In This Issue:
1. The impact of smartphones and social media on young teens
2. Strategies for getting colleagues to listen better
3. Being direct with people about mediocre practices
4. The long-term, spillover impact of English language arts teaching
5. Does teacher race affect exclusionary discipline of black students?
6. Why are black children often seen as older and less innocent?
7. Giving students timely feedback on in-class assignments
8. Getting educational technology right
9. Criteria for good classroom STEM problems
10. Short item: Random student group generator
Quotes of the Week
“I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too. But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.”
Maria Stephan (U.S. Institute of Peace), quoted in “How to Make Fun of Fascists” by
Moises Velasquez-Manoff in The New York Times, August 20, 2017,
http://nyti.ms/2wUNTKp
“Timely feedback kicks mediocrity to the curb.”
Dan Rockwell (see item #3)
“We find that ELA teachers’ contributions to student learning are particularly diffuse, and thus a larger portion of their instructional impact may typically go undetected or be ascribed to teachers in other subject areas or school years.”
Benjamin Master, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff (see item #4)
“Here’s the thing to remember about discipline systems at school: every one of them codifies somebody’s value system, sets in rules and regulations judgments like ‘Being compliant is good’ or ‘A good student is one who questions authority.’”
Peter Greene, quoted in “There’s No One Best Approach to School Discipline, So Let
Parents Choose” by Robert Pondiscio in The Education Gadfly, August 23, 2017
(Vol. 17, #34), http://bit.ly/2wK6UlN
“People of all races see black children as more adultlike than their white peers. In turn, normal childhood behavior, like disobedience and tantrums, is seen as a criminal threat when black kids do it. This misrepresentation causes black children to be overpoliced and underprotected.”
Robin Bernstein (see item #6)
1. The Impact of Smartphones and Social Media on Young Teens
In this article in The Atlantic, psychologist Jean Twenge (San Diego State University) describes her conversation with a 13-year-old in Houston, who said she spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room communicating with friends on her iPhone. “Unlike the teens of my generation,” says Twenge, “who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up with Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other.” The girl said to Twenge, “We don’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people… My bed has, like, an imprint of my body.” Like many teens, she has her phone with her at all times, including when she’s asleep.
Twenge has researched generational trends over the last 25 years – boomers turning on, tuning in, dropping out; Generation X’s yen for independence and endless adolescence; the highly individualistic Millennials – and has been struck by the abrupt change in behavior in the current generation of young teens, especially how they spend their time. Twenge traces the shift to around 2009, when the percentage of Americans with a smartphone passed 50 percent, and the rise of social media. iGen is her term for this cohort – born between 1995 and 2012, own a smartphone and perhaps a tablet, got an Instagram account before high school, don’t remember being without the Internet. These phenomena have “radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives,” says Twenge, “from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.” And this is true of all socioeconomic levels in every part of the nation. “Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.”
When looking at generational changes, she says, it’s important to avoid nostalgia and acknowledge what’s positive. iGen teens are physically safer because they party less, drive less (one quarter of high-school seniors don’t have a license), drink less, have less sex, have fewer teen pregnancies, and commit fewer homicides. On the worrisome side, iGen teens have fewer after-school jobs, do less in-person hanging out with friends, date less, sleep less (under seven hours a night in many cases, compared to the recommended nine hours), are more dependent on their parents for spending money and transportation, and talk less with other family members. The Houston 13-year-old said of her friends, “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.”
iGen teens have more free time than previous generations, says Twenge. “So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.” Which may explain this cohort’s much higher rate of depression and suicide. “There is compelling evidence,” concludes Twenge, “that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives – and making them seriously unhappy.” A recent survey showed that the more time teens spend on screen activities, the unhappier they are, and the less time they spend on screens and the more time physically with other people, the happier they are.
But is this cause and effect? Could unhappy teens be drawn to lonely screen-based activities? Not so, says another study, which makes clear that there is a cause and effect relationship between time spent on devices and sleep deprivation, unhappiness, and depression. Typical statements: “A lot of times I feel lonely.” “I often feel left out of things.” “I often wish I had more good friends.” Of course some teens are socially active on screen and in person, and they do relatively well. It’s those with an unfavorable ratio – more screen time and less in-person time – who are hurting. There has been a sharp increase in teens with depressive symptoms from 2012 to 2015: a 21 percent increase for boys, a 50 percent increase for girls. Suicides have also increased, doubling among boys 12-14 years old from 2007 to 2015, tripling among girls.
