every step, she modified it based on her own way of making soup. “Let’s see, add one teaspoon of sugar. Sugar? Who ever heard of putting sugar in matzo ball soup?” She went on like this, tweaking each step, and when the soup was done, it didn’t taste anything like the famous recipe – it tasted like her own! The neighbor was furious. The woman must have known she was watching and left out the secret ingredient!
Similarly, most math teachers have heard of the NCTM recommendations and even agree with them, perhaps sensing that the way they have been teaching math doesn’t work very well. But these new math ideas come from a different cultural tradition, and when they try to implement the ideas in their classrooms, they make small tweaks, filtering the reform recommendations through their own cultural assumptions and routines, and what comes out the other end looks very much like the way they were teaching before. Most teachers work in isolation from colleagues and are surrounded by American cultural pressures, and it’s very difficult for them to teach in ways that are not part of their cultural script.
Only a small group of highly skilled innovators make major improvements in teaching; other changes happen in small increments as teachers come across new methods and materials that work better. The big question, say Stigler and Thompson, is how to create a repository of these new, more effective practices and pass them along to future teachers. “If we can keep a constant focus on what the endgame is – improving student learning – and if we can find a way to document, validate, and share small improvements toward that goal,” they write, “then we might see over the next 100 years something that we have failed to accomplish over the last 100 years: major evolutionary advances in the quality of teaching, not just teachers, over time.”
Another reason it’s so hard to improve teaching is that there is no one right way to teach in all situations. Effective teaching is contextual: what works on one situation doesn’t work in another. To find the right strategy, teachers need to know lots of best practices and have theories to think through teaching situations and pick the right strategies to maximize student learning.
• Creating and validating professional knowledge – Stigler and Thompson say there are three types of teaching innovations:
- Small improvements within a teaching tradition, for example, writing a better worksheet or finding a better math problem to introduce division of fractions;
- Borrowing an idea from a different tradition, for example, American teachers seeing ideas in Japanese classrooms that might work well in theirs;
- Inventing and implementing novel teaching ideas, which requires great skill and imagination and happens more often among researchers and specialists than classroom teachers.
For new ideas from any of these three sources to get traction in classrooms, there needs to be an explicitly stated theory of action – a statement of the mechanism by which they improve student learning. Teachers also need a way of evaluating if the ideas improve student learning. This requires clear goals and formative assessments to see if students are making progress toward the goals. On-the-spot and interim assessments are essential to testing the efficacy of classroom innovations, getting diagnostic information on students, and convincing other teachers that the ideas are worth adopting.
• Storing and organizing knowledge so it can be shared – The Internet is already being used to share lesson plans, teacher-made worksheets and videos, and engage in dialogue with the creators. But Stigler and Thompson say that a lot needs to be done to index innovations and knowledge so teachers can find their way to the exact information they need to solve a particular classroom problem. There also has to be a way to exercise quality control so teachers can be sure they are getting truly useful material and not junk.
The repository of teaching innovations also needs to be made accessible to teachers. Stigler and Thompson think it should be organized around grade-by-grade student learning goals – each item evaluated on whether it improves student learning. All too often, the authors say, teachers talk about worksheets or lesson plans without saying (or knowing) whether they improve student learning. “This is problematic,” they say, “because it is not possible to judge the success of a particular instructional activity without answering the question, successful for what?” They give several examples of appropriate learning goals:
- Understanding that the solution(s) to an equation are the values that x can take to make the equation true.
- Understanding that a fraction is a number that can be placed on a number line in relation to whole numbers.
- Developing persistence in the face of difficult challenges.
Vague goals (for example, “understanding fractions”) are not helpful for organizing knowledge.
• Criteria for shareable knowledge – Not all innovations belong in the knowledge repository, say Stigler and Thompson, and they propose three criteria for deciding if they should be included:
- Each innovation must be linked to an explicit theory of action that relates to the learning goal. The teacher must say why it was invented, what problem it solved, and why it worked. “We believe,” say the authors, “that in order for teachers to benefit from a large and growing knowledge base, it is necessary for them to replace their automatic execution of cultural routines with the self-conscious application of explicit – albeit informal – theories that relate teaching to student learning… An expert teacher will need to evaluate each situation, analyze various actions she might take in cause/effect terms, and then hypothesize the best course of action based on the effect she is trying to achieve.”
- Innovations must be described in detail, including the details of implementation. Without the details, new ideas are likely to be altered and assimilated into existing routines like the matzo ball soup recipe. “Richly described examples, together with an explicit theory of action, reduce the likelihood that the innovation will be adopted in a superficial way, creating instruction that looks like the innovation but somehow misses the point entirely,” say the authors.
- Teachers must fully describe the context in which the innovation was developed and applied – the standards, curriculum, textbooks, local politics, general instructional approach, student characteristics, teacher characteristics, cultural beliefs, values, and dispositions. A richly detailed description makes it more likely that innovations can be shared from one tradition of teaching to another.

