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Dear MASSP Member,

As an additional benefit to your membership, MASSP has made the Marshall Memo available to you every Tuesday morning to keep you informed about current research and best practices in education. Check out your weekly journal summaries as listed below, prepared for you by Kim Marshall. If you're doing some research or looking for specific information, you can now search all past Marshall memos. Go to www.marshallmemo.com and enter the username: MASSP and password: MASSP

Jim Ballard

Here are today's headlines:

Quotes of the Week
1. Teaching Evolution in a Florida High School
2. The “New Paternalism” in Successful Inner-City Schools
3. Are Financial Incentives for Students a Good Idea?
4. Does Paying Students and Teachers for AP Results Improve Outcomes?
5. A College Teacher Criticizes Advanced Placement
6. Leveling the Gender Playing Field

This week marks five years of Marshall Memos - 250 issues and almost 2,500 article summaries. How time has flown!

There were a number of new magazines this week and I found some thought-provoking articles, including a front-line report on teaching evolution, a new book on no-nonsense schools, and varied opinions on cash incentives for students and Advanced Placement.

I hope your year is off to a great start!

Best wishes,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin he built himself.”
A possibly apocryphal line in a student’s school essay, quoted by George Will in
“Heepism vs. Elitism,” Newsweek, Sept. 8, 2008 (p. 76)

“If you’re afraid to be wrong, you can’t do science.”
Wil van der Veen, director of the Science Education Institute at the New Jersey
Astronomy Center, quoted in “Guidance by Principals Emerging As Crucial in Science
Instruction,” Education Week, Sept. 3, 2008 (Vol. 28, #2, p. 8-9)

“Within every student is an indestructible kernel of enthusiasm for learning.”
Stephen Myers in “Conversations That Matter,” Educational Leadership, September
2008 (Vol. 66, #1) http://www.ascd.org/infocon and navigate to current issue

“The challenges of the 21st century demand an educated populace with intellectual breadth and depth and the ability for critical thought and active public citizenship. Transitory mastery of Advanced Placement examinations falls tragically short of these compelling public needs.”
Paul Von Blum (see item #5)

“It’s absolutely immoral to tell teachers they need to collaborate and not give them the time to collaborate.”
Mike Mattos, California middle-school principal, quoted in “Professional Learning
Communities: School Leaders’ Perspectives” in Education Update, August 2008
(Vol. 50, #8, p. 2, 6-8), http://www.ascd.org/infocon and navigate to this publication

“[S]chools are not Petri dishes. Experimentation has consequences for those experimented upon, and in the case of paying students for right behavior those consequences far outweigh whatever benefits might be accrued.”
Liam Julian (see item #3)
 

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1. Teaching Evolution in a Florida High School

