In This Issue:
1. Daniel Willingham on making educational theory relevant to teachers
2. Jennifer Gonzalez on five teaching strategies she stopped using
3. Making a virtue of failing
4. Helping students remember what’s taught
5. Effective teacher moves in elementary reading groups
6. Should books by accused harassers be removed from school libraries?
7. What high-school libraries can do for “developing” readers
Quotes of the Week
“So many of us teach the way we were taught. We may not even realize we’re doing it. And that means certain practices get passed down year after year without question, methods that are such a normal part of the way we do school, we perpetuate them without realizing there are better alternatives.”
Jennifer Gonzalez (see item #2)
“Teachers need to understand how memory works. The brain plays all kinds of tricks to get us to remember some things but forget others, and we need to know how to trick it back. That’s right: The human brain can be outwitted.”
Bryan Goodwin (see item #4)
“Making mistakes matures the brain, resulting in more efficient synapses and fundamentally altered neurons. In short, failure can actually make you smarter.”
Donna Orem (see item #3)
“Small-group discourse is a dance in which the teacher plays a critical role. Chosen carefully, and perhaps artfully, teachers’ discourse moves can either propel student learning forward or bring it to a screeching halt.”
Liwei Wei, Karen Murphy, and Carla Firetto (see item #5)
“I don’t see a lot of hope in that word [struggling]. It just reinforces this mindset that some people can become readers and some people cannot. And as a teacher, I can’t subscribe to an idea that says some of my kids are not going to make it.”
Donalyn Miller (quoted in item #7)
“Just because you can’t read [well] doesn’t mean you’re not a deep thinker.”
Georgia media specialist Shanna Miles (ibid.)
1. Daniel Willingham on Making Educational Theory Relevant to Teachers
In this article in Education Next, Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) wonders why so many teachers aren’t well versed in the latest research on how children think and learn. It’s especially worrisome, he says, that teachers buy into a number of misconceptions – that children have learning styles dominated by one of their senses; that short bouts of motor-coordinated exercises can improve the integration of the left and right hemispheres of the brain; that kids are less attentive after consuming sugary drinks or snacks.
Teachers, for their part, criticize educational psychology courses as too theoretical, and Willingham, himself an educational psychologist, agrees. Most educational psychology courses are too abstract, he says, teaching content that’s more appropriate for future scientists than K-12 practitioners (for example, Piaget’s theory that children’s thinking from ages 2 to 7 tends to be concrete rather than abstract). It’s unhelpful that much of the content of educational psychology courses is tentative and in some cases internally contradictory (for example, behaviorist versus humanist theories of motivation). In addition, psychology courses don’t give teachers enough practice with theory for them to be able to apply it appropriately in everyday situations. These flaws may explain why few teachers remember the psychological theory they are taught and most are left to rely on their own intuition and personal beliefs when they make decisions in their classrooms.
The solution, says Willingham, is not to make education courses super-practical (for example, techniques for teaching fractions to third graders). That won’t be effective because many of the day-to-day challenges teachers face are unpredictable and demand improvisation: a student goes to a corner of the classroom and spins; a group of sixth graders laughs at a classmate who whispers to himself while he reads. To deal successfully with such situations, psychological theory is of little use; teachers need, quite simply, to understand children. And what’s most helpful for that, says Willingham, are empirical observations psychologists have made over the last 100 years about how children think and act – and specific classroom applications for each one. Some examples:
• Scientific observation: Retrieving from one’s memory improves retention of knowledge.
- Classroom application: Low-stakes or no-stakes quizzes are among the best ways to boost recall of what’s been taught.
• Scientific observation: Practice is crucial to long-term retention.
- Classroom application: There must be sufficient classroom time (or homework) devoted to practice for students to remember skills or knowledge.
• Scientific observation: Memory is more enduring if practice is distributed over time.
- Classroom application: The same amount of time devoted to a lesson will be more efficient if it is spread over several days.
• Scientific observation: Only the aspect of an experience that students focus on will be learned.
