Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Another very strong issue of Kappan and several other interesting articles from other publications.

Another lively piece on national standards from Education Next: a debate between Chester Finn, Jr. arguing in favor and Deborah Meier arguing against - http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/E_Pluribus_Unum.html

Can it be that spring is almost here?

All the best,

Kim

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Quotes of the Week

“Teachers in America almost universally continue to call on students who raise their hands, then move on – while the rest tune out or fall behind because no one took a moment to see if they understood the material.”
Mike Schmoker (see item #1)

“Change agents need to be aware that they walk on sacred ground when they suggest new ways of teaching, especially when they criticize a teacher’s current teaching practices… Knowledge workers are paid for their education, experience, and expertise, so it is not surprising that they take offense when someone else rides roughshod over their intellectual territory.”
Jim Knight (see item #2)

“Educators at all levels need just-in-time, job-embedded assistance as they struggle to adapt new curricula and new instructional practices to their unique classroom contexts.”
Thomas Guskey and Kwang Suk Yoon (see item #3)

“[P]ractitioners at all levels must demand better evidence from consultants and purveyors of new strategies and practices. Stories of what happened at one time in a single school or district may be interesting, but they do not justify broader implementation.”
Thomas Guskey and Kwang Suk Yoon (ibid.)

“Analyzing data and taking action based on data are two different tasks. Taking action is often more challenging and requires more creativity than analysis.”
Jennifer Sloan McCombs and Julie Marsh (see item #4)

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1. Mike Schmoker on Practices That Could Transform Schools

In this provocative Kappan article, Mike Schmoker takes note of the dire economic straits in which we find ourselves and makes five recommendations that he believes would have a huge impact on student achievement – and cost nothing:
• Stop wasting classroom time on ineffective practices. This includes worksheets, movies, coloring, cutting, poster-making, and other low-leverage activities. “In a rank perversion of ‘active learning,’ ‘differentiated instruction,’ and ‘multiple intelligences,’” says Schmoker, “collages and mobiles have emerged as unit assessments for gauging student understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby… It’s time to break the silence on these insidious, indefensible practices… Replacing these with worthy learning experiences… would be like adding two months to the school year.”
• Get students focused on purposeful reading, writing, and discussion. Schmoker says that when students are given: a good text, supervised in-class time to read it, modeling of analytical reading (including how to underline and annotate the text), and pair-share time for initial discussion with a peer, all students engage in robust discussions at a high intellectual level. He is working this year with a middle-school teacher, and their classes have discussed Plessy v. Ferguson, Disney’s use and abuse of history in Pocahontas, and primary-source documents on the lives of a slave and a New England mill worker. “Once you get the hang of these simple activities,” says Schmoker, “they won’t fail you, even if you vary and repeat them hundreds of times per year in almost any subject. Moreover, students do their best, most impassioned writing after they have carefully read and discussed one or more texts – in the argumentative mode.”
• Ensure that a high-quality, coherent curriculum actually gets taught. Too many schools, says Schmoker, suffer from curricular chaos stemming from “our no-oversight, high-autonomy culture.” The key to coherence, he believes, is teacher teams spelling out the standards students will learn each marking period, creating and giving common interim assessments (“not bought from a test-prep vendor”), and meeting to discuss the results of the assessments and continuously improving teaching and learning.
• Ensure reasonably sound lessons in every subject and classroom. Schmoker reels off a list of prominent educators – Dylan Wiliam, Robert Marzano, Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Madeline Hunter, James Popham, Rick Stiggins, Marilyn Burns, Grant Wiggins, and Jay McTighe – who agree on the key elements of an effective lesson:
- Focusing on skills or standards in the agreed-upon curriculum that teachers fully understand;
- Telling students up front the purpose of the lesson and the criteria by which learning will be assessed;
- Teaching the material in manageable chunks;
- Having students engage in guided practice after each chunk with teacher modeling, “thinking aloud”, or exemplars;
- Checking for understanding after each chunk in meaningful ways;
- Adjusting instruction if students don’t understand.
“Students whose teachers largely observe such practices can learn, in a single grading period, what those in less effective classrooms will require an entire school year to learn,” says Schmoker. The most important element is checking for understanding, which is notably weak in most U.S. classrooms. “Teachers in America almost universally continue to call on students who raise their hands, then move on – while the rest tune out or fall behind because no one took a moment to see if they understood the material.”
To change ineffective lessons, says Schmoker, “these elements of good instruction need to be reinforced and clarified regularly and redundantly.” Administrators need to make regular, brief classroom visits to ensure that they are being implemented, with feedback to teachers. In addition, all teachers should observe effective instruction as a part of their professional development.
• Ensure that teachers work in teams. This is what all true professionals do, says Schmoker. “Authentic teams build effective curriculum-based lessons and units together – which they routinely refine together on the basis of common assessment data.”
Schmoker concludes: “To be sure, there are legitimate needs for additional funding to address structural needs in many of our schools. But the actions advocated here are less about cash than courage – and clarity. In these tough budget times, we could do no better than to turn our attention, at the national, state, and local level, to the historic opportunity these changes represent.”

