I finished this month's Kappan - a magazine that shows signs of going through a major revival - and found good stuff in several others. I still haven't gotten to the new Teachers College Record and Harvard Educational Review. Soon!

Stan Pogrow got in touch last week after my summary of his Kappan article. He's set up a blog where teachers can submit ideas for Outrageous Lessons: http://www.outrageousteaching.blogspot.com.

All the best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“We are totally committed to reading, writing, science, and history. But we also know that some history doesn’t come out of a book. Some history you get to be part of.”
Linda Lane, Pittsburgh Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, on students watching the
Inaugural ceremony during the school day (New York Times, Jan. 15, 2009)

“I love Obama! He’s just like me. He’s smart. Like me. Now I won’t get teased for good grades. He’s skinny, like me, and he’s from a messed-up family but he made it to the White House. So can I.”
A white high-school girl, quoted in “Improve Education from Day One: Leverage Parents” by Bill Jackson and Leanna Landsmann in Education Week, Jan. 21, 09, p. 27

“Educators have a duty to get good results in student achievement, but also to do it responsibly, without ‘shortcuts’… and without violating… [in President Obama’s words] the ‘values upon which our success depends: honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.’ Read that list again and ponder the stories of schools narrowing the curriculum, getting rid of everything but reading and math, squeezing out history and civics, forcing children to suffer through weeks of test prep – and telling weak students to stay home on test day. A ‘New Era of Responsibility’ would put an end to that.”
Michael Petrilli in The Education Gadfly, Jan. 22, 2009 (Vol. 9, #3)

“[T]he single biggest factor in whether [high-school] students try or give up, leave or stay, is their sense that somebody in the school knows who they are and cares about what happens to them… It seems that in many cases as little as 20 to 30 minutes of supportive adult attention can move a student from the wrong path to the right one.”
Ben Levin in “20 Minutes to Change a Life?” in Phi Delta Kappan, Jan. 2009, p. 3
 

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1. Sometimes You Have to Call People Out

In this Wharton Leadership Digest transcript of a speech given at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, business executive Alex Gorsky describes a leadership challenge early in his career.
On a team with a lot of opinionated and outspoken members, one man stood out, both for his talent and competence, and also because he needed to prove that he was the smartest person in the room by winning every argument. When he spoke during meetings, other members of the team withdrew and sat in silence, and when others spoke, this man would work on his BlackBerry and not pay attention. All this poisoned group dynamics.
After observing this for a few meetings, Gorsky spoke to the man privately, saying, “Look, you’re bright. There are a lot of things you can do, but the impact you have on other people is that you shut them down. And it’s very clear, even though you don’t say anything, that you’re not valuing what’s being said and the problem with that is that once in a while they may actually be saying something that could really help you. You’re not going to pick this information up and you’re not going to make the right decision.”
The man appeared to hear the feedback, but his behavior in meetings didn’t change. In a board meeting a short time later, another manager started talking and this man talked over him. Gorsky interrupted, saying, “You know, let’s just stop for a minute. When somebody else is talking we need to behave in a respectful and a professional way. And I don’t think talking to somebody else out loud when someone else is talking is the right behavior that we want to have among this team.”
You could hear a pin drop, says Gorsky. It was a risky move since this was a valuable employee. Why confront him during a meeting? Gorsky says that he had already spoken to him in private and that didn’t work. “The behavior continued and, in my mind, no one person is more important than the team. And sometimes an uncorrected standard becomes a new standard… [Sometimes] you’ve just got to be brutally honest and direct and call people out.” After this incident, the group dynamics in this team improved dramatically.

“The Responsibilities of Leadership: Alex Gorsky, Worldwide Chairman of Johnson & Johnson’s Surgical Care Group” in Wharton Leadership Digest, January 2009 (Vol. 13, #3, p. 2-4) http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/digest/index.shtml
 

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2. Warm and Competent – Can People Be Both?

