I did some work on the Memo database over Thanksgiving, splitting what was previously a single topic into two new ones: Interviewing and Hiring (27 articles so far) and Teachers: Induction and First Year (46 articles).

Enjoy!

My best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“Kids are wired differently these days. They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose, and extrapolate, and they think knowledge is infinite. They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear, and rote.”
Sheryl Abshire, Louisiana school technology officer, quoted in “In a Digital Future,
Textbooks Are History” by Tamar Lewin, New York Times, Aug. 8, 2009, spotted in
“Megaphone” in Middle Ground, October 2009 (Vol. 13, #2, p. 48)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/education/09textbook.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=In%20a%20Digital%20Future,%20Textbooks%20are%20history&st=cse

“If I ask a student about a topic and listen to his answer, especially if I’m interested in the topic and the student, I’m learning a lot, but the rest of the class is sitting passively. Do you see something wrong with this picture?”
Rick Wormeli (see item #3)

“We can create curiosity by presenting students with puzzling phenomena, surprising facts, challenges to accepted opinions, appeals to imagination, playful situations with manipulatives, connections among seemingly disparate concepts, moral dilemmas, and personal drama when facing struggle.”
Rick Wormeli (ibid.)

“It’s important for teachers to understand that ELLs’ limited oral responses do not mean that they have limited ability to think abstractly… Directing and maintaining ELLs’ instruction at the lowest level of thinking confines them to the lowest levels of learning.”
Anne Lundquist and Jane Hill (see item #4)

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1. Making Connections with All Students

In this thoughtful article in Middle Ground, Pennsylvania junior-high principal Tracy McCalla describes how a student named Carlo did a 180 when she was a rookie eighth grade English teacher. “Carlo constantly disrupted my class,” she says. “He talked while I was teaching. He openly made fun of other classmates. He never paid attention and was flunking my class. No matter what I did – called home, gave him detention – nothing worked.”
Then one day Carlo noticed his teacher’s car keys lying on her desk and asked, “Do you own a VW?” In fact, she owned two, and they discovered a passionate common interest: Volkswagens! It turned out that Carlo’s family owned a VW repair shop and he knew a huge amount about the cars. “From that day forward,” says McCalla, “Carlo brought me things: VW magazines, T-shirts, and key rings from his father’s shop, and a 1966 VW Bug manual. But most of all, he brought me respect. I never had another issue with Carlo’s behavior. We had a connection. I even found a way to integrate his love of cars into English class.”
This made McCalla appreciate the importance of a human connection with students, especially those who are not doing well. When she was a principal, she devised a staff activity to ensure that every student had at least one connection. She put all students’ names on large sheets of paper in a meeting room and asked staff members to put a dot beside the name of every student with whom they had built a trusting relationship. The staff then focused on the students who had no dots beside their names. Who were they? It turned out they fell into two categories:
- Very quiet students who were difficult to engage.
- Misbehaving students who were difficult to like.
The staff then worked on ways to make connections with all students, including the following:
• Learning students’ names quickly – This makes them feel connected and welcome in the classroom. McCalla recalls a game she used as a teacher. Everyone sits in a circle and the student sitting to the right of the teacher says his her name and something liked that begins with the same letter (“My name is Sam and I like soup”). The next student introduces the first student and then follows the same pattern (“This is Sam, and he likes soup. I am Jessica, and I like juice”). This continues around the circle until the teacher, who goes last, has to remember all the names!
• Using a questionnaire – On the first or second day of school, all students fill out a survey with questions like these:
- What is your favorite subject?
- What do you like to do in your spare time?
- Where you like to sit in the classroom?
- Do you have siblings?
- What you want to be when you grow up?
- Are you artistic?
- If you could change something about yourself, what would it be?
- What do you like to read?
- What’s your favorite movie?
This communicates the teachers’ interest in students as people, and also gathers lots of valuable information.
• Telling about yourself – McCalla recommends filling out the same questionnaire that students get and reading your answers aloud to them.
• Attending students’ extracurricular activities – and telling them the next day how well they did.
• Asking about things – One of the best ways to draw out shy students is to comment on little things: a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey, the fact that a girl is reading Harry Potter books (Have you read them all?), the fact that a student wears a lot of blue.
• Writing notes on papers, quizzes, and tests.
• Calling home or sending a card if the student is absent for an extended period.
• Asking students for help around the class – This can make a troubled student feel respected and trusted.
• Admitting mistakes and weaknesses – At-risk students feel reassured and can be won over when their teacher fesses up to a mistake or says something like, “Math was my worst subject. I struggled my entire junior and senior high school career. I had to work really hard, but it paid off.”
• Asking students for feedback – This tells students their views are respected and gives teachers great information for improvement.

