Fostering a "Growth" Mindset in Students

Fostering a “Growth” Mindset in Students

Parents, teachers, and other adults shape young people’s mindsets by what they say about successes and failures. Praise for being “smart” leads kids to believe that learning should be easy – and if it feels difficult, they’re not smart. Praise for focusing and sticking with a task fosters a much more positive mindset – you can get smart through effective effort.

        Fisher and Frey say educators can foster students’ motivation by the way they talk to them about accomplishments, identity, and agency:

        • Accomplishments – “When teachers phrase compliments so that students understand their own roles in the accomplishment, they will begin to see that their efforts allow them to meet their goals,” say Fisher and Frey. “In doing so, teachers can guide students to ‘attend to their internal feelings of pride’ (Johnston,Choice Words, Stenhouse, 2004), which will build students’ internal motivation and reduce their need for external praise.” Some examples:

• “You figured that out. Feels good, huh? Tell me how you did it.”
• “I bet you are proud of yourself.”
• “Marcos, your group tells me that you were very helpful in figuring out the answer to this problem.”

• Identity – Teachers’ comments can help students build a sense of who they are in the world. Some examples:

• “How are you thinking like a historian today?”
• “Your opening line reminds me of one thing that other authors do. As a reader, I enjoy openings with a startling statement and you really captured that here.”
• “There are so many ways to solve this problem, and I see that you solved it two different ways… I’d bet it was fun to see it work out both ways.”

• Agency – This is the feeling that one’s efforts lead directly to accomplishments, as opposed to luck being the main variable. Teachers can build children’s sense of agency by talking to them in specific ways:

• Asking “Why?” is a helpful way to get students to connect actions to effects.
• “What might you do next?” helps students plan actions that will produce results and also communicates the teacher’s belief that students can and will succeed.
• “You did it, but tell me how,” a teacher might say. “I’m particularly interested in efforts that were and were not helpful.”

Fisher and Frey suggest that when principals visit classrooms, they should listen carefully to teachers’ language and see if it’s appropriately praising accomplishments and building identity and agency.

“Choice Words” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in Principal Leadership, December 2012 (Vol. 13, #4, p. 57-59), http://www.nassp.org/tabid/3788/default.aspx?topic=Instructional_Leader_1212

The authors can be reached at dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu and nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu.

Stephen Anderson

Robert Marzano on Analyzing Complex Texts

(Originally titled “Analyzing Complex Texts”)

        In this Educational Leadership column, author/consultant Robert Marzano says that when students analyze a text’s structure, they should be aware of two levels: (a) the overall organization – for example, rising action, climax, falling action in literature or, in non-fiction, presenting and supporting a claim; and (b) the underlying relationship among ideas, including these four:

• Addition: one idea adds to or is similar to another – for example, She is dark and beautiful.
• Contrast: one idea is different or subtracts from another – for example, He is fast but doesn’t like to play sports.
• Time: one idea occurs before, during, or after another – for example, She walked away before he arrived.
• Cause: one idea leads to another – for example, He woke up because the garbage truck made a racket.

When students hear a complex sentence like: Mary called Bill after he left for work, but he didn’t get the call because his cell phone was off, they can probably follow the logic, but when they are reading, they may need guidance analyzing the relationship among ideas. Marzano says students should be explicitly taught the four types of relationships among ideas and use symbols to mark up passages: an equal sign for addition, a not-equal sign for contrast; an arrow for time; and a double-stemmed arrow for cause.

 

“Analyzing Complex Texts” by Robert Marzano in Educational Leadership, December 2012/January 2013 (Vol. 70, #4, p. 84-85), www.ascd.org

 

 

Stephen Anderson

How to Unleash Creativity

        “Most people are born creative,” say Tom Kelley (University of California/Berkeley and University of Tokyo) and David Kelley (Stanford University) in this thoughtful Harvard Business Review article. “As children, we revel in imaginary play, ask outlandish questions, draw blobs and call them dinosaurs.” But as the years pass, formal education takes its toll and many people no longer see themselves as creative.

Kelley and Kelley believe creativity is vital to getting results, and they’re in the business of helping people rediscover their creative confidence, defined as their “natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.” They use “guided mastery” to help people get past fears that inhibit creativity:

        • Fear of the messy unknown – One’s office is cozy and predictable, say Kelley and Kelley: “Out in the world, it’s more chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with irrational people who say things you don’t want to hear. But that is where you find insights – and creative breakthroughs.” Venturing out of one’s comfort zone and treating it like an anthropological expedition is a sure way to fire up creativity.