In this front-page New York Times article, reporter Amy Harmon describes the challenges faced by David Campbell, a church-going, former Navy flight instructor, as he teaches evolution in a suburban classroom outside Jacksonville. Although Florida recently mandated teaching evolution as “the organizing principle of life science,” and although the overwhelming consensus of scientists worldwide is that all forms of life on earth descended from a common ancestor through a process of mutation and natural selection over millions of years, teachers are still nervous. And with good reason: Gallup polls over the last 25 years have consistently shown that almost half of American adults believe that God created all living things in their present form within the last 10,000 years.
In his kick-off lesson, Campbell wrote “Evolution” on his overhead projector screen. He looked at Bryce, a football player with blond curls who attended early-morning prayer meetings in the school gymnasium, and thought, “If I do this wrong, I’ll lose him.” Campbell’s biggest fear was that religious students would believe that evolution was hostile to their faith. He began by showing several slides of Mickey Mouse, ranging from the original Disney drawings from 1928 to the way Mickey looked in the 1940 film, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to more recent incarnations. Students could see how Mickey had evolved (shorter tail, bigger eyes, cuter) and were able to identify the market forces driving those changes; more people watched cartoons as Mickey became cuter. “We can see [evolution] happen,” said Campbell, “just like you can see it in Mickey.” Students took the point, but on the way out of the classroom at the end of the lesson, Bryce stage-whispered, “I can see something else, too. I can see that there’s no way I came from an ape.”
In the next day’s lesson, Campbell bounced a rubber ball off the classroom floor. “Gravity,” he said. “I can do this until the end of the semester, and I can only assume that it will work the same way each time.” He turned to the skeptical football player. “Bryce, what is it called when natural laws are suspended – what do you call it when water changes into wine?” “Miracle?” came the reply. Campbell bounced the ball again. “Science explores nature by testing and gathering data,” he said. “It can’t tell you what’s right and wrong. It doesn’t address ethics. But it is not anti-religion. Science and religion just ask different questions. Can anyone think of a question science can’t answer?”
“Is there a God?” said a student. “Good,” said Campbell. “Can’t test it. Can’t prove it, can’t disprove it. It’s not a question for science.” Bryce raised his hand. “But there is scientific proof that there is a God,” he said. “Over in Turkey there’s a piece of wood from Noah’s ark that came out of a glacier.” Campbell replied, “If I could prove, tomorrow, that that chunk of wood is not from the ark, is not even 500 years old and not even from the right kind of tree – would that damage your religious faith at all?” After thinking for a moment, Bryce said, “No.”
To a hushed group of students, Campbell continued, “Faith is not based on science. And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks. But I do expect you to understand it.”
Over the next few weeks, Campbell presented bits of evidence on which the theory of evolution is based. Students looked at the embryos of chickens and fish and the anatomy of horses, cats, seals, and bats, and the way moths evolved to camouflage themselves on trees newly darkened by industrial soot. But students weren’t asking enough questions and Campbell worried that he wasn’t getting through to them. So he brought in a fossil of a Tyrannosaurus Rex brain case and the jaw of a dog-sized ancestor of the modern horse, juxtaposed with a drawing of the jaw of a modern horse. Students moved around to different stations, and Campbell noticed Bryce and a friend spending extra time looking at the horse’s jaw. “It’s maybe the size of a dog’s jaw or a cat’s,” he said to his friend. “That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”
The next week, students took a test, with one question asking for an explanation of two forms of evidence supporting evolutionary change and natural selection. Beside this question, Bryce wrote, “I refuse to answer. I don’t believe in this.” Campbell was discouraged, and he felt even worse when he learned that a copy of Evolution Exposed, published by the creationist organization Answers in Genesis, was circulating in the class. The book refuted each reference to evolution in the textbook Campbell was using. It turned out that a local pastor had given a copy of the book to each graduating senior the year before.
But Campbell decided to press on and teach the place of humans in evolution. “True or false?” he said at the beginning of class. “Humans are evolved from chimpanzees.” After taking a few responses, Campbell said, “False. But we do share a common ancestor.” He then explained how, five or six million years ago, a group of primates in Africa split into two groups; one stayed in the forest and evolved into chimpanzees, the other migrated to the grasslands and evolved into early humans. On the overhead projector, he showed a picture of the hand of a gibbon. “There’s the opposable thumb,” he said. “But theirs is a longer hand because they live in trees, and their arms are very long.” He began to demonstrate the origins of upright posture, but was interrupted to a flurry of questions. “If that really happened,” asked one student, “wouldn’t you still see things evolving?” “We do,” replied Campbell, “ but this is happening over millions of years. With humans, if I’m lucky I might see four generations in my lifetime.”
“If we had to have evolved from something,” asked another student, “then whatever we evolved from, where did IT evolve from?” Campbell replied, “It came from earlier primates.” “And where did those come from?” “You can trace mammals back 250 million years,” the earliest ones no bigger than mice. “Even if we did split off from chimps,” asked another student, “how come they stayed the same and we changed?” “They didn’t say the same,” said Campbell. “They were smaller, more slender – they’ve changed a lot.”
Bryce spoke up: “How does our hand go from being that long to just a smaller hand? I don’t see how that happens.” “If a smaller hand is beneficial,” explained the teacher, “individuals with small hands will have more children, while those with bigger hands will disappear.” “But if we came from them, why are they still around?” “Just because a new population evolves doesn’t mean the old one dies out.” “So it just doesn’t stop.” “No. If the environment is suitable, a species can go on for a long time.” “What about us?” asked Bryce. “Are we going to evolve?” “Yes,” said Campbell. “Unless we go extinct.”
Later that week, Campbell gave students a chance to fix the questions they had missed on their last test. As he graded Bryce’s paper, Campbell saw that this time, the question on evidence of evolutionary change had been answered.