“It Started with a Bug: Making Connections with Students” by Tracy McCalla in Middle Ground, October 2009 (Vol. 13, #2, p. 20-12), no e-link available; McCalla can be reached at
tmccalla@neshannock.k12.pa.us.

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2. How to Boost the Quality of Classroom Discussions

In this Kappan article, author Ivan Hannel suggests a three-part strategy for improving the quality of classroom questioning:
• Engage all students and insist on high-quality responses. Most teachers consider it somewhat aggressive to call on students who don’t raise their hands, which means students get used to not being called on if they don’t volunteer. The result is a culture of disengagement that allows many students to slide by as passive “learners.” Hannel suggests that teachers should establish the norm that any student can be called on at any time. [Popsicle sticks are one way of random cold-calling.] He also believes teachers should press students to state the reasoning behind their responses, not just minimally answer the question. The best way to do this is for the teacher to continue asking “Why” until the student has gotten to the heart of the answer.
• Ask questions in a thoughtful sequence. Many teachers come up with their questions on the fly, says Hannel. “They dive into questioning and try to logically extrude critical thinking from students.” This is better than nothing, but he believes discussions improve when teachers think through questions in advance, anticipate likely responses, and plan follow-up questions for divergent answers and misconceptions. Questions might follow this pattern:
- Step 1 – Label or identify key facts.
- Step 2 – Compare, connect, infer, or find disconnections in the information from step 1.
- Step 3 – Make short summaries or sequences from what was learned in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 4 – Apply, predict, or hypothesize what was learned in steps 1, 2, and 3.
- Step 5 – Make a final, larger summary of the overall learning.
Note that these parallel Bloom’s taxonomy.
• Develop strategies for overcoming cognitive roadblocks. Some students have trouble answering even the best scaffolded questions – questions that seem obvious to teachers who have mastered the material. Hannel pinpoints two of these difficulties and suggests solutions:
- Some students have difficulty focusing on the most salient information on a page. For them, questions like What do you see? Can you tell me a fact? What else do you see? Anything else? What does the term “X” mean? are not helpful. Questions like the following help these students focus: What did you notice first? Where should we begin? What are some of the key facts mentioned? What is the most relevant information given?
- Some students have trouble summarizing an entire story or problem. Teachers enable this by calling on one student, getting the first event, calling on another student for the second event, and so on, never asking a student to complete an entire summary. This pattern stems from a cultural feature of U.S. classrooms – it’s unusual for a student to be asked to speak for the extended time needed to do a complete summary. A better method is to ask one student to attempt the whole summary and then ask other students to repeat it and fill in any missing pieces.

“Insufficient Questioning” by Ivan Hannel in Phi Delta Kappan, November 2009 (Vol. 91, #3, p. 65-69) http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/index.htm. Videos on Hannel’s techniques, and information about his 2003 book, Highly Effective Questioning, are at
http://www.workshopsinquestioning.com.