Why such a strong link between screen use and depression? “Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person,” says Twenge, “but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly – on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it.” Teens who post activities are anxious as well, waiting to see how many “likes” and comments they get. All this is especially true for girls, who use social media more heavily and who are more likely to engage in cyberbullying, ostracizing and excluding other girls.
The impact of constant electronic contact is especially pronounced on sleep, and this may be another factor. “Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues,” says Twenge, “including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety.” It’s hard to pin down causation, but “the smartphone, its blue light glowing in the dark, is likely playing a nefarious role.”
All this may result in iGen teens growing up with more than their fair share of social disabilities and depression as adults. “Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills,” says Twenge; “as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them. In the next decade, we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression.”
Some teens are tuning in to the problem and taking matters into their own hands. The girl in Houston described what it felt like to be with a friend in person and have the friend looking at a device instead of at her. “I’m trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look at my face,” she said. “They’re looking at their phone, or they’re looking at their Apple Watch… It hurts… I could be talking about something super important to me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.” She described this happening with a friend, who was texting with her boyfriend and saying, “Uh-huh, yeah, whatever.” The Houston girl took her friend’s cell phone and threw it at the wall.
“Has the Smartphone Destroyed a Generation?” by Jean Twenge in The Atlantic, September 2017 (Vol. 320, #2, p. 58-65), http://theatln.tc/2u3JDX6; Twenge is at jtwenge@mail.sdsu.edu.
2. Strategies for Getting Colleagues to Listen Better
In this Harvard Business Review article, Rebecca Knight (Wesleyan University) has suggestions for working with co-workers or bosses who are poor listeners. “Whether your colleagues interrupt you, ramble on, seem distracted, or are always waiting for their turn to talk, the impact is the same,” says Knight: “You don’t feel heard, and the chances of misunderstandings – and mistakes – rise.” Some strategies:
• Model good communication. “Maybe you’re a rambling speaker,” says leadership coach Christine Riordan. “Maybe you overwhelm your listener with numbers. Maybe you need to tell more stories.”
• Model good listening. Really try to understand and empathize with the other person’s point of view and validate their main points while integrating your own thoughts.
• Take into account different communication styles. It’s possible the person prefers to receive information visually. Maybe ask, “Should we have a conversation, or would you like to see something in writing?”
• Emphasize the importance of what you’re saying. Maybe start with, “I have something really important to talk to you about, and I need your help,” and then perhaps, “I want to repeat this, because I want to make sure it’s understood,” followed by, “Does that make sense?”
• Create accountability. Specifying a deliverable can be helpful. An example: “I have three possible strategies that I want to tell you about. In the end, I’m looking for you to make a decision on one of them,” or “Do you have a date when you want this finished?”
• Show concern. For example, “You seem to have a lot on your plate that’s requiring your attention. It there anything I can do to lighten your load, so when we’re talking you can be fully present?” Or if a colleague’s phone keeps buzzing and it’s distracting both of you, ask, “Do you need to check that?” The answer might be, “No, I’ll turn it off” or “Yes, I’m expecting an important call. Can we talk later?”
• Address the problem directly. With close colleagues with whom you have a strong rapport, it’s possible to come right out and express concern about distracted listening without causing defensiveness. This works best when there’s a specific example of the person not hearing what you or others have said.
• Propose a social contract with the whole team. Without singling out one person, you can suggest norms for attentive, thoughtful listening – for example, being present, not dominating the conversation, not interrupting, putting away devices, and giving everyone a chance to contribute. This approach works best in organizations with a strong, supportive culture.
“How to Work with a Bad Listener” by Rebecca Knight in Harvard Business Review, August 24, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/08/how-to-work-with-a-bad-listener
3. Being Direct with People About Mediocre Practices
“Timely feedback kicks mediocrity to the curb,” says Dan Rockwell in this Leadership Freak article. “Yes, you need the facts to give feedback, but powerful feedback includes heart.” His suggestions:
• Describe behaviors and listen for commitment or excuses. Respond to commitments with encouragement, clarification, and support; with excuses, gently confront and stay on topic.
- “I notice you were late to the last three meetings.”
- A committed response: “You’re right. I need to pay closer attention to the clock.”
- Follow-up: “Thanks for saying that. What might you do to pay closer attention to the clock? How can I help?”
- An excuse response: “I’m late because I’m busy.”
