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Are Reading Groups the best way to teach reading?

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Are Reading Groups the best way to teach reading?

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Educators and researchers are looking to update one of the oldest, most popular-and at times one of the most controversial-methods of targeting instruction: the elementary reading circle.

Grouping students of similar reading skills-think "bluebirds" or "redbirds," for example-has become ubiquitous in American classrooms as a way to target instruction to students' learning needs, spreading from 68 percent of classrooms in 1992 to more than 90 percent by 2015. But evidence suggests that the practice may be less beneficial than teachers think: It can exacerbate achievement gaps and even slow reading growth for some children unless the groups are fluid and focused on skills rather than overall achievement.

The spread of modern ability grouping is likely in response to growing pressures to raise test scores under the No Child Left Behind Act's accountability system, said Adam Gamoran, the president of the William T. Grant Foundation and a longtime researcher of ability-grouping strategies. "Many people believe it is possible to use ability grouping as differentiated instruction to maximize achievement growth," he said. "It often doesn't work out that way in practice."

Early grades are particularly likely to group students by ability, because the typical bell curve in a kindergarten or 1st grade classroom is so wide.
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In one forthcoming study, Marshall Jean, a research fellow at the Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research, tracked nearly 12,000 students from kindergarten through 3rd grade in more than 2,100 schools, following them through high, middle, and low reading groups or ungrouped reading classes.

He found about half of children who were in the lowest reading group in kindergarten were able to improve to at least the median group by the end of 1st grade. By the end of 3rd grade, 46 percent of those who had previously been in the lowest group in 2nd grade were able to move up. However, Jean found that none of the students initially placed in the lowest kindergarten group ever caught up to the reading level of their classmates who had started out in the highest reading group.

"The structural inertia is considerable," Jean noted, finding that having been in the highest reading group in an earlier grade tended to protect students from being put in a lower group later, even with significantly lower scores. Students in lower reading groups not only progressed more slowly academically, but while they were in lower reading groups, they were also slower to develop "learning behaviors," such as varied interests, concentration on tasks, and persistence in the face of difficulty. Those behaviors, in turn, reduced the students' likelihood to move up to higher reading groups in later grades.

Potential Bias?

"If you are more motivated and the teacher perceives that about you, you are more likely to be put into a higher reading group," Jean said. "But there was also some evidence for bias: Even after controlling for prior reading achievement and learning behaviors, students in poverty were more likely to be assigned to lower groups, and their wealthier peers more likely to be tapped for higher reading groups. They were small effects, but they are there and consistent across grade levels and statistically significant."

Similarly, in a series of three new studies in Switzerland, researchers asked practicing teachers and college students to evaluate profiles of students whose scores put them on the borderline of more or less academically rigorous tracks in high school; the students' achievement scores were held constant but their backgrounds were altered to make them appear to be either high- or low-income. Over multiple studies, recently published online in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, both student and practicing teachers were more likely to refer lower-income students to a lower academic track and higher-income students to a more challenging track, even though their scores were the same.

"Because of inequality outside of schools, children from different socioeconomic and racial and ethnic backgrounds often come to school with different levels of preparation. And so by separating the children by their initial reading ability, the teachers are also separating [them] by socioeconomic status or race or ethnicity," said Gamoran of the William T. Grant Foundation. "And, of course, when teachers have low expectations for their weaker readers, they slow down the pace even more than they would need to, so the low-achieving students fall further and further behind instead of catching up."

Fluid Groups

Besser Elementary School in Alpena, Mich., switched to ability grouping in its early-reading classrooms about three years ago. It's not clear yet how well the practice is working. About half the school's students live in poverty, and their achievement gap with higher-income students has stayed stubbornly wide.

"We were focused on making instruction more meaningful for all students. Teachers need to focus on struggling students, but on the other end of the continuum where students needed to be enriched, those students were being left behind," said Eric Cardwell, the principal of Besser Elementary. "The challenge teachers have seen now is they're having to plan for three to four different groups."

Those high-achieving students have improved, he said, but the groups themselves have remained more stable than he'd like.

"What we frequently see is slight movement of students. You don't generally see them jumping two levels at a time when we only do data reviews three times a year," Cardwell said. "Ideally, there would be more [reviews] so that there would be more fluidity, but time is always the monster that's chasing you: time to review data, time to plan."

Internationally, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that countries that predominantly use ability grouping showed significantly deeper performance inequality on the Program for International Student Assessment but no significant benefits for the countries' overall performance. OECD noted that more than 9 in 10 U.S. 15-year-olds attend schools where they are grouped by ability.

"What we know now that we didn't know back in the '80s is that when you group up students, it has to be specifically relative to the content that's going to be taught," Gamoran said. "There're no IQ tests, not even a general reading-ability test that can tell you how to form the groups so that you can meet their needs. You have to form the groups specific to the instruction that's coming and then reassess to form new groups specific to the next instructional unit."

Changing the Calculation

One California program has shown promise in making reading circles more flexible and less stigmatizing. In Assessment to Instruction, or A2I, teachers give a diagnostic assessment to all students every eight weeks to identify strengths and weaknesses in particular reading skills in four areas of literacy: decoding, fluency, comprehension, and usage. An algorithm based on the assessment tells teachers how much individual, small-group, and independent working time each student needs, and students are grouped for instruction based on particular focus skills rather than overall reading ability.

"What we've discovered is that it's fine to have a group of students of different levels, as long as they all are working on the same learning needs," said Carol Connor, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, who developed the program. "You can have students of different reading abilities who all need to work on decoding. ... What doesn't work is if you put your kids who already know how to code in a group to learn how to code, again. You receive more behavior problems because they're really bored, ... and our research suggests that it has a negative effect on their growth."

Phoenix Collegiate Academy (now ASU Prep) in Arizona was one of the schools that piloted the A2I program, and Amanda Jacobs, then-principal, said it changed the way teachers and administrators approached differentiating instruction in small groups. Previously, teachers focused on providing equal time with each small group, but "it shifts your perspective from trying to get to every kid in the time you have to being more strategic with how you're spending your minutes with each child."

In a recent longitudinal, randomized controlled study, students who participated in the targeted reading groups over three years performed significantly higher than students in a control group that used standard reading classes. Though 45 percent of the students in the targeted reading groups came from a low-income background, by 3rd grade, all of them had higher reading scores than the national average for their grade, and none had scores below the expectations for their grade level.

"There are no 'bluebirds' being the bluebirds all year long," Connor said.

Published in Print: August 29, 2018, as Doubts Cast on Ability-Based Reading Groups

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Are Classroom Reading Groups the Best Way to Teach Reading? Maybe Not.

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Educators and researchers are looking to update one of the oldest, most popular-and at times one of the most controversial-methods of targeting instruction: the elementary reading circle. Grouping students of similar reading skills-think "bluebirds" or "redbirds," for example-has become ubiquitous in American classrooms as a way to target instruction to students' learning needs, spreading from 68 percent of classrooms in 1992 to more than 90 percent by 2015.

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This is not online learning, it is emergency remote teaching

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This is not online learning, it is emergency remote teaching

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Opinion

There's a difference

I have taught online for nearly 20 years. As an online professor at George Washington University, my courses continued through the 9/11 terrorist attacks, beltway snipers, Hurricane Isabel, the H1N1 virus, and "Snowmaggedon." Even when I lost power and was stranded in my home, I charged my phone in my car and provided updates on our learning-management system from my smartphone.

During these emergencies, however, the content was already developed and lectures scheduled to launch for the entire semester. Clearly, disruption of our daily lives is not unusual, and preparedness is important, but what we are all experiencing because of COVID-19 is unprecedented.

These are not normal teaching and learning conditions. What we are experiencing now is emergency remote teaching and learning-or as some have called it, "pandemic pedagogy."

It takes a lot of time and effort to design and develop effective, engaging online education. There are already many naysayers noting how inferior online education is, but the truth is that it is not the medium that matters but the design of the learning experiences, the quality of the content, and the engagement of learners.

Well-designed online education can be just as effective as face-to-face instruction. Educators suddenly thrust into emergency remote teaching do not have ideal conditions to offer well-planned, quality instruction.

On top of that, we are all living through a pandemic with a great deal of uncertainty. Everyone is likely experiencing some levels of stress about the unknown (How long will this last? How will this work? Who will get sick/survive/die? How will this affect employment? Will the virus come back in waves?).

So, how can schools across the country help bring high-quality remote education to all students during this pandemic?

First and foremost, school leaders and teachers need to be clear that we are functioning in an emergency. There is no playbook for how to lead and teach remotely at this scale, but here are my suggestions for leaders and educators struggling to adjust:

1. Communicate frequently and honestly: Frequent, straightforward, and honest communication is essential. Not only does it address questions students and families might have, but it also gives assurance that you have a plan-even if it is evolving. Also, ensure everyone knows when and how to access communications. Be sure to touch base with colleagues and students on a regular basis. Document any concerns and those with whom you need to loop back.

2. Prioritize needs: Establish short- and long-term priorities and steps to address them. There is a lot to be accomplished. It's critical to determine what needs to be done and by when.

3. Be flexible: We are functioning in uncharted territory. Many policies and practices that work in brick-and-mortar settings and even regular online classes may not apply. School leaders and teachers will need to be flexible and, in some cases, very creative.

4. Keep it simple: Although numerous companies are offering free subscriptions to a lot of content and technology tools, this is not the time to roll out new tools-unless there is no other option.

5. Establish routines and schedules: When a school's staff and students are distributed across many miles, it is important to establish schedules for virtual conferences, meetings, and communications.

6. Collaborate: School leaders should work with faculty and staff, as well as other school leaders. This is a unique opportunity to learn from and with one another, and not just within one's district or state. Many online communities have emerged on social media and in professional organizations.

7. Engage the whole school community in decisionmaking: When possible and relevant, include a diverse range of voices in decisionmaking; this will not only recognize their roles as part of the learning community but also foster buy-in.

8. Develop contingency plans: Leaders, teachers, staff, students, and their family members will get sick and be unable to meet their responsibilities-and not only because of COVID-19. Technology will fail. Things will not always work as planned. Be sure to have contingency plans in place.

9. Practice, model, and promote well-being: School leaders and teachers' well-being (and not just emotional and physical but also social and intellectual) are important. Practice, model, and promote overall well-being.

10. Pause, listen, reflect, and learn: We all have a great deal to learn from this pandemic. However, it is easy to blaze ahead without pausing or reflecting on lessons learned. What approaches supported the transition to emergency remote teaching and learning? What policies changed? How did stakeholders adapt?

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This Is Emergency Remote Teaching, Not Just Online Teaching

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Opinion I have taught online for nearly 20 years. As an online professor at George Washington University, my courses continued through the 9/11 terrorist attacks, beltway snipers, Hurricane Isabel, the H1N1 virus, and "Snowmaggedon." Even when I lost power and was stranded in my home, I charged my phone in my car and provided updates on our learning-management system from my smartphone.

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Lessons built on universal phenomena extend relevance

On the island of Oahu in Hawaii, 2nd graders weave mats, baskets, or other objects from the local hala plant. In northeastern Oklahoma, middle schoolers investigate why light makes some surfaces work like windows and others like mirrors.

Thousands of miles apart, those projects have something powerful in common: They were designed with equity in mind. The lesson writers deliberately chose, as anchors for the lessons, natural phenomena that all students know equally and can see in their own lives.

Centering science lessons on phenomena that are universal-like light-or deeply rooted in a region's culture or location-like the hala plant-can make science more relevant and interesting for students. But they can also have a powerful role in building equity, since all students begin with something they know.

"I'm not going to have students investigate the chemical reaction of the family silver tarnishing, because not all kiddos are going to have that experience in their lives," said Rebecca Morales, the science-curriculum coordinator in the Broken Arrow, Okla., school district. "I try to get my teachers thinking about choosing phenomena that all students as humans can consider."

Conversations like these are unfolding across the country, as more than 40 states implement the Next Generation Science Standards, or standards based on their underlying Framework for K-12 Science Education.

Equity is woven through the NGSS and their framework; the documents frame expectations for all students, not just those aiming for science careers. Phenomena-based instruction is central to the standards, which envision moving away from rote facts to questions that spark students' natural curiosity.

"As a science teacher, I was trained to look at topics and facts," said Peter McLaren, who co-authored the NGSS and now trains teachers on using them. Starting with questions about natural phenomena "is a big change, and a lot of teachers are having a hard time with it."

Drawing on Culture, Place

Collaborative projects have been springing up around the country to help teachers create equitable lessons anchored in natural phenomena. The hala lesson, for instance, took shape when several teachers in Hawaii, linked online through state-sponsored professional development, worked with Brett Moulding, another NGSS author, to craft science lessons that drew on local culture and traditions.

Mikioi Wichman, the K-5 science, technology, engineering and math teacher at Manoa Elementary School in Honolulu, was in that group. The teachers wanted to build a lesson for a 2nd grade standard that explores how elements in nature can come apart and reassemble into something with a different function.

Their first thought was to use Legos, Wichman said. But Moulding pressed them to choose something that would add cultural richness and a sense of place to the lesson. They hit on the hala plant, which is common around Hawaii. Native Hawaiian and Polynesian voyagers wove it into sleeping mats, baskets, and canoe sails. Even now, students can see hala hats and baskets in local stores, Wichman said.

Over several class meetings, Wichman introduces her students to hala leaves gathered from the local neighborhood. They study the plant's features, such as its long, slender leaves, and learn about its history. They weave mats, take them apart, and brainstorm about other ways to weave them. The children have produced many creative solutions, from baskets and bookmarks to bracelets and tiny fish, Wichman said. Then they write in their journals about the principles they learned.

Wichman said the lesson has given all her students, regardless of their race, class, or cultural backgrounds, a way to enter science on equal footing, through something they all share.

"No matter where they come from, they're all here in the Manoa Valley," she said.

Starting with something children already know isn't just smart from an equity perspective, Moulding said. It also helps students learn by giving them a base to which they can "attach" new knowledge, a constructivist idea that runs through the NGSS and their framework, he said.

He encourages teachers to take a scientific phenomenon and adapt it to reflect their students' local surroundings. To study the ways organisms adapt to where they live, for instance, Hawaiian students could study the feral chickens that are common on the islands and how they've changed their color and egg-laying patterns over time in response to local conditions.

In northwestern Nebraska, children could study the Sand Hill deer mouse, whose fur has lightened over time to blend in with the color of the sandy soil, Moulding said.

"Phenomena that are relevant to students, whether it's because of their culture or their place, are more accessible for all students," he said.

Moulding and other science educators have assembled more than 300 free equity-focused science lessons for the NGSS on a website called #Going 3D with GRC.

Access to well-designed lessons, even paired with good professional development, isn't enough to build equitable science instruction at scale, some experts say.

A research project called ACESSE, funded by the National Science Foundation, has been exploring systems and practices that bring all aspects of the education system-from the classroom teacher to district and state curriculum leaders, and even an interstate brain trust-into play to produce equitable science instruction.

At the classroom level, that work can look like Stacy Beausoleil's lessons at Sequoyah Middle School in Broken Arrow. Working closely with Morales, her science coordinator, Beausoleil has been thinking about how to make her science instruction more equitable.

That thinking plays out in her lessons, with the natural phenomena she chooses as anchors. Using free resources from OpenSciEd, Beausoleil recently taught a unit on light, an NGSS standard for 7th grade. Starting with a video clip of the TV character Mr. Bean goofing around in a two-way mirror, students theorized about the behavior of light on various surfaces. They created a scale model and re-enacted the scenario. She assigned students to find examples in their own lives of how different surfaces affect light.

"They came back full of stories," Beausoleil said. One girl reported that when she passed a restaurant at night, the window was so reflective that she used it to fix her hair, forgetting that customers inside could see her. Another noticed how she could see her reflection in a pond, but she could also see the sand at the bottom.

That assignment shows how equity has affected not just the natural processes Beausoleil chooses, but the way she assigns out-of-school work. She tries to create assignments that put no child at a disadvantage.

Using light as an instructional anchor, and sending students home to investigate it works because it "deals with an everyday thing that all kids have the privilege of accessing, in their houses, their mobile homes, or even in the cars they're living in temporarily."

Beausoleil has changed the way she carries out formative assessment. Instead of using multiple-choice quizzes, she asks students to model their thinking in illustrations and then discusses them. At first, they're one-on-one conversations. That lets students use their own words, without worrying about "correct" vocabulary. It offers Beausoleil a valuable window into their understanding of the concepts.

Then she organizes the class into small groups to discuss their models and their thinking, while she walks around and listens to their conversations. They do the same thing as a whole class, trying to reach a consensus in understanding the concept. Beausoleil said "you have no idea how much" this has changed what she can learn about her students' learning.

A Role for States

As the Broken Arrow district works with teachers on strategies like those, Oklahoma leaders are playing a powerful role to shape science instruction statewide. That kind of big-system change is a key concept in the four-year-old ACESSE project. Oklahoma and 12 other states are participating, and they're sharing ideas with all the other states.

Tiffany Neill, Oklahoma's executive director of curriculum and instruction, is overseeing several lines of work on equitable science instruction as part of the ACESSE project. She and her team conducted surveys and focus groups to see where Oklahoma teachers most needed support in implementing the Next Generation Science Standards.

She coordinates district and regional trainings to help teachers shift to new ways of thinking about instructional and classroom assessment practices. And she has convened key players in the state' to identify programs or policies that aren't well aligned to its science standards.

The state replaced its science test to better reflect the phenomenon-centered aims of the standards.

"Instead of questions that ask students to just explain condensation, we now have things like, 'There's liquid on the outside of a glass. What causes that to happen?' " Neill said.

The project has enabled science leaders to brainstorm across state and district lines. And it's built dozens of new, free science education resources designed to help teachers with equitable science practices.

One of the leaders of the ACESSE Project, William Penuel of the University of Colorado-Boulder, said that all parts of the K-12 system, from the classroom to state offices, must be involved in building equity into science instruction. Just getting new materials isn't enough, he said.

Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education research group, applauded the effort to make science relevant for students. But he cautioned that tying lessons exclusively to what children already know can be limiting.

"In moderation, some of this makes sense," he said. "But the worst thing to do when someone comes from a limited life experience is to just stay inside that box."

Published in Print: March 4, 2020, as The Art of Making Science Equitable

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The Art of Making Science Accessible and Relevant to All Students

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On the island of Oahu in Hawaii, 2nd graders weave mats, baskets, or other objects from the local hala plant. In northeastern Oklahoma, middle schoolers investigate why light makes some surfaces work like windows and others like mirrors. Thousands of miles apart, those projects have something powerful in common: They were designed with equity in mind.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Worried that far too many students have weak reading skills, states are passing new laws that require aspiring teachers-and, increasingly, teachers who are already in the classroom-to master reading instruction that's solidly grounded in research.

In the past three years alone, at least 11 states have enacted laws designed to expand evidence-based reading instruction in grades K-3. Legislative analysts and activists who monitor the issue have noticed a flurry of recent state action on it.