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3. More About Improving Classroom Discussions

“Whoever asks the questions does the learning,” says Virginia-based teacher trainer Rick Wormeli in this Middle Ground article. The problem is that teachers ask forty times more questions than students, according to researcher/author Betty Hollas. “If I ask a student about a topic and listen to his answer, especially if I’m interested in the topic and the student, I’m learning a lot, but the rest of the class is sitting passively,” says Wormeli. “Do you see something wrong with this picture? I am the teacher; I already know the material. My goal is for students to learn it. Students, therefore, need to be asking the questions, not me.”
Teachers can perform this jujitsu in a number of ways, including getting students to brainstorm questions and investigative starting points as much as possible. Some examples:
- What are ten good questions to which “colloquialism” is the answer?
- What are all the possible things we’d want to know about cuneiform writing?
- What do you wonder about your future?
- What questions might a visitor from another planet ask after observing our election process?
- Pretend you’re a radicand (the number under the radical sign in a square root). What would concern you as this math algorithm progresses?
- Create all the Why…? questions you can about light and the way it behaves.
- Skim the whole chapter and list at least eight questions the chapter seems to answer.
The trick is to get students to ask, Why does it do that? What will the effect be? What are the exceptions to this rule? Why do you believe that? How is this false? Where is my mistake? What would happen if… “We can create curiosity,” says Wormeli, “by presenting students with puzzling phenomena, surprising facts, challenges to accepted opinions, appeals to imagination, playful situations with manipulatives, connections among seemingly disparate concepts, moral dilemmas, and personal drama when facing struggle.”
Wormeli also suggests some basic classroom tactics designed to redirect the questioning to students and get them involved:
- Redirect one student to another to another. Instead of answering all questions yourself or being the arbiter of whether answers are right or wrong, get students talking to each other.
- Always state the question to the whole class before calling on an individual student; this increases the amount of thinking.
- Allow wait-time of around ten seconds for students to think about their answers; this communicates that you’re counting on students to come up with quality answers.
- Help students who give incorrect answers preserve their dignity by following up on their answers with interest, saying that you used to think such-and-such but now have seen the light, or restating the question to which the student’s incorrect response is the answer and asking the original question again.
- Don’t accept “I don’t know” as an answer. A good follow-up is, “If you did know, what would you have said?” Wormeli says that this often elicits a good answer, revealing that the problem was a lack of confidence.
- Allow the student to throw out a lifeline to a friend (by text message, if the school permits).
- Affirm the portions of the answer that were correct and disregard the others that were incorrect.
- Use peer critique, think-pair-share, and getting students to talk about what they have learned and ask each other questions about it.

“Bringing Life to Class Discussions” by Rick Wormeli in Middle Ground, October 2009 (Vol. 13, #2, p. 39-40), no e-link available; Wormeli is at rwormeli@cox.net.

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4. Ensuring Academic Rigor for English Language Learners

