This week's Memo draws on an exceptionally strong issue of Education Week, polishes off Middle School Journal, and doesn't quite finish the current Educational Leadership.

Enjoy!

Best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“Self-harming adolescents have discovered that their brain chemistry can serve as a 24-hour pharmacy. When adolescents self-harm, their bodies secrete naturally manufactured endorphins into their bloodstreams to protect from physical pain… Thus, self-harming has become one of the most popular painkilling and sedative drugs for youth today.”
Matthew Selekman (see item #6)

“My own parents left school at age 14 and never came to either my elementary school or my high school, although their commitment to my ‘doing well’ was always clear. Their lack of involvement did not reflect a lack of interest, but actually resulted from their trust in my teachers and school.”
Aileen Wilson (see #10)

“Mrs. Fisher, you seem like you need to get calm. We need some silent time so we can all be more able to learn. Can we meditate?”
A sixth grader to his teacher, who seemed frazzled, putting into practice the
meditation practices she had taught him, in “Silence is Golden” by Judith Gaston Fisher in Educational Leadership, December 2009/January 2010 (Vol. 67, #4, online)
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership.aspx

“The zone is that magical place where basketball players make three-pointers look easy, pitchers are ‘living on the black’ of home plate’s edges, and students are so absorbed in the task that they forget to check the clock.”
Janet High and Gayle Andrews in “Engaging Students and Ensuring Success” in
Middle School Journal, November 2009 (Vol. 41, #2, p. 58-63), no e-link available

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1. What Will It Take to Improve All Schools?

In this Education Week article, Teachers College/Columbia professor Thomas Hatch lists four flawed assumptions about school reform, explains why each is wrong, and proposes some alternatives:
• Assumption #1: We know how to significantly improve the performance of all students; we just need goals and incentives to get teachers and schools to execute. Not so, says Hatch. Although a few schools have achieved remarkable results, taking this to scale is complicated. There’s a lot we don’t know, and it’s naïve to think that national standards, policy alignment, small schools, smaller classes, or incentives based on test scores will “unleash some previously hidden capacity to dramatically improve educational performance.”
• Assumption #2: One year of high achievement means that a school will keep cruising. Hatch uses the analogy of the ups and downs of sports teams to demonstrate that big improvements aren’t always sustained – and how focusing on short-term gains can, in fact, undermine long-term progress. “High-stakes, short-term pressures focused on narrow outcomes,” he says, “may make it particularly difficult for low-performing schools to make the investments in the basic organizational practices of managing staffs, establishing productive work environments, and developing common expectations that they need in order to meet meaningful goals and sustain high performance over time.”
• Assumption #3: Competing for students will spur innovation and improvement. “The true competition,” Hatch argues, “is for scarce resources, such as effective teachers, strong leaders, high-quality professional development, capable external assistance, adequate facilities, political influence, and public support.” High-performing schools often capture a disproportionate amount of these limited resources and get a competitive advantage. In effect, the rich get richer and the competitive process doesn’t help improve all schools.
• Assumption #4: The key to improving all schools is “scaling up” what a few successful schools are doing. “In education,” says Hatch, “even the most successful school networks and model programs only work in some places under some circumstances. Any attempt to scale up successful schools and programs has to be accompanied by a concerted effort to create more favorable economic, organizational, social, and political conditions that will give all schools a better chance to make significant progress.”
This is a discouraging report, but Hatch has several ideas for promoting large-scale school improvement:
- Maintain a steady funding stream over time.
- Spend on the basics that directly benefit students and parents: facilities, child care and after-school programs, and day-to-day support for teaching and learning.
- Track student-achievement data and disseminate practices that bring about sustained, long-term achievement.
- Make classrooms more transparent to parents and the general public, sharing what “good” student work looks like – in American schools and around the world.