“What Money Can’t Buy” by Mike Schmoker in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2009 (Vol. 90, #7, p. 524-527); this article can be purchased at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm

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2. Key Steps in Overcoming Teachers’ Resistance to New Ideas

In this trenchant Kappan article, University of Kansas/Lawrence coaching expert Jim Knight says that teacher resistance is often blamed for the failure of reform initiatives. Rather than pointing the finger at recalcitrant teachers, he believes we should be figuring out smarter ways to present school improvement ideas. Here are his suggestions:
• Make sure the idea being suggested is effective. “Teachers aren’t likely to implement new practices unless they are powerful,” says Knight. “…few teachers will be motivated to implement a teaching practice if it does not increase student achievement, make content more accessible, improve the quality of classroom conversation, make students happier, increase love of learning, or have some other significant positive impact.”
• Provide support so the idea can be implemented without great difficulty. “In a typical day,” says Knight, “teachers grade stacks of papers, create lesson plans, complete reports, attend meetings, contact parents, stay at school for sporting events, do bus duty, supervise the cafeteria, attend IEP meetings, and on and on. On top of that, they complete all of those tasks while doing work that requires a great deal of emotional fortitude.” As a result, teachers often lack the energy and time to implement new ideas, even if they seem promising. So how can school leaders increase the odds that new ideas will be accepted? First, by having a deep understanding of the new practice and explaining it well. Second, by letting teachers see demonstrations of the new idea in action. Third, by breaking down the idea into easy-to-implement steps. And fourth, by providing all the teaching tools and materials needed for implementation – technology, readings, handouts, etc.
• Give teachers a successful experience with the new idea. Verbal persuasion is rarely enough to get people to adopt a new practice, says Knight. In fact, verbal persuasion is often seen by teachers as an attack, as nagging, or as manipulation. First-hand experiences are far more effective – a demonstration, a videotape, or a pilot project within the school.
• Treat teachers with respect. “Change agents need to be aware that they walk on sacred ground when they suggest new ways of teaching, especially when they criticize a teacher’s current teaching practices,” says Knight. When administrators fail to recognize teachers’ expertise and experience, the door clangs shut. “Few change leaders actually intend to be demeaning,” he continues, “but intentions don’t matter. What matters is how teachers perceive change leaders. Perception is reality, and if teachers feel that their identity (their own sense of how good, competent, or talented they are) is under attack, their most frequent reaction is to resist.” School leaders trying to introduce new practices need to be masters of effective communication, genuinely appreciative of the work teachers do – and supremely tactful.
• Understand teachers’ need for autonomy. Knowledge workers live by their wits, says Knight. “Few people do more thinking on the job than a teacher standing in front of 27 students… Thinking for a living engenders thinking for oneself. Knowledge workers are paid for their education, experience, and expertise, so it is not surprising that they take offense when someone else rides roughshod over their intellectual territory.” Knight acknowledges that it’s logical for principals and superintendents to believe they should take the lead in implementing worthwhile changes. But if they come across as doing all the thinking for teachers, they alienate the people who will end up having to do the work! Understanding teachers’ need for autonomy doesn’t mean letting them teach whatever they want, however they want. There’s a middle ground – and the devil is in the details of how new ideas are presented and the degree to which teachers are permitted to adapt the new idea to their classroom needs.
• Be aware of how PD has been handled in the past. A frequent pattern, says Knight, is the “attempt, attack, abandon cycle” in which a new idea is rolled out, implemented with inadequate support, attacked for the problems that inevitably arise, and dumped. “When districts swing from one instructional approach to another, when school leadership is constantly changing, the lack of consistency and focus can undermine a teacher’s enthusiasm for new ideas,” says Knight. Teachers are not irrational to conclude, This too shall pass. Leaders need to acknowledge the mistakes of the past and build trust that this time, things will be different!
• Less is more. “Focus professional learning on a few critical teaching practices,” recommends Knight. “Professional learning that involves too many approaches can lack focus or overwhelm teachers. A better idea is to collaboratively identify a few critically important practices and then work together to ensure that they are implemented successfully.” All other activities – professional learning communities, book study groups, learning walks – should be aligned to the priority practices.
• Provide support and monitor implementation. Leaders need to orchestrate quality coaching, provide teachers with detailed feedback, and use data to track and tweak the initiative as it proceeds.