In this Kappan article, McREL consultant Anne Lundquist and author Jane Hill spotlight what they believe is a common misconception teaching English language learners: that students who are at the lower end of this scale of second language acquisition…
- Preproduction – minimal comprehension, not verbalizing, nodding Yes and No, drawing or pointing
- Early production – Limited comprehension, one- or two-word responses, uses key words and familiar phrases and present-tense verbs
- Speech emergence – Good comprehension, simple sentences, grammar and pronunciation errors, frequently misunderstands jokes
- Intermediate fluency – Excellent comprehension, few grammatical errors
- Advanced fluency – near-native level of speech
… should be given questions from the lower end of Bloom’s taxonomy:
- Knowledge – arrange, define, describe, duplicate, label, list, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, state
- Comprehension – classify, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate
- Application – apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use
- Analysis – analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test
- Synthesis – arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up
- Evaluation – appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose, compare, defend, estimate, judge, predict, rate, select, support, value, evaluate.
Not so, say Lundquist and Hill. They believe these two scales should not be put side by side, asking students at lower levels of language acquisition only lower-level Bloom questions and reserving higher-level questions for students who are more proficient in English.
Teachers might well protest: How can I possibly ask a Preproduction or Early Production student a question that involves analyzing information if the most the student can do is point or give a one- or two-word response? Lundquist and Hill respond, “It’s important for teachers to understand that ELLs’ limited oral responses do not mean that they have limited ability to think abstractly… Directing and maintaining ELLs’ instruction at the lowest level of thinking confines them to the lowest levels of learning.” At every stage of language development, they believe, ELLs should be given questions at the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. They suggest making a matrix with Bloom’s taxonomy on the vertical axis and the stages of language acquisition on the horizontal axis and asking varied types of questions at all the levels.
Here are sample activities from a unit on plant life designed to get students at the lowest levels of language development working at all of Bloom’s levels:
- Knowledge – Point to, gesture for, draw, or match icons of plants at different steps of the plant cycle.
- Comprehension – Locate plant parts in a matching game, then sort by features and colors.
- Application – Demonstrate the process of photosynthesis using gestures and key words.
- Analysis – Categorize types of plants found in desert and alpine tundra biomes using pictures and labels.
- Synthesis – Plan and construct dioramas or collages to show seasons in a forest biome.
- Evaluation – Assess the correctness of a moveable biome model, showing understanding by rearranging parts as necessary.
Lundquist and Hill also have a suggestion on differentiating homework assignments. “ELLs don’t have to receive the same homework as native English speakers,” they say. “In fact, if they’re given the same homework, they’re probably using unfamiliar skills and practicing them incorrectly. Homework assigned to ELLs should require them to use what they already know or are learning.”
Principals can expect discomfort and resistance to these recommendations, say Lundquist and Hill. They suggest the following four-step strategy:
• Create demand. Cultivate discontent with current reality by showing data on the achievement gap and describing a vision of a more attractive future through credible examples of schools that have been successful with similar populations.
• Implement solutions. Support teachers as they use research-based practices.
• Monitor and evaluate. Check to see if the practices are being implemented with fidelity and consistency, and constantly look at student learning results.
• Manage personal transitions. Principals need to help teachers let go of past practices, move through a period of change that feels somewhat chaotic, and buy into new approaches.

“English Language Learning and Leadership: Putting It All Together” by Anne Lundquist and Jane Hill in Phi Delta Kappan, November 2009 (Vol. 91, #3, p. 38-43)
http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/index.htm

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5. Student-Led Report Card Conferences in Kentucky

In this article in Middle Ground, former middle-grade teachers Shawn Faulkner and Christopher Cook (now professors at Northern Kentucky University) quote an exchange in a traditional teacher-parent conference:
Teacher: “Your son’s average is a low C. His grade is not as high as it should be, primarily because he is not turning in his homework, and I am not sure he is studying for tests. I was hoping you could she some light on whether you notice him completing his homework. Then, I thought we could brainstorm some possibilities to get him back on track.”
Parent: “Wow! I did not realize he was doing so poorly in class. I’m not sure what’s going on with him, because he always tells me he finished his homework at school or that he didn’t have any. He says he studies, but I don’t monitor him. Yes, we need to get him back on track. I will talk to him tonight.”
Wouldn’t this meeting be more productive if the student was there to answer for himself? Scenarios like this convinced Faulkner and Cook that students should be included in report-card conferences – in fact, they should be responsible for preparing, organizing, and directing the conference with their parents, touting their accomplishments and focusing on goals and areas for growth.
Faulkner and Cook tell the story of a 1,200-student middle school in Alexandria, Kentucky. Only 85 parents showed up for report card conferences in the spring of 2006 and the school decided it was time to try something new. The next fall, they had students assemble portfolios with their work, behavior reports, goals, and reflections, results of standardized tests, and other items describing their progress and challenges. Students then prepared a scripted outline aimed at keeping the conversation flowing during the 20-25-minute conference with their parents, and role-played the conference with a classmate. Teachers helped with preparations, but on conference day, students took the lead with teachers floating and offering support where needed.
In the first year of the program, students led 565 fall conferences, and that number increased to 593 the second year. The school is now in its third year and things continue to go well. Conferences tend to focus on accomplishments and goals more than misbehavior and other problems. “Because the most important player – the student – is present,” say Faulkner and Cook, “students and parents can address concerns directly and seek the intervention of the classroom teacher, if necessary.” A few parents requested (and got) traditional teacher-parent conferences, but most appreciated the new format. “You know, it’s finally time for him to take responsibility instead of us always telling him,” said one parent. “It was nice to have this conversation with my child because we don’t ever talk about school,” said another. Teachers had to work hard preparing students for the conferences (especially the first time), but they liked the changed dynamics and found conference night less stressful because they were in a support role, with the student handling the direct conversation with parents and looking at the evidence.
What about students whose parents didn’t show up? The principal, available teachers, administrators, counselors, and student teachers from a nearby university stepped in as surrogate parents and students led their conference with them. This meant that every student had the experience of leading a conference.

