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I finished The Reading Teacher and got up to date on publications for the first time in weeks. As always, the Harvard Business Review had some good cross-over material.

Happy Halloween!

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“That’s what they told me in 6th grade, and here I am in 7th.”
A New York seventh grader, when threatened with retention (see item #5)

“If your spoken message and your body language are mismatched, audiences will respond to the nonverbal message every time.”
Nick Morgan (see item #2)

“Differentiation is a huge topic and can be so overwhelming. Remember, though, that true differentiation is not an individual lesson plan for every student.”
Mindy Fattig in “Co-Teaching in the Multi-Level Classroom” in Teacher, Oct. 22, 2008

“The central element of all instruction for ELLs should be to make rich language comprehensible.”
Eurydice Bouchereau Bauer and Patrick Manyak in “Creating Language-Rich
Instruction for English-Language Learners” in The Reading Teacher, October 2008
(Vol. 62, #2, p. 176)

“Keep in mind, of course, that improvement is each individual’s own responsibility. You can only make yourself better.”
Samuel Culbert on performance review in The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 20, 2008

“Those on the extremes tend to think that those who disagree with them simply do not understand, and if only the blighted souls on the other side could be made to see the truth, all would be well… People do not talk to each other in such a world. They talk at each other, or, more often, about each other.”
Jon Meacham in his editor’s comment in Newsweek, Oct. 27, 2008 (p. 4)
 

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1. How a Leader Can Avoid Being a “Dictator by Default”

In this Harvard Business Review article, Boston-based business leader Bob Frisch describes a common scenario in leadership team meetings. An issue has to be decided, and there are several different opinions around the table. After lengthy discussion, there’s no consensus, and all eyes turn to the leader. He or she makes the decision, but nobody is happy with it. The leader feels the team was indecisive, and they are upset that the leader is acting like a dictator.
The dictator-by-default syndrome is common in the business world, says Frisch. The usual response is to run people through team-building and communication exercises to help them get better at having assertive conversations, giving and taking feedback, and trusting each other. But Frisch believes that these psychological approaches don’t address the real problem, namely trying to arrive at a collective preference on the basis of individual preferences. Once leadership teams see that, he says, “they can stop wasting time on irrelevant psychological exercises and instead adopt practical measures designed to break the impasse.” Here are his strategies for moving beyond the blame cycle to no-fault decision-making.
• Clearly describe the desired outcome. Leadership team members may think they are talking about the same thing, but often they are talking past each other, which makes it much more difficult to reach consensus and sets up the boss up to be a dictator. The first step is to be crystal clear about what the team is trying to achieve and how success will be measured. This part of the discussion – the what – needs to be separated from the discussion of how to get there. “Sometimes, simply articulating the desired outcome will forestall or dissolve disagreement about solutions because the options can be tested against an accepted premise,” says Frisch.
• Provide a range of options. This gets away from overly simplified yes/no choices, allowing a more nuanced discussion of how to accomplish the ultimate goal.
• Test fences and walls. When discussing options, leadership teams tend to shy away from certain areas that are seen as insurmountable barriers. Frisch recommends taking the time to look carefully at all perceived barriers to change and asking if they are walls, which can’t be moved, or fences, which can.
• Surface preferences early. Juries often take an informal, non-binding guilty/not guilty straw poll before beginning serious deliberation. Frisch says that leadership teams should do the same. This helps people get the feel of the process early on and highlights areas of agreement and disagreement – and the potential for deadlock. A variation on this is weighted straw-poll voting, where each member of the team has a certain number of poker chips and can allocate them among the various options according to his or her assessment of their relative worth. Again, this helps the team see where things stand right from the beginning.
• State each option’s pros and cons. If there isn’t someone in the room who can speak to each side of every argument, Frisch recommends appointing a devil’s advocate. This tradition originated in the Roman Catholic Church’s canonization process: a lawyer is appointed to make the case against each candidate, regardless of how saintly. This depersonalizes the process and produces a robust argument about the advantages and disadvantages of each option on the table. An alternative is for the leader to ask each team member to speak to each option from the standpoint of their functional team.
• Develop new options. If the team sees the options narrowing to a binary either/or decision, Frisch says the team should generate a broader range of options and keep pushing for solutions that meet their desired outcome and bring the maximum number of team members on board.
Frisch closes with two ground rules that he says are essential to this process. First, the team’s deliberations must be confidential. People won’t feel free to float trial balloons, cut deals, and engage in the “free play of the mind” if their words will leak out to colleagues outside the leadership team. In addition, a closed meeting will help those on the losing side of an argument save face when the decision is made.
Second, it’s important to set aside enough time for a full discussion. Important decisions shouldn’t be shoehorned into an arbitrary 30 minutes. “When new options are devised or existing ones unbundled,” says Frisch, “team members need time to study them carefully and assess the counterarguments. Breaking up the discussion into several meetings spaced widely apart and interspersed with additional analysis and research gives people a chance to reconsider their preferences. It also gives them time to prepare their constituencies for changes that are likely to emerge as a result of a new strategy.”