- Classroom application: Teachers must consider what students will actually pay attention to – for example, a vivid demonstration may distract students from the point the demonstration was meant to illustrate.
• Scientific observation: A student’s learning curve tends to flatten out.
- Classroom application: When learning a new skill, students will initially make rapid progress, but subsequent improvement will be slower.
• Scientific observation: Students who believe that they can get smarter through hard work choose more challenging tasks and persist longer when they have difficulty.
- Classroom application: Teachers can affect student beliefs about intelligence through the way they discuss it and how they talk about student success and failure.
• Scientific observation: Deep understanding of abstract concepts is always preceded by shallow understanding tied to specific examples.
- Classroom application: Teachers should not be put off if students’ initial understandings seem shallow; deeper understanding requires more practice, and so teachers must be selective about which concepts merit that commitment of time.
This approach to teacher education and professional development is a radical departure from past practice. Willingham suggests that pilot programs be launched to test the idea, with systematic evaluation probing these questions:
- Do teachers retain the psychological principles they are taught?
- Do teachers put the principles to work in unit and lesson plans?
- Do teachers use the principles in day-to-day classroom interactions?
- Do these teachers’ students have better educational outcomes than students whose teachers aren’t trained in this way?
“Unlocking the Science of How Kids Think: A New Proposal for Reforming Teacher Education” by Daniel Willingham in Education Next, Summer 2018 (Vol. 18, #3, p. 42-49), http://educationnext.org/unlocking-science-how-kids-think-new-proposal-for-reforming-teacher-education/; Willingham can be reached at willingham@virginia.edu.
2. Jennifer Gonzalez on Five Teaching Strategies She Stopped Using
“So many of us teach the way we were taught,” says Jennifer Gonzalez in this Cult of Pedagogy article. “We may not even realize we’re doing it. And that means certain practices get passed down year after year without question, methods that are such a normal part of the way we do school, we perpetuate them without realizing there are better alternatives.” She describes five classroom practices that she has resolved to stop using, or to use only occasionally, because better alternatives exist.
• Round robin reading – There are variations on this practice, but the basic idea is students taking turns reading aloud from a text while other students silently follow along. Gonzalez rationalized this practice thus: (a) it filled class time; (b) it maintained a quiet and orderly climate; (c) it “covered” material and ostensibly gave all students a chance to digest it; and (d) it allowed her to hear students reading and assess their skills.
What does the research say about round robin reading? That it does nothing to improve students’ comprehension and reading skills; that lots of students mentally check out when they’re not reading, reducing comprehension; that it embarrasses students who don’t read well; that it gives each student only a tiny amount of active reading time; and that it subjects the whole class to models of not-so-good reading, perhaps leading students to pick up bad habits. “When I was a student, I hated round robin reading,” says Gonzalez. “My comprehension plummets when I listen to something read out loud, rather than reading quietly to myself, so any time a teacher had us do round robin, I knew I would have to re-read the whole thing later.”
What are the alternatives? To build fluency and proper expression in younger students, try a teacher read-aloud, choral reading, or fluency-oriented reading instruction (FORI): students choose their own books and then use a variety of methods to build skills. To boost older students’ reading proficiency, schedule regular periods of silent reading scaffolded by an anticipation guide or KWL chart, or have students do reciprocal reading in small groups.
• Giving students a copy of PowerPoint slides or lecture notes – The rationale for this well-intentioned practice is to make sure students get all the substance of a class and don’t have to frantically take notes throughout. It has the additional benefit of making it easier for students to catch up on a missed class. But brain research (as summarized in Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel) says that when students don’t have to put in effort to capture content and put it into their own words, they’re much less likely to process and remember the material. The bottom line: providing notes actually handicaps students.
What are the alternatives? Teach students note-taking skills, providing several options and letting them decide on the one that works best for them. Have students compare their notes with those of other students, discuss them, and make revisions. Provide before-class diagrams – visual structures that help them see the relationship among concepts in the class.