“What Can We Do About Teacher Resistance?” by Jim Knight in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2009 (Vol. 90, #7, p. 508-513); this article can be purchased at
http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm

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3. What Works in Teacher Professional Development

In this important Kappan article, Thomas Guskey and Kwang Suk Yoon report on a new research synthesis of the impact of professional development on student learning. Although only nine of 1,343 studies considered met the What Works Clearinghouse standards for credible evidence, and although those nine covered only the elementary grades, Guskey and Yoon draw some valuable insights:
• Workshops can work. Many educators have concluded that workshops are a waste of time, but all nine studies found that effective PD programs used workshops or summer institutes. They were effective because they focused on the implementation of research-based instructional practices, got participants involved in active learning, and encouraged teachers to adapt practices to their own classrooms. “So while undoubtedly many workshops are poorly organized and focus on unproven ideas and strategies,” say Guskey and Yoon, “as a form of professional development, they are not the poster child of ineffective practice that they are often made out to be.”
• Outside experts can help. It’s often said that PD should be site-based, involve teachers in exploring their own data, and use in-house talent. Guskey and Yoon say that while this can be a good starting point, in too many situations, site-based PD is parochial and gravitates to what teachers already feel good about instead of seeking out more effective practices. The nine studies found that the most effective PD used outside experts to introduce new ideas and worked with teachers to get results with their students. “None of the successful efforts used a train-the-trainer approach, peer coaching, collaborative problem-solving, or other forms of school-based professional learning,” say Guskey and Yoon. “This does not imply that these practices are ineffective. Rather, it simply points out that at the present time, we have no strong, valid, and scientifically defensible evidence demonstrating that they are effective… The best that can be said is that their true value has yet to be determined.”
• Time matters. The nine studies found that at least 30 contact hours were required for professional development to have an impact on student achievement. But those hours needed to be “well organized, carefully structured, purposefully directed, and focused on content or pedagogy or both,” say Guskey and Yoon. “[D]oing ineffective things longer does not make them any better.”
• Follow-up is essential. “Educators at all levels need just-in-time, job-embedded assistance as they struggle to adapt new curricula and new instructional practices to their unique classroom contexts,” say Guskey and Yoon. “Virtually all of the studies that showed positive improvements in student learning included significant amounts of structured and sustained follow-up after the main professional development activities.”
• There’s no one right way. The nine studies found that different PD activities and designs worked in different situations. “In each case, the structural features of the professional development activities were determined by the specific content involved, the nature of the work, and the context in which that work took place,” say Guskey and Yoon. They cite the National Staff Development Council’s 2001 report, saying that “the most effective professional development comes not from the implementation of a particular set of ‘best practices,’ but from the careful adaptation of varied practices to specific content, process and context elements.”
• Content knowledge is key. All nine studies found that a central element in successful PD was enhancing teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. “The activities were designed to help teachers better understand both what they teach and how students acquire specific content knowledge and skill,” say Guskey and Yoon.
What are the implications of these nine high-quality studies for schools? The authors draw four lessons:
First, those who plan and implement professional development must learn how to critically assess and evaluate whether each PD initiative works – that is, whether it improves student learning.
Second, say Guskey and Yoon, “practitioners at all levels must demand better evidence from consultants and purveyors of new strategies and practices. Stories of what happened at one time in a single school or district may be interesting, but they do not justify broader implementation. What we need is trustworthy, verifiable, replicable, and comparative data.” When salesmen and others claim that “Research says…”, educators must push back with questions like, “What research?” “When was it conducted?” “Was it done in contexts similar to ours?” “Are the results applicable in our setting?” and “How trustworthy are those results?”
Third, new professional development strategies should always be tested in a small pilot setting before being implemented more broadly.
Fourth, researchers and front-line educators need to study professional development with greater care and rigor.