“When Teams Can’t Decide” by Bob Frisch in Harvard Business Review, November 2008 (Vol. 86, #11, p. 121-126), no e-link available; the author can be reached at rfrisch@strategicoffsites.com.
 

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2. Speechmaking 101 – Being Authentic and Connecting with Your Audience

In this Harvard Business Review article, veteran communication coach Nick Morgan gives four pointers for giving an effective public speech. He’s found that many speechmakers appear to be doing all the right things – establishing eye contact, pausing at the right moments, telling a story, speaking with expression, walking out from behind the podium, using animated gestures – and yet fail to connect with the audience. For reasons that are hard to define, their presentations seem calculated, insincere, not real, “phoned in.” Why does this happen, even to people who believe passionately in their message?
The problem, says Morgan, is the “second conversation” – non-verbal signals that undermine authenticity. “If your spoken message and your body language are mismatched,” he says, “audiences will respond to the nonverbal message every time. Gestures speak louder than words.” Counterintuitively, the solution is not to wing it but to prepare and rehearse more effectively – keeping an important insight in mind. A natural gesture precedes the words it expresses by a fraction of a second, says Morgan, whereas a calculated, coached gesture comes slightly after the words. “Although audiences are not consciously aware of this unnatural sequence,” he says, “their innate ability to read body language leads them to feel that something’s wrong – that the speaker is inauthentic.”
What Morgan recommends is paradoxical – achieving authenticity through rehearsal – but his clients have found it works. He says the key is to “tap into the basic impulses underlying your speech.” These include four powerful aims:
• Being open – If your listeners see you as closed, they’ll think you are defensive, that the audience is somehow a threat to you. To convey the opposite, Morgan recommends imagining you are speaking to people with whom you’re completely relaxed – a spouse, a close friend – and focusing on how that feels. “This is the state you need to be in if you are to have an authentic rapport with your audience,” he says. “If it’s hard to create this mental image, try the real thing. Find a patient friend and push yourself to be open with him or her. Notice what that scene looks like and, again, how you feel.” There’s always the danger of over-intellectualizing, Morgan concedes. “This is a bit like practicing a golf swing or a tennis serve. Although you might make tiny mental notes about what you’re doing, they shouldn’t get in the way of recognizing a feeling that you can try to replicate later.” People who really open up to audiences smile more, relax their shoulders, convey their passion, and win over their listeners.
• Connecting – Many speakers wait until the end of a presentation to reach out to audience members or notice their reactions. Morgan says this needs to happen from the very beginning. He suggests imagining that you are trying to capture the attention of a young child. How do you do that? Moving closer, speaking a little louder, perhaps making the child part of the presentation. Then the challenge is to hold the audience’s attention. For that, Morgan suggests shifting to imagining a skeptical teenager who needs to be hooked in.
• Being passionate – What do you feel deeply about in this speech? What’s at stake? What results do you want your presentation to produce? What worries you? “Focus not on what you want to say but on why you’re giving the speech and how you feel about that,” says Morgan. “Let the underlying emotion come out (once you’ve identified it, you won’t need to force it) in every word you deliver…” Sometimes thinking about or including a personal story – one speaker remembered how her mother, a dancer, pushed her to persist through every obstacle – can help a speaker connect with real emotions. “Forget about rehearsing specific gestures,” he says. “If you are able to sincerely realize these feelings, your body language will take care of itself, emerging naturally and at the right moment.”
• Listening – Morgan says it’s vital to watch your audience closely from the very beginning, looking for signs of responsiveness or tuning out. From listeners’ body language, you can decide whether to pick up the pace, change your language, eliminate part of the talk, or ask an impromptu question. Taking questions in the middle of the presentation is demanding – you have to know your material cold – but it’s a great opportunity to listen to how people are responding. When an audience member asks a question, Morgan says you have to listen “with your whole body, keeping yourself physically and psychologically still in the way you might when someone is telling you something so important that you dare not miss a word. Without thinking about it, you’ll find yourself leaning forward or nodding your head – gestures that would appear unnatural if you were doing them because you’d been told to.”