“Four Flawed Assumptions of School Reform – And What Can Be Done About Them” by Thomas Hatch in Education Week, Dec. 9, 2009 (Vol. 29, #14, p. 32, 24), available with subscription at http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/12/09/index.html

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2. Ten Turnaround Keys

In this Education Week article, University of Wisconsin/Madison professor Allan Odden says that we already know how to turn around low-performing schools. “The problem isn’t funding,” he says, “it is having the will and persistence to fix the system, drawing on knowledge that exists now.” Here are his recommendations:
• Create a sense of urgency by looking at student performance data and spotlighting the gap between current achievement and desired outcomes. This often creates a will to change.
• Set “eye-popping” goals – for example, doubling student achievement on state tests, doubling the number of students scoring at the Advanced level, getting all students reading at least on grade level, having all students score at or above 24 on the ACT or above 1650 on the three SAT tests, and having no students scoring at the Basic level.
• Focus intensely on high-quality curriculum content and effective instructional practices. This often means throwing out the old curriculum, adopting new textbooks, creating new curriculum units, and building a common understanding of effective teaching. It also means constantly assessing the impact of programs and practices and making changes when they don’t result in improved student learning.
• Use diagnostic assessments to measure students’ knowledge and skills at the beginning of each curriculum unit, on-the-spot assessments to check for understanding during instruction, and end-of-unit assessments and interim assessments to see how well students learned and follow up with reteaching and help for struggling students. “All of these enable teachers to make midcourse corrections and to get students into interventions earlier,” says Odden. Unit and interim assessments help teacher teams compare strategies and adopt those that are most effective.
• Follow up with struggling students because, says Odden, “no matter how powerful the core instruction may be, many students will need extended learning time and extra help to attain proficiency.” Schools need one-on-one tutoring, small-group help, extended day programs, and summer school to meet these needs.
• Use time effectively, including extended blocks for core subjects, time for struggling students to get extra help, and a schoolwide ethos of not interrupting instruction in classrooms.
• Create and implement intensive, ongoing professional development. “The best districts and schools form collaborative teacher teams – professional learning communities – that meet often, make use of student data, and work with school-based coaches to improve curriculum and instruction,” says Odden. Summer institutes are also helpful.
• Distribute leadership. Principals are key motivators and leaders, but so are teacher leaders in grade and subject teams, instructional coaches with subject-area knowledge, and district leaders who see the big picture.
• Stay current with the research and reach out to experts in the field.
• Replace teachers and administrators who are not up to the job.

“We Know How to Turn Schools Around – We Just Haven’t Done It” by Allan Odden in Education Week, Dec. 9, 2009 (Vol. 29, #14, p. 22-23), available with subscription at
http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/12/09/index.html

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3. The Critical Importance of Reteaching

In this Education Week article, author Richard Whitmire reports on his insights visiting schools vying for the Broad Prize for Urban Education, including the factors he believes are needed move “silver medal” level schools to “gold medal” status:
- Gather and analyze lots of student achievement data and use it to adjust instruction.
- Recruit high-potential teachers and boost their skills with PD targeted at specific classroom strategies.
- Adopt standards more ambitious than your state’s and make sure they drive everything.
- Frequently supervise teachers and give them lots of feedback on instructional practices.
All these factors, says Whitmire, “lead to one overarching master strategy: reteaching.” This is not remediation, he says. It’s “pinpointing the students who didn’t quite grasp a lesson… and reteaching the lesson, perhaps in a different way or by a different teacher. At the core, reteaching means not giving up on kids.” He believes that this key factor is missing from the federal “Race to the Top” program’s guidelines.