“What Works in Professional Development?” by Thomas Guskey and Kwang Suk Yoon in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2009 (Vol. 90, #7, p. 495-500); this article can be purchased at
http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm

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4. How Literacy Coaches Can Be Most Effective

In this Kappan article, RAND researchers Jennifer Sloan McCombs and Julie Marsh note that literacy coaching is a popular innovation in schools – but is unproven in terms of its impact on student achievement. Their study of literacy coaching in 113 Florida middle schools was designed to identify what makes a difference:
• Focus on hiring and retaining high-quality coaches. Districts need to develop a pipeline of qualified candidates and offer incentives, training, and support so good literacy coaches stay on the job. Coaches must know literacy and be skillful working with adult learners. “‘Teaching’ teachers may require a different set of skills and knowledge than teaching students,” say McCombs and Marsh.
• Maximize coaches’ time working with teachers on interim assessment data. McCombs and Marsh believe this was the highest-value activity for coaches. But it’s not enough for teachers to look at student data; they need to identify instructional strategies that respond to what they see. “Analyzing data and taking action based on data are two different tasks,” say McCombs and Marsh. “Taking action is often more challenging and requires more creativity than analysis.” Coaches can help teachers take this critical step so they identify students’ strengths and weaknesses and come up with strategies that boost achievement. Coaches need training and support to do this work well, and it should focus on these questions:
- What types of student data are most helpful?
- Should coaches work with teachers individually or in groups when they analyze data?
- What tools (i.e., user-friendly data displays and reflection protocols) help most?
- What specific reading strategies are most helpful with specific student needs?

• Address built-in barriers to coaches’ effectiveness. Literacy coaches’ time tends to be devoured by administrative duties and being drafted as the school’s testing coordinator. Districts need avoid this trap, blocking out time for coaches to work individually with teachers, model lessons, and work with teams. They also need to help coaches build trust and rapport so they can overcome many teachers’ resistance to being “helped.”
• Ensure principals’ support. Literacy coaches will make a lasting difference only if they are in schools for several years, and that depends on the principal understanding what makes a coach effective and providing the support and structures needed for success with teachers.

“Lessons for Boosting the Effectiveness of Reading Coaches” by Jennifer Sloan McCombs and Julie Marsh in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2009 (Vol. 90, #7, p. 501-507); this article can be purchased at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm.