“How to Become an Authentic Speaker” by Nick Morgan in Harvard Business Review, November 2008 (Vol. 86, #11, p. 115-119), no e-link available; the author can be reached at nick@publicwords.com.
 

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3. The Basics of Differentiated Instruction

In this Edutopia column, Ellen Moir, director of the New Teacher Center at the University of California/Santa Cruz, responds to a teacher’s question about how to meet the needs of her multi-level group of fifth graders. “I find myself teaching to the middle and having a difficult time engaging the lower- and higher-level students,” says the teacher. Muir suggests the following:
• Find out a lot about your students. Use good assessments, surveys, and queries to students’ parents and former teachers to get insights into kids’ academic and language levels, learning styles, interests, likes and dislikes, and home situations. It’s vital to have as much information as possible to differentiate instruction.
• Differentiate what you teach. Assign topics and projects based on students’ interests and proclivities so as to increase engagement while covering essential curriculum content.
• Differentiate how you teach. Scaffold the depth and complexity of lessons so that students can understand and apply knowledge in ways that make sense to them. For example, some students may do better discussing or debating a book; others may learn best doing PowerPoint presentations for classmates; and others may learn best manipulating objects or piecing things together.
• Differentiate how students demonstrate mastery. Give students options in how you check on whether students have absorbed what’s been taught. “Oral and written tests are not the only means for assessing student learning,” says Moir. You might use portfolios, rubrics, journals, reports, essays, projects, and other assignments and grading systems.”
• Differentiate the learning environment. “How you arrange your classroom – whether the desks are in rows or groups or learning centers – sets the tone for both teaching and learning,” says Moir.

“Individualize Your Instruction” by Ellen Moir in Edutopia, October/November 2008 (Vol. 4, #5, p. 14); no free e-link; to submit a question to Muir, go to askellen@edutopia.org.
 

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4. Guidelines for Writing Tests That Are Fair to Everyone

In this Education Week article, Christina Samuels describes a checklist (dubbed TAMI – Test Accessibility and Modification Inventory) being developed by researchers at Vanderbilt University to make test items accessible to all students. The problem this checklist addresses is tests that throw unneeded obstacles in the path of English language learners and students with disabilities. The challenge is keeping rigor and validity high while applying universal design principles to cut down on aspects of traditional tests that may disadvantage certain populations. Here are some of the modifications being suggested:
- Cutting down the number of distracters in multiple-choice questions from three to two. This doesn’t seriously reduce the difficulty or validity of the test item and makes it less likely that some students will be tripped up for reasons unrelated to their mastery of the material. Having four possible answers in multiple-choice items is common practice, but there is no magic to four. Some test makers throw in a fifth or sixth choice, such as None of the Above or All of the Above to make things even more challenging, but the Vanderbilt team is skeptical of this approach. “Complicated doesn’t necessarily translate to a better test,” said Stephen Elliott, one of the researchers.
- Eliminating illustrations and cartoons that aren’t directly related to the content. Some students hunt for clues in merely decorative illustrations when none are intended.
- Reducing the length of poems and passages that are designed to measure students’ vocabulary knowledge. If the test item isn’t measuring memory, there is no point in boosting the “cognitive load” more than is necessary. “Extraneous cognitive load can throw [students] off,” said Peter Beddow, the lead author of the checklist.
- Reducing the reading level of passages while still measuring relevant content and skills.
- Sprinkling questions through a long reading passage rather than having all the questions at the end.
- Giving students a choice of several passages so they can tackle material that’s of greatest interest to them.
The Vanderbilt checklist is a work in progress, and the researchers are seeking feedback.