        • Fear of being judged – “If the scribbling, singing, dancing kindergartner symbolizes unfettered creative expression,” say Kelley and Kelley, “the awkward teenager represents the opposite: someone who cares –deeply – about what other people think. It takes only a few years to develop that fear of judgment, but it stays with us throughout our adult lives, often constraining our careers.” People self-censor ideas for fear they won’t be acceptable to peers or superiors, constantly undermining the creative process. Kelley and Kelley recommend keeping an idea notebook or whiteboard and scribbling ideas – good, bad, indifferent – with abandon. It’s amazing how much good stuff is written down by the end of each week. They also suggest scheduling “white space” time when the only task is to think and daydream – perhaps while taking a walk. It’s also important to reach an agreement with colleagues to use more supportive language in response to wild and crazy ideas, shifting from “That will never work” to “I wish…” or “This is just my opinion and I want to help.”

        • Fear of the first step – “Creative efforts are hardest at the beginning,” say Kelley and Kelley. “The writer faces the blank page; the teacher, the start of school; businesspeople, the first day of a new project… To overcome this inertia, good ideas are not enough. You need to stop planning and just get started – and the best way to do that is to stop focusing on the huge overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away.” A boy who procrastinated on a school report on birds till the night before it was due was on the verge of a panic attack, but he got some great advice from his father: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

        • Fear of losing control – Many people think they have to solve problems or come up with answers by themselves. Kelley and Kelley say that when we’re stuck, we need to let go and reach out for help. “Confidence doesn’t simply mean believing your ideas are good,” they write. “It means having the humility to let go of ideas that aren’t working and to accept good ideas from other people.” Call a meeting of people who are fresh to the topic and brainstorm. Let the most junior person in the room lead the meeting. Look for opportunities to let go and leverage different perspectives.

 

“Reclaim Your Creative Confidence” by Tom Kelley and David Kelley in Harvard Business Review, December 2012 (Vol. 90, #12, p. 115-118), no e-link available

 

Five Myths About the Common Core ELA Standards

(Originally titled “The Common Core Ate My Baby and Other Urban Legends”)

            In this important Educational Leadership article, literacy expert Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/Chicago) debunks five myths about the common core literacy standards:

            • Myth #1: The new standards prohibit teachers from setting purposes for reading or discussing prior knowledge. True, the original publishers’ criteria written by lead authors David Coleman and Susan Pimentel in 2011 suggested deemphasizing the common practice of spending time building up students’ background knowledge, establishing the purpose for reading a passage, and asking for students’ predictions. Facing a storm of protest, Coleman and Pimentel retreated and issued an April 2012 revision that eliminated admonitions against pre-teaching.

            “So to clarify, there simply is no ban on pre-reading in the Common Core State Standards,” says Shanahan. But there are significant changes – close reading and re-reading – which suggest that it’s a good idea to get students to plunge into texts without a lot of prior teaching. “The benefit of the pre-reading controversy,” says Shanahan, “is that it’s getting educators to take a hard look at how best to send students into a book – and this rethinking can help us clear up our pre-reading act… Preparing students to read a text… should be brief and should focus on providing students with the tools they need to make sense of the text on their own.”

            • Myth #2: Teachers are no longer required to teach phonological awareness, phonics, or fluency. Not true, says Shanahan. The common-core standards are strong on phonological awareness K-1, phonics K-3, and fluency K-5. So how did this myth get started? Perhaps because the new literacy standards began with comprehension, which is the reverse of the sequence in many previous standards documents.

            • Myth #3: English teachers can no longer teach literature in literature classes. Nonsense, says Shanahan. What the new standards do is give informational texts equal billing with novels, stories, poems, and plays in the elementary grades and 30 percent of classroom time in the upper grades – but that includes science and social studies. English teachers can continue to teach literature, as they have always done.

            • Myth #4: Teachers must teach students at frustration levels. It’s true that the common-core standards call for students to work with more-challenging material at each grade level than has been typical in basal readers in recent years. This is based on research showing that students make less progress when they read easier texts – and the urgent need to prepare students for the literacy demands of college and the workplace. But the higher reading levels in the new standards should not lead primary-grade teachers to push students beyond what is required by the common-core (which is similar to previous expectations) in order to prepare them for more-demanding grade 2 standards. And all teachers should give their students a mix of reading material – more-demanding material for close reading and direct instruction, easier material for fun reading.