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5. Teaching “Executive Skills” to Adolescents

In this Principal Leadership article, psychologists Peg Dawson and Richard Guare give a name to teen behaviors that many adults call flakiness, disorganization, forgetfulness, distractibility, and carelessness. What these teens lack, say the authors, is executive skills – the ability to get organized, execute tasks, and take an idea from start to finish – all the way from getting their homework done to getting into a good college. Executive skills are essential to success in school and in life, and include:
- Response inhibition – thinking before acting;
- Working memory – holding information in mind while performing complex tasks;
- Emotional control – managing emotions to complete tasks or control behavior;
- Sustained attention – staying focused despite distractions, boredom, or fatigue;
- Task initiation – beginning tasks without undue procrastination;
- Planning and prioritization – creating a roadmap to reach a goal and making decisions about what’s important;
- Organization – creating and maintaining systems to keep track of information or materials;
- Time management – estimating how much time one has, what’s important, how to allocate time, and how to meet deadlines;
- Goal-directed persistence – having a goal, following through to completion, and not getting sidetracked;
- Adaptability – being able to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks, new information, or mistakes;
- Metacognition – being able to step back and ask, “How am I doing?”

According to the authors, executive skills develop slowly and unevenly through adolescence, but once people are adults, these skills are much less malleable. The problem is that schools rarely teach executive skills explicitly (except as part of IEPs for students with obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, autism, depression, Tourette’s syndrome, and other disabilities). “Teachers tend to hold students accountable when they don’t have executive skills,” say Dawson and Guare, “but fail to recognize that the skills can be taught the same way that students are taught to perform geometry proofs, outline a book chapter, and write an essay.”
The authors believe that the middle and high school years are prime time for explicit instruction in executive skills and suggest three approaches, each differentiated into tiers – one for all students, a second targeted at the 10-20 percent of students for whom universal supports are insufficient, and intensive support for the 1-7 percent of students with chronic and more severe problems:
• Make instructional modifications to reduce the impact of weak skills. These include structures, routines, and organizational schemes (e.g., calendar organizers); making tasks shorter; making the steps more explicit; building in variety and choice; reducing the number of open-ended tasks; and providing more prompts, reminders, and supervision.
• Explicitly teaching executive skills. Identify a skill deficit (for example, not doing homework), set a goal, outline the steps to be followed to achieve the goal, turn the steps into a checklist or a list of rules to be followed, monitor and supervise the student, provide feedback, evaluate the program and revise it as needed, and gradually release responsibility to the student.
• Use incentives to encourage students to use the executive skills they are learning. These might include specific praise, no-homework passes, or group rewards (pizza parties when a class hands in 100% of homework in a week). A school might also levy penalties when students don’t apply their executive skills.

“Executive Skills: The Hidden Curriculum” by Peg Dawson and Richard Guare in Principal Leadership, March 2009 (Vol. 9, #7, p. 10-14), e-link for NASSP members only; Dawson and Guare have written a book on this subject – Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Practical Guide for Assessment and Interventions (Guilford Press, in press).

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6. Chicago’s New High-School Data Project

In this Education Week article, Catherine Gewertz describes the Chicago Public Schools’ Graduation Pathways strategy, launched a year ago. It provides detailed information to high schools on their incoming ninth graders with the goal of keeping all students on track for graduation. Students who are entering high school with marginal grades or a record of poor attendance are put on a “watch list” so that teachers can tailor these students’ schedules and teach to their strengths. Kelvyn Park High School, with 1,700 students, has two data specialists who help crunch the data for teachers. Data reports give each house within the school a comprehensive picture of the grades and graduation status of their students, making it possible for teachers to see trends across subject areas and intervene strategically. As the year progresses, poor grades trigger interventions.
For example, five weeks into freshman year, one student at Kelvyn Park got Fs in two classes and was asked to meet with his teachers. What did he need? they asked. He said he had to get better at raising his hand before speaking in class, needed to move away from some friends who were distracting him, wished his teachers would check on him more often in class, and wanted a backpack so he could bring all the right stuff to class. His teachers drew up a contract that included lunchtime tutoring and weekly meetings with his counselor, and everyone signed it. The teachers also bought him a backpack.
Despite these interventions, five weeks later the boy was failing all but one of his classes. At that point he was pulled out for “academic boot camp” sessions. Five weeks further along, his grades were improving, and by the end of the first semester, he had an A in English – the first he’d ever received. “I didn’t know I could do that,” he said. However, he still had two Fs and showed up in the data system as “off track” for graduation. He was immediately signed up for credit recovery classes from 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.