“A Teacher on the Front Line As Faith and Science Clash” by Amy Harmon in the New York Times, Aug. 24, 2008 (p. 1, 18)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/education/24evolution.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=Amy%20Harmon&st=cse&oref=slogin
 

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2. The “New Paternalism” in Successful Inner-City Schools

In this compelling Education Next article, journalist David Whitman gives us the main points in his new book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008). Whitman zeroes in on six “educational gems” – high-achieving urban secondary schools that he’s studied in some depth. All have produced impressive results in high-poverty neighborhoods, taking entering students who are typically two or three years behind grade level and boosting them above most other districts in their states. The schools are:
- American Indian Public Charter School, Oakland, CA
- Amistad Academy, New Haven, CT
- Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, Chicago, IL
- KIPP Academy, Bronx, NY
- SEED School, Washington, DC
- University Park Campus School, Worcester, MA
Whitman believes that the common thread in what makes these schools so successful is what he calls “paternalism” – telling students exactly how to act while maintaining warm human relationships with them. Here’s his list of how this manifests itself:
- The schools all have highly skilled, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals.
- They tell students exactly how to behave and tolerate no disorder.
- They require a rigorous, college-prep curriculum and don’t track some students into vocational or non-college curriculums.
- They assess students regularly, and use the results to target struggling students and improve instruction.
- They build a collective culture of achievement aimed at college attendance for all.
- They reject the culture of the streets, including cursing and the use of the ‘n’ word.
- They extend the school day and/or year.
- They welcome accountability for teachers and principals and embrace constant reassessment.
- They use unconventional channels to recruit committed teachers.
- They don’t demand too much of parents.
- They don’t waste resources on fancy facilities or technology.
“The new breed of paternalistic schools,” says Whitman, “appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap… Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.”
Whitman acknowledges that most educators and parents regard “paternalism” as a dirty word, and shy away from the notion that such traditional, no-nonsense methods are the solution to what ails inner-city schools. “Paternalism is controversial because it contains an element of moral arrogance,” he says, “an assertion of superior competence.” He points to two earlier examples of paternalistic education that gave it a bad name: Indian boarding schools that sought to “civilize” Native American children in the late 19th century, and public schools that tried to “Americanize” immigrant children from Italy, Ireland, and Poland around the turn of the 20th century. In both cases, especially the first, there was a strong undercurrent of cultural arrogance – the schools were trying to wrestle children away from their native culture and met stiff resistance.
But Whitman believes that the six schools he visited represent a new and more enlightened kind of paternalism. The values they teach, as well as the high standards to which they push all students, are what inner-city parents want for their children, he says. These schools are attempting to preempt misbehavior in the same way that effective parents supervise their families. The schools embrace the “broken window” theory originally put forward by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling and embraced by a number of big-city police forces: “disorder or even signs of disorder (e.g., the broken window left unfixed) are the fatal undoing of urban neighborhoods.” That’s why these schools “sweat the small stuff”, outdoing even strict Catholic schools as they insist that shirts must be tucked in, students must speak politely and give eye contact when shaking hands with adults, sitting properly in class is essential as is learning to use the proper utensils in a restaurant and comport themselves appropriately in a business setting; trash is immediately picked up in school and the bathrooms are kept clean.
Whitman is struck by the schools’ approach to parent involvement. He reports that they “do not presume that boosting parental participation is the key to narrowing the achievement gap. Parents’ chief role at no-excuses schools is to steer their children through the door… and then ensure that their children get to school on time.” Teachers and principals act in loco parentis, getting to know their students extremely well and making themselves available day and night for academic and personal guidance. It’s common for students to call these schools their “second home.”
Whitman believes passionately that we need more schools like these, but worries that district officials will resist their innovations, teacher unions will balk at the extra hours that are required, and schools of education will cling to what he calls their “romantic” notion of how children should learn – free to explore, cultivate a love of learning, and develop critical thinking skills. Whitman quotes NYU professor Lawrence Mead as saying that “the problem of poverty or underachievement is not that the poor lack freedom. The real problem is that the poor are too free.” Whitman says that these schools “work on the assumption that disadvantaged students do best when structure and expectations are crystal clear, rather than presuming that kids should learn to figure things out for themselves.”
Can these methods be replicated in other schools? Whitman worries that the odds may be against this happening, but hopes for the best because “Done well, paternalistic schooling would constitute a major stride toward reducing the achievement gap and the lingering disgrace of racial inequality in urban America.”