            • Myth #5: Most schools are already teaching to the new standards. Baloney, says Shanahan: “We are going to have to make some real changes in our practices.” These include (a) less emphasis on pre-reading and more on close reading, re-reading, and follow-up;

(b) building students’ skills and motivation to tackle difficult texts without telling them what the texts say; (c) an increase in critical analysis and synthesis of information from multiple texts; (d) a greater emphasis on informational texts in upper-grade social studies and science classes; and (e) more student writing about the ideas from texts than personal thoughts.

“Each one of these changes is considerable and will require better and more appropriate professional development, instructional materials, and supervision,” says Shanahan. “Educators who shrug off these changes will face a harsh reality.” The fact is that 40 percent of students who currently meet state standards need remediation when they get to college and many fail to graduate. The new standards are in line with what students need to know and be able to do to succeed in college and careers. Shanahan believes they will give teachers, students, and parents a much more accurate picture of where students stand, and what they need to succeed.

“The Common Core Ate My Baby and Other Urban Legends” by Timothy Shanahan in Educational Leadership, December 2012 (Vol. 70, #4, p. 10-16), www.ascd.org; Shanahan can be reached at shanahan@uic.edu. 

Making Feedback to Students Effective

(Originally titled “Know Thy Impact”)

        “Gathering and assessing feedback are really the only ways teachers can know the impact of their teaching,” says Australian educator John Hattie in this Educational Leadership article. The problem is that not all feedback is effective. Hattie offers these suggestions for making feedback work:

        • Clarify the goal. “The aim of feedback is to reduce the gap between where students are and where they should be,” says Hattie. “With a clear goal in mind, students are more likely to actively seek and listen to feedback.” The teacher might provide scoring rubrics, a completed example, the steps toward a successful product, or progress charts.

        • Make sure students understand the feedback. “When we monitor how much academic feedback students actually receive in a typical class, it’s a small amount indeed,” says Hattie. Teachers need to check with students to see if they’re getting it. This may involve asking them to interpret written comments and articulate next steps.

        • Seek feedback from students. Do they need help? Different strategies? Another explanation? Teachers who listen to students can adapt lessons, clarify work demands, and provide missing information, all of which helps students do better.

        • Tailor feedback to students.   Novice students benefit most from task feedback, somewhat more proficient students from process feedback, and highly competent students thrive on feedback aimed at self-regulation or conceptual understanding.

• Task feedback – How well the student is doing on a particular task and how to improve.
• Process feedback – This might be suggested strategies to learn from errors, cues to seek information, or ways to relate different ideas.
• Self-regulation feedback – This helps students monitor, direct, and regulate their own actions as they work toward the learning goal – and helps build a belief that effort, more than raw ability, is what produces successful learning.

To move students from mastery of content to mastery of strategies to mastery of conceptual understanding, teachers need to give feedback that is at or just above their current level.

        • Use effective strategies. One tip is to scope out entering misconceptions and have students think them through. Another is providing students with formative assessment information, giving them specific information on strengths and weaknesses. A third is to start with effective instruction and learning experiences. “Teachers need to listen to the hum of students learning, welcoming quality student talk, structuring classroom discussions, inviting student questions, and openly discussing errors,” says Hattie. “If these reveal that student have misunderstood an important concept or failed to grasp the point of the lesson, sometimes the best approach is simply to reteach the material.”

• Avoid ineffective feedback. Researchers have found that praise and peer feedback are problematic. “Students welcome praise,” says Hattie. “Indeed, we all do. The problem is that when a teacher combines praise with other feedback information, the student typically only hears the praise… The bottom line seems to be this: Give much praise, but do not mix it with other feedback because praise dilutes the power of that information.” As for peer feedback, Graham Nuthall monitored students’ peer interactions through the school day (using microphones) and found that most of the feedback students receive during the day is from other students – and much of it is incorrect. Peer feedback needs clear structure, such as a rubric and a set of guiding questions.

        • Create a climate of trust. Students must understand that errors and misunderstandings are part of learning and not be afraid of negative reactions from peers – or the teacher – if they make mistakes.

 

“Know Thy Impact” by John Hattie in Educational Leadership, September 2012 (Vol. 70, #1, p. 18-23), www.ascd.org; Hattie can be reached at jhattie@unimelb.edu.au

 

Stephen Anderson

Principal,

Student Survey Data As Part of Teacher Evaluation

Student Survey Data As Part of Teacher Evaluation

        In this important Kappan article, Harvard senior lecturer Ronald Ferguson describes a scenario in which a principal peeks into a classroom and likes what she sees (students are busy and well-behaved) and the teacher and principal are pleased with his test-score results (they’re almost always above average). But the students, if asked, would have told a very different story: lessons are uninteresting, assignments emphasize memorization more than understanding, and the teacher seems indifferent to their feelings and opinions. In short, it’s not a happy place and there is no love of learning.