“9th Grade, By the Numbers” by Katherine Gewertz in Education Week, Mar. 11, 2009 (Vol. 28, #24, p. 26-28), article available to subscribers only

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7. Understanding Foreign-Born Students’ Math Approaches

In this article in Essential Teacher, St. Michael’s College professor Tim Whiteford explores the challenges of math teachers with students who were taught different computational approaches in other countries. “I just can’t work out how Anna does these subtraction problems,” says one elementary teacher of a student who spend her early years in Bosnia. “She puts a little 1 here and another little 1 down here, and she gets the right answer every time, even when I give her a four-digit number subtracted from a five-digit number. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Here is Whiteford’s advice:
- Get to know students’ “first” mathematics. For example, some countries use Base 5, 12, or 20, while others emphasize gestures in counting.
- Be aware of the parts of American math language that trip up foreign students. For example, eleven and twelve don’t sound like they are in the teens and don’t parallel the way other languages treat those numbers, and fifteen and fifty are easily confused.
- Get to know students’ mathematical procedures. Conceptual understanding tends to be universal, but procedures differ from country to country.
- Get to know students’ “cultural math.” For example, children who didn’t grow up in the British empire wouldn’t know these terms: “Three and six” (3 shillings and 6 pennies); “He was three for one-twenty-five” (3 wickets for 125 runs in a game of cricket).
- Get to know how students were taught math. In many cases, they were taught procedures through rote memorization, not through manipulatives and conceptual understanding.
- Get to know students’ mathematical understanding. Whiteford tells the story of a third-grade teacher who was concerned that a student who had recently arrived from the Congo was struggling in math because she didn’t understand enough English. But when she had her tested by a French-speaking teacher, it turned out that the child couldn’t count past eight in either language; the issue was her woefully undeveloped math skills.
In some cases, it may be in the child’s best interests to continue using his or her “first math.” But in all cases, concludes Whiteford, it’s important to “honor, validate, and respect students’ math as we would their first language and culture.”

“The Culturally Responsive Mathematics Classroom” by Tim Whiteford in Essential Teacher, March 2009 (Vol. 6, #1, p. 19-21), no e-link available

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8. What To Include in An Effective Post-Interview Thank-You Letter

In this “Career Intelligence” column in Education Week, California State University/San Marcos career counselor Diana Sanchez says that it’s smart to send a thank-you
letter after a job interview and offers these tips on what it should contain:
- An expression of enthusiasm – Why you are a good fit for the job and your continued interest in it, expressed with sincerity;
- Fill in any gaps – Address anything you didn’t get to mention in the interview or would like to clarify.
- Be personal – Customize each thank-you letter; refresh the interviewer’s memory about key points in the interview and make it clear you remember key points that were raised.
- Stay on message – Ideally you’ve decided on no more than three key points about your skills and experience for the job that you presented in your resume, highlighted in your application, discussed in the interview, and reinforced in your thank-you note.

“Networking Your Way To a Teaching Job” by Diana Sanchez in Education Week, Mar. 11, 2009 (Vol. 28, #24, p. 38) http://blogs.edweek.org/topschooljobs/careers.

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9. Short Items: a. Teen reading website; b. Forms of government video;

a. Teen reading website – Teen Reads – http://www.teenreads.com - has everything for the young adult reader – book reviews, news about awards, recently published books, books that have been made into movies, discussion questions, author interviews, and more.

“Bulletin Board – TeenReads” in Principal Leadership, March 2009 (Vol. 6, #1, p. 9)

b. Forms of government video – This outstanding video analyzes the various forms of government (communism, fascism, democracy, oligarchy, republic, anarchy) and walks us through a really thoughtful analysis of what’s what. No talking heads! All video footage and commentary. Probably best for high-school students: http://wimp.com/thegovernment/

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