“Researchers Piloting ‘Accessible’ Guidelines” by Christina Samuels in Education Week, Oct. 22, 2008 (Vol. 28, #9, p. 10-11); check the link to this article to see a sample test item:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/10/22/09assess.h28.html
 

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5. A Middle Ground Between Retention and Social Promotion

In this Education Week article, Lawrence (NY) seventh-grade teacher Adam Berlin has an intriguing suggestion for solving the perennial problem of middle-school students who thumb their noses at threats of being kept back. As one cheeky seventh grader said to Berlin when he mentioned retention, “That’s what they told me in 6th grade, and here I am in 7th.” What students like this have figured out is that many educators are reluctant to pull the trigger because they know that retention doesn’t work and is tightly linked to the high-school dropout rate. Less-motivated students game the system and drift through the grades without doing any serious work – and end up dropping out anyway.
So how can middle schools get these students to apply themselves? Berlin suggests that middle and high schools join forces and create an integrated system for accumulating credits needed for a high-school diploma. “A graduation credit system that included grades 7-12 would help establish the academic accountability currently lacking in middle schools,” writes Berlin. “In such a system, middle-school students, needing to earn credits toward graduation, would repeat failed classes as they do in high school. Ideally, they would also come to understand at the age of 11 or 12 – not as 14-year-olds – that it is important to study and do your work.”
Berlin acknowledges that this system could easily produce multiple retentions, and stresses that it needs to be backed up with a mandatory, intensive summer-school program focused on the core concepts and skills that students didn’t master during the year. It’s pointless to have students repeat the entire course, says Berlin; they need to focus on the areas they didn’t master. He also suggests alternative assessments in place of traditional final exam to help all students show their mastery. He believes that this approach would result in virtually all students being promoted and staying with their age cohort.

“Social Promotion or Retention? Finding a Middle Ground Should Start in Middle Schools” by Adam Berlin in Education Week, Oct. 22, 2008 (Vol. 28, #9, p. 28-29)
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/10/22/09berlin.h28.html
 

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6. Using Riddles to Improve Reading Comprehension – and Have Fun

In this article in The Reading Teacher, Marcy Zipke of Providence College (RI) says that having students work with riddles improves their comprehension by getting them to work nimbly with words that have more than one meaning. Of the 1,000 most frequently used words in the English language, more than half have more than one meaning, and research has shown that first and second graders’ ability to understand different meanings in context – for example, The man’s nails were very sharp – is a strong predictor of reading proficiency in later grades. This is also true of second graders’ ability to see structural ambiguities – for example, The chicken was ready to eat (is the farmer saying that the chicken needs to be fed, or is the cook saying the meal is ready to be served?).
The ambiguities of the English language make for good advertising slogans (Nothing comes between me and my Calvins), endless double-entendres (see previous), and a lifetime supply of humor. Kids Make Nutritious Snacks and Two Sisters Reunited After Eighteen Years at the Checkout Counter are among the many headlines in this vein (for others, see
http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguous_headlines.html).
Zipke summarizes the research on ambiguous language and then sings the praises of using riddles in the classroom, making a distinction between two types:
Lexical riddles, for example:
- Why do spiders like baseball? They’re good at catching flies!
- Do you have fans in your house? No, everyone hates me!
- Why can’t cheetahs hide very well? Because they’re always spotted!
- What has an ear but cannot hear? Corn!
- What is gray, has four legs, big ears, a tail, and a trunk? A mouse going on vacation!
- How do you weigh a fish? They come with scales!
- Why did Grandma knit three socks for her grandson? Because he grew a foot!
Structural riddles, for example:
- How do you stop a skunk from smelling? You hold its nose!
- How is a duck like an icicle? Both grow down.
- What has four wheels and flies? A garbage truck!
- Will you join me in a bowl of soup? Do you think there’s room for both of us?
- How do you stop your dog from barking in the house? Put it outside!