“An Appeal to Authority: The New Paternalism in Urban Schools” by David Whitman in Education Next, Fall 2008 (Vol. 8, #4, p. 52-58)
http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/26967964.html. For a response to this book, see “Going Beyond ‘Sweating the Small Stuff” in Marshall Memo 247.
 

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3. Are Financial Incentives for Students a Good Idea?

In this forceful Education Gadfly article, Thomas B. Fordham Institute staffer Liam Julian flat-out disagrees with a program recently launched by Michelle Rhee, Washington D.C. schools chancellor, to give monthly “paychecks” of up to $100 to middle-school students who turn in homework, attend classes, and maintain good grades. This experiment, like a similar one in New York City, is the brainchild of Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer; both are being funded by private foundations. Julian says that cash incentives are only a good idea “in a world in which schools are charged only with increasing their students’ test scores and nothing else; in which attaining that end justifies any means; and in which unintended consequences can be blithely ignored.” Here are his main points:
• Schools are not like the workplace. Rhee made the following analogy, “When you have a job, your attendance is tracked, whether or not you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing is tracked, and based on that you keep your job and you get a paycheck.” Not so, says Julian: “A school, unlike an employer, does not reap the services of its students – it provides services to them. If it provides a lousy service, as many public schools do, that is resolved by fixing the management, staff, curriculum, etc.” Students who don’t do what they should do, he says, should be fixed by “strict discipline, not bribes.”
• Paying students to do what’s expected is perverse. School attendance is legally mandatory and doing schoolwork is expected, says Julian. “When these obligatory activities are rewarded with cash, what was once mundane becomes exceptional… The student who shunned class is paid to be there, which makes a mockery of the rules, and the pupil who already came to school on time now receives money for it and learns the false lesson that punctuality and conscientiousness are extraordinary and noteworthy.”
• Cash incentives will undercut intrinsic motivation and real learning. Julian worries that the D.C. and New York City plans ignore the crucial areas of personal responsibility, delaying gratification, planning for the future, and the value of learning for learning’s sake. He argues that, while money might boost short-term achievement, it will make students even less interested in their studies in the long run. And since maintaining payments over time is unsustainable, when they end, students will be justified in asking, “What’s in it for me?” Julian draws an analogy to a parent who pays a child $100 to eat his broccoli. “Such a parenting strategy is likely to produce a rules-shirking monster,” he says, “– and one who will learn nothing important and enduring about nutrition, behavior, obedience, personal responsibility, or authority.”
• The plan hasn’t been thought through. If test scores don’t rise, asks Julian, will D.C. increase the payouts? What if the students who earn the cash benefits come mostly from more-affluent families? What if students end up spending the money they “earn” on unhealthy products and activities?
• The research on incentives is weak. Julian says that cash payments are an experiment that isn’t backed up by empirical studies, and even short-term gains in achievement may not materialize. Fryer admits that “the jury is still out” about whether cash incentives cause middle-achieving students to improve. “K-12 education must welcome promising innovations and responsible experiments,” concludes Julian, “but schools are not Petri dishes. Experimentation has consequences for those experimented upon, and in the case of paying students for right behavior those consequences far outweigh whatever benefits might be accrued.”