“Student-Led Conferences: Involving the Most Important Player” by Shawn Faulkner and Christopher Cook in Middle Ground, October 2009 (Vol. 13, #2, p. 22), no e-link available; the authors can be reached at faulkners1@nku.edu and cookc2@nku.edu.

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6. What It Takes for Teachers to Maintain High Expectations

In this Kappan article, Berkeley (CA) Unified School District evaluation/assessment director Rebecca Cheung describes the “pervasive tension” between teachers and students in urban high schools. “Teachers want students to work harder and learn more,” she says, “and students are anxious about the expectations that they must work harder and learn more. Often, students’ anxiety leads to resistance to learn.” Cheung says this tension causes many teachers to lower their expectations and produces a good deal of teacher burnout, but she believes the most committed and effective teachers push back in four ways:
- Psychologically they accept the tension as a normal part of their work and maintain high expectations despite student push-back.
- Philosophically they affirm their commitment to social justice and/or their belief that teaching involves more than classroom instruction; it includes giving extra academic support, counseling, and help to students outside of class.
- They constantly adapt instruction in response to student learning difficulties and make a point of keeping students engaged.
- They work closely with colleagues and may become teacher leaders.
Cheung says that school leaders play a crucial role providing the conditions that foster this kind of deep commitment – for example, addressing negative teachers, hiring upbeat team players, giving honest feedback and encouragement, being there for teachers in moments of discouragement, encouraging teacher teamwork, scheduling common planning times, and facilitating meetings. Also, Cheung says that principals can help white teachers understand that some black and Hispanic students say that demanding white teachers are picking on them, discriminating against them, and not caring, while they interpret high expectations from nonwhite teachers as evidence of care and concern. Most teachers are not prepared to deal with these dynamics, and principals are key to working them through.

“Tension Between Students and Teachers in Urban High Schools” by Rebecca Cheung in Phi Delta Kappan, November 2009 (Vol. 91, #3, p. 53-56)
http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/index.htm

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7. Using Trained Dogs to Help Reluctant Readers

In this American School Board Journal article, researcher Susan Black reports on the growing use of dogs to encourage students to read in classrooms and public libraries. Among the programs using this approach are READ (Reading Education Assistance Dogs, with 1,300 dogs and handlers in several states), BARKS (Bonding, Animals, Reading, Kids and Safety), Sit Stay Read (serving 800 students in Chicago), Reading with Rover (75 dogs in Seattle), and Paws to Read. The most common use of dogs is getting students with reading problems to sit and read to the dog, who is trained to lie quietly, gaze attentively, and sometimes stretch a paw across the child’s arm. Some schools also use trained dogs to help autistic students develop social skills.
Becky Bishop, founder of Reading with Rover, says the dogs soothe and encourage students who fear ridicule when called on to read in front of other students. Brian Daly, a Seattle-area elementary teacher, says the dogs were an “instant success” in his classroom. He says his most reluctant 7- and 8-year olds were reading books from cover to cover with their canine friends and quickly built up their confidence and skill. Experiments have shown increases in fluency, and medical researcher James Lynch, director of Baltimore’s Life Care Health Clinic, has measured students’ blood pressure reading alone in a quiet room (high) and reading with a dog (quickly reduced).
Susan Black lists several steps that a school should take before embarking on a reading-dog program:
- Make sure dogs and handlers are fully trained, registered, and certified by a reputable organization.
- Don’t allow untrained pets to be used in place of trained dogs.
- Work only with agencies that provide liability insurance and define safety and liability up front.
- If the school district prohibits animals in classrooms, seek an exception.
- Make sure that students with allergies and fear of animals don’t have contact with the reading dogs.
- Get funding for the program.
- Inform parents of the program and get permission for children to take part.