• Getting the idea bank into classrooms – “The only way the knowledge can be used to improve student learning is through the active participation and creative energy of classroom teachers,” say Stigler and Thompson. “[T]he classroom [is] the final common pathway through which all efforts to improve education must pass.” This means changing the job expectations of teachers and getting them fully involved in learning from and contributing to the new knowledge base. “Teaching, like other complex skills, requires years of practice to learn,” say the authors. “Yet schools are still, for the most part, structured so as to provide little or no opportunities for teachers to learn from more experienced colleagues, not to mention from a continuously growing knowledge base.” Teachers need to:
- Study their own students and identify the roots of their learning problems;
- Learn from others, including colleagues, coaches, researchers, subject-matter experts, and the knowledge repository; teachers need to become connoisseurs of the resources available to them and develop the professional judgment to separate wheat from chaff;
- Develop hypotheses to guide their attempts to improve their teaching;
- Make thoughtful decisions on the methods that are best for their classroom and students;
- Monitor student thinking during instruction by observing and using on-the-spot assessments;
- Reflect on instruction and contribute detailed accounts of their insights to the knowledge base.
Is this too much to expect from teachers? It can’t be, say Stigler and Thompson. “Improving teaching requires teachers to learn from their own experience and to use what they and others learn as the basis for making incremental improvements in the cultural routines of teaching.” But for this to happen, schools must provide the setting – collaborative teacher team meetings focused on identifying learning problems, planning instruction using the best possible ideas, and evaluating whether it worked.

“Thoughts on Creating, Accumulating, and Utilizing Shareable Knowledge to Improve Teaching” by James Stigler and Belinda Thompson in Elementary School Journal, May 2009 (Vol. 109, #5, p. 442-457); purchase at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/esj/current

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4. Larry Cuban on What Works In Classrooms

In this Education Week article, Stanford professor and former superintendent Larry Cuban says he is sick of “fruitless ideological bickering” and “tired debates” about whether progressive or traditional teaching methods work best. Only a tiny percentage of the nation’s 3 million teachers use a “pure” model, he says. “The fact is that most children attend schools in which pragmatic teachers hug the center of the continuum and draw from both ways of teaching to produce hybrid classroom practices.” Why?
“First,” says Cuban, “most experienced teachers have learned through trial and error that no particular teaching approach, no matter how successful its champions say it is, yields desired outcomes with all students, all the time. Researchers have yet to show a one-size-fits-all-students pedagogy… In short, the setting demands different forms of teaching in order to achieve success with a diverse population of students.”
The second reason is that teachers are “unrelenting borrowers of lessons, materials, and practices they believe will help their students.” Cuban’s research on classrooms between the 1890s and 2005 found a consistent streak of pragmatic foraging in search of effective practices and materials. Over the years, teachers have dealt with all kinds of circumstances, from classes of 50-70 students a century ago to diverse and challenging contemporary schools. “Within these demanding classroom settings,” says Cuban, “teachers have learned to ration their time and energy to cope with conflicting societal demands by using certain teaching practices that have proved, over the years, to be simple, resilient, and efficient solutions in dealing with large numbers of captive students in a small space for extended periods of time.”
So enough with ideological purism, says Cuban. Teaching is the single most important factor in student achievement, but there isn’t one right way to teach. Teachers are sensible to eschew the extremes and continuously look for what works for their students right now.