- Follow-up: “It seems like you’re saying it’s okay to be late for meetings.”
• Describe behaviors and ask for clarification.
- “I noticed you leaned back and crossed your arms. What’s going on for you?”
• Describe impact.
- “When you text in meetings, that comes across as disrespectful.”
• Clearly state your emotional response.
- “It feels like something isn’t right. What’s going on for you?”
• Describe what you see when people seem unhappy, resistant, frustrated, happy, enthusiastic, or fulfilled.
- “I noticed you smiled when we talked about your latest project. What’s making you happy?”
• Speak directly if there’s need for action, but if appropriate, soften confrontations with, “I could be wrong.”
- “You need to show up for work on time.”
“How to Kick Mediocrity to the Curb” by Dan Rockwell in Leadership Freak, August 21, 2017, https://leadershipfreak.blog/2017/08/21/how-to-kick-mediocrity-to-the-curb/
4. The Long-Term, Spillover Impact of English Language Arts Teaching
In this Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis article, Benjamin Master (RAND Corporation), Susanna Loeb (Stanford University), and James Wyckoff (University of Virginia) use data from two large urban school districts to explore the short- and long-term effect of English language arts teachers on student achievement. Their findings:
• Short-term, the impact of ELA teachers on students’ test scores is less than that of math teachers.
• However, the long-term impact of ELA teachers is greater than that of math teachers – for example, 1.7 long term compared to 1.0 short term.
• The long-term impact of ELA teachers ripples across other subject areas; it even improves students’ math performance.
“We find that ELA teachers’ contributions to student learning are particularly diffuse,” say Master, Loeb, and Wyckoff, “and thus a larger portion of their instructional impact may typically go undetected or be ascribed to teachers in other subject areas or school years… Investments in developing students’ ELA skills, whether through classroom instruction or other means, may yield larger benefits to students than are generally recognized or immediately apparent.”
“To the extent that teachers’ instructional effects influence student achievement over time and across subject areas,” continue the researchers, “educators and policymakers may miss valuable information if they rely only on short-term within-subject student learning to evaluate teachers’ ‘value added’ to student achievement… In the context of teacher performance evaluations that are linked to student achievement gains, our results reinforce the value of attending to team-level indicators of teachers’ contributions to student achievement, or to estimating value-added models that simultaneously account for multiple different subject-teachers’ contributions.”
“More Than Content: The Persistent Cross-Subject Effects of English Language Arts Teachers’ Instruction” by Benjamin Master, Susanna Loeb, and James Wyckoff in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, September 2017 (Vol. 39, #3, p 429-447),
http://stanford.io/2xqBuOm; the authors can be reached at bmaster@rand.org, sloeb@stanford.edu, and Jhw4n@virginia.edu.
5. Does Teacher Race Affect Exclusionary Discipline of Black Students?
In this Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis article, Constance Lindsay (Urban Institute) and Cassandra Hart (University of California/Davis) use data from North Carolina schools to see if there is a connection between expulsions and suspensions of African-American students and teachers’ race. North Carolina schools are required to report all expulsions and suspensions, and the data show a disproportionate percent of exclusionary discipline for African-American students, especially black males.
Lindsay and Hart’s main conclusion: “Overall, our results suggest that black students see modest, but consistent, reductions in exclusionary discipline exposure when they are matched with larger shares of black teachers. We find that black teachers are associated in particular with reductions in office referrals for defiance-related offenses.” The last point is significant, since teachers’ perceptions of “defiant” behavior tend to be quite subjective.
Another finding: when non-black students were assigned to African-American teachers, the rate of disciplinary referrals for those students stayed the same as it was with other teachers, or slightly improved (i.e., fewer referrals). This suggests that when there are more African-American teachers in a school, black students benefit without a negative impact on non-black students.
Lindsay and Hart offer this caveat: “While our results present a clear picture that exposure to same-race teachers has particular benefits for black children, the mechanisms for that result are not fully clear.”
- Was it because black teachers have better classroom control, getting misbehaving children to improve their behavior?
- Was it because black students responded differently to black teachers, behaving better without any special efforts or techniques on the part of teachers?
- Or was it because black teachers were more tolerant of mild misbehavior and less inclined to discipline students harshly for the same level of misbehavior, or less likely to misread behavior that students didn’t intend to be defiant?