        Universities routinely survey students on how professors are performing, but until recently, K-12 students have not been given the chance to evaluate their teachers. This is because, although students spend hundreds more hours in classrooms than any administrator, people doubt that students can provide valid, reliable, and stable responses about the quality of teaching.

        The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project has put those doubts to rest. Comparing value-added analysis of test scores, classroom observations, and student perception surveys (using Ferguson’s Tripod questions), researchers have found that students provide accurate, helpful information on their teachers’ performance. “[S]tudents know good instruction when they experience it as well as when they do not,” says Ferguson. The research design was careful to control for students’ family background and isolate each teacher’s characteristics and impact on learning.

These robust findings notwithstanding, Ferguson offers two caveats about using student survey results to evaluate teachers:

• Any method of assessing teacher effectiveness is prone to measurement error.
• Teachers may temporarily alter their behaviors to improve their survey results, especially if students’ opinions have high stakes.

These concerns lead Ferguson to say, “No one survey instrument or observational protocol should have high stakes for teachers if used alone or for only a single deployment.” He supports the idea of student surveys being one of several measures used to evaluate teachers.

        Over the last eleven years, almost a million K-12 students have filled out anonymous Tripod surveys on their teachers, and Ferguson and his colleagues have refined the questions to the point where they pass muster with other researchers. The survey questions are grouped under seven headings, and students respond by rating their agreement or disagreement with each statement on a 5-4-3-2-1 scale:

        • Care. This goes beyond a teacher’s “niceness” to encompass demonstrated concern for students’ happiness and success. A sample question: My teacher really tries to understand how students feel about things.

        • Control. These questions measure management of off-task and disruptive behaviors in the classroom. A sample question: Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.

        • Clarify. This addresses the teacher’s skill at promoting understanding, clearing up confusion and misconceptions, differentiating, and helping students persevere. A sample question: My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.

        • Challenge. This covers effort and rigor and measures whether the teacher pushes students to work hard and think deeply. Sample questions: In this class, my teacher accepts nothing less than our full effort and My teacher wants us to use our thinking skills, not just memorize things.

        • Captivate. Do teachers make instruction stimulating, relevant, and memorable? Sample questions: My teacher makes lessons interesting and I often feel like this class has nothing to do with real life outside school.

        • Confer. This covers teachers seeking students’ points of view and allowing them to express themselves and exchange ideas with classmates. A sample question: My teacher gives us time to explain our ideas.

        • Consolidate. This measures whether teachers check for understanding and help students see patterns and move learning into long-term memory. A sample question: My teacher takes the time to summarize what we learn each day.

        Ferguson notes that five of these areas measure teachers’ support of students – Care, Clarify, Captivate, Confer, and Consolidate – and two measure “press” – Control and Challenge.

        What have the survey results revealed about teachers? Even lower-elementary students express clear distinctions among teachers, with greater variation within schools than between schools. Overall, the MET study has shown Tripod survey results to be valid and reliable predictors of student learning in math and ELA – in fact, more reliable than administrators’ classroom observations. Students whose teachers scored in the top quarter on Tripod questions learned the equivalent of 4-5 months more per year than students whose teachers scored in the bottom quarter. The differences in ELA were about half as large as in math.

        Not all the Seven C items are equally predictive of student achievement. When Ferguson asks audiences which of the Seven C’s they think are most important to student achievement, most pick Care. But that’s not what the MET data show. Here are the seven survey questions that correlate most strongly with achievement gains:

• Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
• My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
• Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
• In this class, we learn a lot every day.
• In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.
• My teacher explains difficult things clearly.

However, the difference between these and other Tripod items is not large, says Ferguson: “Educators should keep all of them in mind as they seek ways to improve teaching and learning.”

        What about student outcomes beyond test-score gains? “We also want attentiveness and good behavior, happiness, effort, and efficacy,” says Ferguson. The good news is that he and his colleagues have found “the same teaching behaviors that predict better behavior, greater happiness, more effort, and stronger efficacy also predict great value-added achievement gains.” It’s not either-or; it’s both, and student survey results, used wisely, can help give teachers and administrators valuable data to improve teaching and learning.