“When we encounter someone new, we quickly seek answers to two questions rooted in the evolutionary need to make correct survival decisions,” says Amy Cuddy in this Harvard Business Review article: “What are this person’s intentions toward me? and is this person capable of acting on those intentions?” Put more simply, are they warm and are they competent? This happens all the time in schools: teachers size up students, students size up their teachers, and administrators assess their staffs.
Psychological research in 24 countries has revealed that this quick assessment of people is remarkably consistent, says Cuddy, as is the way we act on our perceptions: “We like to assist people we view as warm and block those we see as cold,” she says; “we desire to associate with people we consider competent and ignore those we consider incompetent.”
Unfortunately, people’s perceptions are often skewed by stereotypes, which can lead managers to trust unworthy colleagues and undervalue valuable colleagues. For example, many people feel warmly toward the elderly but disrespect them because they believe they are less competent. And the same is true of mothers in the workplace, who are regarded warmly but are often stereotyped as less competent – with the result that they are under-promoted and underpaid.
Another unfortunate dynamic is that people tend to see warmth and competence as inversely related – in other words, if people are sweet, they’re probably not competent, and if they’re competent, they’re probably not that nice. Cuddy has two pieces of advice to help managers avoid “the high cost of mistaken judgments”:
• Don’t make snap judgments. Push yourself to be aware of how you form impressions. Avoid sizing people up on the basis of stereotypical perceptions of warmth and competence.
• Separate the two dimensions. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” says Cuddy. “Warmth and competence aren’t mutually exclusive.” People are capable of both.

“Just Because I’m Nice, Don’t Assume I’m Dumb” by Amy Cuddy in Harvard Business Review, February 2009 (Vol. 87, #2, p. 24), no e-link available
 

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3. Avoiding Dumb Decisions

In this intriguing Harvard Business Review article, management experts Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, and Sydney Finkelstein ponder the question of why smart leaders sometimes make stupid decisions. For example, Brigadier General Matthew Broderick, who was chief of the Homeland Security Operations Center and had the responsibility of telling President Bush and other government officials if Hurricane Katrina had breached the levees in New Orleans, went home in the late afternoon of August 29, 2005 believing that everything was okay.
Campbell, Whitehead, and Finkelstein analyzed 83 flawed decisions like this one and concluded that people depend on two hardwired processes when they make decisions – and each can be distorted:
• Pattern recognition – “Faced with a new situation, we make assumptions based on prior experiences and judgments,” say the authors. “But pattern recognition can also mislead us. When we’re dealing with seemingly familiar situations, our brains can cause us to think we understand them when we don’t.” In the case of Hurricane Katrina, Broderick’s previous experience in Vietnam and with hurricanes elsewhere in the U.S. had taught him that early reports of crisis were often overblown and it was better to wait for “ground truth” from a reliable source before acting. The Army Corps of Engineers reported that there were no levee breaches and a CNN report showed New Orleans residents in the French Quarter celebrating having “dodged the bullet” and Broderick believed these over other reports of major flooding.
• Emotional tagging – This is when emotions from a previous experience become latched to something in our memory. The process happens at a subconscious level, so if we are angry at someone because of a previous encounter, we tend not to make sound judgments when we interact with them – without realizing why.
Snap judgments based on pattern recognition and emotional tagging are often made instantaneously, without following a logical process of laying out options, defining our objectives, and thinking carefully before we act. There are few checks and balances, and people tend not to revisit their bad decisions until it’s too late.
“Because we now understand more about how the brain works,” conclude Campbell, Whitehead, and Finkelstein, “we can anticipate the circumstances in which errors of judgment may occur and guard against them.” Here are three “red flags” that can lead managers to see false patterns or allow their judgment to be distorted:
• The presence of inappropriate self-interest – “Research has shown that even well-intentioned professionals, such as doctors and auditors, are unable to prevent self-interest from biasing their judgments of which medicine to prescribe or opinions to give during an audit,” say the authors.
• The presence of distorting attachments – “We can become attached to people, places, and things,” they write, “and these bonds can affect the judgments we form about both the situation we face and the appropriate actions to take.”
• The presence of misleading memories – “These are memories that seem relevant and comparable to the current situation but lead our thinking down the wrong path,” say the authors. “They can cause us to overlook or undervalue some important differentiating factors, as Matthew Broderick did when he gave too little thought to the implications of a hurricane hitting a city below sea level.” If things seemed to work out well in a previous situation, that can leave a positive emotional tag and that prevents us from making good judgments in a different situation.
Isn’t all this obvious? It is, say the authors, but that doesn’t mean people avoid these pitfalls: “We’ve found many leaders who intuitively understand that their thinking and their colleagues’ thinking can be distorted. But few leaders do so in a structured way, and as a result many fail to provide sufficient safeguards against bad decisions.” Campbell, Whitehead, and Finkelstein conclude with three pieces of advice for situations where any of the red flags are operating:
a. Inject fresh experience or analysis. “You can often counteract biases by exposing the decision-maker to new information and a different take on the problem,” they say.
b. Introduce further debate and challenge. This helps to confront biases explicitly. It’s easier to get this to happen when the power dynamics within a group are relatively even.
c. Impose stronger governance. The most important decisions should be ratified at a higher level.

“Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions” by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, and Sydney Finkelstein in Harvard Business Review, February 2009 (Vol. 87, #2, p. 60-66), no e-link available; the authors can be reached at andrew.campbell@ashridge.org.uk,
jo.whitehead@ashridge.org.uk, and sydney.finkelstein@tuck.dartmouth.edu
 

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4. Tips for Making a Presentation

In this passage in his 1997 book, Visual Explanations, Yale professor emeritus Edward Tufte gives these pointers for making a presentation to an audience:
• Near the beginning, tell your audience (a) What the problem is, (b) Why the problem is important, and (c) What the solution to the problem is. “If a clear statement of the problem cannot be formulated,” says Tufte, “then that is a sure sign that the content of the presentation is deficient.”
• To explain complex ideas or data, use the method of PGP: Particular, General, Particular. For example, when explaining a complex chart, introduce it quickly, then point to one particular number and say what it means, then step back and describe the general architecture of the table, then reinforce it by explaining a second particular number. Choose your two data points to illustrate the overall lesson.
• No matter what, give everybody in the audience one or more pieces of paper, packed with material related to your presentation. These could be pictures, diagrams, data tables, research methods, references, names of people to contact, and detailed information on what you presented.
• Analyze the details of your presentation and then master them by practice, practice, practice. Rehearsals with a critical friend or a video camera are very helpful, focusing not just on what your audience will hear but also what it will see.
• Show up early. You can look the place over, recover if there’s a problem with equipment or location, and greet people as they arrive.
• Finish early. People never complain when a presentation ends a little before the announced time. In fact, they love it!

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward Tufte (Graphics Press, 1997)
 

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5. Riffing on the Dream

In this New York Times review of Eric Sundquist’s recent book, King’s Dream (Yale University Press, 2009), veteran reporter/columnist/author Anthony Lewis writes about something he learned about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 I Have a Dream speech: “A remarkable fact of which I was unaware is that the last third of the speech – the part about the dream – was extemporized by King. He had a text, completed the night before. But as he was addressing the crowd, protesting the indignities and brutalities suffered by blacks, he put the prepared speech aside, paused for a moment, and then introduced an entirely new theme.”
“I still have a dream,” said King. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
What were the origins of the last third of the speech? In his book, Sundquist traces it to King’s previous speeches, Negro spirituals, and the Bible (“…every valley shall be exalted”). Coretta Scott King believed the words “flowed from some higher place.”
Why did King set aside his prepared text? (Among the deleted passages was a statement that the Lincoln Memorial, looming behind him, was “but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we can make real in our national life, in every state and every section, the things for which he died.”) Sundquist theorizes that, despite shouts of approval from the 200,000 people before him, King felt he had not yet connected with them.
Whatever the reason, this was the part of the speech for which King was remembered – and which became, says Lewis, one of the three things that made Barack Obama’s election possible (the other two were Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision). “Speaking suddenly from the heart,” writes Sundquist, “he delivered a speech elegantly structured, commanding in tone, and altogether more profound than anything heard on American soil in nearly a century. In the midst of speaking, King rewrote his speech and created a new national scripture.”

“A New National Scripture” by Anthony Lewis in The New York Times Book Review, Jan. 18, 2009 (p. 9-10)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/books/review/Lewis-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=A%20New%20National%20Scripture&st=cse
 

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6. Marie Carbo on Matching Teaching Strategies to Learning Styles