“Sit, Stay, Read” by Susan Black in American School Board Journal, December 2009 (Vol. 196, #12, p. 36-37), no e-link available

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8. Presuming Competence With Special-Needs Students

In this letter to Kappan, Northern Arizona University professor Susan Unok Marks worries that schools’ stated belief that “All children can learn” often isn’t applied to students with disabilities. As a result, too many of these children are subjected to lower expectations and separated into classrooms with students who are “like them.” Marks cites three common misconceptions:
• Misconception #1 – Students with disabilities must first show that they can learn before being mainstreamed. “If we withhold certain lessons because we assume a student can’t learn and later discover the student could have learned,” says Marks, “then we’ve made a very dangerous assumption. If we teach the student and the student doesn’t learn what we teach, then we’ve lost nothing.”
• Misconception #2 – Students with disabilities should be grouped with other students with the same disability. “If we believe children learn best in groups that exhibit a range of interests and skills,” says Marks, “why do we think differently for children with disabilities? Variety creates stimulating environments.”
• Misconception #3 – All students must demonstrate the same learning outcomes. Teachers allow for differences in learning pace and cognitive styles in regular-education classrooms, says Marks. The same should be true for children with special needs.

“Nature v. Nurture in Special Education” by Susan Unok Marks in Phi Delta Kappan, November 2009 (Vol. 91, #3, p. 65-69) http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/index.htm.

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9. Financial Literacy for Teens

In this Middle Ground article, economic-literacy expert Jennifer Cornell shares resources for teaching “financial fitness” across the curriculum, including:
• The Council for Economic Education’s voluntary national content standards, available at http://www.councilforeconed.org/ea/program.php?pid=19; the site has the 20 most important, enduring ideas, concepts, and issues of economics.
• The Powell Center for Economic Literacy publishes keystone economic principles for teachers who are new to economics. Among the concepts:
- We all make choices.
- There’s no such a thing as a free lunch.
- All choices have consequences.
- Incentives produce predictable consequences.
The center is at http://www.powellcenter.org.
• The Council for Economic Education published the Financial Fitness for Life curriculum in 2001, geared to grades 6-8: http://www.fffl.councilforeconed.org.
• The National Endowment for Financial Education has the High School Financial Planning Program at http://www.nefe.org/HighSchoolProgram/tabid/146/Default.aspx and also MoneyWi$e Teens and Money series:
http://www.money-wise.org/modules/module_teens_and_money.
Key concepts, says Cornell, are helping students develop skills and knowledge about budgeting, saving, and spending.

“Making Financial Fitness Part of Your Curriculum” by Jennifer Cornell in Middle Ground, October 2009 (Vol. 13, #2, p. 32-33); Cornell can be reached at jcornell@collegiate-va.org.

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10. Short Items: a) We Can Change the World Challenge b) Citizen Science Central

a) We Can Change the World Challenge – The Siemens Foundation, Discovery Education, and the National Science Teachers Association are challenging K-8 students to team up with classmates and create replicable solutions to environmental issues in their classrooms, schools, and communities. See http://www.wecanchange.com for more information.

Spotted in “News to Use” in Middle Ground, October 2009 (Vol. 13, #2, p. 9)

b) Citizen Science Central – This Cornell University website has resources for students to get involved in hands-on citizen science projects in all areas:
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/projects/find.

Spotted in “Everyone’s a Scientist” by Jessica Fries-Gaither in Middle Ground, October 2009 (Vol. 13, #2, p. 28-29)

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