“The Hole in ‘Race to the Top’” by Richard Whitmire in Education Week, Dec. 9, 2009 (Vol. 29, #14, p. 22-23), available with subscription at
http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/12/09/index.html

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4. Robert Marzano on a Powerful Way to Improve Student Learning

(Originally titled “When Students Track Their Progress”)
In this Educational Leadership article, Robert Marzano highlights a strategy that he says brings about 32 percentile-point gains in achievement: having students record their scores on a chart after taking each interim assessment and following their progress over time. When the assessment involves a rubric score, this gives students and teachers two kinds of information: a specific description of what is expected, and a graphic representation of how each student is doing. “The combination of these two types of information,” says Marzano, “produces a powerful effect.”
However, Marzano cautions that this strategy will produce dramatic gains only if three things are done right:
• All the interim assessments must address the same year-end learning goal or goals. If the goals are different from assessment to assessment, teachers and students will be comparing apples to oranges and won’t see an accurate trajectory of progress.
• Use consistent rubrics instead of points. When teachers use points to score assessments, there are often variations in the difficulty of test items, leading to inconsistent scores from test to test. Rubrics that clearly describe end-of-year performance on a 4-3-2-1-0 scale (for example, at Level 3, Students will explain and illustrate how habitats provide plants and animals with the things they need to survive) do a far better job.
• Branch out from paper-and-pencil assessments. Marzano suggests using demonstrations, probing discussion, unobtrusive observations, and student-generated assessment.

“When Students Track Their Progress” by Robert Marzano in Educational Leadership, December 2009/January 2010 (Vol. 67, #4, p. 86-87)
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec09/vol67/num04/toc.aspx

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5. A Graphic Organizer to Facilitate Math Problem-Solving

In this Middle School Journal article, Northern Illinois University/DeKalb mathematics professor Alan Zollman describes and highly recommends getting middle-school students to fold a regular sheet of paper into the following graphic organizer (by folding it in half, then quarters, then folding over the closed corner, creating creases that look like the diagram below) to help them think through math problem-solving challenges.

Having studied the problem, students use the five cells as follows:
- In the diamond in the middle, they write what they need to find.
- In the top left-hand cell they write what they already know.
- In the top right-hand cell they brainstorm ways to solve the problem.
- In the bottom left-hand cell they jot down an attempt at a solution.
- In the bottom right-hand cell they write the explanations needed for an extended-response write-up and what they learned by doing the problem.
The teachers who conducted action research on this idea with 186 students encouraged students to fill in the objective in the center diamond and them “muck around” with the other four cells, trying out ideas and working their way toward the solution. They found the four corners and a diamond approach produced dramatic gains: the students who took part in the experiment scored as follows on a pretest, using the state rubric:
4% meets or exceeds on math knowledge
19% meets or exceeds on strategic knowledge
8% meets or exceeds on explanation
After using the graphic, students scored as follows:
75% meets or exceeds on math knowledge
68% meets or exceeds on strategic knowledge
68% meets or exceeds on explanation

The method is not foolproof, says Zollman. It needs to be introduced and modeled effectively, and students should be encouraged to proceed in a non-linear fashion, experimenting with different ideas and bouncing from cell to cell as they work their way toward solutions. But the graphic clearly has great power to help students solve problems more effectively. Teachers said students of all achievement levels did better because it got them writing out their thinking and gave them a tool they readily used in class, at home, and taking tests. The graphic also allowed teachers to quickly identify the strengths and weaknesses of students’ problem-solving and deliver more effective assistance.
“As teachers seek to expand and improve students’ mathematical knowledge to help them solve problems,” Zollman concludes, “they may find that good teaching in reading and writing is good teaching in math.”

“Students Use Graphic Organizers to Improve Mathematical Problem-Solving Communications” by Alan Zollman in Middle School Journal, November 2009 (Vol. 41, #2, p. 4-12), no e-link available; the author can be reached at Zollman@math.niu.edu.

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6. Strategies for Helping Students Who Harm Themselves