In this Kappan article, reading expert Marie Carbo says she knows why Reading First has not been effective. “When more time and money are spent on teaching reading, and yet there is no improvement in reading comprehension,” she says, “that’s a strong indication that ineffective teaching practices are being used… Reading instruction should use students’ reading style strengths and preferences. In short, learning to read should be easy and fun. When it’s difficult and boring, it’s invariably the wrong work.” Carbo cites studies showing remarkable gains from a reading-styles approach in a number of districts and schools (see http://www.nrsi.com/research.php for her citations).
Carbo says that for the last 100 years, the pendulum has swung back and forth between the “global” approach to reading instruction (e.g., whole language) and the “analytic” approach (e.g., phonics). The problem is that few educators have paid attention to the fact that different approaches work with different children: “our individual reading styles predispose us to learn easily with certain reading methods and materials,” she says. Here’s how:
• Analytic – This model has children go from parts to whole – from sounds to words to connected text. The children who do best with this approach are those with strongly auditory and analytic reading styles: they can hear and recall letter sounds and the logic of phonics makes sense to them because they like things to be sequential, organized, direct, and predictable. But this approach is not easy or pleasant for students who are not auditory and analytic. The problem is most serious for children who can’t hear the differences between sounds and therefore can’t learn and blend sounds.
• Global – This model moves from whole to parts – connected text to words to sounds. Lots of stories are read aloud to children, and after they can read with some independence, students practice words and phrases in isolation. Finally, they are helped to “discover” similarities in the words they have been reading and writing. The children who do best with this approach are those with strong visual and global reading styles. They can recall words from the stories they hear, and writing words helps them remember. But the global approach feels disorganized and haphazard to analytic learners, and they may not develop as readers.
The big challenge, says Carbo, is finding the right approach for at-risk readers, who tend to be strongly global, tactile, and kinesthetic. For these children, meaning is critically important. “Global students need to be deeply interested in what they’re reading,” says Carbo. “While all students benefit from high-interest reading materials, strongly global students absolutely require these kinds of materials to do their best. Based on what we know about these youngsters, their reading programs should focus on high-interest stories (with special recordings, if needed), words learned primarily in context, and reading skills that are drawn from the stories being read, preferably taught in a game format.”
What is the goal of reading instruction? Raising reading comprehension levels and reading enjoyment, says Carbo. How should this be assessed? By students’ ability to understand increasingly difficult, high-interest material; by the number of books students take out of the library voluntarily; by the amount of time children voluntarily discuss, recommend, and exchange books with classmates; and by the amount of voluntary reading done by children in their classrooms, the library, and at home. Skills should be taught, says Carbo, but “the focus should be on reading comprehension and enjoyment.”
Carbo believes that these key strategies produce the greatest gains in students’ reading achievement:
• Identify students’ reading-style strengths.
• Match reading methods, materials, and strategies with those strengths.
• Provide sufficient modeling of reading methods and continually stretch students into higher-level reading materials using well-written, high-interest texts.
• Use colored overlays to lessen the effects of visual dyslexia. For some students, letters and words reverse, swirl, or slide off the page, and colored overlays help them focus. For more information, see http://www.dyslexiacure.com and http://www.seeitright.com.
• As much as possible, teach with hands-on games in a comfortable, relaxed environment in a variety of individual and group settings.
• Maximize the amount of time students read for pleasure, deeply engaged in what they are reading.
In a sidebar to this article, Carbo lists four ineffective reading practices; these “make reading “unnecessarily difficult for students and reduce reading for pleasure,” she says:
• Too many worksheets and skill sheets; there is little to no research supporting their use, she says.
• Too many reading materials in which students have no interest. Sixth graders, for example, love reading scary books and stories; comics; cartoons; magazines about popular culture; books and magazines about sports, cars, and trucks; series books; funny books, and books about animals.
• Too much emphasis on end-of-year reading tests with daily testing on minuscule, usually unnecessary reading skills. “This endless testing and test practice, the continual fear of failure, and the resulting high levels of stress all have a negative effect on learning,” says Carbo. “While small amounts of stress may motivate some people, brain research tells us that large doses of stress cause fear, decrease motivation, make learning difficult, and perhaps worst of all, reduce the ability to think and perform at high levels.”
• Too much emphasis on skills teaching. “Few of the hundreds of skills and sub-skills have been validated as being necessary for children to become good readers,” says Carbo. “In fact, at-risk readers who have made great leaps in reading ability have spent most of their time reading books and short stories they enjoy with the aid of modeling methods, with small amounts of time spent on a few important reading skills.”

“Match the Style of Instruction to the Style of Reading” by Marie Carbo in Phi Delta Kappan, January 2009 (Vol. 90, #5, p. 373-378); this article can be purchased for $5.00 at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm. To take a virtual tour of Reading Styles schools or schedule a visit, go to http://www.nrsi.com/model_schools.php.
 