“The first two mechanisms would suggest that, all else equal, exposure to black teachers would produce a less disruptive classroom environment,” say the researchers. “By contrast, the latter mechanism would suggest either a comparable level of disruption (if student behavior is the same regardless of the teacher tolerance of misbehavior) or possibly greater disruption (if students misbehave more, given greater tolerance for misbehavior). As classroom disruptions are tied to lower levels of student achievement, which mechanism predominates deserves future study to contextualize our results.”
The authors close with three thoughts: (a) They urge school districts to minimize race-segregated schools, which tend to have the highest levels of exclusionary discipline when African-American students are in a majority; (b) They don’t believe school or district leaders should radically alter class groupings to try to make sure that black students are matched to black teachers, which might inadvertently create semi-segregated classes; and (c) They suggest studying the classroom management techniques used by successful African-American teachers and spreading those techniques to all teachers.
“Exposure to Same-Race Teachers and Student Disciplinary Outcomes for Black Students in North Carolina” by Constance Lindsay and Cassandra Hart in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, September 2017 (Vol. 39, #3, p 485-510), http://bit.ly/2xG0UHd; the authors can be reached at clindsay@urban.org and cmdhart@ucdavis.edu.
6. Why Are Black Children Often Seen As Older and Less Innocent?
In this New York Times article, Robin Bernstein (Harvard University) cites research showing that to many people, African-American boys and girls look older than they really are – on average 4.5 years older. “People of all races see black children as more adultlike than their white peers,” says Bernstein. “In turn, normal childhood behavior, like disobedience and tantrums, is seen as a criminal threat when black kids do it. This misrepresentation causes black children to be overpoliced and underprotected.” An extreme example: when George Zimmerman confronted 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, he thought Martin was just under 28.
What is the origin of these beliefs? Bernstein examines how childhood has been conceptualized through history. Before the Enlightenment, children were regarded as anything but innocent. “The devil has been with them already,” said Cotton Mather in 1689. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarded children as blank slates, part of nature. Then, during the 19th century, innocence was increasingly seen as the key characteristic of childhood, and this became part of the American belief system.
“But only white kids were allowed to be innocent,” says Bernstein. “The more that popular writers, actors, and visual artists created images of innocent white children, the more they depicted black children as unconstrained imps. Over time, this resulted in them being defined as nonchildren. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, perhaps the most influential book of the 19th century, was pivotal in this process.” The angelic Eva was contrasted to the mischievous Topsy, who behaved as she did because of the trauma of slavery.
Theatrical troupes around the U.S. adapted Uncle Tom’s Cabin, portraying Topsy as adultlike, cartoonish, laughing when she was beaten. “The minstrel version of Topsy turned into the pickaninny,” says Bernstein, “one of the most damaging racist images ever created. This dehumanized black juvenile was comically impervious to pain and never needed protection or tenderness. The racist caricature of the pickaninny often appeared alongside cherubic white children.”
Leaders of the Civil Rights movement pushed back on these stereotypes, and Kenneth Clark’s research on black children’s affinity for white dolls was an important part of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision on school desegregation. And yet studies continue to show that black children are seen as less innocent and more adultlike than their white counterparts.
Perhaps, says Bernstein, the idea of the innocent child is not the best approach. “It’s time to create language that values justice over innocence,” she concludes. “The most important question we can ask about children may not be whether they are inherently innocent. Instead: Are they hungry? Do they have adequate health care? Are they free from police brutality? Are they growing up in a democratic nation? All children deserve protection, not because they’re innocent, but because they’re people. By understanding children’s rights as human rights, we can begin to undermine the political power of childhood innocence, a cultural formation that has proved, over and over, to be one of white supremacy’s most potent weapons.”
“Let Black Kids Just Be Kids” by Robin Bernstein in The New York Times, July 26, 2017,
http://theatln.tc/2u3JDX6; Bernstein can be reached at rbernst@fas.harvard.edu.
7. Giving Students Timely Feedback on In-Class Assignments
In this Edutopia article, author/administrator Ben Johnson remembers the daunting piles of grading and comment-writing he faced as a teacher – but if he didn’t grade students’ work, they didn’t take it seriously. This was especially true of beginning-of-class Do Now warm-up activities, which Johnson found were important to getting the class off to a brisk “let’s get busy” start. He tried having students switch papers and grade each others’, but some students went easy on their friends. Giving out red pencils for peer grading helped, but the whole process took too long and he wasn’t getting through his lesson plans.