• Whole-class punishments – All students suffer for the sins of a few, usually by missing recess or some other privilege. Gonzalez says she frequently promised her middle-school classes a reward (perhaps free time toward the end of the period) if students worked quietly or finished early, hoping it would serve as an incentive. When this tactic failed, which happened frequently because some students didn’t comply, she deprived the whole class of the reward. Whole-class punishments are faster and easier than trying to figure out which students caused a problem, but they’re widely despised by students and parents. There isn’t much research on the subject, but one study of collective punishment concluded that it was “fairly ineffective at best and strongly counterproductive at worst in shaping group behavior.”
What’s the alternative? “The best way to deal with a rowdy class is prevention,” says Gonzalez. Make sure students understand what they’re supposed to be doing. Make the work engaging and interesting. Build interaction and movement into lessons. Clarify rules, routines, and consequences. And deal quickly with small disruptions before they escalate. Gonzalez mentions several other strategies and provides links to two articles on managing all-class behavior.
• Using learning styles to plan instruction – This involves trying to differentiate lessons for groups of students to match visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning styles. “This one I didn’t do too much,” says Gonzalez. “What I did instead was beat myself up for not doing it.” What does the research say? Yes, we may believe that we learn best through a particular learning style, but that is just a preference. “There is no research that supports the idea that you actually learn better through that modality,” says Gonzalez. “And attempting to label students and narrow our teaching strategies with them can ultimately limit them, making them believe they are only capable of learning in one way.”
What’s the alternative? Provide a variety of learning experiences that reach all students through different pathways – for example, teaching students to recognize text structures helps them develop mental models for understanding challenging texts; using culturally responsive teaching strategies helps students from all backgrounds absorb material more readily; the “mind’s eye” strategy helps students visualize rich vocabulary in a text before they read it; and the concept attainment strategy gets students constructing concepts before the teacher presents them. “In the same way that eating a variety of foods helps ensure you get all the nutrients you need,” says Gonzalez, “using a variety of instructional strategies will help you reach every student.”
• Differentiating by having advanced students help struggling students. The teacher pitches the lesson to the middle of the class and then has students who are quick to grasp the material help those who are having difficulty. For a while, this made perfect sense to Gonzalez. “I couldn’t be everywhere to help all the students who needed it, and my more advanced kids were just sitting around with nothing to do (red flag!), so it seemed like an obvious solution. The kids who needed help got it, and the advanced kids got to learn the material really well by teaching it to someone else.”
What does the research say? That this isn’t really differentiation. Yes, struggling students get help, but this peer helping does nothing to challenge higher-achieving students. What the high flyers need is regular opportunities to work with students at their level of attainment on appropriate tasks and projects. This should be part of a truly differentiated classroom using learning stations, tiered assignments, orbital studies [see the link in the full article], and learning agendas where students are given a list of tasks to complete over a period of time.
“5 Common Teaching Practices I’m Kicking to the Curb” by Jennifer Gonzalez in The Cult of Pedagogy, September 3, 2015, https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/ineffective-teaching-methods/
3. Making a Virtue of Failing
In this article in Independent School, NAIS president Donna Orem describes her own fear of failure when she visited a school and tried to complete an eighth-grade maker project involving circuit boards. “I wrestled with the soldering, something I’d never done before, and quickly became quite anxious,” she says. “Instead of basking in the joy of learning something new, I was letting my fear of failure sabotage the experience.”Orem was experiencing what many students go through every day – something studies have found is one of the biggest inhibitors of success. And yet mistakes and failures are keys to learning. “Your brain begins compiling information about the experience and actually gets bigger throughout the learning scenario,” reports Orem. “And while the brain returns to close to its original size after the learning experience, it retains new neural pathways by taking in new information, compiling the key takeaways from trial and error. Making mistakes matures the brain, resulting in more efficient synapses and fundamentally altered neurons. In short, failure can actually make you smarter.”
But not all mistakes are the same. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has identified three kinds of failure:
- Preventable – These are a sign of insufficient training or knowledge and can be avoided by filling the gaps.
- Unavoidable – Here the complexity or uncertainty of the task makes mistakes quite likely, and the trick is to learn from small mistakes to avoid bigger ones.