"There is an absolute buzz around the science of reading. There's no question that states are getting on board with this," said Laura Stewart, the director of the Reading League, a group that works to build understanding of what research says about good reading instruction.

The "science of reading" generally refers to the body of research that's piled up over decades on how children learn to read. The National Reading Panel Report, in 2000, articulated what have come to be known as the "big five" essential components of effective reading instruction for young children. The federally funded panel found that most children will become better readers with explicit, systematic phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, as well as instruction in fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

See Also: Highlights of New Legislation on the Science of Reading

Those findings have been reaffirmed in so many studies that they're widely considered settled science. But many elementary schools and teacher-preparation programs still favor a balanced-literacy approach, which draws from the "whole language" movement popular in the '90s, and is based on the idea that children learn to read if they're given good books and the right supports and strategies. Some phonics instruction is generally included, but it's not necessarily systematic.

Balanced literacy is increasingly coming under attack, however, as educators notice stubborn reading problems, mirrored in national reading scores. The 2019 National Assessment for Educational Progress showed that 4th and 8th grade students have made no progress in reading in the past decade, and between 2017 and 2019, reading performance actually declined. Barely one-third of those students are proficient readers.

A Sharper Focus

Those results added new urgency to what was already a mushrooming cloud of legislative activity on reading. Passing laws to improve reading is nothing new; many states have ambitious reading-improvement programs enshrined in law, and some don't let 3rd graders move to 4th grade unless they read proficiently. In 2015, the Education Commission of the States found that requiring aspiring teachers to pass a test in reading instruction was an "emerging trend."

But what distinguishes the newer crop of laws in the last few years is their sharpened focus. Many are spelling out the elements of research-proven reading instruction, specifying the big-five components of reading from the National Reading Panel report, or citing other foundational skills known to be important to reading, such as building students' base of content knowledge.

Recent laws also put the entire pipeline of reading instruction directly in their crosshairs, imposing new requirements not only on aspiring teachers but also on district leaders, principals, and classroom teachers. Most target K-3 teachers, but some laws impose new requirements on all K-6 teachers, and some even reach into high school.

States are working together on this new breed of requirements. State superintendents organized a national convening last month, where they brainstormed about how to hold teacher-prep programs accountable for new teachers' competency in reading instruction; how to press for high-quality, research-based curriculum; and how to work with districts to ensure that current teachers are skilled reading teachers.

States are sharing strategies in other ways, too. The Foundation for Excellence in Education, a policy group, drafted model legislation on the science of reading in 2018, and 18 states have requested it, according to foundation spokesman Joe Follick.

A Comprehensive Approach: Arkansas

A recent batch of laws in Arkansas illustrates the comprehensive approach that states are increasingly taking as they codify new expectations for reading instruction. Starting with the 2017 Right to Read Act, which grew out of the state's major literacy campaign, a half-dozen laws there have imposed new requirements on all parts of the state's reading-instruction pipeline.

Colleges of education must teach "scientific reading instruction" and administer a stand-alone reading test on it, and new teachers must pass it to get a license. School districts must provide training in evidence-based reading instruction and can choose one of a dozen "pathways" by which K-6 teachers can demonstrate proficiency, including taking a test or being observed by an administrator trained to evaluate their reading-instruction skill.

Teachers in all other grades and subjects, as well as all administrators, are also affected: They must demonstrate "awareness" of the science of reading. The state must also prepare a list of literacy-curriculum materials that reflect evidence-based reading instruction, and after 2021, districts must buy from that list.

It's a massive lift to comply with all the new laws' requirements, including shepherding all 33,000 of the state's certified teachers through training, said Stacy Smith, Arkansas' assistant commissioner for learning services. The K-6 trainings are moving forward, powered in part by a $1 million annual allotment from the governor's rainy-day fund that helps pay for 45 to 50 literacy specialists around the state, Smith said.

About 75 percent of teacher-candidates passed the most recent reading test, she said, a rate she expects will improve. The other 25 percent can work with provisional licenses for a year while they try again to pass it.

Some of the work is about changing attitudes. When the state's science-based reading push kicked off in 2017, Smith said she encountered no shortage of skepticism.

"For 20 years, all our PD had been whole-language-based, balanced literacy," she said. "[We] spent a lot of time figuring out how to turn that ship around for all these literacy specialists who were supposedly the experts. There were a lot of crossed arms, a lot of tough meetings. But we never wavered. We said, 'Either you're on our ship or you're not.'"

Being on that ship is no simple matter for district leaders, even if they believe in the mission. Bruce Orr, the assistant superintendent in the Arkansas' Lakeside district, chose the face-to-face training route for his 90-plus K-6 teachers, with a skilled observation that unfolds over time, rather than letting them take a test to show proficiency in reading instruction.

To lead that process effectively, Orr joined the six-day training his K-2 teachers took. His principals are taking two-day "assessor academy" training to become observers and evaluators of teachers' reading instruction.

'I Had to Swallow My Pride'

"I was the least knowledgeable person at the table in those sessions," he said. "I had to swallow my pride and just get in there and start learning how kids learn to read."

The district's academic coach, its principals, and assistant principals are now taking their training into classrooms to provide feedback to teachers, Orr said. And he's using his new knowledge on the district's language-arts-curriculum committee, which is choosing new reading materials aligned to evidence-based practices.

Orr worries a little that all his staff members might not meet the proficiency bar when the rubber meets the road. And it's been tough for teachers to find time to accommodate the expanded blocks of reading instruction.

But he sees signs for optimism: Student scores on DIBELS, an early-literacy test, have improved "drastically," Orr said.

He's eager to build on those gains in all his classrooms. As the state's literacy campaign took off three years ago, Orr knew his district had profound academic problems he couldn't pinpoint. Its average ACT scores were high, and its schools routinely got A and B grades from the state. But state test scores showed fewer than 6 in 10 3rd and 4th graders reading proficiently. In middle and high school, it's barely half or less.

His teachers knew there was a problem and were "hungry" for a solution, Orr said. "We didn't have to waste time with them fighting us or saying I don't believe in this."

Tennessee, too, is taking a broad-based approach to tackle reading instruction. Legislation filed Feb. 3, proposed by the department of education and backed by the governor, would provide a free, evidence-based early-literacy curriculum to districts, and they'd be required to use it or show that their own curricula is evidence-based. Districts would also have to use approved curricula designed to build students' content knowledge. All K-3 teachers would be trained in research-based foundational reading instruction, and teacher- and principal-preparation programs would have to teach evidence-based reading instruction.

"If you are in an educator-prep program in the state of Tennessee, you will teach teachers to teach reading in the right way," Commissioner Penny Schwinn said in an interview hours before the bill was filed. A comprehensive approach that touches all parts of the teacher pipeline is necessary, she said. Tackling only teacher prep, or only professional development, results in a "game of Whac-A-Mole" that won't address the roots of students' poor reading skills.

Mississippi Eyes Ed. School Faculty

The roots of many new reading laws trace back to Mississippi, which has emerged as a leader in science-based reading instruction since 2003, when it started requiring colleges of education to teach two courses focused on the key components of good reading instruction. Later, it added more requirements: Teacher-candidates must pass a test in reading science, and elementary schools must certify that their curricula address the key components of reading. The state appropriates $15 million each year to pay for professional development, literacy coaches-the state has 74 this year-and other supports.

Mississippi's work has paid off in ways that have drawn national notice: It was the only state to improve 4th grade reading scores on the 2019 NAEP. Only 21 percent of Mississippi's 4th graders scored "proficient" in reading on NAEP in 2013; by 2019, 32 percent did. Scores on the state's own 3rd grade reading test-which students must pass to move to 4th grade-have risen, too.

Leaders of the science-based-reading movement in Mississippi now have a new target in their sights: the faculty of educator-prep programs. Sparked by studies showing persistent deficiencies in research-based reading instruction in colleges of education, a governor's task force recommended requiring faculty who teach reading instruction to pass a test in the science of reading, said Kelly Butler, the CEO of the Barksdale Reading Institute, which conducted those studies and is a key player in the work to improve reading instruction in Mississippi.

Education school deans have opposed that proposal, so no new rule has been implemented yet, said Kymyona Burk, who oversaw Mississippi's literacy work from 2013 to 2019 and is now the early-literacy policy director for the Foundation for Excellence in Education.

Even as momentum builds for a sharper focus on evidence-based reading instruction, however, support is hardly universal. In schools, some teachers resist moving away from the methods they're used to. One activist in Tennessee said she anticipates pushback from "some board members [who] would die on the hill for balanced literacy."

P. David Pearson, a widely respected literacy expert, is skeptical of the new movement for "evidence-based" reading instruction. Teaching literacy for more than 50 years, he's seen these cycles unfold before.

"With remarkable regularity, every 10 to 12 years, we've had movements to reinfuse phonics and foundational skills into reading," said Pearson, a professor emeritus of education at the University of California, Berkeley.

More Training, More Support, More Coaching

He pointed to Jean Chall's 1967 book, Learning To Read: The Great Debate, which emphasized the importance of decoding skills; a "back to basics" movement in the 1990s in response to whole-language instruction; and the early 2000s, when the National Reading Panel and the No Child Left Behind Act produced a renewed focus on reading skills.

This latest cycle, he said, is based on research citations that rely too heavily on brain imaging and not enough on "careful experimental studies" of which instructional approaches produce achievement results. The new push for reading is "obsessed with decoding" at the expense of other crucial skills, such as the development of children's oral language and knowledge base, and "rich discussions of text with the guidance of a teacher."

Even the most ardent backers of good reading instruction say that while state laws can be powerful levers for change, they're not enough. Passing a 2013 law that required 3rd graders to be proficient readers, was a crucial "wakeup call" in Mississippi, Butler said. Also key was the state department of education's control of state funding to supply training and coaching, she said.

Steven Dykstra, who monitors state action on reading as an adviser for the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction, said that teachers work hard and want the best for their students, but "giving them a little information or dropping a new reading curriculum into their classrooms isn't going to be enough."

"They're going to need more training, more support, more coaching than people ever imagine will be necessary," Dysktra said. "Passing a state law is just a first step. If you're not prepared to take on the rest of it, you're not going to get where you want to go."

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States to Schools: Teach Reading the Right Way

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Worried that far too many students have weak reading skills, states are passing new laws that require aspiring teachers-and, increasingly, teachers who are already in the classroom-to master reading instruction that's solidly grounded in research. In the past three years alone, at least 11 states have enacted laws designed to expand evidence-based reading instruction in grades K-3.

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What teachers can do to boost student motivation

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What teachers can do to boost student motivation

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Videos!

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What teacher doesn't want an environment where students are working on lessons and learning because they want to do it instead of because they have to do it? Researchers have identified four specific ways to nurture a sense of intrinsic motivation in students. In this video series, educators and authors Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski discuss these elements: autonomy, which is helping learners feel that they have a choice in what they do and how they do it; competence, or creating situations in which students feel that they are capable of doing what they are being asked to do; relatedness, or doing activities that help students connect to others; and relevance, or making work seem interesting, valuable, and useful to students' everyday lives.

Why Autonomy Matters

Studies show that giving students a role in deciding what their educational experience looks like can help motivate them. This input may include having a say in their classroom environment, being able to choose their homework assignment, or even being allowed to develop ideas for their own assignments related to what is being studied in class.

Praising Competence Instead of Natural Ability

Students are more likely to do something if they feel like they have the ability to be successful doing it. This can be accomplished by praising effort instead of natural ability, showing students their growth over a semester, or even having students become teachers to their classmates.

Helping Students Relate to Others

Building relationships with peers and teachers helps students feel cared about by people they respect. There are two parts to this equation: one is creating learning situations in which students come to like and respect their classmates and have opportunities to work with them, and the second is creating a positive relationship between teachers and students.

Making Students' Work Relevant

For students to feel motivated, they must see the work they are doing in the classroom as interesting, valuable, and useful to their present lives. Teachers should consider having lesson plans and discussions about topics prevalent in students' lives, having students set academic and non-academic goals, and challenging students to write about why what they are learning is relevant.

Related Reading

Video Credits:
Written by: Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski
Filmed by: Tyrel Tesch
Animated by: Richard Sliwinski
Executive Producer: Emma Patti Harris

Sponsored by:

Coverage of whole-child approaches to learning is supported in part by a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

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What Teachers Can Do to Boost Student Motivation

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What teacher doesn't want an environment where students are working on lessons and learning because they want to do it instead of because they have to do it? Researchers have identified four specific ways to nurture a sense of intrinsic motivation in students.

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Do you have to "love" all your students?

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Do you have to "love" all your students?

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...what if you don't?

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Decades of research-and conventionally held wisdom-say that positive teacher-student relationships matter. But do you really have to love every student? And what if you don't?

"We go into [teaching] with the idea that we're going to love our students, we're going to be like the teachers in the movies, ... all of the kids are going to be motivated, there's going to be a soundtrack, it's going to be amazing," said Vickie Crockett, a high school English/language arts teacher in Atlanta. "I think we allow ourselves to get boxed into [the idea] that we're just going to fall magically in love with all of these disparate personalities that come into our classroom."

But the reality is not quite like the movies. As most teachers can attest, some students are challenging. They might be disruptive, or disengaged, or even rude. Some might genuinely dislike their teacher for reasons outside of the teacher's control. Sometimes, no matter how hard a teacher tries, he or she can't "click" with a certain student.

Strong student-teacher relationships, however, are linked to both short-term and long-term improvements on multiple measures: higher student academic engagement, better attendance, better grades, fewer disruptive behaviors and suspensions, and lower school dropout rates. These effects hold true regardless of students' individual, family, and school backgrounds.

Experts say that forging positive relationships with the full range of students, including the aloof, withdrawn, and even defiant ones, is not necessarily an intuitive skill-it comes with training and experience. Yet there's a stigma against admitting that connecting with some children is easier said than done, teachers say.

"We are allowed to say that our spouses frustrate us, we're allowed to say our [own] children frustrate us, we're allowed to say that we don't necessarily like our colleagues or even supervisors," Crockett said. "But we're not allowed to say that there's a child that I work with that I find very difficult, and the truth of the matter is that I weep a little inside when I see them coming, and I rejoice when I see them leaving."

Still, teachers "don't get to act on those feelings," she stressed. "I do think that it is imperative that we understand where our students are coming from."

So how do teachers connect with a student who may be hard to like? Education Week spoke to both experts and veteran teachers from all grade levels to get their advice.

Try not to take it personally. Remember that the disruption and mean comments probably don't have anything to do with you, and it's human nature not to mesh with everyone, educators said. Still, that's easier said than done.

"You can't judge this person because of the way they're behaving in this moment, there's always some underlying thing," said Audrey Green, an 8th grade Global Scholars program teacher in Broward County, Fla. "But how do you get through the day if the kid is acting like that all the time?"

For example, she said, a student once told her that she shouldn't be a teacher. The comment stung.

"It's very hard to not take it personally," Green said. "You immediately become the middle schooler. We're all human. If you have people berating you all day," it's going to hurt.

That's why it's important for teachers to learn how to regulate their own emotions, and take a step back in the heat of the moment to calm down, said Allison Riddle, a veteran teacher who is now the elementary mentor supervisor for the Davis school district near Salt Lake City.

"I felt so much better inside when I was able to just be calm and have empathy for a student-as soon as I learned, 'This isn't directed at you, this person is in pain,'" she said.

Find something to like about a prickly student. A student isn't defined by their attitude in class, teachers say.

"It's easy to like the kid who is compliant," said Wendy Ramos, a high school English teacher in Weslaco, Texas. "It's more of a challenge to like the kid who's giving you trouble; but that doesn't mean you can't. I think you can find things in most students that you like. ... I think that, sometimes, you can even just like the challenge that they're giving you, to help you grow as an educator and as a compassionate person."

This starts with forming relationships with students at the beginning of the year, teachers said. Learn about their interests and hobbies, and try to find common ground.

After all, "the more you get to know somebody, the more that you develop empathy for them, the stronger the relationship is," said Vicki Nishioka, a senior research adviser with the nonprofit group Education Northwest who studies teacher-student relationships.

Teachers said they try to engage their students in personal conversations before or after class. At the elementary level, recess might even be a place for teachers and students to forge a common bond, said Kevin Parr, a 1st grade teacher in Wenatchee, Wash.

"Sitting down one-on-one is almost a confrontation, but if you're shooting baskets or playing tetherball, it's more of a safe space to talk," he said.

Step outside the authority role to better connect with students. Don't be afraid to open up with students, Nishioka said.

"It helps students to see [a teacher] as a person who maybe has had some of the same struggles, ... or had some failures and made some mistakes that they've recovered from," she said. "I think it's important as a model, but also for relationship-building, for students to hear some of those stories."

When Green, the 8th grade teacher in Florida, allowed her students to use the game Minecraft for a class project, it put her in the learner's seat. Her students knew more about how to build virtual worlds in the game than she did.

"You become human," she said. "[They see] you are fallible, and you're trying."

Build a positive classroom culture. It's important for all students to feel welcomed by their teachers, experts said.

"I think that establishing a sense of belonging for students is so essential for them to want to come [to class], for them to want to engage with teachers," Nishioka said. "I can't tell you how many times a student has told me I did my homework, but I was mad at the teacher so I didn't turn it in."

That's why it's critical to continue to try to show support to students, even if they're resistant, teachers said.

"Even just a little smile can go a long way," Parr said. "If you act positively toward a kid, eventually they'll act positively toward you. They'll gain the trust."

Also, other students can help: "If there's a positive classroom environment, and everyone is treating each other respectfully, ... over time, that challenging student will assimilate to the rest of the group," Parr said.

And when a student isn't acting appropriately, teachers have to be "emotional detectives," said Tyrone Howard, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles' graduate school of education, who co-wrote an upcoming book called No More Teaching Without Positive Relationships.

A teacher should try to pick up on cues that a student is upset about something, he said, and ask questions like, "Is there anything I can do to assist, or maybe just lend an ear? Do you need some additional time to complete an assignment? Is everything OK? Do you need a counselor you want to talk to?"

"I think students can tell if teachers really are truly interested in their well-being by demonstrating what I call authentic care," Howard said.

Build a relationship with parents, too. They can be both a valuable ally and an insight into why the student is acting out, teachers say.

Crockett, the English teacher in Atlanta, said reaching out to parents early on gives her a "partner at home-someone I know who is batting on my team."

One time, she said, she had a student who "loathed" her and would push back on everything she said. Crockett met with the student's mother, who immediately knew the problem-Crockett looked just like the student's father's new girlfriend. The mother was then able to talk to her child and help her get through the school year.

"I was never her favorite, and she was never mine, but we were able to reach a compromise," Crockett said. "It's not the ideal, but sometimes it's the reality."

Make sure to confront any unconscious biases or stereotypes. Data show that black students are more likely to be disciplined at school at disproportionate rates. And teachers make the first decisions about behavioral consequences.

Nishioka said it's important for teachers to confront their implicit biases, which might influence how they treat students in their classroom. For example, white teachers-who make up 80 percent of the profession-might see a black student as more aggressive or unruly than a white student, and could dole out harsher consequences for similar behavior.