Then Johnson implemented an idea he got from a colleague: while students worked on their warm-up assignment, he walked around with his grade book, looked quickly at each student’s work to assess the level of understanding, gave a mark, and checked whether homework was completed. “It only took about five minutes to do the whole class,” says Johnson, “and I was able to jump right into the lesson.” And there were no papers to grade.
Johnson’s beginning-of-class routine got even smoother when he started using a happy-face rubber stamp. “Yes, I am serious,” he says. Walking around the class after taking roll, he quickly assessed warm-up papers and stamped either a smiley face for okay work or an upside-down frowny face for Not yet. To Johnson’s surprise, almost all students who got a frowny stamp quickly followed up with improved work and were rewarded by a good end-of-week grade. And the rubber stamp worked with elementary, middle, and high-school students. Johnson also created stickers for students doing excellent work, volunteering, or participating enthusiastically, and they could use these to add one point to a quiz.
“Creative Ways to Grade and Provide Feedback for Students” by Ben Johnson in Edutopia, November 24, 2015, http://edut.to/2vu1VBF
8. Getting Educational Technology Right
In this Education Gadfly article, Chester Finn, Jr. wonders whether today’s technology “can transform the old Prussian model of schooling that most of the world has followed since the eighteenth century.” Tech devices can certainly help individualize instruction and save educators time on record-keeping and management tasks. But Finn agrees with four cautionary notes in a recent set of articles in The Economist on the subject (http://econ.st/2uewP2tand http://econ.st/2gNK4m2):
• Using technology to personalize the pace at which students move through the curriculum must not fall into the trap of gearing learning experiences to students’ “learning styles,” which the Economist authors call “pseudoscientific” and a “discredited theory.”
• Technology shouldn’t lead us away from teaching all children the broad body of shared knowledge they need to learn higher-order skills and navigate successfully in the modern world.
• Educational technology must be used in ways that narrow, not widen, existing inequalities among student populations.
• If teachers aren’t on board, even the best technology won’t succeed. “They are right to ask for evidence that products work,” says the Economist article, “but skepticism should not turn into Luddism.”
“Personalizing via Technology?” by Chester Finn, Jr. in The Education Gadfly, August 23, 2017 (Vol. 17, #34), https://edexcellence.net/articles/personalizing-via-technology
9. Criteria for Good Classroom STEM Problems
In this article in Education Week Teacher, veteran teacher Anne Jolly (Center for Teaching Quality) suggests criteria for real-world problems to use in math, science, engineering, and technology classes – the goal being to enliven and deepen learning and help students see that there are issues outside the classroom that are worth their dedicated efforts.
• The problem must be real. Perhaps an authentic engineering challenge grounded in compelling societal, economic, or environmental issues that affect people’s lives. “Mythical insects, space aliens, and theoretical life forms are not real-world problems,” says Jolly, “at least not yet.”
• Students must be able to relate to the problem. They won’t buy into solving a problem they don’t care about. Of course an issue outside their ken could be made vivid through a visiting speaker, video, or field trip.
• The problem should be do-able. Students need access to the resources, knowledge, and skills to solve it. This might take interplanetary space travel off the list.
• The problem should allow for multiple acceptable approaches and solutions. Students will learn less from a project that has a single, predetermined answer.
• Students should use an engineering design process to solve the problem. That means drawing on science, math, and technology skills and concepts with an overall engineering thought process. Here’s the sequence: Define the problem; research; imagine; plan; create; test and evaluate; redesign; and communicate.
• The project should align with grade-level standards. “In a packed school day, neither teachers nor students have time for much ‘extra’ curriculum content,” says Jolly.
• Encourage students to come up with real-world STEM problems. “You might start by asking students to be on the alert for problems in their home, school, or community,” says Jolly. They might observe problems around them: homeless people, air pollution, erosion in the schoolyard, or the challenge of managing homework assignments.
• Use websites and museums that have good resources for real-world STEM problems. Some possibilities:
“The Search for Real-World STEM Problems” by Anne Jolly in Education Week Teacher, July 19, 2017, http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2017/07/17/the-search-for-real-world-stem-problems.html
10. Short Item:
Random student group generator – This free tool (in Javascript) created by Connecticut teacher Abigail Henderson quickly creates random student groups for grouping classroom tables, curriculum projects, field trips, after-school activities, or lunch tables: https://ahenderson.neocities.org/groupmaker.html. If you have questions, you can contact Henderson at ahenderson@greenwichacademy.org,
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