- Intelligent – These failures are at the “frontier” of learning, where mistakes are essential to gaining new knowledge and moving forward.
Edmondson works with leaders to distinguish between different types of failures and put people on the steepest possible learning curve. Her suggestions:
• Frame the work accurately. This involves developing a shared understanding of the kinds of failures that can be expected in each context.
• Encourage truth-tellers. People who draw attention to bad news, questions, concerns, and errors should be encouraged and rewarded; they provide a pathway to figuring out how to fix the situation and learn from it.
• Be humble about limits. Leaders need to set an example by acknowledging what they don’t know and mistakes that have been made.
• Invite participation. Organizations need to create opportunities for people to detect and think through failures and engage in intelligent experimentation.
• Set boundaries and hold people accountable. People will feel safer to experiment and not be perfect when leaders clarify what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Educators need to “create cultures that allow for intelligent failures at the frontier,” concludes Orem. “We need to set up experiments for the purpose of learning and innovating – and that means planning to fail. When our students observe us doing so, they are more likely to accept failure.” She describes a recent struggle she had with a new interviewing technique: “Instead of getting anxious, I laughed at my incompetence, listened to feedback, and performed a bit better the second time. Baby steps.”
“The Power of Failure” by Donna Orem in Independent School, Summer 2018 (Vol. 77, #4, p. 8, 10), https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/summer-2018/the-power-of-failure/
4. Helping Students Remember What’s Taught
“Teachers need to understand how memory works,” says Bryan Goodwin (McREL) in this article in Changing Schools. “The brain plays all kinds of tricks to get us to remember some things but forget others, and we need to know how to trick it back. That’s right: The human brain can be outwitted.” Most of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is quickly forgotten, which is okay since there’s way too much information coming in every day to digest and retain. Cognitive scientists have mapped out the highly selective pathway to long-term memory:
- Sensory register – This fleeting awareness lasts mere seconds.
- Immediate memory – Information can be held here for about 30 seconds.
- Working memory – By focusing on information (perhaps by jotting notes or underlining a text) we can hold a limited amount of data for 5-20 minutes.
- Long-term memory – To get this far, there must almost always be repetition, rehearsal, contextualization, or application.
What are the implications of all this for classrooms? Goodwin has the following suggestions for getting important knowledge and skills past students’ mental filters:
• Sensory register and immediate memory:
- Capture students’ interest. Create a safe and comfortable learning environment and then hook their emotions and curiosity.
- Help students commit to learning the new knowledge. The best way is to help them see how the new information fits into the bigger picture and affects their lives – basically answering their question, What’s in it for me?
• Working memory:
- Focus on the target knowledge. This requires an active process like taking notes, close reading, watching a process being modeled, or an active discussion.
- Make sense of it. New information will rapidly fade unless it’s in bite-sized chunks, clustered with related content, and connected with prior knowledge.
• Long-term memory:
- Practice and rehearse the new knowledge. “Cramming seldom works,” says Goodwin. Cognitive scientists have shown that retrieval practice (quizzing oneself) and distributing practice over several days are the best way to embed lasting memories.
- Develop multiple connections. The more students think about, use, and apply new information in real-life situations, the more neural pathways they establish in their brains and the more readily students can access the information in the future. They need to use it or they will lose it.
“Introducing a Research-Inspired Student Learning Model” by Bryan Goodwin in Changing Schools, Spring 2018 (Vol. 79, p. 2-4), no e-link available; Goodwin can be reached at bgoodwin@mcrel.org.
5. Effective Teacher Moves in Elementary Reading Groups
“Small-group discourse is a dance in which the teacher plays a critical role,” say Liwei
Wei and Karen Murphy (Pennsylvania State University) and Carla Firetto (Arizona State University) in this Elementary School Journal article. “Chosen carefully, and perhaps artfully, teachers’ discourse moves can either propel student learning forward or bring it to a screeching halt. Although one often thinks of pedagogy in terms of the broader instructional goals, the reality is that even the briefest discourse moves of the teacher… are influential in promoting or hindering students’ learning outcomes.” This is especially true, say the authors, in small-group, text-based literacy instruction. One of the least effective (and most common) dynamics is the IRE cycle – the teacher inquires, a student responds, and the teacher evaluates the response and moves on.