"I think many teachers will say, 'I'm fair to everybody,' so it really takes a lot of work, and probably work that they need to do on their own but also in partnership with other people," Nishioka said. "I think it's hard to look at yourself inwardly without getting some information from teachers around you."

Part of that, Nishioka said, comes from having a school community that values the cultural differences of students and teachers.

"If we begin to ask students and listen to them about their story, then we begin to appreciate and maybe begin to challenge some of our own misconceptions or opinions that we made about the students," she said.

Don't try to force a resolution with a student who is not receptive. Trying to resolve a problem when the student and the teacher are still upset won't be productive, teachers say.

Riddle, the elementary mentor supervisor in Utah, said she learned over the years that it's important to give everyone involved some space and calm down before addressing the conflict.

"It feels better to walk away and let a child de-escalate than it does to stand there and stay angry," she said. "It feels better for everyone. ... It feels better for the learning atmosphere."

Students still have to be held responsible for their work, their effort, and their actions, Riddle said, but it will be more productive if they're allowed to calm down first. "You have to give grace sometimes," she said.

Even in the long-term, some students might not want to build a relationship with their teacher, despite the teacher's best efforts.

"One of the things that kills teachers is that there are always going to be students who, for whatever reason, don't engage or are not receptive," Howard said. "You shouldn't press it, if students are not wanting to receive it, because that can oftentimes go really bad."

Instead, he said, teachers should be consistent and let students know they're always available to talk.

Don't expect instant results. Building meaningful relationships with students takes time, experts said, and it might take longer than a semester or even a school year to yield fruit.

"I've seen over the years teachers say that a student that they thought they never made an impact with will come back a year later or two years later and say, 'I appreciate you because you always checked. I never did open up, but you continued to check to see how I was doing, you still made yourself available,'" Howard said. "We tell teachers, don't always expect immediate results."

Green, the 8th grade teacher, said she's had a few challenging students reach out years later-a sign that she was doing something right, even if it might not have felt like it at the time.

"They come back from high school where they've matured and say, 'I get it now,'" she said. "It doesn't happen that often. But that's where the measurement should be."

Published in Print: February 26, 2020, as When It's Hard to Really Love That Student

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Do You Have to 'Love' Every Student? And What If You Don't?

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Decades of research-and conventionally held wisdom-say that positive teacher-student relationships matter. But do you really have to love every student? And what if you don't? "We go into [teaching] with the idea that we're going to love our students, we're going to be like the teachers in the movies, ...

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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FOUR Foundational Reading skills - phonics is only one

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FOUR Foundational Reading skills - phonics is only one

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Opinion

We must teach the integrated set of foundational skills completely

Here's the good news: Most educators have gotten the message that K-5 students need to learn the foundational reading skills outlined in the common core and other college and career-ready standards: print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency. The bad news? The foundational skills instruction that students receive is too often incomplete and ineffective. Districts are "checking" the foundational skills box but are using practices of questionable quality and not addressing all of the foundational skills. It's not enough to just do foundational skills. They must be taught completely-yet efficiently-with quality materials to build capacity for comprehending lengthy, advanced literary, and informational texts.

Literacy is livelihood. If you can't read words, many aspects of your life will be impacted. Take this question on a cosmetology licensing exam: "Which of the following refers to the deepest layer of epidermis-stratum spinosum, stratum granulosum, stratum germinativum, stratum lucidum?" It requires understanding complex Latin vocabulary as well as decoding multisyllabic words.

That's why foundational reading skills must work together-it is the integration of the skills that provide an entry point to complex literacy. As students increase in their abilities to automatically recognize words, they also increase in the amounts of mental energy they can devote to understanding complex ideas and vocabulary. No one can concentrate on Newton's laws, plot development, or electrical circuits if they are struggling to decode every fifth word.

A common misconception is that "foundational skills" only means "phonics." The truth is that the four areas are an integrated gestalt, greater than the sum of their parts. Often emphasized in K-2, phonics is teaching students the correspondence between visual symbols (graphemes made of letters) and speech sounds (phonemes). But to access phonics, children must have certain insights, or the system will make no sense.

Students often learn letters but don't know, for example, that print runs left-to-right or that words are groups of letters separated by space-insights called print concepts. Similarly, students learn letter names but do not understand the alphabetic principle-that symbols represent speech sounds ("cat" equals 3 symbols, 3 sounds). Kindergarteners learn the alphabetic principle and print concepts when their teachers model reading and writing. We are putting the cart before the horse if we drill letter/sounds without also teaching print concepts and the alphabetic principle.

Some educators think phonological awareness is synonymous with phonics, but this is another misconception. In fact, when I recently observed foundational skills lessons in more than 10 K-2 classrooms, I only saw one phonological awareness lesson. Phonological awareness is the ability to orally identify and manipulate the sound units of language such as words, syllables, and speech. Research tells us that if students do not consciously attend to and distinguish these units, they are unlikely to benefit from phonics. Similarly, instruction in print concepts primes students to learn phonics. Can you imagine going to a job where you learn all about the different types of buttons, threads, fabrics, and zippers but no one tells you that you are manufacturing jeans? Yet that's often how reading instruction can feel for children.

Phonics and word recognition skills include analyzing multisyllabic words into morphemes, the smallest meaning units (e.g., pre-treat-ing). Many schools stop instruction after students can decode single syllable words, but multisyllabic words outnumber single syllable words 4-to-1 in advanced texts. To complete foundational skills instruction, we need systematic instruction in morphology through the 5th grade and beyond.

The last foundational skill, fluency, closes the deal. It is the ability to read connected text automatically (with little conscious effort), accurately, and with proper expression using volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace to convey the meaning. Addressed in 1st through 5th grade, fluency enhances-and is affected by-meaning making. Without requisite fluency, students will have little cognitive energy to devote to complex ideas.

It can be exhausting to hear about research-based this and research-based that-but there are well-established findings regarding foundational skills instruction. Simply put: Foundational skills cannot be separated. Print concepts and phonological awareness support phonics instruction, morphological instruction extends students' word recognition, and fluency automatizes word reading. Here are truths educators should focus on:

1. Systematic instruction is effective. It is driven by a scope and sequence, a guide specifying the content to be taught and its order. Let one scope and sequence drive instruction. I often see districts using two to three foundational skills plans, an overkill approach that is bound to confuse students.

2. Students need to learn all the foundational skills. I see approaches that heavily emphasize just one or two skills, such as phonics, but completely miss others. These skills are complementary and need to be consistently taught, in response to development, through grade 5.

3. Instructional language should be explicit. Teachers should clearly and directly tell students the grapheme/phoneme relationships, word roots, or syllable patterns being taught. I recently tested more than 150 kindergarteners who knew about 90 percent of their letter/sounds but could not decode simple words. Most young children must be taught explicitly how to decode words.

4. Solid foundational skills instruction is assessment-guided and responsive. All students do not need the same thing. In a 2014 study, one researcher found that entering kindergarteners ranged from knowing zero letter names to knowing all of them. Teachers must use simple diagnostic assessments that inform cumulative review and instruction and often must use small group instruction.

5. Instructional materials must be aligned to the standards. A recent analysis from the RAND Corporation found that only 7 percent of elementary school teachers used at least one high-quality English/language arts material. Thoroughly vet materials to ensure full coverage of all foundational skills. EdReports.org provides a rigorously developed tool that give leaders a road map. (I recently sat on an advisory panel for the organization's inaugural review of Foundational Skills curriculum.) With focused planning even small or underresourced districts can find research-based, standards-aligned materials.

Moreover, all four foundational skills deserve our full attention as they provide an entry point to complex literacy. Decisionmakers must fully understand what the foundational skills are and apply the robust research that informs best practices. These foundational reading skills are truly foundational-an essential ingredient but not the full recipe. Comprehension and writing instruction, which requires a wide range of instructional targets such as vocabulary and world knowledge, the focus of the other standards, round out the complete recipe. Millions of students are looking to their schools to provide them with the essential knowledge they need to succeed in college and career-it is imperative that we get these skills right.

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There Are Four Foundational Reading Skills. Why Do We Only Talk About Phonics?

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Opinion Here's the good news: Most educators have gotten the message that K-5 students need to learn the foundational reading skills outlined in the common core and other college and career-ready standards: print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency. The bad news?

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G6 Quick Writes
Students leading IEPs

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Best News Websites for Students | Common Sense Education

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Which news sites can students trust? These great, classroom-friendly news apps and sites can give students different perspectives on key current events. Find options for students of all grade levels -- all un-biased, well-researched, and guaranteed to pique students' interest.

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In September 2019, I wrote about a review of the research on how to teach critical thinking by University of Virginia professor Daniel Willingham. His conclusion was that generic critical thinking skills don't translate from one subject to another but that subject-specific critical thinking skills can be explicitly taught as you go deep into a lesson, be it history or math, as students need to learn a lot of information to process it.

A large study on teaching science to middle school students was published afterwards and it adds more nuance to this debate between critical thinking skills and content knowledge. A team of researchers found that students who learn to think like a scientist (more on what that means later) learn many more of the facts and figures in their science classes and absorb the content better.

The big wrinkle is that the researchers found that it's not effective to start the school year with a couple of weeks of lessons on the scientific method, which many teachers do. Instead, the successful teaching of scientific thinking starts with a content-rich lesson where students learn to ask the right questions and evaluate evidence while they are processing information on dolphins, molecules or another specific science topic.

In other words, critical thinking is necessary to absorb content better but a content-rich lesson is needed to teach critical thinking in the first place.

The study, " Scientific sensemaking supports science content learning across disciplines and instructional contexts," was published in October 2019 in the journal of Contemporary Educational Psychology. The researchers were Matthew Cannady at the University of California at Berkeley, Joo Man Chung from Georgetown University and Christian Schunn and Paulette Vincent-Ruz, both from the University of Pittsburgh.

In the study, researchers tested more than 2,500 sixth and eighth grade students multiple times during fall term, measuring their scientific reasoning abilities separately from how much content knowledge they were learning in biology or chemistry classes. The students hailed from a large Eastern city with a high proportion of black students and from several school districts in the West where there were many Latino students.

The researchers measured "thinking like a scientist" by breaking down the thinking and analyzing that scientists do into categories, such as asking questions, designing experiments, interpreting data, constructing cause-and-effect explanations, making arguments and understanding how scientific theories evolve. Much of it involves the skills you would need in order to follow the scientific method of generating, testing and modifying hypotheses. For example, the researchers were interested in how students were able to connect claims to evidence, prioritize which forms of justification to use as evidence and refute alternative claims. The adjacent table from the study provides concrete examples of how students were assessed.

A breakdown of thinking like a scientist

The researchers calculated that students who started the year with a higher degree of scientific reasoning learned considerably more content during the term than students who didn't have as strong a sense of scientific reasoning. It was true in both biology and chemistry classes and for both sixth and eighth graders.

The researchers also paid close attention to the style of instruction in the science classrooms. Some teachers adhered closely to a textbook. Others had a more hands-on approach with lots of experiments and projects. Hands-on instruction tended to produce more growth in scientific reasoning for students; doing science is helpful for learning to think like a scientist. However, one surprising result is that the researchers didn't see a difference in the amount of content that a student learned between the two teaching approaches.

Both styles could be done well, helping students to learn how to reason like a scientist, and both could be done poorly. For example, a hands-on teacher can merely ask students to follow step-by-step instructions in a prepackaged experiment kit without pushing students to think through why they're doing these steps. Meanwhile, a textbook teacher can ask fabulous questions.

Those questions seem to matter the most. For example: Why did you ask that question? Why is it a good or reasonable question? Why is the study you designed the right study to answer that question? Why does the data support your idea?
Related: Scientific research on how to teach critical thinking contradicts education trends
Why strong scientific reasoning helps you learn more facts and figures is mysterious. Learning scientists have a couple of theories. One has to do with information processing. The human brain is constantly mishearing and misreading things. If we understand what should be going on and are trying to make sense of the information coming to us, we fix the errors.

The other theory is based on how human memory works. When we try to understand new information and make connections between ideas, learning scientists say it takes less effort to memorize new facts and figures. Another approach is repetition. And certainly studying something 10 times is more effective than only five times. But understanding it once is better.

When I first became an education reporter almost a decade ago, I remember education policymakers and experts explaining to me that we don't need to teach students as much boring content anymore because you can look up everything you need to know on Google. They believed that thinking skills are the really important thing to teach students and that's what will last with students year after year after they've forgotten all about the periodic table. But this research shows that you can't learn how to think as an abstract skill. You have to dig into the "boring" and "forgettable" content to acquire it.

This story about teaching the scientific method was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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A study on teaching critical thinking in science

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In September 2019, I wrote about a review of the research on how to teach critical thinking by University of Virginia professor Daniel Willingham. His conclusion was that generic critical thinking skills don't translate from one subject to another but that subject-specific critical thinking skills can be explicitly taught as you go deep into a lesson, be it history or math, as students need to learn a lot of information to process it.

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A new Rutgers study has found that one-fourth of children with autism spectrum disorder may go undiagnosed.

Moreover, children whose autism is not recognized are more likely to be black or Hispanic, according to findings published last month in the journal Autism Research.

The bottom line, the new findings suggest, is that children whose lives could be improved by getting needed services may be falling through the cracks.

"There may be various reasons for the disparity, from communication or cultural barriers between minority parents and physicians to anxiety about the complicated diagnostic process and fear of stigma," said study coauthor Walter Zahorodny, an associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

"Also, many parents whose children are diagnosed later often attribute their first concern to a behavioral or medical issue rather than a developmental problem," he added.

Children of color have long been suspected of being underdiagnosed with autism, the nation's fastest-growing developmental disability. Characterized by communication and social difficulties or deficits and repetitive behaviors, autism must be detected early in order to help children reach their full potential, experts agree.

The study was conducted by reviewing medical and education records of children in 11 states, including New Jersey, that are part of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. Studies are performed within the network to estimate autism prevalence rates.

The researchers analyzed records of 266,000 8-year-old children and found 4,550 who met the diagnostic criteria for autism. Of those children, 1,135 had not been diagnosed with the disorder. Black and Hispanic children were more likely to be in the undiagnosed group.

When the network's prevalence rates for 8-year-olds were last released in 2018, one in 59 children were estimated to be on the spectrum. New Jersey had the highest prevalence, with a rate of one in 34 children. Diagnosis of children of color at the time appeared to be increasing, but the new study suggests there is still substantial need for improvement.

Zahorodny, who directs the New Jersey portion of the study, said findings like this underline the need for universal screening for autism.

"I have no problem advocating that every child be screened at 18 and 24 months," Zahorodny said. "In fact, I'm a person who would be most likely to say not only at 18 and 24 months but given what we see about late detection, I would do screening at 30 or 36 months and again at 40 or 48 months because there are still children who are getting to school age without evaluation."

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A psychologist explains practical ways teachers can support children with autism:
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Rita Giordano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

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A Quarter of Kids With Autism May Go Undiagnosed, Study Finds

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The bottom line, the new findings suggest, is that children whose lives could be improved by getting needed services may be falling through the cracks.

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Myth 1: Practice activities should mainly include tasks that require basic recall and following procedures.

FACT: Practice should match the rigorous expectations of the standards. While some practice activities should include procedures, students should spend a significant amount of their practice time on problems that allow them to develop deeper-level learning skills such as demonstrating understanding, generalizing, and making connections.

TIP: Math practice should help students understand the "why" behind math concepts and flexibly apply their understanding before building fluency.

Myth 2: If students can remember how to apply rules and procedures, then they will be successful in math.

FACT: Students who are taught both how to do the procedures AND why the procedures work are more likely to retain their understanding longer, more likely to connect new learning with previous learning, and less likely to make careless mistakes. Students who are taught to focus only on the "how" come to see math as isolated pieces of knowledge and have a harder time making connections between concepts and learning new skills.

TIP: When planning, start with students' current understandings in mind, instead of with rules and procedures. Provide practice that allows students to enter the problem with whatever level of skills and understanding they have.

Myth 3: The main purpose of math practice is to increase procedural fluency.

FACT: For students to be proficient in math, they need daily practice on all five of the strands of mathematical proficiency- not just procedural fluency. These five strands are interdependent and equally important for students to meet the demands of the standards. How students connect pieces of mathematical knowledge is a critical factor in whether they will develop deep understanding.
TIP: Practice should incorporate contexts that are relevant to students' lives and encourage them to make connections between mathematical concepts.

Myth 4: We only need to teach students the traditional algorithm. With enough practice, students will understand the math concepts and will be able to apply them long-term.

FACT: If students do not understand the underlying concepts and why an algorithm works, the math will not make sense, no matter how much they practice-and could reinforce misconceptions or errors.

TIP: Provide practice opportunities that require students to demonstrate the full depth of knowledge necessary of the content standards.

Myth 5: Practicing math in an "I do, we do, you do" method leads to long-term understanding.

FACT: Initiate/Response/Evaluate routines of teaching (e.g., the "I do, we do, you do" method) only develop short-term procedural fluency because they do not require students to develop conceptual understanding-students are acting as "math mimickers" rather than "math thinkers."

TIP: Incorporate practice tasks that foster mathematical discourse, which encourages students to take ownership of their learning and develop conceptual understanding.

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FACT: Practice should match the rigorous expectations of the standards. While some practice activities should include procedures, students should spend a significant amount of their practice time on problems that allow them to develop deeper-level learning skills such as demonstrating understanding, generalizing, and making connections.

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Eight educators share their best math lessons

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Eight educators share their best math lessons

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Education Week - Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo

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The new question-of-the-week is:
What has been the best math lesson you have taught and why do you think it was so good?
We've all taught some great lessons and we've also all taught some pretty bad ones. This two-part series will feature math educators sharing more of the former ...