 

“Can Student Surveys Measure Teaching Quality?” by Ronald Ferguson in Phi Delta Kappan, November 2012 (Vol. 94, #3, p. 24-28), http://www.kappanmagazine.org; Ferguson can be reached at ronald_ferguson@harvard.edu

 

Stephen Anderson

Principal,

Charlotte Danielson on Effective Observation and Follow-Up

(Originally titled “Observing Classroom Practice”) “Classroom observations can foster teacher learning – if observation systems include crucial components and observers know what to look for,” says teacher-evaluation guru Charlotte Danielson in this Educational Leadership article. To be fair, “the judgments that are made about a teacher’s practice must accurately reflect the teacher’s true level of performance.” Although some of teachers’ work is “behind the scenes”, Danielson believes the most important parts of teaching can be observed in classrooms. A teacher who is ineffective in front of students can’t be considered competent. What should administrators look for in classrooms? Danielson believes that every district needs a research-based instructional framework (hers, for example) that gives everyone a detailed, well-crafted, agreed-upon definition of teaching at different levels of effectiveness. The framework should be validated, meaning that teachers who do well on the rubric produce significant gains in student achievement. Administrators should also be clear on what evidence they must gather to score teachers, and the evaluation process should be supported by training ensuring that different administrators would give pretty much the same ratings to the same teacher. In addition, it’s important that teachers have a clear picture (ideally through videotapes) of performance at different levels. Danielson believes administrators need to be proficient in four areas to conduct effective classroom observations, and should be certified in these before conducting high-stakes evaluations: • Collecting evidence – She says administrators should write down what they actually see and hear in classrooms, not their opinions or interpretations. This might include something the teacher says (e.g., “Can anyone think of another idea?”), what students do (e.g., taking 45 seconds to line up), or something else (e.g., backpacks strewn in the middle of the floor). It’s hard for many administrators to refrain from making judgments, says Danielson, but it’s important to separate evidence from conclusions, especially when there’s disagreement about a teacher’s level of performance. • Deciding on rubric scores – This is where the administrator takes the evidence gathered in the classroom and finds the rubric language that provides a valid interpretation and judgment. Ideally, different administrators observing the same classroom will identify the same rubric lines and the same 4-3-2-1 levels of performance. This is relatively easy for low-inference items (did the class start on time?) but considerably more difficult for items like a teacher using questioning and discussion to deepen understanding. • Conducting professional conversations with teachers – Although there are times when administrators need to tell teachers bluntly that something must change, the focus in most follow-up conferences with teachers, Danielson believes, “should be dialogue, with a sharing of views and perspectives. After all, teachers make hundreds of decisions every day. If we accept that teaching is, among other things, cognitive work, then the conversations between teachers and observers must be about cognition.” These conversations “are the best opportunity to engage teachers in thinking through how they could strengthen their practice.” This, of course, has implications for how administrators are trained and supported. • Making the teacher an active participant – In most conventional evaluations, says Danielson, teachers are passive recipients and the administrator does almost all the work – not the best strategy for bringing about adult learning. To change this one-sided dynamic, Danielson suggests the following steps. First, both teacher and administrator become conversant with the evaluation rubric. Second, after a classroom observation, the administrator shares his or her low-inference notes with the teacher and accepts additions and edits from the teacher’s perspective. Third, the teacher and administrator independently align the observation notes with the rubric, identifying which cell accurately describes and evaluates what was taking place in the classroom. Finally, they meet and compare their rubric scores and discuss any differences. “Observing Classroom Practice” by Charlotte Danielson in Educational Leadership, November 2012 (Vol. 70, #3, p. 32-37), http://www.ascd.org; Danielson can be reached at info@danielsongroup.org. Stephen Anderson

Dealing with Boredom in the Classroom

In this Education Week article, Sarah Sparks reports on a study in the October issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science on student boredom in the classroom (about 65 percent of students say they are bored in school at least once a day). “I think teachers should always try to be relevant and interesting,” says lead author John Eastwood of York University in Toronto, “but beyond that, there are other places to look. By definition, to be in the state of boredom is to say the world sucks out there in some way. But often that’s not the case; often it’s an interior problem…” In other words, being “bored” might be a proxy for other things – finding the work too difficult, thinking about a fight with Mom last night, being distracted by a loud air conditioner, ADHD, or thinking about that D in math last year. All these can interfere with the brain’s executive function, which resides in the prefrontal cortex just behind the student’s furrowed brow, allowing the emotional center, the amygdala, to take over – hence the feeling of being tired, anxious, or depressed or the desire to act out or zone out. Students who feel bored may doze off and then try to keep themselves alert by doodling (which is actually helpful). What should teachers do to minimize student boredom? A study conducted in Germany by Ulrike Nett of the University of Konstanz compared coping strategies used by grade 5-10 students confronted with a math problem that was difficult and potentially boring: Avoiding the task by studying a different subject or talking with friends; Criticizing the task and asking for more interesting material; Reappraising the situation, thinking about how to make it relevant, and fighting boredom. The third approach produced more enjoyment, less stress, higher academic achievement, and less boredom down the road. “Although teachers try to create interesting lessons, they must be aware that despite their best intentions, some students may still perceive interesting lessons as boring,” says Nett. “What is imperative to underscore at this point is that both teachers and students must take some responsibility for boredom, and both must be involved in finding an adequate way to reduce this emotion in their classrooms.”