(Originally titled “Helping Self-Harming Students”)
About 14-17 percent of adolescents deliberately cut, scratch, pinch, burn, or bruise themselves, says Illinois clinical social worker Matthew Selekman in this troubling Educational Leadership article. Most of these teens harm themselves not because they are victims of abuse, have psychological disorders, or have suicidal thoughts. In most cases, says Selekman, they harm themselves “as a coping strategy to get immediate relief from emotional distress.” What kinds of distress?
- Media content steeped in violence, sex, materialism, and self-destruction;
- Pressure to grow up quickly;
- Too many choices among “must-have” possessions;
- An overload of extracurricular activities and homework;
- Pressure from parents to get straight As and attend college;
- Parents who are emotionally distant, yell, threaten, and punish excessively;
- Pressure to fit in with the popular group;
- Hanging out with similarly disaffected peers;
- Spending as much as 5-½ hours a day online, often unsupervised by parents;
- Receiving nasty messages on Facebook or MySpace (called “Mean Space” by some).
“In adolescence,” says Selekman, “being rejected by your peers is the equivalent of social death. The peer group is much more demanding today than it used to be, and it changes at a frenetic pace. Adolescent students who lack strong social skills often struggle to stay afloat and may resort to extreme behaviors endorsed by more popular and powerful peers.” Self-harming is one strategy; drug and alcohol abuse and stealing socially popular items are others.
Why is inflicting pain on oneself an attractive solution? “Self-harming adolescents have discovered that their brain chemistry can serve as a 24-hour pharmacy,” explains Selekman. “When adolescents self-harm, their bodies secrete naturally manufactured endorphins into their bloodstreams to protect from physical pain. These endorphins rapidly numb the emotional distress they may be experiencing. As with drug addiction, longtime self-harming adolescents not only report feeling loss of control, compulsion to engage in this behavior, and physical tolerance of the pain but also experience mild withdrawal symptoms like anxiety and irritability when they abstain from self-harming. Thus, self-harming has become one of the most popular painkilling and sedative drugs for youth today.”
What can schools do? Becoming familiar with the nature and reasons for self-harm and knowing the signs and symptoms – for example, students who openly display cuts and burns on their necks or faces are sending out the most urgent cries for help. It’s also important to know how to respond, what the most effective treatments are, and the difference between self-harming and suicidal behavior. Selekman has two additional recommendations:
• Referring students who have been identified as self-harming to a support group that capitalizes on their strengths and teaches them how to become more resilient, cope with stress, and take on leadership responsibilities (see the link below for one such program).
• Identifying and training adults in the school who will take the lead talking to self-harming students. Some guidelines:
- Listen respectfully, validate students, build trust, and refer students to the school psychologist, social worker, or counselor;
- “At all costs,” says Selekman, “school personnel need to avoid responding to self-harming students with disgust, anxiety, or fear. They must not lecture the students about the dangers of this behavior, play detective and ask to see their cuts or burn marks, or interrogate and further invalidate them. Instead, they should strive to understand the meaning of this behavior for the student, how the behavior has been helpful, and how they can now be helpful to the student. It is important to remember that each self-harming student’s story is unique.”
- Decide whether to counsel the student on-site (in mild cases) or immediately involve parents (if the behavior is more serious and is accompanied by other risky behaviors).
- In severe cases – and when suicidal thoughts are voiced – the student should be taken to the nearest hospital emergency room for evaluation.
- Reach out to inspirational adults in the school to provide extra support.
- Enlist graduates of intervention groups to help identify at-risk students who are harming themselves and get them to counselors
“With compassion, guidance, and support,” concludes Selekman, “we can empower self-harming students by being respectful listeners and accentuating their natural gifts.”

“Helping Self-Harming Students” by Matthew Selekman in Educational Leadership, December 2009/January 2010 (Vol. 67, #4, p. 48-53),
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec09/vol67/num04/Helping_Self-Harming_Students.aspx; Selekman is at ms@partners4change.net.

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7. Addressing Nutrition and Health in a Bronx Classroom