Today, Beth Kobett, Jill Henry, Avery Zachery, Cindy Garcia, Molly Rawling, Catherine Murphy, Dr. Jennifer McBride-Donaldson, and Dennis Griffin Jr. share their choices. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Beth, Jill, and Avery on my BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

You might also be interested in past columns appearing here on Math Instruction.
"My ... Students Were Solving Problems Interesting to Them"
Beth Kobett, Ed.D., is a mathematics educator and an associate professor of education at Stevenson University in Baltimore. She is a current member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics board of directors and co-author of Formative Five: Everyday Assessment Techniques for Every Math Classroom and The Mathematics Lesson Planning Handbook: Your Blueprint for Success:
I have asked this question hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times in my career. As a practice, I never ask a question I won't answer myself. Still, I squirm a bit as I write this. As I reflect on the best mathematics lessons that I have taught, I consider one of my very first "best" mathematics lessons and, 30-plus years later, one of my most recent "best" mathematics lessons. While one lesson occurred in a 5th grade classroom and the other lesson took place in a college classroom, there are several common themes. First, I planned both lessons with depth. Planning means I know the goals for the lesson, what I am doing, where I am going in the lesson, and how I will respond to student understanding, including misconceptions and advanced thinking. I do this all the time, but when it is a "best" lesson, I actually get pretty close to figuring out how my students will respond to the learning experience. One thing I know is that if I don't plan deeply, I won't get even moderately close. When I anticipate what my students will do and say, I can respond thoughtfully with feedback that values who they are and advances their thinking in meaningful ways. Second, the lessons involved a lot of mathematical discourse. Of course, I didn't call it discourse 30 years ago, but that is what it was. Students talked to each other enthusiastically about the mathematics they were doing and learning. Back then, I stood in my room in complete awe while students made discoveries about squares, square roots, primes, and composite numbers as they made concrete multiplication models while shouting their ideas with glee and enthusiasm that I couldn't quite believe but wholeheartedly loved. More recently, my college students formed debate teams and argued their ideas about the relationship between area and perimeter and why it was an important idea in the elementary classroom. This time, I took a seat in the back of the classroom and let my students shine. Oh, and there was a little bit of good-natured shouting once again. Now that I think about it, in both lessons, someone curiously peeked in from the hallway to see what was going on. Finally, but most importantly, my elementary and college students were solving problems that were interesting and compelling to them. They were focused on proving their ideas, constructing arguments that others would find convincing, and showcasing their incredible mathematical ideas in thoughtful and creative ways. These mathematics problems are worth solving because they show my students how much I respect and care about who they are as mathematical learners and people. My "best" can always be better. I talked too much then and find I still do. I fire off questions because I am excited, and my students scramble to figure out which question to answer. I am still working on how to get out of the way when my students are thinking, analyzing, and problem-solving, and step in at just the right moment to pose a question that will prompt a new strategy or idea. More recently, I have turned my focus to recognizing and leveraging my students' innumerable strengths in every mathematics lesson. This focus is a work in progress but has the potential to increase access to mathematics and provide a more equitable learning environment for each and every one of my students. Right now, my effort to thoroughly plan, provide multiple student-discourse opportunities, situate my lessons within a problem-solving context, and leverage students' strengths is my hope for my next "best" lesson. If I can get these components to align, perhaps my next lesson will be my "best" lesson.
Student Engagement Is "The Barometer for a Good Math Lesson"
Jill Henry teaches problem-based Algebra 2 at Flintridge Preparatory School, a 7-12 independent school in the Los Angeles area. Jill holds a master's degree in secondary mathematics education with a specialization in constructivist learning and has served as a curriculum consultant for several national mathematics education grants:
I've always considered student engagement to be the barometer for a good math lesson. The best ones are those that grab students' attention by getting them invested in the content. Ones that prompt students to ask thoughtful questions with enthusiasm. Ones that result in a collaborative learning environment where the whole room is engrossed in a discussion together. Year after year, I consistently find that my students display their highest levels of engagement when we talk about college-student loans in my Algebra 2 class. This lesson happens during the unit on geometric sequences and series and ties in nicely with any discussion about interest. For homework the night before the lesson, I give students three tasks. First, answer several research questions about loans: "What percent of college students carry student loans? What is the average amount borrowed? What are the typical interest rates for loans (federal and private)? What is the maximum loan amount (federal and private)? What is a typical loan length? How is the loan paid back, and how is the interest calculated?" Second, students are instructed to determine the full sticker price for four years (tuition plus room and board) at their "dream" school. Finally, if comfortable, they are encouraged to have a conversation with their parents about how they will be expected to pay for college. If they are uncomfortable having that conversation, and have no knowledge of any college savings that may exist for them, then they are told to assume a yearly family contribution of $5,000. The next day in class, students are asked to determine how much money they would need to borrow to attend their dream school. This value is calculated with a simple difference: loan amount = total cost of school - total family contribution. They then break down their anticipated need into two separate loans, one federal and one private (if needed), as these have different maximum limits and interest rates. Finally, using Excel, students simulate the payback and calculate the most meaningful figure: the amount due per month. The lesson typically ends with a brief discussion about that specific monthly loan payment, for which we brainstorm the cost of other standard "adult" expenses in order to give that figure some context. There are many ways to extend this lesson. Some years, I've had students explore Roth IRA's to illustrate the positive effects of interest. In others, I've had students research the starting salary of their dream job and create a budget for themselves, including their loan payment along with other life costs, to determine the amount of discretionary income, or "fun money," they'd realistically have left over at the end of each month. The personalized nature of this lesson is a large part of what I believe makes it so engaging. Students find it fun to both consider and research their future-where they might go to college, what they might do for work, and where they might live. Taking out a student loan is often the first large financial decision that a person makes, and it's of critical importance that high school students are educated about the ramifications of debt before they are faced with borrowing money for school. "Buried in Debt," a national research study completed in 2018, illustrated the significant financial hardship and devastating domino effect that student-loan debt is having on the lives of graduates across the country. If you have a chance to review this report for yourself, I'm sure you'll agree that the findings are very disheartening. For many of my students, this lesson marks their first time looking at a college website, particularly at the cost page. The first time teenagers consider how they're going to pay for college shouldn't be during the college process itself, where emotions and stress are already running high for both student and their family. Talking about these things well in advance of college allows for a highly engaging but relatively low stress conversation, one that prepares students for real life in a way that few other math topics truly can.
"Understanding Fractions"
Avery Zachery graduated from Georgia State University with a bachelor's degree in early-childhood education and a master's degree in reading, language and literacy, and has an ESOL and mathematics endorsement. Zachery has been teaching for nine years, currently at Winston Elementary School in Douglas County, Ga., teaching math, science, and social studies in a team-teaching model:
As an elementary math teacher in Georgia, it's important for me to be aware of the Georgia Milestones Assessment and particularly the fact that fractions account for 30 percent of the content. Without a firm understanding of fractions, students will struggle to perform well on their End of Grade Assessment.
With this in mind, the best and perhaps most important lesson I taught was "Lesson 17: Adding and Subtracting Mixed Numbers" in our Ready Georgia Mathematics The lesson starts off with two problems featuring addition of mixed numbers. Both problems require the students to regroup fractions and rename them as whole numbers. Most teachers would start with adding like terms and not including regrouping in the first introduction of the concept. However, our curriculum builds in the rigor from the start of the lesson. The first two problems have real-world connections and are relatable to students. I really liked how the problem was taken step by step and presented in a variety of ways. The problems were modeled pictorially, on a number line, and numerically.
The second half of the lesson is on subtracting mixed numbers, which can be a major challenge for students. Ready Math introduces the concept with a problem that has a greater fraction in the subtrahend than in the minuend. When teaching this lesson, I was shocked at the depth of knowledge needed to complete this problem: 4 ¼ - 1 ¾. The problem starts with allowing the students to model it. Modeling the problem allowed the students to see how to subtract mixed numbers pictorially. They were able to show the regrouping within the model. The lesson also presented the concept of subtracting mixed numbers in multiple ways. This is a very difficult concept for students to comprehend, but the way it was taught here made it much easier for students to be successful. "I Just Told Them We Were Going for a Walk" curriculum. This is a pivotal lesson in giving students a firm understanding of fractions. One of the best math lessons that I taught was teaching perimeter to my 3rd grade students. It was a good lesson because it sparked my students' curiosity, it prompted my students to be problem solvers, the task involved was a real-world task that made sense, they collaborated with each other, there was movement involved, they used real-world mathematics tools, and it was hands-on. I took my students on a walk along the fence that was around the perimeter of the field. I didn't tell them the real reason; I just told them we were going to go for a walk. As we walked, I asked them to share what they were noticing as we walked. They mentioned we were walking in a rectangle, walking by a fence, and we were in a straight line. I stopped the line four times and shared the measurement of the length we had walked and then we went inside. I handed each group a card that had a picture of a field with a rectangular fence with the same measurements we had just walked. I prompted them to determine the perimeter of the fence. They talked it out and determined that the perimeter must be the measurement of the fence surrounding the field and they figured out that they could add the four measurements to determine the perimeter. We talked about their solution process and confirmed the meaning of perimeter. I then showed them our undecorated bulletin board and told them that we needed to staple on a border. I gave them border, a ruler, and scissors. Once again, they worked together to determine the perimeter of the bulletin board and how much border they would need. One of the main reasons this worked out so well was because there was time given for students to figure things out, draw their own conclusions, and test things out.
"Choral Counting"
Cindy Garcia has been a bilingual educator for 14 years and is currently the district instructional specialist for PK-6 bilingual/ESL mathematics in the Pasadena Independent school district (Texas). She is active onTwitter @CindyGarciaTX and on her blog:
Our work started by going around the school teaching "row" and "column" to many classrooms in the building. These are crucial tier-2 words that are commonly misunderstood. To advance this work, we teamed up to co-teach a choral-counting routine that incorporates these terms in a meaningful way. Choral counting is a fun, engaging routine in which students count aloud together, then notice patterns and make connections. We love this routine because all students are fully engaged in oral language in mathematics. This activity promotes authentic academic conversations that encourage students to make connections with each other and with the content. In this routine, the children count aloud together by a given number-sometimes forward, sometimes backwards. The teacher selects a number for the students to skip count by, and on what number to start and end the count. As the Teacher Education By Design site says, "The goal of this activity is not just to practice rote counting but to engage children in reasoning, predicting, and justifying." Having the math coach come into the ELL pullout classroom and co-teach choral counting with the ELL teacher provides the scaffolds necessary for ELLs to engage in the routine. Classroom teachers lead the choral-counting routine in their rooms, and our goal is to give our ELLs practice using the scaffolds so that they can be more engaged with the native-language speakers in the classroom. While not all children may be counting up to the same range of numbers, it's important for all students to hear the sequence, notice the rhythm, and make connections.
There are many benefits in using choral counting with ELLs:
Molly Rawding, K-5 mathematics coach, and Catherine Murphy, K-5 ELL specialist, have been working together for years to develop scaffolds in math for our shared ELLs in the building. They both teach at Fiske Elementary School in Lexington, Mass.
We have integrated this 10-15 minute routine on a regular basis (every other week). Here's what it looks like:

there is an entry point for all language levels

the focus of the activity is on a visual with low language demands

can be used for oral and written responses

fosters great effective prompts for academic conversations i.e., " What do you notice?" We had lower WIDA level students paraphrasing each other to get valuable practice with talking about math.

imbeds tier-2 words that students hear and need to know in their classrooms

Next, the teacher records as the students count. Based on the goal of the selected number sequence, the teacher records in a certain way (from the top or bottom-and a certain number in each row).
Image by Molly Rawding

Before class, the math coach and ELL teacher meet to plan the count: Determine the count (start and stop number) and how to record the numbers on chart paper.

To begin, the teachers share what number the count will start with and by what number students are skip counting. ("Today, you are going to count starting at 5 and counting up by 5s and keep counting until 135.")

The goal is to have "one voice" so the students, similar to singing a song, all say the numbers at the same time. This takes practice, and it's important for the teachers to stop if the voices are not in sync. Then start again.

After the students count to 135, they count again often with a focus on making sure all voices are in the count.

The teacher might ask, "What number comes next?" and "How do you know?"

This routine is one of our favorites because it is so engaging and students notice many interesting patterns and connections. This activity is highly beneficial for ELLs of all WIDA levels because it promotes development in all domains in mathematics. For further thought: → We have also added a "clap" on the 10's so students recognize groups of 10's (10, 20, 30...), and when they say that number, they clap. → We have also connected choral counting to money as we count by nickels or dimes. → We audiotaped students during the choral count and replayed it for them so they could hear how they sounded. Students were excited to try again counting louder, clearer, and in sync. More Resources: Check out Choral Counting Academic Conversation Recommendations Teach academic conversation norms and develop a routine at the start of the year. Check out Catherine's website Employ routines for paraphrasing and elaborating (so what you're saying is). Check out Jeff Zwiers
Developing "Student Understanding of Numeracy Vocabulary" for more information and ways to get started. The math lesson I found to be the best and most memorable was one I taught with i-Ready The Understanding Addition lesson provided students with practice, challenges, and fun. Math practice determines the students' level of knowledge according to tailored math lessons and develops each student's ownership of their learning. Challenging mathematics teaches students how to link math vocabulary and symbols when discussing concepts-steps that are needed to be used to solve problems. Promoting engagement with math―as opposed to drill and skill exercises―is a tactic that encourages students to use math to solve everyday problems. The following technology connections are within this lesson: All these components work together to improve student engagement in their learning process while personalizing lessons for students according to their strengths and weaknesses. Personalized mathematics-lesson data is used for charting data about student performance and progress. As a kindergarten teacher, I find that this lesson provides teachers with concrete data about student engagement, understanding, mastery, and needs for growth. A data-driven classroom is a classroom built for student success. Cross-Curricular Teaching , "Understanding Addition Level AA." This lesson creates a classroom environment that develops student understanding of numeracy vocabulary. Understanding Addition is introduced through pictorial, concrete, and abstract problem-solving strategies. These strategies equip students with the skills and knowledge to know how to count and add. The lesson also provided me with data about the students' strengths and weaknesses, which I used to form learning units and adjust classroom instruction to meet the needs of both succeeding and struggling students. The best math lesson that I have had the opportunity to teach was a collaborative effort with a language arts teacher. In math, the lesson was drawing and identifying units to scale in the month of February. While collaborating with the language arts teacher, we created a research project that would require our students to research and write a report about a prominent African American in history; the students would take a picture of the person they were researching and create an enlarged image of one of their pictures. Of course, our students were able to choose the person they would like to study and the picture they would enlarge. The project took the better part of three weeks if my memory serves me correctly. We gave the students the opportunity to flexibly go between classrooms during this time. Each and every day the students were provided feedback from not just the educators but their peers as well. The students helped to create the rubric that they would be assessed on. Each student had to present their learning as a culminating project. We displayed their learning in the hallways. The students were proud of everything that they learned and were willing to put their learning on display for the school community. This is a lesson that I would love to teach again because it truly demonstrated the cross-curricular connections within our learning. I still have several of the finished projects in my possession.
for more information on academic conversations. for more information, videos, and ideas.

After the count, students take a minute to silently look at the recording of the number to "notice" patterns and observations.

Students then share, one at a time, describing their observations using a sentence frame such as, "The pattern in the row is _____________" or "I see a pattern that _____________" During this time, the teacher records the patterns on the chart.

After two or three students share, students engage in academic conversations to paraphrase and elaborate on the patterns that they see.

Students notice so many interesting patterns, and they build on each other's ideas. We set a time limit of 15 minutes for this routine-and often revisit the chart later in the week.

Dr. Jennifer McBride-Donaldson is a native of Augusta, Ga. She is in her 20 th year as a teacher, currently as a kindergarten teacher at Richmond Hill K-8 STEM School. McBride-Donaldson gains the greatest pleasure by watching young learners use various technology devices to solve problems, explore, grow, and enhance their understanding of mathematics:

Dennis Griffin Jr. serves as the principal of Brown Deer Elementary School in Wisconsin. He has seven years of experience as a middle school educator and is entering his sixth year as an administrator. He is currently pursuing his doctoral studies in educational leadership at Cardinal Stritch University. Dennis believes all students will be successful in school when they develop relationships with educators that value their gifts, cultures, and individuality:
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email or RSS Reader. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first eight years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. The list doesn't include ones from this current year, but you can find those by clicking on the "answers" category found in the sidebar. This Year's Most Popular Q&A Posts Race & Gender Challenges Classroom-Management Advice Best Ways to Begin the School Year Best Ways to End the School Year Implementing the Common Core Student Motivation & Social-Emotional Learning Teaching Social Studies Cooperative & Collaborative Learning Using Tech in the Classroom Parent Engagement in Schools Teaching English-Language Learners Reading Instruction Writing Instruction Education Policy Issues Assessment Differentiating Instruction Math Instruction Science Instruction Advice for New Teachers Author Interviews Entering the Teaching Profession The Inclusive Classroom Learning & the Brain Administrator Leadership Teacher Leadership Relationships in Schools Professional Development Instructional Strategies Best of Classroom Q&A Professional Collaboration Classroom Organization Mistakes in Education Project-Based Learning
Thanks to Beth, Jill, Avery, Cindy, Molly, Catherine, Jennifer, and Dennis for their contributions.
Look for Part Two in a few days.
Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it's selected or if you'd prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

Education Week has published a collection of posts from this blog, along with new material, in an e-book form. It's titled Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching.

I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column.

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Eight Educators Share Their Best Math Lessons

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The new question-of-the-week is: What has been the best math lesson you have taught and why do you think it was so good? We've all taught some great lessons and we've also all taught some pretty bad ones. This two-part series will feature math educators sharing more of the former ...

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by Tamara Ghandour

Brainstorms are important and an easy way to get everybody together to collaborate, discuss, debate, and ultimately, innovate. But sometimes, you come out of them feeling as if you didn't get the ideas that you needed, or that the same ideas were being rehashed, or that it was a complete waste of time. So, why do your brainstorms suck, and how can you overcome that?
Reason #1: Brainstorm exercises lack intention
Most brainstorms aren't really brainstorms - they're arts and crafts sessions with icebreaker exercises. Interaction, fun exercises, and engagement are important in a brainstorm. However, if the activities you're doing during your brainstorm sessions are just for fun, but don't connect to the problems you're trying to solve and aren't relevant, nobody is going to participate. In these kinds of brainstorms that are just a bunch of fun exercises with no purpose, people tend to tune out and disengage, because while fun is great, they can't see the point of the exercise.

When you think about leading your next brainstorm, it's not enough to think about how to make it engaging and interactive. You also need to think about how to create exercises that have a purpose. The exercises need to make people think, help them connect in new ways, and create new paths for ideas.

Be purposeful and intentional with your exercises. Ensure that you can correlate them directly to the task at hand, not just "for fun". Putting thought into your exercises and brainstorm activities takes a little bit more effort, but it is absolutely worth it.
Reason #2: Brainstorms discuss people, not ideas
A huge challenge in brainstorming is that we accidentally end up discussing and debating people instead of ideas. In a brainstorming session, we often associate the ideas with the people who came up with them, and this makes the process too personal. It makes people feel like they personally are being discussed, rather than constructively debating the idea itself.

A very simple solution to this is, instead of having people say their ideas out loud, have them write their ideas on sticky notes and put them up on a wall. This way, the ideas are brought to the front and center of the discussion. The focus then shifts to the content, and the ideas, not the people.

In my experience, when we debate and discuss ideas, rather than the people who came up with them, it's much easier to get to the right solutions, see the opportunities, and fill the gaps. Putting the spotlight on the ideas means we're able to have real, honest discussions about the ideas, and not get derailed by discussing the people behind them.
Reason #3: Brainstorms only cater to one type of person
Every team or organization is made up of different types of people, yet our brainstorms are often designed to cater to just one type of person or style of thinking. This means we're not leveraging all the different strengths that everyone brings to the table.

In order to capitalize on all the different types of innovators in the room, we have to build the agenda of the brainstorm in a way that speaks to different types of people. We might include reflection time, talking time, small group discussions, large group discussions and a variety of other exercises to tap into the different types of people.