“‘Hugging the Middle’: Why Good Teaching Ignores Ideology” by Larry Cuban in Education Week, Apr. 29, 2009 (Vol. 28, #30, p. 30-31), e-link available to subscribers only

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5. What Is the Most Important Precursor to College Success?

This ACT paper (excerpted in Education Digest) reports on a study of the correlations between six factors and students’ college success. See if you can guess which is most important:
- Background characteristics: gender, race/ethnicity, parents’ education, income, home language;
- 8th-grade achievement in English, reading, math, and science;
- High-school courses – the highest level of non-advanced, non-honors courses taken;
- High-school advanced and honors courses
- High-school grade-point average;
- Student testing behaviors – did students re-take ACT exams?
Researchers found that the second factor was by far the most important predictor of doing well in college. “Compared with 8th-grade academic achievement,” write the authors, “the predictive power of the other factors we examined was small, and in some cases negligible.”
The shocking news is that only two of ten eight graders are on track to be ready for college-level coursework by the time they graduate from high school. So it’s crucial that elementary and middle schools get their students proficient and above in core subjects by 8th grade.
The ACT study found that three other characteristics in eighth and ninth graders were closely associated with being on track academically: good work habits (including consistently completing homework), “orderly conduct”, and positive relationships with school personnel.
The report concludes with the following recommendations for getting more students on track for college success:
• Focus K-8 standards on the English composition, reading, math, and science knowledge and skills essential to college and career readiness, and make these non-negotiable for all students. “It is no longer acceptable for only some students to possess these skills,” says the report. “Mastery of these foundational skills must become a nonnegotiable prerequisite for entry into high school.”
• Monitor student progress on these prerequisites and intervene with students who are not on track, beginning in upper elementary school and continuing through middle school.
• Focus on improving students’ academic behaviors in the upper-elementary and middle-school grades. This includes confronting procrastination and other dysfunctional characteristics. “The earlier a student develops… academic discipline…, the more likely those behaviors are to become habitual,” says the report.
• Increase federal and state support for schools to implement intervention programs that help all students.

“The Forgotten Middle” from ACT’s report of the same name (2009), summarized in Education Digest, May 2009 (Vol. 74, #9, p. 37-41); the full ACT report and an executive summary are at http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/reports/ForgottenMiddle.html

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6. Learning from Failure

In this thoughtful Chronicle of Higher Education article, Mount Holyoke College English instructor and dean Leah Blatt Glasser describes how some of the students who come to her office because they have poor grades are “paralyzed academically.” They internalize the grades as symbols of their inadequacy, often avoid meeting with the professor who gave them, and resist using criticism to learn and move forward. According to Glasser, “One of the most pivotal skills for a student who wishes to succeed in the academic arena is the ability to fail well… Failure can and should be the key impetus for success.” She goes on to quote author Anne Lamott: “[P]erfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life… [G]o ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Use up lots of paper. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend… We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.”
After the mess, says Glasser, learning can begin. In fact, students can learn more valuable lessons from failure than from a course in which they get an A. “The energy, even courage, to rethink a failed piece of work, write, rewrite, inquire, and respond to the comments and questions of a critical reader is crucial for anyone aiming to excel in college,” she says. Unfortunately, “the shame and embarrassment of producing a less-than-perfect paper or exam becomes a handy shield against the hard work it takes to build on failure.”
How can teachers, advisers, and counselors help students who get themselves into this rut? Encourage the student to examine the causes of failure, provide space for honest self-assessment, and guide them toward taking responsibility for improvement. “The goal is to help students listen to themselves and make the needed connections so that their failure fuels success,” says Glasser. Here are some possible questions:
- What do you think went wrong?
- Have you met personally with the teacher (versus e-mailing)?
- Did you go to the writing center?
- Did you ask the reference librarian for help?
- What will you do differently going forward?