“Johnny Says, Show Me the Money!” by Liam Julian in The Education Gadfly, Sept. 4, 2008 (Vol. 8, #34, p. 2-3) http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/index.cfm. See also a New York Times Op Ed critique of New York City’s program in Marshall Memo 196.
 

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4. Does Paying Students and Teachers for AP Results Improve Outcomes?

In this Education Next article, Cornell economics professor Kirabo Jackson reports on a program that offers $100-$500 to participating students for each passing score (3 or above) on an Advanced Placement exam. Dubbed the Advanced Placement Incentive Program (APIP), this initiative began in ten Dallas schools in 1996 and has since spread to 50 Texas high schools and is being replicated in a number of other states.
APIP involves more than just incentives. Teachers receive training from the College Board, and participating school districts appoint lead teachers and create vertical teams of teachers going back as far as seventh grade to get students on track for AP expectations. Some districts also run special AP prep classes in test-taking strategies. The program costs between $100,000 and $200,000 per school, including:
- $100-$500 to AP teachers for each AP score of 3 and above from a student in their course;
- A yearly supplement of $500-$1,000 for pre-AP teachers for extra work;
- A bonus of $3,000-$10,000 for lead teachers and an additional $2,000-$5,000 based on student results;
- Private donors pay 60-75 percent of the cost, with school districts picking up the rest, as well as training and travel expenses;
Here are the results so far (see the link below for graphs and more detailed statistics):
- In the Dallas schools, APIP produced a major increase in the number of students taking AP courses and a less-pronounced but significant increase in students passing APs.
- APIP resulted in a 30 percent increase in the number of students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or above 24 on the ACT.
- APIP produced an 8 percent increase in the number of students at a high school who enrolled in a Texas college or university.
Jackson believes these gains were probably caused by stronger encouragement from teachers and guidance counselors to enroll in AP courses, better information provided to students, and changes in teacher and peer norms, all associated with a strong schoolwide push to increase the number of students taking AP courses and exams. “Through APIP,” says Jackson, “the interests of schools, teachers, and students were aligned.”
However, counselors interviewed by Jackson downplayed the role of the cash incentives in the results. And there were two less encouraging outcomes:
- APIP was not associated with improved high-school graduation rates.
- APIP was not associated with increases in the number of students taking college entrance exams.
Jackson believes that the last two findings suggest that APIP improves the outcomes of high-achieving students who were already on track for college rather than those who would not otherwise have graduated from high school or applied to college. But he still believes that the program, which costs between $100 and $300 a student, is worth implementing.
Looking ahead, Jackson wonders how APIP students will do in college and beyond. “If this program increases a student’s likelihood of attending college, elevates the quality of college attended, and reduces the time it takes to graduate from college, the costs of the program on a per-student basis would be far less than the average increase in lifetime earnings,” he writes. “That would be a whole new kind of smart money.”