To get students writing their own riddles, it helps to pick a domain (baseball, for example), brainstorm words in that domain that have more than one meaning (bat, ball, diamond, plate, etc.), do some whole-group riddle-making, and then set students to work on their own or in teams. Some of what students come up with will be lame, but the experience of devising and sharing riddles pays dividends. “Learning to identify ambiguous language and consider all the possible meanings improves students’ reading comprehension ability,” concludes Zipke. “Brief training in these skills is enough to increase students’ sensitivity to the vast possibilities of our language. This sensitivity in turn helps students recognize the need to monitor their comprehension and ultimately to better comprehend what they read. Best of all, riddles and ambiguous texts that rely on humor are fun. They create an invaluable enthusiasm for literacy learning that is all too often missing from the elementary curriculum.”
Zipke also recommends the following riddle books:
- Did You Say Pears? by A. Alda (Tundra, 2006)
- Fiddle with a Riddle: Write Your Own Riddles by J. Bernstein (Dutton, 1979)
- The Everything Kids’ Joke Book by M. Dahl (Adams Media, 2001)
- The King Who Rained by F. Gwynne (Aladdin, 1970)
- The Sixteen Hand Horse by F. Gwynne (Aladdin, 1987)
- A Chocolate Moose for Dinner by F. Gwynne (Aladdin, 1988)
- A Little Pigeon Toad by F. Gwynne (Aladdin, 198)
- Kids Are Funny: Jokes Sent by Kids to the Rosie O’Donnell Show, Lucky Charms Entertainment (Warner, 1997)
- Amelia Bedelia series by H. Parish (Harper Collins, 1963-2008)
- Biggest Riddle Book in the World by J. Rosenblum (Sterling, 1976)
- The Zaniest Riddle Book by J. Rosenblum (Sterling, 1984)
- Eight Ate: A Feast of Homonym Riddles by M. Terban and G. Maestro (Clarion, 1982)
- Funny Side Up! How to Create Your Own Riddles and Riddle Books by M. Thaler (Scholastic, 1985)

“Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension with Riddles” by Marcy Zipke in The Reading Teacher, October 2008 (Vol. 62, #2, p. 128-137), no e-link available; Zipke can be reached at mzipke@providence.edu.
 

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7. Adapting Interactive Writing for a Third-Grade Class