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7. An Alternative to Ruby Payne’s Approach to Teaching Poor Children

In this Kappan article, University of Minnesota/Twin Cities professors Mistilina Sato and Timothy Lensmire applaud the increasing willingness of educators to learn new approaches to teaching diverse students. But they decry the way low-SES children are being labeled with “grossly overgeneralized, deficit-laden characteristics that put them at risk of being viewed as less capable, less cultured, and less worthy as learners.” The authors are especially critical of Ruby Payne, whose company, aha! Process, Inc., conducts 800-1,000 workshops a year in the U.S. and Canada, and whose book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty (2005) has sold more than a million copies. While Payne claims she wants to help people living in poverty, say the authors, her stereotypical descriptions actually contribute to “the larger effort to persuade society that the poor are undeserving of society’s help.”
Sato and Lensmire present a three-part alternative to Payne’s approach based on respecting all children’s competence, teachers rethinking their cultural identity, and a professional development model based on teacher collaboration:
• Children’s competence – “Rather than dwelling on children’s perceived deficits,” say the authors, “we believe teachers should be encouraged to focus instead on children’s competence as cultural and intellectual people.” Teachers need to become skilled at understanding cultural mismatches based on race, ethnicity, poverty, and beliefs and providing instruction that reaches all children. They quote multicultural expert, Geneva Gay, who suggests:
- Using the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups in the classroom;
- Bridging home and school experiences;
- Making connections between academic abstractions and children’s lived realities;
- Using instructional strategies aligned with students’ learning styles;
- Incorporating multicultural information, resources, and materials.
They encourage educators to make periodic home visits, which helps them see students’ environment as “robust, historical, and worthy.”
• Teachers’ cultural identity – “Payne offers educators the role of savior,” say the authors, providing a certain “guilty voyeuristic pleasure” as we affirm our normalcy against an image of the pathological poor. “It is an offer we need to reject,” they say, “and to reject it, we need to bring the same sorts of assumptions and concepts to bear in relation to ourselves that we bring to our rewriting of who we imagine the poor to be.” Teachers are “complex, cultural, and historical beings… human actors born into a web of meanings and values of which we are only partially aware and not in complete control.” Given that most American teachers are white and middle-class, an important professional development activity is engaging in “critical whiteness studies” by forming study groups centered around “re-imagining ourselves as educators and our relationships to students living in poverty.” The authors recommend Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White edited by David Roediger (Schocken, 1998).
• Teacher collaboration – Teaching is a “complex and uncertain endeavor”, say Sato and Lensmire. “To imagine that we can create a list of strategies and assign them to whole groups of children because of who their parents are or where they live is a gross oversimplification of what it means to teach or to be a teacher… Teachers will need support in developing a better understanding of themselves and their own worldviews in order to better engage with children who bring different experiences, cultures, values, and ways of understanding the world into the classroom.” Teachers need “new ways of being,” ways of being “present in the moment with students, while listening to them and respecting their ideas. Part of that being is a willingness to ask students questions, to get to know them as thinkers, as children, and as people.”

“Poverty and Payne: Supporting Teachers to Work with Children of Poverty” by Mistilina Sato and Timothy Lensmire in Phi Delta Kappan, January 2009 (Vol. 90, #5, p. 365-370); this article can be purchased for $5.00 at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm. See these previous Marshall Memos for more articles on this topic: #190/1, #232/5 (an article by Payne), and #264/2.
 

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8. Ruby Payne Defends Her Work

In this Kappan article, author/consultant Ruby Payne says that she wrote her best-selling book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty (2005), to help educators address the challenges of educating all children to high levels. “It is my fervent hope that in 20 years I will never hear again, ‘This child cannot learn because he or she is poor,’” says Payne.
Her aim is to support more effective teaching of low-SES students, who become “incredible problem-solvers” in the “situated learning” environment of their homes and neighborhoods and need help making the transition to the “decontextualized environment of school”, which puts a premium on the “abstract representational system of knowledge that is learned and usually not available in the situated-learning environment of generational poverty.”
Responding to her critics, Payne says they are “social determinists” – that is, they believe that who we are and what we can become “are determined by systems and social access.” She has this to say about several criticisms aimed at her work:
• In response to those who say she embraces a “deficit model”, she says we need to look at what students can and cannot do, and inevitably any member of the dominant culture will be accused of deficit thinking when talking about less-advantaged students. She says that the latest edition of her book refers to an “additive model” and she has always advocated honoring the “internal assets of people from all economic classes.”
• In response to accusations of indirect racism, Payne says, “My work looks at poverty primarily through the lens of class, not race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age, or other criteria.”
• In response to accusations that she stereotypes the poor, Payne says, “Well, poverty often is violent,” and cites the disproportionate impact of gun violence, incarceration, child abuse, and food insecurity on the poor. “To frame the facts simply as stereotypes is to trivialize and dismiss the brutal reality of generational poverty,” she says, adding, “This work is based on patterns. All patterns have exceptions.” Payne also says that for several years, she and her colleagues have been implementing many of the techniques and approaches advocated by her critics, including seeking out giftedness in children of poverty, bringing the poor to the decision-making table as co-investigators, and building relationships with students and their parents.
• Finally, Payne refers readers to http://www.ahaprocess.com for what she describes as peer-reviewed research on the statistically significant impact of her work on the achievement of poor students.