“Cash for Test Scores” by Kirabo Jackson in Education Next, Fall 2008 (Vol. 8, #4, p. 52-58)
http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/27020009.html
 

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5. A College Teacher Criticizes Advanced Placement

In this Education Week article, veteran UCLA lecturer Paul Von Blum argues that Advanced Placement courses are “overrated and may, ironically, diminish rather than advance the deeper objectives of a liberal arts education.” Why? Because, he says, students forget most of what they cram into their heads as they prepare for AP exams in high school. Von Blum says he frequently gets blank stares when he alludes to major historical events, figures, and movements in class and has to fill in the missing information.
At moments like this, he’s taken to asking how many students took AP courses, and most raise their hands. When questioned, they remember their AP classes as “another tedious hurdle to be overcome in gaining admission to selective colleges and universities… primarily an exercise in memorization and exam passing… a response primarily to pressure from parents, peers, and institutions…” Von Blum has found that most AP students come away with little authentic learning and few critical-thinking skills: “Résumé padding substitutes for durable knowledge and lifelong intellectual curiosity.” What’s worse, he says, is that students use their AP credits to comp out of college courses in the humanities, missing out on wider and deeper intellectual exploration.
Von Blum believes that the intellectual deficits among AP-takers go deeper. “I see particular evidence of a vast lack of knowledge about the events and people associated with labor, civil rights, feminist, anti-war, gay and lesbian, environmental, and other resistance movements,” he writes. “Similarly, in art-related courses in which I highlight work by members of marginalized communities such as African Americans, Latinos, women, and others, there is little evidence of background knowledge… I can only conclude that, like most high-school courses in history, art, and social studies, AP efforts reflect a conventional bias that neglects large populations and discourages more-comprehensive treatment of dissenting political and cultural forces.”
Von Blum points to two reasons for this mess. First, there’s the narrow AP curriculum. Second, he believes that high-school AP teachers, with some notable exceptions, are not up to snuff. “The inescapable reality,” he writes, “is that high-school teachers are not at the forefront of research and intellectual discovery. Indeed, their very workloads often preclude them from even keeping up with major developments in most academic fields.”
A final problem, says Von Blum, is that AP courses, which are a ticket to selective colleges, are more readily available to students in affluent schools than to those in poorer districts. But this doesn’t make him an advocate of adding AP courses in less-affluent schools. Doing that, he says, “scarcely addresses the structural inequalities and injustices. Replicating a dubious system of AP credit arrangements fundamentally misses the point.”
What is to be done? Von Blum is glumly realistic about the chances of doing away with Advanced Placement. “AP opportunities will flourish as long as powerful institutional forces combine with the increasingly frantic efforts of privileged parents to secure high-status college and university slots for their children,” he says. “Students themselves, caught up in the admissions frenzy, also demand mechanisms to set themselves apart from their peers.” The only countervailing force, he concludes, lies in colleges. He suggests that they should push back against the AP juggernaut, perhaps even refusing to grant college credit or preferential treatment to applicants with AP courses on their transcripts. “The challenges of the 21st century demand an educated populace with intellectual breadth and depth and the ability for critical thought and active public citizenship,” he says. “Transitory mastery of Advanced Placement examinations falls tragically short of these compelling public needs.”

“Are Advanced Placement Courses Diminishing Liberal Arts Education?” by Pal Von Blum in Education Week, Sept. 3, 2008 (Vol. 28, #2, p. 26-27)
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/09/03/02vonblum_ep.h28.html
 

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6. Leveling the Gender Playing Field