The truth is, we have to design our brainstorms to be more dynamic. There's a reason why we want diversity in background and thinking on our teams. But it's more than just having them on our teams. We need to create brainstorms that leverage them and tap into their strengths by bringing in a variety of tools and resources that speak to each different type of innovator.
Bonus: Innovation doesn't happen out of nowhere
The underlying reason why brainstorms really suck is because people are often expected to innovate out of nowhere. They're expected to just keep their heads down and not even think about innovation in their day-to-day work, and then to produce creative and innovative ideas when they're thrown together in a room at 3pm with scented markers and blank easel pads. That's an unrealistic expectation, and a key reason why brainstorms suck.

If you want your brainstorms to succeed at the times when you do bring people together to collaborate, you have to allow people to innovate outside these sessions, while they're actually doing the work. Allowing people to innovate and prioritizing innovation outside the brainstorm will help generate more innovation during the brainstorm. People will come prepared with fresh perspectives, ideas and challenges that they'd have been contemplating already.

Here's the thing: brainstorms can be powerful, and we do need to bring people together, but we need to do it in a way that works.

By using brainstorm activities that have an objective attached to them, debating ideas instead of people, building brainstorms that tap into the varied styles of thinking, and allowing people to innovate beyond just the time allocated for it, we can have more productive and fruitful brainstorms that help us innovate, and win.

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Tamara Ghandour of GoToLaunchStreet is a TED speaker and entrepreneur. From building and running multimillion dollar businesses, advising Fortune 500 like Disney, Procter and Gamble and RICOH on fostering innovative ideas and people. Tamara's life is about breaking through the status quo for game-changing results, and that's what her keynotes, online programs and assessments can do for you.

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by Tamara Ghandour Brainstorms are important and an easy way to get everybody together to collaborate, discuss, debate, and ultimately, innovate. But sometimes, you come out of them feeling as if you didn't get the ideas that you needed, or that the same ideas were being rehashed, or that it was a complete waste of time.

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"fun" is not always memorable

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When we look back on our own school days, our strongest memories are probably a mix of big occasions-field trips, plays, and sports days alongside more personal events tinged with strong emotion. Things that happened that were really funny or sad, or that made us feel excited, interested, exhilarated, or angry. We don't tend to remember vividly, if at all, actually learning the substance of math or English or design technology. We might remember amusing anecdotes from lessons gone awry, or still bristle at past injustices - "but I wasn't talking" - or have a vague impression of sitting in the science lab, with fleeting snippets of memories of this or that experiment. All of which leads to us making the entirely reasonable hypothesis that if we want students to remember what we teach them, then we need to make our lessons more like the spectacular one-off special events, or, at the very least, involve something specially selected because it's exciting and possibly unusual. Memorable events, in this view, should form the template for creating memorable lessons.

As reasonable as this seems, this is a myth. It is a myth because human memory works in two different ways, both equally valid but one of which is much better at enabling us to transfer what we have learnt to new contexts. This transfer is an essential prerequisite for creativity and critical thinking.

The two forms of memory are known as episodic and semantic memory. Episodic memory is the memory of the 'episodes' of our life-our autobiographical memory. This takes no effort on our part, it simply happens. We don't have to try consciously to remember what happened yesterday. Those memories just happen automatically. But there is a downside. Episodic memory is "easy come, easy go." If you try to remember what you had for lunch yesterday, you will probably remember. If you try to remember what you had for lunch a year ago today-unless that happened to be some very significant date and some particularly noteworthy lunch-you will have no idea.

Semantic memory, on the other hand, involves much harder work. We have to expend effort to create semantic memories. This is the kind of memory we use when we consciously study something because we want to remember it. Unlike episodic memory, it does not just happen. The upside, however, is that the effort involved results in a long lasting memory.

Have you ever been in a course where you have really enjoyed listening to the speaker, found the subject matter interesting and the presenter amusing and engaging. Yet when you try to explain to someone the next day what the course was about, all that is really left is a vague impression of your emotions during the day, tinged with the odd snippet of content? You know the course was really good yet can't really explain what it was actually about beyond the most general of assertions. That's because at that point your memories are mainly episodic and are already fading. This is particularly likely to have happened if you just listened to the speaker rather than making some notes, and if you didn't have to do activities during the day that made you think hard about the content. But even if you did, unless you reread those notes some time later, or read the PowerPoint, or the blogs they mentioned, or plan a staff meeting to tell others about what you have learnt, unless you expend some effort in revisiting the message, however inspiring you found the message at the time, your memory of actual specifics will quickly fade away-leaving you with at best fond memories of an enjoyable and interesting day.

Episodic memory is highly contextual-memories come bundled together with the sensory experiences and emotions we experienced at the time. So when we recall our course, we remember the vicious air conditioning, the awesome lunch, the snazzy stationery. Annoyingly, we may remember these things more strongly that the things we really want to remember. Teachers probably have had this experience with classes. When teachers ask students to remember what they were learning the previous day, the students remember all sorts of things: that you used Post-it Notes, that Mollie was late, that you spilt your coffee, that Liam made a hilarious joke. The actual lesson content? Memories of that are much weaker.

These emotional and sensory cues are triggered when we try and retrieve an episodic memory. The problem is that sometimes students remember the contextual tags but not the actual learning. Episodic memory is so tied up with context it is no good for remembering things once that context is no longer present. This means that it has serious limitations in terms of its usefulness as the main strategy for educating children, since whatever is remembered is so bound up with the context in which it was taught. This does not make for flexible, transferable learning that can be brought to bear in different contexts and circumstances. Yet it is this transferability that is the essential prerequisite for creativity and critical thinking.

Fortunately, we also have semantic memory. Semantic memory does not have the limitations of episodic memory. Semantic memories are context free. Semantic memories have been liberated from the emotional and spatial/temporal context in which they were first acquired. Once a concept has been stored in the semantic memory, it is more flexible and transferable between different contexts. Semantic memory is central, therefore. to long-term learning, learning that can be put to use in novel contexts to solve unexpected problems. Semantic memory is what we use when we are problem-solving or being creative. Those involve applying something learnt in one context to another, novel context. Episodic memories, by contrast, aren't flexible and don't easily transfer, because they are anchored in specifics.

This explains the frustration teachers feel at the beginning of each school year when children they have been assured are very competent appear to have absolutely no clue. It is not that their previous teacher was lying or deluded when they said they understood fractions. It was that the previous teacher had not realized that this understanding was not yet secure in semantic memory and was still highly reliant on episodic memory. It was therefore highly dependent on strong contextual cues to be remembered. Move the child to a different classroom, with a different teacher, sitting next to different classmates, and, without the familiar context, the learning simply cannot be recalled. This is bad enough when children move from one class to another but is greatly amplified when children change schools, such as moving from primary to secondary school. Here the context is hugely different, different building, different journey to school, different uniform, much that is familiar gone. No wonder secondary teachers often think primary teachers over-estimate what their former pupils know. With so much familiar context removed, only what has been securely remembered in the semantic memory will be able to be transferred to life in year 7.

Forming semantic memories requires work and practice. Unlike episodic memories, they don't just happen. If you want to remember something, you need to think about it, not just experience it. The cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explains that "memory is the residue of thought." The more you have thought about something, the more likely it is that you will remember it. So teachers have to make sure that lessons give students the opportunity to think the things we actually want them to remember, rather than some extraneous other thing. We need them to think about the message of the lesson, rather than the medium we use to teach it. This is where "fun" lessons can unintentionally prevent learning happening. If the medium chosen to deliver the lesson is too obtrusive, it is that the students will think about, rather than whatever it is we actually want them to learn. For example, I remember someone suggesting using water pistols to teach children about angles. This is a suggestion not without some merit. In particular, I like the way here angle is being taught vertically as trajectory rather than just horizontally as is more usual with paper, pencil, and protractor. However, maybe the author of this suggestion is a much more skilled teacher than most, but I can't help thinking that many children would be thinking more about opportunities to accidentally on purpose squirt Hamid than on the nature of acute angles. Even a rather less adventurous activity-a math game for example-runs the risk that children think hard about the rules rather than the actual math. This is not a problem if a teacher decides to sacrifice one lesson to learn the rules of a game that will then be used repeatedly throughout the year. But is highly problematic if teachers are not alert to the possibilities that they might be unintentionally sabotaging learning by making the medium of learning more prominent than the actual message. When teachers plan lessons, we need to be mindful of what children will be thinking about during each part of the lesson, rather than what they will be feeling or doing. Have we planned activities that will ensure children think hard about the right things? If not, don't be surprised when children remember very little beyond the confines of that specific lesson.

Some kinds of activity do involve hard thinking, but not always about the central things we want children to understand. For example, doing practical science experiments involves lots of thinking about planning, what to do next, monitoring what is happening. In fact, the practical elements require so much mental energy that there isn't much cognitive bandwidth left over for actually thinking about the concepts the experiment is meant to prove. When Ofsted, the British Office for Standards in Education, investigated science teaching in primary schools, it found that many schools mistakenly attempted to teach the concepts of science almost entirely through practical experiments:
"The misconception here is that 'working scientifically' becomes the mechanism for teaching knowledge and concepts. However, approaching the teaching of science in this way leads to a recurring problem that pupils are engaged in these lessons, but it is the experiment that is memorable and not the underlying knowledge intended to be learned. For instance, when inspectors questioned pupils during the research visits, pupils could easily recall the task carried out, but struggled to explain how the processes they were investigating actually worked."
Which is not to say that children shouldn't do scientific experiments, but that teachers need to be acutely aware that students are highly unlikely to gain understanding of scientific concepts unless the experiments are conducted after these concepts have already been taught. Once the scientific concepts are secure, children are much more able to really 'think like scientists' with the added benefit that the practical activity then consolidates understanding of the previous learning.

The same is true for activities that require children to research information for themselves. If this is done as a way of acquiring information in the first instance, then the cognitive effort of locating the correct information is unlikely to leave space for children to actually remember much about what they have found out. Children will be thinking about where they can find what they need to find out and whether what they are reading is relevant, rather than actually thinking about what it says. If remembering what it says is important - and presumably it was or why waste time finding out about it-then teachers need to bear in mind that extra time, either before or after the research activities, will need to be spent thinking hard about it.

This problem raises its head yet again in teaching math through problem solving. Some teachers believe that rich tasks such as investigations where children discover relationships for themselves are a much better way of teaching than telling children explicitly how to do things. Discovering is seen as more creative, requiring more imagination, more interesting and therefore much more likely to result in children really understanding the math conceptually, rather than just regurgitating a procedure. However, while rich tasks have their place, they are completely inappropriate for the initial stage of learning, when children are encountering a concept for the first time. If we want children to become independent problem-solvers, we need to teach them carefully and explicitly so that semantic memory can begin to form. Counter intuitive as it may seem, children do not become independent problem solvers by independently solving problems. This is because when children are trying to solve problems before they know the necessary math to do so, they will be expending considerable mental energy tracking what they are meant to be solving against what they have found out so far, so much so that even when they are successful, they will have forgotten what they actually did en route to finally finding the answer!

There is a lot of research that shows that teaching is much more effective when the teacher explicitly explains material in small, carefully thought out steps, giving children lots of opportunity to practise before going onto the next small step. This is particularly true in the early knowledge acquisition phase of learning. For example see Barak Roshenshine's "Principles of Instruction," or Coe et al What Makes Great Teaching or Centre for Education and Statistics of New South Wales, Australia, report, What works best: evidence-based practices to help improve NSW performance, all of which reach similar conclusions.

Even if lessons break material down into small steps and involve children thinking hard about the right things, teachers might still have the following all too familiar experience. At the end of a sequence of lessons on a particular topic, a teacher feels reasonably confident that most of the class have learnt how to do whatever it was they have been learning-the grid method, for example. Children may perform reasonably well in an end-of-unit assessment. However, revisit the topic a few weeks later, and not only can children not remember how to do the grid method, several deny all knowledge of having even heard of it before! This situation can leave teachers feeling dispirited and wondering where they have gone wrong.

Unless teachers plan opportunities to revisit concepts again later, some time removed from recent teaching of the concept, it is likely that semantic memory will not yet be strong enough to do the job we need it to do. We need to multiply the opportunities pupils have to think hard about the important things we want them to learn. Are we giving students opportunities to think about concepts in a less highly cued environment? It's not that hard to do the grid method in the middle of a lesson where the teacher has just modelled how to do the grid method. To build strong semantic memory, students need opportunities to do things when the specific teaching of how to do them is less recent. They also need opportunities to do them when they are less tightly cued. When. For example, they haven't been told - "to work this out this you will need to multiply, using the grid method."

In lessons, teachers provide all sorts of clues and prompts that held children give the right answers. This is fine as a first step, but unless teachers also have strategies that enable learners to move beyond performance, little might actually be retained longer term. In a 2015 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork explain the difference between performance and learning. Performance is what we can see happening during teaching. Learning, on the other hand, is something invisible that goes on inside children's heads. We cannot observe learning, we can only infer it. Frustratingly, current performance is a terrible guide to knowing whether or not learning has actually happened or not. Teachers and leaders are at risk at being fooled by current performance and think that change in the long term semantic memory (aka learning) has taken place.

It is not uncommon for people to disagree with this emphasis on building semantic memory. Sometimes people argue "but I don't remember anything I learnt at school." When people say this, what they usually mean is "I don't have strong episodic memories of learning specific things at school." This is actually a good thing for which they should be grateful. We don't want to have to remember the context alongside content-that would really impede our ability to think. Much of what we learnt at school we don't remember learning, and yet we know it. This is because the episodic memory of the actual lesson has long since faded, while the semantic memory formed through thinking hard about the content-albeit perhaps somewhat reluctantly at the time-endures. This is why people know about triangles and oxygen, Anne Boleyn and paragraphs, square numbers and ox bow lakes, color-mixing and Lady Macbeth. Do people remember actually learning about these things? Probably not, yet you know it (or most of it) and though a person may have not thought about ox bow lakes for decades, at the very mention, back the memory comes, effortlessly. That's the beauty of semantic memory. It isn't, and doesn't need to be, tied up with episodic clutter. We don't need to have fond memories of sitting on the carpet in Reception whilst Mrs. Blackburn told us all about triangles to know about triangles. You have, as Solomon Kingsnorth so gloriously put it " a private tour guide to the universe, living inside your brain " instantly available.

What you know shapes what you see. You or I might look at a mountain and just see...a mountain. A geologist might look at mountains rather differently, as might a keen cyclist. One sees the mountain as we do, yet also sees rock formations, the other sees gear ratios. To have a richly stocked semantic memory is, as Ian Leslie put it in the book Curious, to have access to "an augmented reality, everything [you] see is overlaid with additional layers of meaning and possibility."

If you know about the kind of things listed above-Anne Boleyn and paragraphs and ox bow lakes, for example-you are knowledge privileged. You have been given opportunities to think hard about stuff you didn't know and therefore have a vast repository of semantic memory on hand, readily available whenever you want it. Yet it is all too easy to overlook this privilege and vastly under-estimate how much we do in fact know and how much our schooling benefited us. Because we don't remember learning what we know, we don't remember the effort that went into teaching it. We may assume that the really important stuff we know was learnt once we left school, not realizing that it was the semantic memories acquired at school that created the foundations we were able to build upon so fruitfully later. Had things been otherwise, our ability to think would have been greatly diminished. We might have gone to a school that thought it most important to provide interesting and exciting experiences, and that while that might have been fun, it might well have left us with an impoverished ability to think or be truly creative, especially if our access to powerful knowledge at home was limited. Before we decide to impose our own agendas onto children's education, we need to check our knowledge privilege before making decisions that will deprive children of their fair share of the rich cultural inheritance our world affords and to which they are entitled.

Episodic memory might appear, at first glance, the more 'human' of the two forms of memory, the memory of people, feelings and places that makes us who we are. Semantic memory seems colder, more robotic. Yet it is our amazing ability to store culturally acquired learning in our semantic memory that makes as so successful as a species. The key purpose of education is to build strong semantic memory, to pass on the knowledge built up over centuries to the next generation; how to read and write, how stories work, how to use mathematical reasoning to solve problems, science with its amazing predictive power and the myriad of other concepts, ideas, and practices. That is not to say that building semantic memory is the only purpose of education. We want to help form children who are emotionally literate and morally responsible too. That will involve thinking about the kind of episodic memories we try to build for our children. If we treat our children with kindness and respect, they will have episodic memories of what it was like to be treated kindly and respectfully, which makes it more likely they too will treat others with kindness and respect themselves. Alongside the building of cultural capital in the semantic memory, we should also be building social, moral, and spiritual capital. While building semantic memory will play an important part in this, so too will be developing episodic memory as for these vital dimensions of human experience recalling the emotional context is perhaps even more crucial.

Nor is it to say that there should be no consideration of creating the kind of memorable experiences that trips and plays and so forth afford. Such special events that punctuate the day-to-day routine of school life are the festivals, the "Christmas dinner" of the school year. They are special because they are infrequent and resource-heavy and different. They contrast with the everyday, bread and butter hum drum familiarity of ordinary school life. But the everyday is our core purpose.

Lest I create in turn more myths, let me make some caveats.

Where we educate children who have limited life experience and who do not have rich episodic memories, it will be all the more important for us to provide the kind of rich experiences- trips to the seaside, to the theatre and art galleries, to see first-hand mountains, cities, forests. For many children, such exposure is part and parcel of family life. For others, experience beyond the immediately local is pretty much non-existent. Where this is the case, we owe it to the children to try and provide the kinds of first-hand experience that expands horizons. Very young children, regardless of background, by definition have less rich life experience, so need more memorable experiences as a sort of "welcome to the world" primer pack.

It is also possible to overstate the separateness of episodic and semantic memory. There is a degree of overlap between the two. They are not water-tight compartments. For example, in one experiment, people were asked to list kitchen utensils. First, participants drew on the contents of their semantic memory, but when that ran out they turned to thinking specifically about their own kitchens and remembering what was there. They augmented their recall from semantic memory with context-specific episodic memories.

Strong emotion makes things stick in episodic memory, as does novelty. So doing some sort of less routine, novel or exciting event to round off learning about something might complement semantic memory-a trip at the end of a topic of work for example. Returning to the early example of teaching angle using water pistols, maybe doing this after a series of more traditional lessons might be a good way of reaping the benefits of both forms of memory, as might be doing that science experiment that proves the concept you have been learning about. It is not a simple binary choice between always only doing one or the other. Nor is it the case that episodic memory is in some way "bad" or inferior. It's just different. The deliberate building of semantic memory is much more likely to result in long lasting, flexible and transferable memory than putting most of your energies into the episodic basket, so should form the bulk of what we spend our time on. But not every moment of every day. Knowing the limitations of both forms of memory can help us make wiser and more productive choices.

Clare Sealy has spent 30 years as a primary school teacher, 22 of them as head of St Matthias Primary School in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London. She has recently left headship to become of head of curriculum and standards for the States of Guernsey. She blogs at www.primarytimery.com. Her particular interests are the application of cognitive science in the classroom, rethinking assessment for learning, and curriculum development. This article is based on a chapter she wrote for The ResearchEd Guide to Education Myths: An evidence-informed guide for teachers (John Catt Educational, 2019, $15, 160 pages.)