“Researchers Argue Boredom May Be ‘A Flavor of Stress’”

by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, Oct. 10, 2012 (Vol. 32, #7, p. 1, 16), http://bit.ly/RjyjPF

Stephen Anderson

Ways to Help ADHD Students

(Originally titled “Ferrari Engines, Bicycle Brakes”) In this Educational Leadership article, psychiatrist Edward Hallowell describes the rocky time he himself had in school because of ADHD and dyslexia, and the huge difference a first-grade teacher made when she put her arm around him as he read in class. “No one laughed at my stammering and stuttering, because I had the Mafia sitting next to me!” he says. “Such a simple intervention, but profound in its impact.” Hallowell now works with children and adults with ADHD and dyslexia, and has two recommendations for teachers: • Create a safe environment for all students. “Fear and humiliation, which once upon a time were standard teaching tools, should be relics of the past,” he says. “It is a neurological fact that feeling safe opens up the brain, whereas feeling anxious and afraid clamps it down.” • Adopt a strength-based model. Hallowell says to an ADHD student, “I have great news for you. I’ve taken your history, and I’ve read what your various teachers have had to say about you… After putting all this information together, I’m now able to tell you that you have an awesome brain. Your brain is very powerful. It’s like a Ferrari – a race car. You have the power to win races and become a champion. However, you do have one problem. You have bicycle brakes. Your brakes just aren’t strong enough to control your powerful brain, so you can’t slow down or stop when you need to… But not to worry! I’m a brake specialist, and if you work with me, we can strengthen your brakes.” So what can teachers do to strengthen students’ brakes? First, explain ADHD the way Hallowell does. Second, establish yourself as a caring member of a team devoted to helping the student succeed. Then, when a student is disruptive, set limits in a non-shaming way: “Joey, your brakes are failing you now.” Other key steps: Set up predictable schedules and rules. Have ADHD kids sit near you. Break down large tasks into bite-size chunks. Relate new material to previous learning. Balance structure with novelty. Make sure the class gets recess and provide frequent brain breaks. “Physical exercise, even for one minute, presses the rest button on the brain and refreshes students mentally,” says Hallowell.

“Ferrari Engines, Bicycle Brakes” by Edward Hallowell in Educational Leadership, October 2012 (Vol. 70, #2, p. 36-38), http://www.ascd.org; the author is at drhallowell@gmail.com

Stephen Anderson

School Wide Service Project

We are planning to conduct a school wide service project on the two half days in November (14th and 15th) the Report Card Conference dates. This will facilitate parent involvement and encourage community building. All members of the central High School community, including parents are asked to donate a food item for the Connecticut Food Bank. For that week, November 13-November 15, we will be holding a non-perishable food drive. Students and staff will be encouraged to bring in food and leave it at the Main Office. Bags for classroom collection of food items will be distributed by BuildOn personnel that Tuesday. The focus for the service project will be “Hunger and Homelessness.” The BuildOn staff will be generating curricula for the first period on the 14th related to the theme of hunger and homelessness. If you prefer to prepare your own lesson on that theme, you may do so. If you wish to use the lesson in all your classes for the day, you may do that as well. My request is that at least for period one, all students are exposed through a variety of disciplines to a thoughtful exercise on hunger and homelessness. On the 15th, about 60 BuildOn students will be leaving the school to do a service project at United Congregational Church. Thanks for your support of this community initiative.