“No matter what the pundits say, girls and boys get different educations in the same classroom,” says Virginia educator Laura Reasoner Jones in this Teacher Magazine article. She recalls watching a colleague struggling to control a group of third-graders by telling them to sit boy-girl-boy-girl. Asked why, the teacher said, “The girls make the boys behave.” Jones bit her tongue, thinking to herself, I did not send my daughters to school to control boys! She wrote this article to suggest ideas on making classrooms more gender-equitable.
For starters, Jones wonders if lining up students by gender makes sense. “Would you ever divide by ethnicity or native language or intelligence level or race or by who owns an iPod?” she asks. “Of course not! Then, you shouldn’t group by gender either.” Some alternatives:
- When studying the calendar, line up or group by birth month.
- When working on dictionary skills, line up alphabetically, first by last name, then by first name.
- When learning about the planets, group by astrological sign.
- Or group by color of shirts or type of shoe.
Apply the choice for a week, suggests Jones. Mondays might be challenging, but students catch on. “It mixes things up, and makes for many teachable moments.”
Jones then takes on the question of which students get the most air-time in classrooms. “Do you call on the first, loudest person to respond to a question?” she asks. “Chances are very good that person is a boy, and he has done this often because he has been rewarded by your attention.” It’s vital that all students get the valuable commodity of the teacher’s attention, says Jones, but there are quiet boys and hesitant girls who aren’t getting their fair share. “They may have learned that once the shouters and hand-wavers have answered, you will get around to calling on other children, but until then, there is really no point.” Here are some ways to include all students:
• Wait 4-5 seconds after asking a question before calling on a student, and look around to get eye contact with almost everyone before you make a choice. This gives the teacher time to think about whom to call on, and gives all students time to think of an answer and volunteer. “Research shows that this technique is particularly valuable for girls and students who are learning English,” Jones reports.
• Wait 4-5 seconds before responding to the student’s response, which gives the teacher time to think about a response and tells students you’re really thinking about what they said.
• Move students around, since all teachers have observable preferences on which part of the room they favor in calling on students (Jones says that videotapes of her teaching revealed that she had a strong, unconscious tendency to call on students to her right, perhaps because she is right-handed). “Shuffle yourself or your students to compensate for your natural tendencies,” she advises.
• Tune in to your responses. “Many teachers have been observed giving different kinds of feedback to boys and girls,” says Jones. “Boys tend to receive correction, help, and criticism. Most follow-up questions and suggestions for improvement are directed at boys. But girls tend to receive comments on the appearance of their work, rather than the academic content… Pay attention to the kinds of informal interactions you have with students. Do you ask the boys about the weekend soccer game and tell the girls how pretty they look? Do you acknowledge the hard work that all students do, thereby helping them understand that effort produces improvement, or do you just grade the work?”
• Think about attribution. “Research shows that many girls seem to grow up feeling that they get good grades or perform well due to luck,” says Jones, “not skill or effort. By feeling this way, they also feel that any failure is internal and due to their lack of intelligence or ability. They personalize it. Boys seem to feel that failure is due to illness, poor instruction – external factors. These two different approaches lead to girls downplaying success and boys taking credit.”

“Teaching Secrets: Bridging the Gender Gap?” by Laura Reasoner Jones in Teacher Magazine, Sept. 6, 2008 http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2008/09/03/01tln_jones.h20.html

 

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About the Marshall Memo


Mission and focus:
This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 37 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”

To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 44 carefully-chosen publications (see list to the right), sifts through more than a hundred articles each week, and selects 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, pulls out several striking quotes, provides e-links to full articles when available, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday evening (with occasional breaks; there are about 50 issues a year).

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Individual subscriptions are $50 for the school year. Rates decline steeply for multiple readers within the same organization. See the website for these rates and information on paying by check or credit card.

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If you go to http://www.marshallmemo.com you will find detailed information on:
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• Publications (with a count of articles from each)
• Article selection criteria
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• Headlines for all issues
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Publications covered:
American Educator
American School Board Journal
ASCD, CEC SmartBriefs, Daily EdNews
Atlantic Monthly
Catalyst Chicago
CommonWealth Magazine
Ed. Magazine
EDge
Education Digest
Education Gadfly
Education Next
Education Week
Educational Leadership
Educational Researcher
Edutopia
Elementary School Journal
Essential Teacher (TESOL)
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Education Letter
Harvard Educational Review
JESPAR
Journal of Staff Development
Language Learner (NABE)
Middle Ground
Middle School Journal
NASSP Bulletin
New York Times
New Yorker
Newsweek
PEN Weekly NewsBlast
Phi Delta Kappan
Principal
Principal Leadership
Principal’s Research Review
Reading Research Quarterly
Reading Today
Rethinking Schools
Review of Educational Research
Teacher Magazine (online)
Teachers College Record
TESOL Quarterly
The Reading Teacher
Theory Into Practice
Tools for Schools

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