(Originally titled “Saving Marvin Sweettooth”)
“An aura of hopelessness sometimes surrounds the public discourse about diabetes as it pertains to poor and minority communities,” says former New York City teacher Shannon O’Grady in this Educational Leadership article. “People won’t change their habits, we say. Government won’t change its policies, corporations will always focus on the bottom line, and this generation of children is doomed to a shorter life span than that of its parents.” O’Grady then describes an interdisciplinary Socratic seminar she taught in her 11th-grade classroom that made a difference.
O’Grady introduced students to Marvin Sweettooth, a fictitious 13-year-old who had just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Students split into eight groups, four students in each, and each group was given a role:
- Marvin
- Marvin’s mother
- Marvin’s gym teacher
- Marvin’s doctor
- A fast-food executive
- An advertising executive
- A local politician
- A community organizer.
Students counted the number of places near the school where they could buy fresh vegetables (zero), the number of fast-food places they passed on their way to school (between 6 and 23), and the amount they each spent on fast food each week (as much as $70). O’Grady then assigned students newspaper and magazine articles and books (including Fast Food Nation). O’Grady then brought the class together for several days, with one student representing each of the eight characters sitting in a fishbowl circle and the rest of the class on the outside observing as they discussed four questions.
• Who are we and how did we get here? Each group worked on explaining his or her character’s situation, history, and motivation, answering clarifying questions from classmates.
• Who’s to blame? Students researched the ways in which each person in Marvin’s circle of influence was responsible for his situation.
• How can we help Marvin? People in Marvin’s world had to collaborate and come up with strategies that would help Marvin and others suffering from obesity and diabetes.
• How can we save Marvin’s younger sisters? In this final round, students discussed how each of the eight roles could help future generations of children avoid diabetes.
O’Grady reports that the unit was highly successful. It brought out the best in her students – lively participation by all students, substantive research stretching reading levels as they dealt with difficult material, and collaboration with peers. Most important, students connected what they learned to their own health and that of their families and many began to change their eating and exercise habits.

“Saving Marvin Sweettooth” by Shannon O’Grady in Educational Leadership, December 2009/January 2010 (Vol. 67, #4, p. 66-69); this article can be purchased at
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership.aspx; O’Grady can be reached at ogrady@gmail.com.

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8. Are the “Best” Schools Really the Best?

In this Education Week article, charter school leader Deanna Burney faults a list of the fifty supposedly best public schools in her Pennsylvania/New Jersey region recently published in Philadelphia magazine. Her own son attended one of the high schools on the list and encountered plenty of ineffective and indifferent instruction and lost much of his love for science, which made her look more closely at the criteria for ranking schools.
The Top 50 list was determined by schools’ high SAT scores, extracurricular activities, and facilities. “There’s no denying that students in them benefit on many levels from such relative abundance,” says Burney. “But in terms of teaching individual learners and maintaining focus on the core purpose of public schools – to provide rich educational opportunities for all kids – this wealth of resources no more guarantees educational quality than a well-appointed house guarantees a happy family.”
Lists like these, she argues, don’t measure what really matters – the quality of teaching in every classroom. By focusing on attainment statistics, what they really reflect is the socioeconomic composition of their student body – students who enter with numerous advantages and are in most cases willing and able to jump through the hoops and get the credentials they need. Top-schools lists don’t shed any new light on real school quality and “reinforce a culture that is damaging to many students – those who languish because educators fail to take their needs into account and provide them with the support and instruction that will enable them to succeed.”
What would a truly good school look like? Burney says it would focus on the “progress of each student, his or her performance, rather than attainment through compliant coursetaking. It would continually gauge student learning throughout the year, and intervene when work effort or quality seemed to decline, addressing issues of motivation and interest, providing the resources and instruction each student needed to learn at high levels. It would connect students’ learning to the world outside school, so that they remained engaged and enthusiastic. It would ensure that every teacher was a knowledgeable and capable teacher with the time, skill, and inclination to reach every student.”