Wei, Murphy, and Firetto took on the ambitious task of gathering teacher discourse moves from numerous sources and synthesizing them into a new taxonomy for small-group discussions. Their target audiences are elementary teachers and educational researchers. Here are the 12 possible moves, with actual quotes of teachers using them [these are slightly edited]:
- Backchanneling – Quickly letting a student know the teacher is tuned in to the student (“Okay” “All right” “Yeah” “Uh-huh”).
- Challenging – Pushing a student to think about a response and consider an alternative point of view (“Yes, but does that prove she was nice to them?”)
- Checking – Trying to make sure that every student has a basic literal understanding of the text (“So, did the people on the Pony Express go the whole route?”)
- Clarifying – Prompting a student to give a clearer response by asking a question or helping the student refine a response (“So you’re talking about when this took place?”)
- Debriefing – Giving summarized comments on students’ performance, usually at the end of a group discussion (“Good. So I think we had a good discussion today. Everyone participated.”)
- Instructing – Giving explicit instruction on background knowledge, content, and discussion-related skills or rules (“Remember, we’re talking to each other and we’re not just talking to me, okay?”)
- Marking – Drawing attention to or reinforcing specific aspects of students’ responses by explicitly pointing them out (“That was great – bringing up another text that we’ve all read about.”)
- Modeling – Drawing attention to an aspect of discourse that the teacher would like students to exhibit by explicitly stating what he or she is going to do (“So, let me ask a follow-up question.”)
- Procedural – Managing the flow and directing the focus of the discussion (“Let’s move on to a new topic, because we’re getting away from the text, okay?”)
- Prompting – Helping a student construct an elaborated response, perhaps asking for reasons and evidence (“So why do you think that? Can we think of any evidence from the text?”)
- Reading – Reading the text aloud to students as a read-aloud activity or as a reference to the text for information (“I’d like to ask you a question about, on page 44, it says, ‘After Paul and Babe settled on the river… and spent the day rolling the logs down the river, and he was so tired, he said…’”)
- Summarizing – Providing an overview of part of the discussion to help build coherence for students (“So I think we’ve come to the conclusion that this study took place in the past, not in the present, and that it took place in the South, but in the United States.”)
“How Can Teachers Facilitate Productive Small-Group Talk?” by Liwei Wei, Karen Murphy, and Carla Firetto in Elementary School Journal, June 2018 (Vol. 118, #4, p. 578-609),
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/697531; Murphy can be reached at pkm15@psu.edu, Firetto at Carla.Firetto@asu.edu.
6. Should Books by Accused Harassers Be Removed from School Libraries?
In this article in School Library Journal, editor Kara Yorio addresses the dilemma many librarians are facing: what to do with the books written by authors who have been accused (or convicted) of sexual harassment as part of the #MeToo movement. Does pulling those books amount to the kind of censorship librarians have fought for years? What if parents or colleagues complain? Among the problematic authors: Bill Cosby (My Big Lie, the Little Bill series), Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why), and James Dashner (The Maze Runnerseries).
“I’m strongly opposed to removing books because of who the author is, regardless of what they’ve done,” says Massachusetts school librarian Scott McGinley. “We have to be a little cold sometimes to our own feelings when it comes to making decisions for the populations we serve.” Ann Morgester, an Alaska library supervisor, knows many people who have been traumatized by harassment and assault, but she says, “I truly do believe you have to be able to separate the artist from the work. I think we still need to champion those books based on the fact that they speak for and to our students, they engage our students, and they represent a really important voice. If I went to my collection at my previous high school and removed every book whose author offended me in some way, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of things in there.” Anna Coats, a youth services administrator in New Jersey, notes that Lewis Carroll was believed to be obsessed with two young girls, photographing them naked and taking a picture of himself kissing an 11-year-old. “Yet I never hear the question of whether or not to circulate Alice in Wonderland,” she says. “In fact, Carroll is celebrated as an eccentric character.”