In this article in The Reading Teacher, Gainsville (GA) instructional coach Heather Wall describes how interactive writing is used at the primary level and then discusses adapting it for the upper elementary grades.
At the primary level, interactive writing is a powerful tool for teaching spelling, punctuation, and grammar in the context of authentic writing. Developed in 1991 by a group of researchers and teachers associated with Ohio State University, interactive writing involves the teacher helping students compose a sentence about something that’s happened in the classroom and then “sharing the pen” as the sentence is written letter by letter and word by word on an easel sheet. Students take turns writing while the whole class negotiates phonemic, structural, and semantic rules to compose the message. The teacher guides the process, calling on students appropriately (“Steven, your name begins with an S, come up and write this S”), has students hold two fingers for appropriate spacing between words, and uses white-out tape to cover mistakes so they can be corrected. When the class is done (the process usually takes about ten minutes), the sentence is complete and error-free. Some teachers have students participate individually by writing on small whiteboards, writing in the air, or tracing letters on the carpet.
“Research has shown that as students receive this repeated practice in composing sentences, while using resources such as word walls, memorizing sight words, and applying phonetic skills, their writing improves,” says Wall. “Interestingly, reading skills, including reading comprehension, have also been shown to be positively affected.”
The question is whether interactive writing can be helpful in the upper elementary grades. Wall had great success using it in her first-grade classroom, and when she moved to third grade, she experimented with an adaptation. At the end of every week, she gathered her students to compose a few paragraphs summarizing the week’s learning for their weekly parent newsletter. They agreed on a topic and composed their class news article sentence by sentence on a large whiteboard. Hall chose students to write each sentence, and classmates helped with composition, spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The teacher supervised the process, drawing students’ attention to more sophisticated revisions. Some examples: “Who has a suggestion on how we can begin? Remember, we need a lead that will help the parents understand our topic right away… Can we combine these sentences in some way? … Jose, you come be the writer. Since we’re starting a new topic how will we begin this paragraph?... Let’s think about how this sentence begins. This word sounds like another very similar word. Will we use our or are? Look at the word wall to help.”
At the beginning of the year, Wall says that the sentences were simple and the paragraphs short. As the year progressed, the group’s collective writing improved, with more complex sentences, more voice, and improved grammar and spelling. There were debates about usage and spelling, and all students benefited from the process. Hall also used interactive writing with smaller, needs-based groups of students, tailoring the process to their specific needs. She found this format particularly helpful with special-needs and ELL students.
Hall believes that interactive writing could be adapted for older students to create short articles, reports, or narratives involving more difficult grammar concepts such as adverb clauses and introductory phrases. Initial instruction might take place in a large group, with students then breaking into smaller groups to construct a text using agreed-upon guidelines such as imperative sentences or specific adverbs.
Hall concludes, “Interactive writing can provide students in the upper elementary grades a chance to apply and experiment with new and more advanced writing concepts with the help and support of their peers.”

“Interactive Writing Beyond the Primary Grades” by Heather Wall in The Reading Teacher, October 2008 (Vol. 62, #2, p. 149-152), no e-link available; Wall can be reached at Heather.Wall@hallco.org.
 

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8. A Quiz on Teachers’ Legal Liability

In this article in Principal View, Matthew Militello and David Schimmel present a quiz on legal liability for educators. You might want to take a crack at it. The answers will be in next week’s Memo.
• Case #1: Mr. Jones breaks up a fight in the hallway, and as a result, a second grade student hits his head on the floor and has a serious concussion. Is Mr. Jones liable?
• Case #2: Mr. Harvey repeatedly warns one of his third graders to stay in his seat, but the boy continues to jump up and disrupt the class. Mr. Harvey (against the advice of his colleagues) walks over and puts a restraining hand on the boy’s shoulder. Is Mr. Harvey liable?
• Case #3: Ms. Martinez leaves her fifth-grade class for ten minutes to make copies of some science worksheets, telling her students to work quietly while she is gone. In her absence, several students begin to throw spitballs, paper airplanes, and pencils. A pencil flies into a girl’s eye, resulting in her losing sight in that eye. Is Ms. Martinez liable?
• Case #4: The same situation as #3, but instead of students in Ms. Martinez’s classroom throwing objects while she is gone, a student on the playground outside throws a baseball and shatters one of the classroom’s windows, spraying glass and blinding a boy in one eye. Is Ms. Martinez liable?
• Case #5: Mrs. King is on playground duty, but instead of observing students, she chats with a colleague. A first grader, Sue Sadly, runs across the playground, trips on her untied shoelace, falls on her face, breaks three teeth, and needs seven stitches to close a nasty cut. Is Mrs. King liable?
• Case #6: On a different day, Mr. Charles was on recess duty and some students start pushing Sally around at the other end of the playground. Mr. Charles is engrossed in a conversation and pays no attention to Sally’s call for help. Five minutes later, Sally is pushed to the ground and receives a concussion. Is Mr. Charles liable?

“The Principal As Law Instructor: A Lesson Plan for Reducing Your Teachers’ Fear of Liability” by Matthew Militello and David Schimmel in Principal View, Fall 2008 (Vol. 23, #1, p. 8-11), no e-link available. The authors can be reached at matm@educ.umass.edu and Schimmel@educ.umass.edu. For two other legal quizzes, see Marshall Memos 66 and 205; for an online First Amendment quiz, go to:
http://www.firstamendmentschools.org/firstamendment101/
 

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