“We Must Teach Students to Fail Well” by Leah Blatt Glasser in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 1, 2009 (Vol. LV, #34, p. A56), no e-link available

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7. Turning Around a Philadelphia High School

(Originally titled “Raising the Bar at Furness High”)
In this Educational Leadership article, Robert Slavin, Gwen Carol Holmes, and Cecelia Daniels tell the story of Philadelphia’s struggling Furness High. The authors looked at the data, conducted interviews, and visited each classroom with three questions:
- What was the teacher doing?
- What were the students doing?
- What was the level of rigor in the students’ tasks?
They saw some excellent teaching, but in many classrooms, teachers assigned seatwork, demanded little, and allowed socializing and sleeping. One girl said, “If we wait long enough, either the teacher will give us the answer or the period will be over.”
The team decided to introduce structured cooperative learning and provided training and materials. Starting in 2006, 11th-grade teachers divided classes into heterogeneous four-student groups and got students helping each other master learning objectives. Teachers called on students at random, giving recognition to the whole team for correct answers. Teachers shared test results with students and set improvement goals with their classes and with individual students. Individual tutoring and Saturday classes were added, with pizza parties and movie tickets as rewards for progress.
“School became fun, social, competitive, and exciting,” report the authors. “When cooperative learning is done right, classrooms function like sports teams, and most of these students knew all about teams and what it meant to be a good teammate.” Students did more talking than teachers as they explained concepts to their group-mates, often talking about how they figured out an answer. Teachers and principals monitored team and class performance on quarterly assessments, attendance, and other indicators and shared them with students, giving rewards for increasing the number of teams receiving each reward rather than rewarding only a few winners. Extrinsic rewards were mixed with public praise, and gradually the latter became more acceptable among students. Over time, students took increasing responsibility and pride in their improvement.
In 2007, the cooperative learning/interim assessment initiative was implemented in the other three grades, and the school has made significant progress: from 14 to 22 percent proficient and above in literacy, and from 15 to 27 percent in math.

“Raising the Bar at Furness High” by Robert Slavin, Gwen Carol Holmes, and Cecelia Daniels in Educational Leadership, December 2008/January 2009 (Vol. 66, #4, online only)
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec08/vol66/num04/toc.aspx;
the authors can be reached at rslavin@jhu.edu, gholmes@successforall.org, and cdaniels@successforall.org.

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8. Douglas Reeves on Web 2.0

(Originally titled “Three Challenges of Web 2.0”)
In this Educational Leadership column, Douglas Reeves says he has three concerns about Web 2.0:
• Hype – Proponents of websites, devices, and software enthuse, but these are transient tools. “There is a crying need for brand-neutral analysts, advisors, and consultants who will help school systems evaluate alternatives in technology,” says Reeves.
• Impersonality – “Education is a relationship-based enterprise,” he says. Technological “relationships” lack the personal links needed to develop trust between content contributors and users. “The closer the personal connection, the harder it is to engage in deceit.”
• Chaff – Wikipedia is a fountain of information, but often it’s thin on citations, says Reeves. Traditional reference books are more authoritative and often more efficient than sorting through thousands of Google hits. Web “research” may be producing students who “confuse data with knowledge and thus lose the opportunity to apply intellectual filters in a manner that reflects critical thinking,” Reeves concludes. “Today more than ever, students need guidance to turn the Web’s deluge of information into meaningful knowledge.”

“Three Challenges of Web 2.0” by Douglas Reeves in Educational Leadership, March 2009 (Vol. 66, #6, p. 87-89); this article is available at
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/toc.aspx
Reeves can be reached at DReeves@LeadAndLearn.com.

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