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The Best Way to Help Children Remember Things? Not "Memorable Experiences"

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The difference between "Episodic Memory" and "Semantic Memory," and what it means for teaching and learning

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Whole class Vs small group reading instruction

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Whole class Vs small group reading instruction

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What the Research says

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Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on April 28, 2018 and re-posted on November 23, 2019. I thought it a good idea to re-issue this posting now because of MIke Schmoker's recent column in Education Week ( https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/11/20/how-to-make-reading-instruction-much-much.html). I know lots of educators love the idea of working with small groups in reading, but that is not always best practice (though under the right circumstances it can be useful). This blog explores the ins and outs (and ups and downs) of small group instruction in reading. Hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving).
Teacher question: I was curious what your thoughts are regarding small group instruction in Elementary school during the ELA block. I'm unaware of any definitive research on the effect size of small group instruction or the impact it has regarding student achievement in reading. There seems to be a few different schools of thought: direct whole group instruction for all components of reading, shortened whole group reading followed by differentiated small group instruction, whole group instruction followed by student work groups facilitated by teacher walking around. It seems all three could be effective depending on the students, the teacher and rigor of text or content being used. However, I'm curious if there is a research-based recommendation?
Shanahan's response:

What a smart question.

Small group teaching is ubiquitous in elementary reading. Sixty-years ago (when I was being taught to read) the same was true-though since our classes then were so large, "small group" usually meant groups about the size of today's typical classroom enrollment!

A hundred years ago there was a great deal of within-class grouping, but that was due to the pervasive one-room schoolhouse. The "groups" were the "grades" that the kids were in (my dad, for years, bragged that he "graduated at the top of his class"-meaning that the other kid flunked).

When I was first exploring the idea of becoming a teacher myself, the lore of the time was that reading teachers always had three reading groups: the Robins, Blue Jays, and Crows. As a teacher's aide it looked that way to me, and I certainly wasn't surprised during student teaching when Mr. Krentzin had me take over his reading groups one at a time, so I could ease into it.

As a primary grade teacher, I always grouped my kids for reading instruction. (Studies since the 1960s usually report that more than 90% of primary grade teachers group for reading instruction, and the numbers are still high in grades 4 and 5, as well).

Nevertheless, I've been surprised recently by the odd practice of organizing instruction specifically around the idea of "small group" teaching. In the past, the grouping was to match book levels to the kids' reading levels (let's face it, the Crows just can't keep up).

But this is different: by organizing the schedule around "small group time" these schools are promoting the idea that small group teaching is valuable-no matter what the teacher may be teaching or what the kids' levels may be or what the materials are that they are using.

That makes your question especially timely. Does small group teaching advantage kids in learning to read?

John Hattie identified three meta-analyses on small group instruction and reported it to have a medium-to-large effect (.49) on learning. However, few of the studies in those meta-analyses focused on reading, they weren't always comparing small group teaching to whole class instruction, and some of the reading studies were from back in the day when 45-60 kids in a class was common practice. Several of the studies were based on secondary school and college teaching, too.

Robert Slavin also conducted a best-evidence synthesis of research on grouping back in the 1980s (effect size of .32). But at that time, he found no reading studies that compared grouping for reading instruction with whole class teaching.

Not exactly the evidence base I'd want to use for recommendations about elementary reading instruction.

However, even if we were to rely on those meta-analyses, the payoff of grouping for reading instruction had lower effects than was found for the other subjects (only .13), and it mattered a great deal how large the groups were-groups of 5 or larger received little or no learning benefit from within-class grouping (Lou, et al., 1996).

There are a couple of sizeable individual studies I think we need to consider, however.

For example, Kamil and Rausher (1990) conducted a study in which they compared whole class reading instruction with small group teaching in a large suburban school district. Surprisingly, they found that small groups "were not superior to whole class" teaching in terms of learning. There was just "too much variance within classrooms for the grouping patterns to have much of an impact."

Even more sobering is a large study of grouping in reading conducted by Sørensen & Hallinan (1986). They found small group teaching more effective than whole class instruction-that is, if one compares 30 minutes of small group teaching versus 30 minutes of whole class teaching, the kids in the small group tend to make larger learning gains.

However, they also found small group teaching provides kids with fewer learning opportunities. Basically, teachers teach more when teaching whole class.

Comparing equal amounts of small group teaching with whole class teaching might make sense to researchers, but it has little to do with the actual circumstances of classrooms. If a teacher has three groups who each receive 20 minutes of teaching, this should not be compared with 20 minutes of whole class instruction... but with 60 minutes-the time it takes to teach the three groups (in fact, it might even be fairer to compare it with 65-75 minutes because it takes transition time to switch out these groups).

When one compares small group and whole class instruction in this more meaningful way, small group teaching loses its advantage; that is, no differences in average achievement.

But, that doesn't mean there's no impact. What Sørensen & Hallinan (1986) concluded was that the high groups tended to get more learning opportunities in small group instruction than the low groups. And, since race and SES are correlated with reading, Black kids and poor kids (and I imagine ELLs) are more likely to find themselves in the low groups. Thus, there is no overall or average learning benefit for small group teaching, but there is a bit of rotation that ensures that minority kids make the least progress.

My conclusion from this is that small group teaching is beneficial in that it improves the impact of a lesson on the kids who are taught the lesson. But amount of instruction matters, too, and when kids are grouped they are necessarily going to get less teaching. It's a tradeoff at best. But we also need to be concerned about the lower readers who tend to be somewhat disadvantaged by this approach.

I'm not willing to give up altogether on small group instruction (or even individual teaching)-because there can be useful learning advantages from it. But I'd never organize classrooms so as to ensure that they specifically deliver small group teaching. And, I'd always try to minimize small group teaching whenever possible for the sake of efficiency.

Never do with a small group, what you could be done as well with the whole class. I've observed the identical lesson being delivered repeatedly to groups of three, for instance. That is foolish-even if the curriculum director mandated small group teaching. Similarly, the idea that conferencing one-on-one about a book (for 2-5 minutes) is going to take kids to the same depth of interpretation with a text that a group or whole class discussion (for 30-60 minutes) is strikingly unconvincing.

Districts would be wise to provide teachers with professional development in the most effective ways to teach whole classes--including how to use grouping within those classrooms when it is sensible. Seatwork is necessary in both small group and whole class instruction. In the former, the assignments are aimed at keeping the kids busy while the teacher works with other groups, while in the latter the teacher is usually able to circulate among the kids while they work on the assignment (giving support and additional guidance as needed). Perhaps teachers would be better off teaching a whole class lesson, that was followed by individual work done in ability groups (in other words, three or four different follow up assignments based upon the lesson depending on the students' levels). Then the teacher could circulate, helping kids at all levels.

Last week I watched my friend, Catlin Tucker, showing teachers how she organizes her classrooms by task. If kids are working on research projects, she groups them based on what part of the project they are focused on at a given time. That allows her to maximize the power of her instruction, without the inefficiencies of unnecessary grouping.

In other schemes, teachers deliver whole class lessons, monitoring kids' success and then small group work is reserved for re-teaching as needed.

Of course, there are approaches like cooperative grouping that have good research records, but that allow for a mix of whole class, small group, and individual work without the large losses of time evident in most small group centered classrooms. Cooperative grouping, project based learning, and other similar approaches may be beneficial in part because they don't lock kids into reading levels--but encourage work with grade level texts or with a range of text difficulties.

Maximize the amount of learning opportunity that you provide to students. Use groups to focus on different learning tasks or to follow up whole class lessons as needed. Don't group for the sake of grouping and minimize grouping on the basis of reading level-at least beyond grade one.

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Whole Class or Small Group? | Shanahan on Literacy

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Teachers are often taught that small group instruction is superior to whole class teaching. Although that is true, that isn't the comparison that teachers need to make. In real classrooms small group instruction increases the amount of independent work that children need to do and this offsets the benefits of small group teaching.

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Video

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How do children learn to read?

For almost a century, researchers have argued over the question. Most of the disagreement has centered on the very beginning stages of the reading process, when young children are first starting to figure out how to decipher words on a page.

One theory is that reading is a natural process, like learning to speak. If teachers and parents surround children with good books, this theory goes, kids will pick up reading on their own. Another idea suggests that reading is a series of strategic guesses based on context, and that kids should be taught these guessing strategies.

But research has shown that reading is not a natural process, and it's not a guessing game. Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code-teaching systematic phonics-is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words.

Of course, there is more to reading than seeing a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As such, there is more to teaching reading than just teaching phonics. Reading requires children to make meaning out of print. They need to know the different sounds in spoken language and be able to connect those sounds to written letters in order to decipher words. They need deep background and vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the words they read. Eventually, they need to be able to recognize most words automatically and read connected text fluently, attending to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

But knowing how to decode is an essential step in becoming a reader. If children can't decipher the precise words on the page, they'll never become fluent readers or understand the passages they're reading.

That's why we've put together this overview of the research on early reading, in grades K-2. It covers what's known about how we should teach letter-sound patterns, and what we don't know for sure yet. It touches on what else should be part of early reading programs. And it explains why we know that most children can't learn to read through osmosis or guessing.

Here's what the evidence shows.

Don't children learn to read the way they learn to speak?

Infants learn to speak by listening to and repeating sounds made by adults and connecting them to meanings. They don't consciously distinguish individual sound units (called phonemes) when hearing spoken language. Some research suggests infants learn probabilistically-for example, hearing the sound "ball" at the same time as the sight of a round, bouncy object over time makes the child associate the two-while other studies suggest children map meaning to a word after experiencing it just once or twice. Within the first two years, typically developing toddlers' brains focus on the most common sounds in their native languages and connect those sounds to meaning. A child develops understanding of speech through exposure to language and opportunities to practice the "serve and return" patterns of conversation, even without explicit instruction.

By contrast, children do not naturally develop reading skill through exposure to text. The way they learn to connect oral and written language depends on what kind of language they are learning to read.

Alphabetic languages, like English or French, use letters to stand for sounds that make up spoken words. To read an alphabetic language, children must learn how written letters represent spoken sounds, recognize patterns of letter sounds as words, and match those to spoken words whose meanings they know. This differs from Chinese, for example. It uses a tonal spoken language, conveying meaning with small differences in stress or pitch. Its writing system is partially logographic- in which written symbols correspond directly to a word or concept-and also includes words that couple symbols for meaning and symbols for sound. Someone reading Chinese hanzi characters could not "sound out" unfamiliar words character by character.

What is systematic, explicit phonics instruction, and why is it important?

Connecting printed letters on a page to written sounds isn't intuitive. While some young children may make those connections themselves, most do not. One set of studies from 1989-90 illustrates this phenomenon well.

In these studies, conducted by Brian Byrne and Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, researchers taught young children between ages 3 and 5 to read whole words aloud, like "fat" and "bat." These children didn't already know their letter names.

Then, the researchers tested whether the children could transfer their knowledge to reading a new word. They gave them the word "fun," and asked whether the word was "fun" or "bun." Very few of the students could do this successfully. They couldn't break down the original word into phonemes and then transfer their knowledge of those phonemes to a new word.

But children could succeed on this task if they were first given some explicit instructions. When children were taught how to recognize that certain letters represented certain sounds, and taught how to segment words to identify those individual letters and sounds, they had much greater success on the original transfer test. Neuroscience research has since confirmed and helped explain these findings. When learning how to read new words in an unfamiliar made-up language, participants had more long-term success if they were first taught which symbols correspond to which sounds, than if they tried to remember words as wholes. Brain imaging of these readers finds that the two teaching strategies tap into different neural pathways in the brain. Readers taught to connect print to meaning directly could recall words initially more quickly, but less accurately; readers taught to connect print to sound and then to meaning read aloud more quickly and correctly, better recalled the correct meanings of words, and transferred their knowledge to new words.

Decades of research has shown that explicit phonics instruction benefits early readers, but particularly those who struggle to read.

That's because small strengths or deficits at the start of reading compound over time. It's what reading expert Keith Stanovich in 1986 dubbed the "Matthew Effect in Reading," after the Bible verse in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer: "The combination of deficient decoding skills, lack of practice, and difficult materials results in unrewarding early reading experiences that lead to less involvement in reading-related activities," Stanovich wrote. "Lack of exposure and practice on the part of the less-skilled reader delays the development of automaticity and speed at the word recognition level. Slow, capacity-draining word-recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to comprehension. Thus, reading for meaning is hindered; unrewarding reading experiences multiply; and practice is avoided or merely tolerated without real cognitive involvement."

My reading curriculum includes letter-sound instruction. Am I providing enough phonics?

Not all phonics instruction is created equal.

The most effective phonics programs are those that are systematic. The National Reading Panel found this in 2000, and since then, further research reviews have confirmed that this type of instruction leads to the greatest gains in reading accuracy for young students.

A systematic phonics program teaches an ordered progression of letter-sound correspondences. Teachers don't only address the letter-sound connections that students stumble over. Instead, they address all of the combinations methodically, in a sequence, moving on to the next once students demonstrate mastery. Teachers explicitly tell students what sounds correspond to what letter patterns, rather than asking students to figure it out on their own or make guesses.

In one series of experiments, Stanford University neuroscientist Bruce McCandliss and his colleagues made up a new written language and taught three-letter words to students either by asking them to focus on letter sounds or on whole words. Later, the students took a reading test of both the words they were taught and new words in the made-up language, while an electroencephalograph monitored their brain activity. Those who had focused on letter sounds had more neural activity on the left side of the brain, which includes visual and language regions and is associated with more skilled reading. Those who had been taught to focus on whole words had more activity on the right side of the brain, which has been characteristically associated with adults and children who struggle with reading. Moreover, those who had learned letter sounds were better able to identify unfamiliar words.

Early readers benefit from systematic phonics instruction. Among students in grades K-1, phonics instruction led to improvements in decoding ability and reading comprehension across the board, according to the National Reading Panel. Children at risk of developing future reading problems, children with disabilities, and children from all socio-economic backgrounds all benefited. Later research reviews have confirmed that systematic phonics instruction is effective for students with disabilities, and shown that it also works for English-language learners.

Most studies of phonics instruction test its immediate effectiveness-after the intervention, are children better readers? Among students in older grades, the results are less clear. A recent meta-analysis of the long-term effects of reading interventions looked at phonics and phonemic awareness training, mostly in studies with children in grades K-1. Both phonics and phonemic awareness interventions improved reading comprehension at an immediate post-test. But while the benefits of phonemic awareness interventions persisted in a follow-up test, the benefits of phonics interventions faded much more over time. The average length of all interventions included in the study was about 40 hours, and the follow-up assessments were conducted about a year after the interventions were complete, on average.

Some of my students didn't need phonics instruction to learn to read. Why are you saying that all kids benefit?

Depending on the estimate, anywhere from 1 percent to 7 percent of children figure out how to decode words on their own, without explicit instruction. They may spot the patterns in books read to them or print they see in their environment, and then they apply these patterns. These include children with a neurotypical form of "hyperlexia"-a condition in which children may begin decoding as early as 3- but this is more frequently associated with children who have autism-spectrum disorders and often have separate problems with reading comprehension.

It may seem like these children are reading words as whole units, or using guessing strategies to figure out what comes next in the story. But they are attending to all of the words' individual letters-they're just doing it very quickly.

A systematic phonics program can still benefit these students, who may have gaps in their knowledge of spelling patterns or words that they haven't encountered yet. Of course, phonics instruction-like all teaching-can and should be differentiated to meet the needs of individual students where they are. If a student can demonstrate mastery of a sound, there's no need to continue practicing that sound-he or she should move on to the next one.

There's another answer to this question: Students may look like they're decoding when they're actually not. For example, a child may see an illustration of an apple falling from a tree, and correctly guess that the sentence below the picture describes an apple falling from a tree. This isn't reading, and it doesn't give the teacher useful information about how a student will tackle a book without pictures.

Can cueing strategies help students to read?

Many early reading classrooms teach students strategies to identify a word by guessing with the help of context cues. Ken and Yetta Goodman of the University of Arizona developed a "three-cueing system," based on analysis of common errors (or "miscues") when students read aloud. Ken Goodman famously called reading development a "psycholinguistic guessing game," and cueing systems teach students to guess at a new word based on:

* Meaning/Semantics, or background knowledge and context, such as vocabulary a student has already learned;

* Structure/Syntax, or how the word fits in common grammar rules, such as whether the word's position in a sentence suggests it is a noun, verb, or adjective; and

* Visual/Graphophonics, or what a word looks like, such as how upper- and lowercase letters are used (suggesting a proper noun, for example) or common spelling patterns.

Cueing systems are a common strategy in whole-language programs, and also are used in many "balanced literacy" programs that incorporate phonics instruction. Cueing systems were designed by analyzing errors rather than practices of proficient readers, and have not shown benefits in controlled experiments.

Moreover, cognitive and neuroscience studies have found that guessing is a much less efficient way to identify a new word, and a mark of beginning or struggling readers, not proficient readers. Skilled readers instead sound out new words to decode them.

Balanced literacy programs often include both phonics and cueing, but studies suggest cueing instruction can make it more difficult for children to develop phonics skills because it takes their attention away from the letter sounds.

I know phonics instruction is supposed to be explicit and systematic. But beyond that, how should I teach it? Does the research say anything about what content I need to cover, and how should it be sequenced?

There is a general path that most children follow as they become skilled decoders. Research can tell us how children usually progress along this path, and which skills specifically predict better reading performance.

Before starting kindergarten, children generally develop some early phonological awareness-an understanding of the sounds that make up spoken language. They can rhyme, break down multi-syllable words, and recognize alliteration.

A next step in the process is understanding that graphemes-combinations of one or more letters-represent phonemes, the smallest units of spoken language. It's easier for students to learn these letter-sound correspondences if they already have early phonological skills like rhyming and alliteration, along with knowledge of the names of the letters of the alphabet.

And while vocabulary is important for reading comprehension, research has also found that it's a component in decoding ability. One study found that when children know a word's meaning, they can more quickly learn how to recognize it automatically, because the visual letters, corresponding sounds, and meaning all map together when a reader recognizes a word.

There are other early skills that relate to later reading and writing ability as well, regardless of IQ or socio-economic status. Among these are writing letters, remembering spoken information for a short time, rapidly naming sequences of random letters, numbers, or pictures, and other phonological skills-like the ability to segment words into phonemes.

To decode words, students need to be taught to blend together the phonemes that graphemes represent on the page. For example, a young reader must learn to recognize that /r/, /o/, /d/ are three sounds that together form the word "rod," but also that the word "rock" also contains three sounds, /r/, /o/, /k/ This is a process that builds on itself rapidly. Though there are some 15,000 syllables in English, after a child has learned the 44 most common sound and letter combinations, they will begin to sound out words as they read. These include both the basic letter and vowel sounds, but also common combinations such as "th," "sh," and "-ing." There are two main ways to demonstrate to children that words are made up of sound-letter correspondences. In one method, students learn the sounds of the letters first and then blend these phonemes together to sound out words. That's synthetic phonics-they're synthesizing phonemes into greater whole words. The other method, analytic phonics, takes an inverted approach: Students identify-or analyze-the phonemes within words, and then use that knowledge to read other words.