Works of fiction are one thing, but memoirs and autobiographies are different. “I would definitely pull any biographies,” says Morgester, “because the biography would need to be updated to reflect the actual life experience of that person.” She’s ambivalent about Alexie’s book: “Does it speak clearly to his experience as a Native American individual growing up in his circumstance?”
And what about Melvil Dewey, the man who developed Dewey Decimal Classification and co-founded the American Library Association? He was banned from the ALA in the early 1900s because of his sexual conduct toward female colleagues on an ALA cruise (there were numerous unreported incidents before that). Probably libraries are not going to adopt a new classification system.
Alessandra Nicodemo, a New Jersey youth services librarian, carved out a middle ground, buying the minimum number of copies to meet demand, not putting these books on display, and taking them off the shelves according to normal weeding standards (low circulation). “I feel this is the best balance between my responsibility to give my patrons the materials they want,” she says, “and my desire to hold these men accountable for their actions and stop rewarding them financially.”
“Separating Art from the Author” by Kara Yorio in School Library Journal, June 2018 (Vol. 64, #6, p. 10-11), no e-link available
7. What High-School Libraries Can Do For “Developing” Readers
In this School Library Journal article, Illinois librarian Heather Booth puts a couple of sobering statistics on the table: of third graders who aren’t reading on grade level, only about 25 percent will graduate from high school by age 19; sixth graders who fail English have only an 18 percent chance of earning a high-school diploma. Booth says the way adults talk about high-risk students matters. She agrees with Book Whisperer author Donalyn Miller that we should stop using the word struggling. “I don’t see a lot of hope in that word,” says Miller. “It just reinforces this mindset that some people can become readers and some people cannot. And as a teacher, I can’t subscribe to an idea that says some of my kids are not going to make it.”
So what should we call students who are way behind in reading? Miller suggests the adjective developing: “We’re all on the same highway, headed to the same destination. We’re just at different mile markers.” And she likes the word dormant for reluctant readers: “There’s a seed of a reader inside there somewhere,” she says. “If we can just tap into what will connect with that child, then finding reading engagement is possible. Every child can connect with a text that is personally meaningful to them.” University of Illinois professor Carol Tilley agrees: “We can foster engagement regardless of skill level. Engagement, in turn, builds fluency, comprehension, and overall reading ability.”
How can school libraries support developing and dormant readers? By creating a welcoming, culturally sensitive climate, with couches, beanbag chairs, and meditation cushions, helping students to feel comfortable around books and see peers devouring books of all kinds. By displaying high-interest, low-vocabulary books in ways that make it easy for students to find the right books by topic. One librarian was asked frequently for the thinnest books and put together a shelf of “skinny reads” that became a “huge draw” for students. “No more baby books,” says Ohio media specialist April Hoy. “Our goal is simple: to have books that are easy to read but with covers that look like they could be every other middle-school book.” Hoy doesn’t think reading level is the main issue: she does booktalks in classrooms on a wide range of books and works on finding the right books for students’ interests.
A common strategy is following up on hot topics like Black Panther and displaying books that have created buzz – such as Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists and The Autobiography of Gucci Mane. “Just because you can’t read [well] doesn’t mean you’re not a deep thinker,” says Georgia media specialist Shanna Miles. Another Georgia school librarian, Cicely Lewis, made “Read Woke” the theme of her 2018 library, challenging teachers and students to read and think deeply with books that challenge norms. She reports gains in student vocabulary, intrinsic motivation, reading stamina, and sense of fulfillment. Other strategies: challenging students to read 40 books during the year, and reading quietly to a couple of dogs (including a rottweiler) in the library. “We can’t predict what world our children are going to inherit,” says Miles, “but what we do know is that literacy is going to be a part of it. This is the work of our lives. This is why we’re here: to do right by our kids.”
“Unlimited Engagement: Helping Teen Readers by Giving Up the Struggle” by Heather Booth in School Library Journal, June 2018 (Vol. 64, #6, p. 40-42), no e-link available |
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