“Poverty Does Not Restrict a Student’s Ability to Learn” by Ruby Payne in Phi Delta Kappan, January 2009 (Vol. 90, #5, p. 371-372); this article can be purchased for $5.00 at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm. See these previous Marshall Memos for more articles on this topic: #190/1, #232/5 (another article by Payne), and #264/2.
 

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9. Collaborative Problem-Solving with Difficult Students

In this American School Board Journal interview, editor Kathleen Vail speaks with Harvard Medical School professor Ross Greene about his recent book, Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them (Scribner, 2008). Greene says that there are three ways that adults deal with children who have social and emotional problems:
• Plan A: Adults impose their will – School discipline is based on this approach: rewards and punishments. It works with less-challenging children but not with the most difficult. They whine, pout, sulk, scream, swear, bite, spit, kick, and hit. “Their challenging behavior is a learning disability of sorts,” says Greene. “They lack crucial skills: flexibility, frustration tolerance, problem solving.” Adults often assume these children are being manipulative, seeking attention, or testing limits. In fact, says Greene, they have trouble with the skills of behavior, just as other children have trouble learning to read. When we use Plan A, we start losing them.
• Plan C: Dropping our expectations completely – Clearly this isn’t the way to go, says Greene.
• Plan B: Collaborative problem-solving – There are three ingredients: (1) The adult takes the time to gather information and understand what the child’s concern is and get his or her perspective on the unsolved problem; (2) The adult puts his or her concerns on the table: safety, loss of learning, or how the child’s behavior affects other people; and (3) The adult and child brainstorm solutions and narrow down the choices until they agree on an effective approach. “It’s very hard work,” says Greene, “but teachers are working hard with the challenging kids already.”

“Q&A with Ross Greene, Author of Lost at School” by Kathleen Vail in American School Board Journal, February 2009 (Vol. 196, #2, p. 13), no e-link available
 

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10. Short Items: a. Morphing presidents; b. Blog to improve students’ writing; c. Interactive computer models website; d. Bullying prevention website; e. Continuing math education for teachers;

a. Morphing presidents – This amazing YouTube clip shows portraits of all 44 presidents morphing one into the next to the accompaniment of “Bolero.” Quite something!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYrZZ68zhSs
“From George Washington to Barack Obama: A Long Way”

b. Blog to improve students’ writing – This link from Learning Express is a forum to share ideas on how to help students become better writers: http://www.thewritingteacher.org.

Spotted in “Bulletin Board” in Principal Leadership, January 2009 (Vol. 9, #5, p. 10)

c. Interactive computer models website – The Wolfram Demonstrations Project offers interactive demonstrations of anything that can be modeled mathematically – bacteria growth, light refraction, supply and demand, etc. Running a demo requires Mathematica Player, which can be downloaded free, along with the demos: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com.

Spotted in “Bulletin Board” in Principal Leadership, January 2009 (Vol. 9, #5, p. 10)

d. Bullying prevention website – Finding New Words: A Resource for Addressing Bullying in School was created by- Race Bridges for Schools, and includes a lesson plan and teacher material:
http://www.racebridgesforschools.com/2008_2009_lessons/FindingNewWords.pdf.

Spotted in “Bulletin Board” in Principal Leadership, January 2009 (Vol. 9, #5, p. 11)

e. Continuing math education for teachers – Mathematics Illuminated is an online course that promotes the idea that math is a means to understanding the world, not an end in itself. Each unit has a streamed video and an online textbook. Free after registration:
http://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated.

Spotted in “Bulletin Board” in Principal Leadership, January 2009 (Vol. 9, #5, p. 11)
 

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