Steve Anderson

Teaching Struggling High-School Students to Write

In this important article in The Atlantic, author/foundation staffer Peg Tyre tells the story of how New Dorp High School on Staten Island, New York addressed students’ writing deficits. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level, and most students did poorly on the state Regents exams. “Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet,” says Tyre. The staff had watched the principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, get rid of some bad-apple teachers, win foundations grants, and break the school into small learning communities – but student achievement didn’t budge. “Although New Dorp teachers had observed students failing for years, they never connected that failure to specific flaws in their own teaching,” says Tyre. The prevailing belief was that the students weren’t smart enough to write at the high-school level. One teacher said, “It was my view that these kids didn’t want to engage their brains. They were lazy.” Because of its rock-bottom results the school was in danger of being closed down, and DeAngelis led a last-ditch effort to identify the root causes of student failure. Staff members zeroed in on writing. “Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects,” says Tyre. “Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page.” The school began to do its own action research on why students’ writing was so poor. Was it a lack of reading skills? A few teachers administered diagnostic reading tests and reported that students with low writing skills could read fairly well. But a history teacher noticed that struggling students’ sentences were mostly short and disjointed, whereas more-successful students used coordinating conjunctions to link and expand on simple ideas – words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Another teacher gave a quick quiz to see if students knew how to use these simple words, and the results astonished the staff: most could not. “The harder they looked,” says Tyre, “the teachers began to realize the harder it was to determine whether the students were smart or not – the tools they had to express their thoughts were so limited that such a judgment was nearly impossible.” As teachers continued their search for answers, they noticed that the best-written student paragraphs contained complex sentences with dependent clauses like although and despite, signaling a shift in logic within a sentence. Struggling students, on the other hand, were unable to complete a complex sentence. After reading Of Mice and Men, teachers asked them to complete the sentence, “Although George…” What they expected was a sentence like, “Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream,” but they got variations on, “Although George and Lenny were friends.” Tyre says that New Dorp had an epiphany: “These 14- and 15-year-olds didn’t know how to use some basic parts of speech. With such grammatical gaps, it was a wonder they learned as much as they did.” Prose like that of the Gettysburg address was way beyond them. They hadn’t learned that the key information in a sentence doesn’t always come at the beginning. How had students gotten to high school without these basics – without knowing how to use the word although? Tyre says this lack of basic writing skills is actually quite common in American schools. Twenty-five years ago, she says, schools shifted from the old-fashioned approach to teaching writing to the theory that writing should be “caught, not taught.” The theory was that if students were given creative assignments, put in a social context, and told that writing was fun, they would become good writers. Formal grammar and sentence-structure lessons were passé. But this approach didn’t work for all kids – especially those who grew up in poverty, had learning difficulties, and had weak early instruction. Then in 2001, No Child Left Behind de-emphasized writing, and it was taught less and less. “Writing as a way to study, to learn, or to construct new knowledge or generate new networks of understanding has become increasingly rare,” says Arthur Applebee of the University of Albany. Desperate for a program, DeAngelis took a group of New Dorp teachers to visit the Windward School, a small grade 1-9 private school in White Plains, NY known for a writing approach developed by former teacher Judith Hochman. After the visit, DeAngelis said, “I had one question and one question only: How can we steal this and bring it back to New Dorp?” She invited Hochman to a series of meetings with her staff, and they became convinced that there was a close link between writing, thinking, speaking, and reading. They concluded that improving writing would be a gateway to boosting achievement in the other three areas. In the fall of 2009, with Hochman’s guidance, New Dorp began a complete revamp of its curriculum, with a laser-like focus on a highly structured approach to teaching students to write expository essays. “The thing is,” said Hochman, “kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.” Teachers began to teach students how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by using three prompts: but, because, and so. Students learned how to use appositive clauses to vary sentence beginnings – for example, in a chemistry class, students were guided to write sentences beginning with three words: “Although hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion, a compound of them puts out fires.” “Unless hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.” And “If hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.” Later, students learned how to recognize sentence fragments, pull the main idea from a paragraph, and write the main idea. By the sophomore year, students were learning how to map out an introductory paragraph and then how to write body paragraphs. One student said, “There are phrases – specifically, for instance, for example – that help you add detail to a paragraph. Who could have known that, unless someone taught them?” Teachers assigned more homework at a more demanding and rigorous level. And there was less emphasis on creative, narrative writing. In classroom discussions, students were required to follow specific prompts posted on the wall: “I agree (or disagree) with ____ because….” “I have a different opinion….” “I have something to add…” “Can you explain your answer?” In a discussion of the play Death of a Salesman, students responded to the teacher’s question about why the protagonist seemed tired. “Willie Loman seems tired because he is getting old,” said one student. Why? asked the teacher. “The stage direction says he’s 63,” said another student. “That’s old!” Another said, “I agree that his age is listed in the stage direction. But I disagree with your conclusion. I think he is tired because his job is very hard and he has to travel a lot.” Another student joined in: “I disagree with these conclusions. The way Willie Loman describes his job suggests that the kind of work he does is making him tired. It is repetitive. It can feel pointless. It can make you feel exhausted.” The Hochman curriculum quickly produced results. As students developed a better understanding of the parts of speech, their reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure,” said one student. “But it was like a sea of words. The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.” Students who entered New Dorp in 2009 had an 89 percent pass rate when they took the English Regents as sophomores – up from 67 percent for the preceding class. The Global-History pass rate went from 64 to 75 percent. Regents-repeater classes shrank from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20, and the number of students in college-level classes went from 148 to 412. And last spring, the school’s graduation rate was 80 percent – up from 63 percent before the writing program was introduced. “In a profoundly hopeful irony,” concludes Tyre, “New Dorp’s reemergence as a viable institution has hinged not on a radical new innovation but on an old idea done better. The school’s success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals – fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten – need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.”