Take the word "bat." In synthetic phonics, students would first learn the /b/ sound, then the /a/ sound, then the /t/ sound and blend them together to sound out "bat." In analytic phonics, students would learn the word "bat" alongside words like "cat," "mat," and "hat," and would be taught that all these words end in the "at" sound pattern.

So there's synthetic phonics and analytic phonics-is one way better than the other?

A few studies have found synthetic phonics to be more effective than analytic phonics. Most notably, a seven-year longitudinal study from Scotland found that synthetic phonics taught in 1st grade gave students an advantage in reading and spelling over analytic phonics. Still, when examined as a whole, the larger body of reading research doesn't surface a conclusive winner. Two landmark research reviews haven't found a significant difference in the effectiveness of the two methods. Other more recent research is still inconclusive.

Do these strategies apply to words that don't follow traditional sound-spelling patterns? What about words like "one" and "friend"-can those words still be taught with phonics?

Yes, but not alone; spelling and semantic rules go hand-in-hand with teaching letter sounds. Words like "lime" and "dime," have similar spelling and pronunciation. But some words with similar spelling have different pronunciations, like "pint" and "mint." And others have different spellings and similar pronunciations, like "jazz" and "has." Brain imaging studies find that when readers see word pairs that are inconsistent, they show greater activity in the areas of the brain associated with processing both visual spelling and spoken words. This shows that young readers use systems of understanding of both printed shapes and sounds when they see any written word. When those two systems conflict, the reader may call on additional rules, such as understanding that words at the end of lines of a rhyming poem (such as "has" and "jazz") likely rhyme even if their spelling would not suggest it.

Some research has found that teaching common irregular words, like "one" and "friend," as sight words can be effective. Still, in these studies, children were also taught phonics along with sight words-and that's important. Understanding phonics gives students the foundation to read these irregular words. Take "friend." While the "ie" doesn't produce the same sound it normally does, the other letters in the word do. Research has suggested that children use the "fr" and the "nd" as a framework when they remember how to read the irregular word "friend."

When should children start to learn how to sound out words? Is there a "too early"?

Even very young children can benefit from instruction designed to develop phonological awareness. The National Early Literacy Panel Report (2009), a meta-analysis of early literacy studies, found that teaching preschoolers and kindergartners how to distinguish the sounds in words, whether orally or in relationship to print, improved their reading and writing ability. The children in these studies were generally between the ages of 3 and 5.

Studies suggest progress in phonics is less closely linked to a child's age than to the size and complexity of his spoken vocabulary, and to his opportunities to practice and apply new phonics rules. There is some evidence that "decodable" books, designed to help students practice specific letter-sound combinations, can benefit the earliest readers. But it is mixed, and students very quickly progress enough to get more benefit from texts that provide more complex and irregular words-and often texts that students find more interesting.

How much time should teachers spend on teaching about letters and sounds in class?

There isn't yet a definitive "best" amount of time to spend on phonics instruction. In several meta-analyses, researchers haven't found a direct link between program length and effectiveness.

The National Reading Panel report found that programs focusing on phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the smallest units of speech sounds, that lasted less than 20 hours total had the greatest effect on reading skills. Across the studies that the researchers looked at, individual sessions lasted 25 minutes on average.

But the authors of the NRP are quick to point out that these patterns are descriptive, not prescriptive. The studies they looked at weren't specifically testing the effectiveness of different time lengths, and it may be that time wasn't the relevant factor in these shorter programs performing better.

Eventually, a skilled reader doesn't need to sound out every word that she reads. She sees the word and recognizes it immediately. Through reading the word again and again over time, her brain has linked this particular sequence to this word, through a process called orthographic mapping.

But neuroscience research has shown that even if it feels like she's recognizing the word as a whole, she's still attending to the sequence of individual letters in the word for an incredibly short period of time. That's how skilled readers can tell the difference between the words "accent" and "ascent."

What else-aside from phonics-is part of a research-based early reading program?

Phonics is essential to a research-based reading program. If students can't decode words, they can't derive any meaning from them. But understanding the alphabetic code doesn't automatically make students good readers. There are five essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The National Reading Panel addressed all five of these components. The researchers found that having students read out loud with guidance and feedback improved reading fluency. Vocabulary instruction, both explicit and implicit, led to better reading comprehension-and it was most effective when students had multiple opportunities to see and use new words in context. They also found that teaching comprehension strategies can also lead to gains in reading achievement, though most of these studies were done with students older than 2nd grade.

For younger students, oral language skills; understanding syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and idioms; and having general and topic-specific background knowledge are also essential for reading comprehension.

This is one of the premises of the Simple View of Reading, a framework to understand reading first proposed by researchers Philip B. Gough and William E. Tunmer in 1986. In the simple view, reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension. If a student can't decode, it doesn't matter how much background knowledge and vocabulary he understands-he won't be able to understand what's on the page. But the opposite is also true: If a student can decode but doesn't have a deep enough understanding of oral language, he won't be able to understand the words he can say out loud. Since Gough and Tunmer first proposed this framework, many studies have confirmed its basic structure-that comprehension and decoding are separate processes. One meta-analysis of reading intervention studies finds that phonics-focused interventions were most effective through grade 1; in older grades-when most students will have mastered phonics-interventions that targeted comprehension or a mix of reading skills showed bigger effects on students' reading skills.

For young students, early oral-language interventions can help set them up for success even before they start formal school.

The National Early Literacy Panel found that both reading books to young children and engaging in activities aimed at improving their language development improved their oral language skills.

If children don't learn to read naturally from being exposed to reading, why are parents and teachers encouraged to read to infants and preschoolers?

The amount of time adults read with preschoolers and young children does predict their reading skills in elementary school. One of the most important predictors of how well a child will learn to read is the size and quality of his spoken language and vocabulary, and children are more likely to be exposed to new words and their meanings or pick up grammar rules from reading aloud with adults.

In a series of studies in the late 1990s of 5-year-olds who had not yet learned to read, Victoria Purcell-Gates found that after controlling for the income and education level of the children's parents, children who had been read to regularly in the last two years used more "literary" language, longer phrases, and more sophisticated sentence structures. Moreover, an adult reading with a child is more likely to explain or expand on the meanings of words and concepts that the child does not already know, adding to their background knowledge.

Reading with trusted adults also helps children develop a love of reading. "The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process [of emergent literacy], and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one," notes cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf.

What about independent choice reading?

In a choice reading period-also known as sustained silent reading or Drop Everything and Read-students get to pick a book to read independently in class for a set amount of time. The premise behind this activity is that children need time to practice reading skills on their own to improve.

There is a lot of correlational research that shows that children who read more are better readers. But many of these studies don't quantify how much reading students are actually doing. While they may specify a time frame-15 minutes of sustained silent reading, for example-the studies don't report whether kids spend this time reading. That makes it difficult to know how effective choice reading actually is.

More importantly, these studies don't provide experimental evidence-it's not clear whether reading more is what makes students better readers, or if better readers are likely to read more. The National Reading Panel found that there wasn't evidence that choice reading improved students' fluency.

Does it make a difference whether children learn to read using printed books or digital ones?

In the last decade or so, access to Internet-based text has continued to expand, and schools have increasingly used digitally based books, particularly to support students who do not have easy access to paper books at home. Yet some emerging evidence suggests children learn to read differently in print versus digitally, in ways that could hinder their later comprehension.

Researchers that study eye movements find that those reading digital text are more likely to skim or read nonlinearly, looking for key words to give the gist, jump to the end to find conclusions or takeaways, and only sometimes go back to find context in the rest of the text. In a separate series of studies since 2015, researchers led by Anne Mangen found that students who read short stories and especially longer texts in a print format were better able to remember the plot and sequence of events than those who read the same text on a screen.

It's not yet clear how universal these changes are, but teachers may want to keep watch on how well their students reading electronically are developing deeper reading and comprehension skills.

Related Education Week Stories

Further Reading

How to Cite This Article

Schwartz, Sarah and Sparks, Sarah D. (2019, October 2). How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says. Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/how-do-kids-learn-to-read.html
For a fully annotated version of this article, view on desktop. A previous version of this article misstated the year Keith Stanovich coined the term "Matthew Effect in Reading." It was 1986.
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How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says

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The debate on how to teach early reading has raged for a century. But for the last few decades, the cognitive science has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code-teaching systematic phonics-is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words.

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How Much Should Teachers Talk in The Classroom?

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How Much Should Teachers Talk in The Classroom?

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And what apps can help us self-monitor?

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If you carried a stopwatch into your district's schools and sat quietly in various classrooms for a week, timing how much teachers talk and how much students talk, what would you find?

Are lessons dominated by teachers talking? Do students have a robust role in discussing what they're learning? Or are they mostly answering procedural or factual questions? Are teachers consciously monitoring how much they talk? Should they be?

Research and front-line teacher experience suggest they should be. And some teachers are using new tools like apps on their phones to help them reflect on their classroom talk habits.

Most educators agree that it's important for teachers to get students talking about what they're learning. Doing so can get students more involved and interested in what they're studying and help them understand it better. It can also yield valuable insight into what students need, and improve achievement.

"If you're talking all the time, how can you hear the impact of your teaching?" asked John Hattie, a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia who has analyzed research on "teacher talk." He's concluded that teachers should talk less and think more carefully about when they're talking and the kinds of questions they're asking.

Teachers who have experimented with changing the balance of student and teacher talk in their classrooms, and researchers who study it, say that simply shifting the ratio isn't enough. The real goal is finding ways to spark productive classroom discussions.

'Surface' and 'Deep' Stages

There are many ways to do that. Getting students to talk more about their learning means teachers must carefully plan lessons that include more open-ended questions. But before teachers can consistently do that planning, they must navigate a deeper shift. Educators who have revamped their classroom talk habits say they've had to reinvent their roles as tellers and become askers and listeners.

"It's more than a collection of strategies. It's a mind shift," said Rosie Reid, an English teacher at Northgate High School in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Therese Arahill, an instructional coach in New Zealand, described that mind shift.

"I join their discussion, ... answering their questions," Arahill said via Facebook. "It's an attitude. Moving away from teacher ego, toward student voice, student agency."

Research documents the dominance of teacher voices in classrooms. Hattie's synthesis of studies on the topic, detailed in his 2012 book, Visible Learning for Teachers, found that teachers talk for 70 percent to 80 percent of class time on average. His own research produced an even higher average: 89 percent.

All that talking doesn't necessarily produce good learning. One study tracked middle and high school students and found their engagement flagged the most when their teachers were talking. Others show that most of teachers' questions seek lower-order responses like factual recall.

On the flip side, researchers have found that students' comprehension, engagement, and test scores improve when they get to discuss what they're learning. But research hasn't elucidated many details that could guide teachers, Hattie said, such as the right ratio of monologue to dialogue and how talk patterns might need to shift to suit students' grade level or the topic being taught.

Hattie's own studies, in classroom "labs" at his university, suggest that teachers should talk more as students are acquiring information and shift into a questioning mode as they're deepening their understanding, he said. He encourages teachers to split their lessons into "surface" and "deep" stages and plan distinct strategies for each.

Measuring and Analyzing

Many teachers start with the simplest piece: paying attention to how much they talk. Some are using a new app, TeachFX, on their phones or laptops to measure it. They click it open as class begins, and afterward, the app emails them an analysis of talk patterns, such as how much the teacher talked and whether he asked open-ended questions. Another app, Visible Learning, designed by Hattie, offers similar tools.

Reid, who is California's 2019 teacher of the year, said TeachFX helped her spot a pattern she needed to change.

"I was talking at them too much at the beginning of class, when my students are at their freshest," she said. "I realized I need to use that time to do engaging warm-ups instead."

Jamie Poskin, a former English and math teacher who developed TeachFX as a Stanford University graduate student, said he's been surprised that teachers find the app so useful by itself, even without professional learning linked to it.

"They're telling us that just seeing the data profoundly affected their perspectives," he said. "They're shocked by how much they talk and how little their kids talk."

Once they see that feedback, Poskin said, they "unlock knowledge they already had" and start using it, such as deliberately including more open-ended questions in their lesson planning and making sure they extend the "wait times" between asked and answered questions.

One strategy Reid uses is to get students to reflect regularly on their own talking. She distributes what she calls "metacognitive cards" that the teenagers keep on their desks during class discussions. They make notes about things like whether they built on classmates' ideas or cited textual evidence and how much they talked. They evaluate their participation and set goals for improvement.

Finding New 'Moves'

An instructional coach from Hampden, Maine, Susan O'Brien, encourages teachers to do what she did with her 5th grade students when she was in the classroom. O'Brien used nine "talk moves" designed by two Massachusetts researchers to promote "academically productive" discussion.

To facilitate conversation, O'Brien rearranged her classroom so students sat in groups at tables. She taught them things to say in discussions to help them speak, listen, and build on one another's ideas, such as, "Let me see if I understand what you're saying" and "Can you say more about that?"

And she had to make another big change: She had to talk less and listen more. She started walking around the tables, eavesdropping on students' discussions.

"What I saw was that students started leading their own learning instead of having me up front doing sit-and-get," O'Brien said. "They were challenging each other and stretching their own thinking."

Cris Tovani, a literacy consultant and instructional coach whose 2017 book with researcher Elizabeth Birr Moje, No More Teaching as Telling, explores ways to reduce teacher talk, said that one of her favorite strategies for promoting good classroom discussion is using a simple chart she developed to record her observations as students discuss what they're reading, in small groups or as a whole class. She calls it "the discussion catcher."

In one section of the chart, teachers can jot down quotes or interactions they see that reflect good discussion, like one classmate helping another understand something, and share them later with students. Teachers can also use the chart for their own planning, noting areas of misunderstanding that could use a follow-up mini-lesson.

Revising the kinds of questions she asked, and waiting longer before providing answers, were important changes Tovani made in her classroom as she tried to get more students talking, she said. When students made comments, she'd "toss the ball back to them" with responses like, "Why do you think that?" or "Tell me more."

"Teachers hate wait time, but kids hate it more," she said. Talking about ideas together, rather than quickly resolving a question with a "right answer," produced more complex, interesting discussions, she said.

A Colorado high school history teacher, Lucas Richardson, came up with six strategies to build meaningful student talk in his class. A big one, he said, is asking questions that aren't designed to get a predetermined answer but instead aim to offer insight into students' thinking.

Whose Voice?

Richardson likes to start class with students' voices, staging 90-second "micro debates" about controversial topics. He restricts himself to no more than 10 minutes of talk at a time in his 70-minute class periods. He also has students do more ungraded writing in class, he said. That allows them time to think about what they want to say and is especially helpful with quieter students, he said.

A 2017 project called "Who's Doing The Work?," inspired by the book of the same name by teachers-turned-consultants Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris, explored a variety of strategies designed to get students talking more and got strong, positive results: After only six weeks of using those strategies, 90 percent of the teachers who participated reported that they talked less and their students were more engaged.

Led by Student Achievement Partners, which provides instructional coaching, several small groups of elementary teachers tried to expand students' own leadership in their learning. Instead of preteaching before children read a text, they'd let them read-or they'd read aloud to them if they were young children-and then ask questions like, "How did you figure that out?" Before correcting wrong answers, they tried using open questions like, "Is that right? How do you know?"

Teachers in the project also worked to downplay their own talk and facilitate discussion among students. They used such prompts as, "What do you think? Agree, disagree, or add on," and "Let's hear from three more people and decide if we agree." Instead of calling only on students who raised their hands, they tried asking everyone to write their responses down before a discussion began.

Responding to the survey after the project, one teacher said that "students are doing more of the thinking" with the new strategies. Another videotaped herself teaching before and after the project, and the second video showed "more students were contributing, thinking, and tracking" what their classmates said.

Published in Print: December 11, 2019, as How Much Should Teachers Talk in Class? Some Say Less

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How Much Should Teachers Talk in the Classroom? Much Less, Some Say

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If you carried a stopwatch into your district's schools and sat quietly in various classrooms for a week, timing how much teachers talk and how much students talk, what would you find? Are lessons dominated by teachers talking? Do students have a robust role in discussing what they're learning?

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Students Who Can Manage Their Emotions Do Better in School

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Students Who Can Manage Their Emotions Do Better in School

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Education Week

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Emotional intelligence is an important part of academic success-from kindergarten into college-according to a new study.

In particular, students who understand and can manage their emotions earn higher grades and do better on standardized tests.

The findings help bolster the growing consensus among researchers that skills such as emotional intelligence are not just important for future workplace success, but also students' academic success in the here and now. The results are also likely to help schools make the case that investing in teaching social-emotional skills will bring a payoff in improved student achievement.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, is notable in both its scale and depth.

It's a meta-analysis of every relevant study researchers could find-162 in all-that cover 42,000 students in 27 countries.

"Because of the large number of samples, I'm really certain of these results," said Carolyn MacCann, an associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia and the lead author of the study. "It isn't a study about one school in one country."

While raw intelligence, or IQ, is still the biggest predictor of academic performance, the study's findings put understanding and managing emotions right up there with it.

The extent of a students' emotional intelligence can account for 4 percent of the differences in students' academic performance, said MacCann.

"That doesn't sound big, but intelligence only explains 15 percent," she said. "And certain parts of it, like understanding emotions, explains 12 percent of the difference between students."

MacCann believes this is the first large-scale meta-analysis of studies examining the link between emotional intelligence and academic performance.

"A meta-analysis of such an enormous sample of studies always catches the eye," said Shannon Wanless, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "What really jumps out at me, which you hope you would see, is that it really tells the story you're feeling ... the findings do fit a lot of the things we're seeing in lots of different places but it's helpful to look at the broader pattern."

The study also examines different types of emotional intelligence and methods of measuring it to see how these variations impact tests, grades, and success in different academic subjects.

The goal is to determine exactly what parts of emotional intelligence move the needle on academics.

"We try to be very clear about the active ingredient," said MacCann. "There may be similarities, but if you are designing interventions, you want to know what the active ingredient is."

For example, MacCann found that students' ability to read others' emotions was not as important as the ability to regulate their own emotions.

The way that emotional intelligence was measured also mattered in how much it appeared to affect academic performance. For example, objective tests of emotional intelligence are better at predicting student academic success than measurement tools that rely on people ranking their own emotional intelligence.

All of this means that the better students are at understanding and regulating emotions-based on objective measurements, not self-reporting-the better they will do on tests and the higher the grades they will earn, particularly in the humanities.

That's not to say that strong emotional regulation skills don't have an affect on math and science abilities, it's just not to as high of a degree, said MacCann.

"I think it's because some of the ability of understanding human motivation and emotion is actually part of the academic skill needed for analyzing literature, or understanding the historical causes of world wars," said MacCann.