“What Do School Rankings Really Mean?” by Deanna Burney in Education Week, Dec. 9, 2009 (Vol. 29, #14, p. 23, 25), available with subscription at
http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/12/09/index.html

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9. Stories and Novels That Teach Math

In this Middle School Journal article, professors Karen Koellner and Faith Wallace and researcher Lyn Swackhamer recommend a number of novels and short stories that can be used to support middle-school students’ mathematical learning. Here are the books, organized by their level of complexity:
• Complexity Level 3 – The plot centers around math problems or on problem-and-solution formats, focusing on one math concept in depth and solving problems in more than one way. Stories include characters with different levels of math understanding, with more knowledgeable characters helping others work through their misunderstandings:
- The Man Who Counted (Tahan, 1972) – A series of ancient tales involving a young Arab mathematician who travels to Baghdad and uses his brilliant mathematical mind to solve people’s dilemmas.
- The Parrot’s Theorem (Guedj, 2000) – A deaf boy, a disabled man, a parrot, and Fermat’s last theory are combined in this complex adventure.
- Number Devil (Enzensberger, 1997) – A dreaming boy is visited by the number devil and forever changes the way he thinks about math and sleep.
- Conned Again, Watson, Cautionary Tales of Logic, Math, and Probability (Bruce, 2001) – Readers are invited to solve Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries using math, logic, data analysis, and probability.
- Mind Games (Grunwell, 2003) – Students in a “Mad Science Club” try to answer the question whether ESP actually exists by using a scientific method to write a final report.
• Complexity Level 2 – Math skills and concepts are embedded within the plot of the story and the reader doesn’t need to understand the solutions to “get” the story. Problems are solved
using one strategy from one perspective by characters of similar math acumen:
- Toothpaste Millionaire (Merrill, 1972) – The central character succeeds in becoming a millionaire by the end of middle school by working with other students to make inexpensive toothpaste.
- The Write 3 (Balliett, 2006) – The sequel to Chasing Vermeer, the same characters work together to help save Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Robie house from destruction.
- Chasing Vermeer (Balliett, 2004) – In this mystery we encounter geometric shapes that impart knowledge, a painting that communicates, and a very strange teacher.
- A Gebra Named Al (Isdell, 1993) – A fantasy tale in which Julie enters the land of higher math, meets Gebras, and solves various problems while attempting to get home.
- Flatlands (Abbott, 1899) – Imagining what life would be like if there were only two dimensions.
• Complexity Level 1 – Math skills and concepts are peripheral to the stories, merely enriching it or enhancing character development. Readers don’t need conceptual understanding of math to understand the story:
- Millions (Boyce, 2004) – Two young brothers in England discover a bag of stolen money two weeks before the conversion to Euros.
- Hannah Divided (Griffin, 2002) – A young girl in the early 1900s has amazing math abilities and moves to a private boarding school far from her dairy-farm home.
- The Man Who Counted (see above)
- Phantom Tollbooth (Juster, 1961) – Milo travels through the mysterious tollbooth that appears in his bedroom and discovers the lands of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis where words and numbers rule.

“Integrating Literature to Support Mathematical Learning in Middle School by Karen Koellner, Faith Wallace, and Lyn Swackhamer in Middle School Journal, November 2009 (Vol. 41, #2, p. 30-39), no e-link available; the authors can be reached at karen.koellner@ucdenver.edu, fwallac1@kennesaw.edu, and swackhamer@rmcdenver.com.

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10. Ideas on Parent Involvement

In this letter to Education Week, Pratt Institute art professor Aileen Wilson responds to an article on parent involvement [see Marshall Memo 311, #4]. “Many parents have a complex relationship to education and to schools,” she writes. “My own parents left school at age 14 and never came to either my elementary school or my high school, although their commitment to my ‘doing well’ was always clear. Their lack of involvement did not reflect a lack of interest, but actually resulted from their trust in my teachers and school.”
The problem in some schools is too much parent involvement, says Wilson. Teachers can be distracted from teaching and learning by overinvolved parents and community tensions can play out in the parent-teacher association, with highly educated middle-class parents elbowing out less-educated and less-vocal parents.
“Parental involvement on behalf of student achievement, while important, should not be seen as the only solution to education’s problems,” concludes Wilson. “Schools serve all in the community, regardless of parents’ cultural fit with the school or their involvement in them.”

“Parental Involvement’s Underexamined Issues” – a letter from Aileen Wilson in Education Week, Dec. 9, 2009 (Vol. 29, #14, p. 24), available with subscription at
http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/12/09/index.html

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