“The Writing Revolution” by Peg Tyre in The Atlantic, October 2012 (Vol. 310, #3, p. 96-101), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/

Stephen Anderson

Measures for Teacher' Evaluations

The MET Project Combines Three Measures for Teacher Evaluation ​In this Education Next article, Harvard professor Thomas Kane describes the work of the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which, under his direction, is “searching for tools to save the world from perfunctory teacher evaluation.” MET’s 2012 report recommends that three tools should be used to evaluate teachers – test-score gains, classroom observations, and student surveys – to compensate for the built-in weaknesses of each. Here is Kane’s analysis of their strengths and shortcomings: ​• Test-score gains – Looking at a teacher’s track record of producing student-achievement gains is better than the other two measures at signaling whether a teacher will get similar gains in the future, especially if the same test is used. The correlation between a teacher’s value-added in one year with another is .48 in math and .36 in English language arts. Interestingly, MET researchers found that gains on lower-level multiple-choice tests correlated well with gains on higher-level constructed-response tests and with students’ success in non-cognitive areas. But value-added analysis of test scores has significant weaknesses: only about one quarter of teachers work in grades with standardized ELA and math tests; the scores that are available don’t provide much help in improving classroom practices; and ELA scores are considerably less reliable than math scores. ​• Classroom observations – The MET researchers hired and trained observers and studied the efficacy of six different rubrics to score 7,500 classroom videotapes. Observation of lessons did better than the other two measures at improving classroom practice, especially if the observers were well trained and honest with their feedback. But lesson evaluations have numerous disadvantages: the evidence of impact on student achievement is unproven; classroom creativity may be stifled if teachers feel they have to conform to one rubric’s definition of good teaching; there’s considerable variation in ratings from lesson to lesson and observer to observer; and getting several observations by several different observers, which MET considers essential to reliability, is expensive. ​• Student surveys – MET researchers administered the Tripod survey to students in grades 4-9 (see item #3 below), making sure students trusted that their feedback was confidential. The questions, developed by Ron Ferguson of Harvard and his colleagues, ask students to rate their teachers on a 5-4-3-2-1 scale on specific, observable characteristics, for example: - In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes. - Our class stays busy and does not waste time. - Everybody knows what they should be doing and learning in this class. Data from the surveys showed that students see clear differences among teachers, and ratings of teachers were quite consistent across different groups of students (.66 correlation). Students’ evaluations of their teachers were a better predictor of ELA and math achievement gains than classroom observations, but not as robust as value-added test-score analysis. “Even if the typical student is less discerning than a trained adult,” says Kane, “the ability to average over many students (rather than one or two adults), and having students experience 180 days of instruction (rather than observe two or three lessons), obviously improves reliability.” Student surveys have the additional advantage of being quite inexpensive. ​Kane uses the analogy of the way his 6-year-old son picks a team of superheroes with different strengths: the way to deal with the various strengths and weaknesses of these three approaches to teacher evaluation is to use all three. Combining test-score analysis, classroom observation, and student surveys produces evaluations that are less volatile and have greater predictive power. Plotting predictive power against reliability (see the graph in the linked article below), combined ratings are significantly better than any single measure. The MET team weighted the three tools .758, .042, and .200 respectively. (Although classroom observations were given the least weight, the team hopes that feedback to teachers will end up being an important contributor to improved teaching and learning.) “The use of multiple measures not only spreads the risk but also provides opportunities to detect manipulation or gaming,” says Kane. It also allows administrators to take a closer look when results from the three tools don’t line up – for example, a teacher might be using unconventional classroom methods that don’t produce high rubric scores, but still show high student achievement value-added.

“Capturing the Dimensions of Effective Teaching” by Thomas Kane in Education Next, Fall 2012 (Vol. 12, #4, p. 34-41), http://educationnext.org/capturing-the-dimensions-of-effective-teaching

Stephen Anderson