That's one potential reason why emotional intelligence drives academic performance.

Emotionally intelligent students may also be better at handling negative emotions that come from, say, test anxiety.

Students with high emotional intelligence may also be better at managing their social world-from navigating peer pressure to forming positive relationships with teachers-which puts them in a better position to focus on learning.

But for MacCann, the big takeaway is this: teaching emotional intelligence skills doesn't detract from students' academics-it boosts them.

"Teachers are under a lot of pressure to teach to the curriculum or the test, and there is a movement toward social- emotional programs, but it can be seen as taking away from passing their academic tests," MacCann said. "I just want teachers and educators to know that students' emotional skills are not in a totally separate bucket from their academic skills."
Related stories:

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Students Who Can Manage Their Emotions Do Better in School, Large Scale Study Finds

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Emotional intelligence is an important part of academic success-from kindergarten into college-according to a new study. In particular, students who understand and can manage their emotions earn higher grades and do better on standardized tests.

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What teachers should know about The Science Of Reading

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What teachers should know about The Science Of Reading

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Video (30 mins)

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30:41

Why do so many students struggle with reading? In a recent radio documentary for APM Reports, Emily Hanford says that the science on how to teach reading is clear, and yet it's not being used in elementary classrooms today.

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What Teachers Should Know About the Science of Reading

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30:41 Why do so many students struggle with reading? In a recent radio documentary for APM Reports, Emily Hanford says that the science on how to teach reading is clear, and yet it's not being used in elementary classrooms today.

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Lesson-sharing website resources may be poor quality

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Lesson-sharing website resources may be poor quality

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It's common for teachers to go looking for lessons and classroom resources online-digital marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers or Share My Lesson offer seemingly endless pages of user-created materials that teachers can use to supplement their schools' curricula, or in some cases, piece together one when none is provided.

Teachers rely on sites like these to save time and fill resource gaps. But many educators have argued that the materials available aren't high-quality .

Now, a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute confirms some of those concerns. Reviewers evaluated more than 300 resources from three online platforms-ReadWriteThink, Share My Lesson, and Teachers Pay Teachers-for alignment to the Common Core State Standards and overall quality. Most of the materials, 64 percent, received an overall rating of very poor or mediocre.

In the years since the release of the Common Core State Standards, the nonprofit EdReports formed and began to evaluate curricular materials against new requirements.

For the most part, EdReports reviews comprehensive core offerings. But most teachers aren't just using the curriculum that their school or district provides (if teachers are provided a curriculum at all). A 2016 study from the RAND Corporation found that 98 percent of secondary math teachers and 96 percent of secondary English-language arts teachers were using materials that they had developed or selected themselves.

In many cases, these supplemental resources are coming from crowdsourced marketplaces, where teachers don't have access to independent reviews of the materials they're downloading.

For this study, researchers Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education, and Jennifer Dean, an educational consultant, created a rubric that could do this kind of vetting.

Their criteria look at how well these resources aligned to the shifts in instruction outlined in the Common Core State Standards-like requirements that materials build students' knowledge, give them opportunities to work with complex text, and ask them to cite textual evidence. They also considered other aspects of curriculum quality, like rigor, usability, and inclusion of diverse cultural perspectives.

To build the rubric, they adapted criteria from a prior Fordham study on assessment quality and existing tools that evaluate materials against the common core-like EdReports, the EQuIP rubric, and the state of Louisiana's curriculum rubrics. Polikoff and Dean also partnered with four reviewers who had experience evaluating resources against the common core.

Reviewers looked at more than 300 of the most-downloaded resources for high school English-language arts, across three lesson-sharing platforms:

1. ReadWriteThink, a hub for free, peer-reviewed ELA lessons managed by the International Literacy Association and the National Council of Teachers of English;

2. Share My Lesson, another free lesson site, from the American Federation of Teachers; and

3. Teachers Pay Teachers, a for-profit marketplace where any former or current teacher can sell resources or list them for free.

The study focused on multi-day units and some single-day lessons, rather than one-off worksheets or activities. Most of these units were book studies, with reading and writing comprehension tasks built around one or more anchor texts.

Overall, the reviewers' analysis painted a bleak picture of these marketplaces.

Most materials-56 percent-weren't aligned to the majority of the standards that authors said were covered in each resource. (Eight percent weren't aligned to any of the standards that the materials' authors claimed were covered.)

There's an incentive for creators to tag their lesson with as many standards as they can, said Polikoff, in an interview with Education Week. On many lesson-sharing websites, users can search by these tags. Listing more standards means showing up in more search results.

"The consequence of that is that a lot of these materials are overtagged," Polikoff said. This means that it's often up to teachers to figure out whether a resource actually aligns to the standards it claims to meet.

Even if teachers find a lesson that does address the standards they're looking for, quality varies. Overall, reviewers thought that the anchor texts in these lessons-the fiction or nonfiction books that the reading, writing, and speaking tasks are organized around-were strong selections. When books didn't meet this bar, it was often because they were below grade level, as determined by Lexile measures, one assessment of text difficulty.

Even so, materials didn't fare well on measures of cultural relevance. About two-thirds of lessons didn't include authors from diverse backgrounds.

Text quality also varied across sites: ReadWriteThink and Share My Lesson scored higher than Teachers Pay Teachers. Reviewers made these judgments on qualitative evaluations of the book's quality of writing and importance, as well as measures of grade-level appropriateness.

On average, reviewers ranked the reading, writing, and speaking tasks in the lessons as low- or mediocre-quality. Prompts often weren't text-dependent, instead asking students to draw on personal feelings or other knowledge. The vast majority-86 percent-didn't offer any support for differentiation. (One bright spot in the analysis: Most of the resources didn't have major errors, and were well-organized and visually appealing.)

The reviewers also looked at how the multi-day units built knowledge-how they covered the historical or literary context for the ELA text, or made connections to subjects like social studies, science, or the arts. More than half of the units didn't build knowledge, or did it weakly, devoting more time to "skill building, simple recall, or personal interpretation," according to the report.

When it came to assessing student learning, reviewers found that most lessons and units (69 percent) included assessments that covered most or all of the core content in the lesson. But about half of all materials didn't include rubrics that would help teachers understand how the assessments were meant to be scored.

Curation Could 'Shore Up' Gaps

Researchers looked at some of the most popular resources on these sites. But it's hard to know whether downloads and star ratings are good metrics of teachers' true feelings about a resource.

In interviews with the research team, teachers talked about feeling pressure not to critique their colleagues' work, even if they thought it was subpar. "They went way out on a limb to put it out there, and I don't want to seem like I'm criticizing ... We get bashed constantly, by administrators, the press, parents, etc., so I can't see making it any worse for anybody," one teacher is quoted in the study as saying.

Still, it's apparent that the materials teachers are downloading aren't always meeting their needs. Teachers told the researchers that they're often making modifications to materials before they use them.

More curation has the potential to solve some of these problems, Polikoff said. For example, he said, Teachers Pay Teachers could vet the materials on their site, and spotlight a few dozen that are of the highest-quality.
See also: On 'Teachers Pay Teachers,' Some Sellers Are Profiting From Stolen Work
And especially when users are paying for materials, it's a big problem that teachers don't have a way to preview and vet the entire resource before they purchase, Polikoff said. (Currently, Teachers Pay Teachers-the only one of the three sites in this analysis to charge for materials- has a limited refund policy, and some requests are subject to review by side admin.)

"There's also a role on the school district side, or maybe even a state department of education, to help curate," said Polikoff. Districts could identify the potential gaps in their core curricular materials, and point to supplemental materials that they think would "shore up those weaknesses," he said.
Charts via the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

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Poor-Quality Materials Abound on Lesson-Sharing Websites, Report Says

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It's common for teachers to go looking for lessons and classroom resources online-digital marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers or Share My Lesson offer seemingly endless pages of user-created materials that teachers can use to supplement their schools' curricula, or in some cases, piece together one when none is provided.

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Lucy Caulkins responds to "phonics-centric people"

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Lucy Caulkins responds to "phonics-centric people"

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One of the giants of the literacy world is grappling with the recent push for the "science of reading"-and responding to critics who say her early reading program doesn't align to evidence-based practice.

Lucy Calkins, the Teachers College professor known for her popular reading and writing curricula, released a statement last week in response to "the phonics-centric people who are calling themselves 'the science of reading.'"

Growing interest in science-based early reading instruction, spurred by reporting from American Public Media's Emily Hanford, is leading some districts and states to rethink their practices. Calkins' statement suggests that some of the most established curriculum providers, whose materials have popularized many of the instructional strategies now facing pushback, are feeling similar pressure.

Calkins' program, the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, uses a workshop model. Teachers demonstrate the skills and habits that good readers have, and then students practice them on their own, with teachers acting as guides. The program takes a constructivist approach to education, minimizing direct instruction.

These materials are used in schools across the country. A forthcoming Education Week survey will provide some numbers-the results take a look at which commercial reading programs teachers are using most often in their classrooms.

But critics of the programs have said that Calkins' approach is counter to the scientific evidence base on reading instruction.

Decades of research has shown that teaching students which letter combinations represent which sounds-teaching systematic phonics-is the most effective way to ensure that children can read words. (For more on how children learn to read, see our research explainer.)

In Calkins' early reading lessons, in grades K-2, children are encouraged to start to see themselves as readers, get excited about exploring print, and learn reading strategies. There is comparatively little explicit instruction in how to decode words.

Recently, Calkins released her first Units of Study in Phonics program. But marketing materials for the curriculum imply that phonics should not be a central focus in early grades. "Phonics instruction needs to be lean and efficient," the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project website reads. "Every minute you spend teaching phonics (or preparing phonics materials to use in your lessons) is less time spent teaching other things."

In her recent statement, Calkins tows a similar line: She clearly states that students need explicit phonics instruction. At the same time, she cautions against an overemphasis on phonics-citing concerns that it would take away focus from other areas of reading. There's no one way for instruction to improve, she writes, and focusing on phonics might not be the solution for every school.

She also argues that it can be valuable for early readers to use multiple sources of information, not just letters, when they're figuring out what words say.

'Guessing' at Words?

This notion-that children can use multiple sources of information to solve words-is based on an idea that many teachers know as "three-cueing," or MSV. In this system, students are taught to figure out what words say by using the pictures or context clues (meaning), the structure of the sentence (syntax), or the letters on the page (visual).

Students have the option to sound out tricky words, but they can also use other clues instead to guess what the word might be.

Critics argue that cueing directs children to take their eyes off of the words, and note that the strategy hasn't shown benefits in controlled experiments.

In her statement, Calkins argues that there's no such thing as the three-cueing approach to reading. MSV is only used as an assessment system, she writes, to analyze what source of information might have led astudent to make an error.

Still, she writes that it's helpful for an early reader to predict words based on all of the information sources available. "It would be wise for teachers to say, 'Try it,' instead of 'Guess,' as, of course, some children do literally just glance at the word or the picture and take wild guesses, which is not what anyone desires or intends," she writes.

Calkins also discusses decodable and predictable books. Decodable books give students practice with the specific letter-sound correspondences that they have learned, while predictable books are designed to give emerging readers "support" from illustrations and repetitive sentence structures. Both are meant to be used as stepping stones to more authentic texts for kids who are just learning how to read. But critics of predictable books argue that they encourage guessing and attempting to memorize words as wholes.
For more coverage of early reading, see our ongoing series: Getting Reading Right
While Calkins writes that it would be "a wise move" to include decodable books in a young student's "reading diet," she also defends the practice of using predictable books.

"A few months into kindergarten, a child can 'read' a book that says, 'I can read the newspaper,' and 'I can read the recipe,' if the child relies on the pattern of the repeating text, on the pictures, and on first letters," Calkins writes. "I have found value in those books. The child is approximating reading. Her experience is not unlike that of a bike rider who relies on training wheels."

Teachers who have used the Units of Study for Teaching Reading have pushed back against Calkins' argument that three-cueing isn't an instructional strategy.

In an open letter to Calkins in response to her statement, Margaret Goldberg, a literacy coach in California, wrote that guessing was encouraged in Units of Study.

"I had a chance in 2016 to attend the Teachers College Reading and Writing Program ('TCRWP') Foundational Skills Institute. At the Institute, we discussed cueing instruction when our trainer displayed the three-cueing Venn diagram and explained the purpose behind 'strengthening MSV' lessons.

Our trainer frequently used the word 'guess' to describe what good readers do. Your programs, Units of Study for Teaching Reading and Units of Study for Teaching Phonics, use that word as well."

Pamela Snow, a reading researcher, also responded Calkins' statement. In a post on her blog, Snow called Calkins' concern about overemphasis on phonics a straw man argument.

No one on "the science of reading side of the debate" would argue for phonics-only instruction, Snow wrote. Young students also need instruction in vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and writing, which "has been resoundingly argued by science of reading advocates for decades," she wrote.

It's not clear whether Calkins' statement signals any forthcoming changes to her materials. (Calkins was not available for comment before deadline.)
Image: Lucy Calkins -Peter Cunningham-File

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Lucy Calkins, Creator of Reading Workshop, Responds to 'Phonics-Centric People'

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One of the giants of the literacy world is grappling with the recent push for the "science of reading"-and responding to critics who say her early reading program doesn't align to evidence-based practice.

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Read-Aloud (or Read-Along) with MS students!

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Read-Aloud (or Read-Along) with MS students!

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First Person

Eyes wide and mouths agape, 24 8th graders are waiting with bated breath as the villain sneaks up behind our protagonists. I pause. "Should we stop for today?" I ask with a smirk.

"Noooo!" the class collectively reacts, and I laugh and continue. It's rare to have the rapt attention of two dozen adolescents around anything, but when I garner that attention for a book, I am particularly grateful.

Their engagement should hardly be surprising, however. Reading aloud is a strategy elementary school teachers have capitalized on for generations. Teachers use storytelling and drama to get younger students engaged with and loving literature, only to mourn when those same students appear to lose that love once they reach middle and high school. We rarely acknowledge that reading quickly turns from a group experience to an individual one once kids reach middle school.

For the past six years, I've used "read-along," a twist on reading aloud, as a staple of my middle and high school teaching practice. Based on the Performance English program from the Curriculum Research and Development Group at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, my students and I read about 75 percent of our texts together in class (they also have independent reading books that they choose). Unlike traditional read-alouds, all students follow along with their own copy of the text, and I stop periodically to explain vocabulary, model note-taking in the margins, or engage in class discussion.

This strategy has been hugely beneficial for my students. Reading texts aloud in class has helped me build community. And the experience of hearing a story together has helped build student enjoyment, engagement, and camaraderie. Since I began doing read-along, my students have started discussing the books we read the way an audience talks after a movie: They walk out of class chatting about what happened. They ask their peers in other classes about the voices I used, or if I added sound effects. Other teachers tell me they catch students reading ahead or discussing what we read in class with their peers.

This love of storytelling can snowball into an overall love of literature that extends beyond our classroom walls. I often have students ask me if Harper Lee has written anything else they can read after we finish To Kill a Mockingbird as a class.

By reading the book with students, I'm also able to engage more deeply in discussions mid-text. When we encounter a difficult word, we stop and work through it as a class. I'll model metacognitive thinking as we read, stopping after a line and questioning my reactions to plot points or literary devices, or connecting the story to other things we've read. Later, I'll ask students to pause and share their reactions and reflect on where those feelings are coming from, as well as have them create text-to-text connections.

Reading aloud can be nerve-wracking for those new to the method. Here are some ways to reap its full benefits:

Use performance and storytelling techniques.

Do I use a subtle Southern affect while reading To Kill a Mockingbird? Absolutely! Not only does it show students that reading can be playful and imperfect (their reactions to different voices are always amusing), but it also helps conjure the world of the novel and attract interest in the story. I create different voices using pitch, vocal placement, and speech patterns to differentiate characters. I also play with pacing to build suspense or excitement. I'll even turn off the lights or project images on the board for ambience.

Build in time and activities to purposefully engage with the text.

Reading along gives us the opportunity to discuss not just the overall story, but the intricacies of the writing. We can model and use a variety of skills to understand new vocabulary, and give students chances to explain their reasoning when they infer meaning. Stopping to help students recognize "sign-post" moments in a story-strategically placed words, phrases, or plot points that help readers recognize that something important is happening-can help them learn and practice deeper analytical skills in a group setting. I'll have students share their thoughts, questions, and epiphanies ( TQEs, as teacher Marisa Thompson calls them) at the ends of sections or even mid-paragraph, ensuring we read actively. These strategies also allow students to have critical conversations with themselves and each other as they read the text, not just after they've read it. Students can hone these skills together before they have to use them independently.

Practice, practice, practice.

Read-aloud is like any performance: We do better when we know what's coming and how we want to create feeling. When I practice, I time myself reading a page so I can better plan for how much we'll get through in class. I also make notes on different voices, difficult words to address, and where I want to stop to engage in discussion or activities.

Only ask students to read if they've had time to prepare or are reading in small groups.

This a question I'm often asked when I share my read-along practice: How much do I read and how much do the students read? I read a majority of the text in a whole-class setting. While reading aloud can build fluency, research shows that forcing students to read aloud, in front of their peers, and without preparation is not only unhelpful, but potentially damaging. When I do have students read aloud, I use a number of strategies that lower the stakes (such as partner or small-group reading) or give them time to prepare a passage on their own. This gives them a chance to practice fluency while ensuring we don't do more harm than good.

Beyond its practical benefits, read-along has provided me some of my most rewarding teaching experiences. Students frequently share that is one of their favorite, most memorable parts of their experiences with me, and nothing quite beats the feeling of hearing a classroom full of students gasp, laugh, or squeal in delight in response to a great story-ultimately leaving us feeling just a little closer to one another at the end of the day.

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Bringing the Joy of Read-Alouds to Middle School Students

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First Person Eyes wide and mouths agape, 24 8th graders are waiting with bated breath as the villain sneaks up behind our protagonists. I pause. "Should we stop for today?" I ask with a smirk. "Noooo!" the class collectively reacts, and I laugh and continue.

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...they are not good at spotting fake news!

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The video posted on Facebook was provocative: Grainy footage showed scenes of people cramming papers into boxes; a voiceover claimed it showed ballot-stuffing in the 2016 presidential election. "Have you ever noticed that the ONLY people caught committing voter fraud are Democrats?", text at the bottom of the post prompted.

Asked whether the video constituted strong evidence of voter fraud, many U.S. high school students concluded that it did.

As it turns out, the video showed scenes from Russia, not the United States. And even among those students who saw through the ruse, a quarter couldn't articulate why the video was suspect. Only three among the more than 3,000 responses tracked down the source of the original video.

Students' weak performance on that task and five other tasks aiming to gauge their online-reasoning skills constitutes alarming evidence that a large majority of students are not well prepared to investigate sources of information for their accuracy, relevance, and quality. And despite more than a decade's worth of policy chatter about media literacy, whatever schools have been doing doesn't appear to have been enough to inoculate students against "fake" news.

"Reliable information is to civic health what proper sanitation ad potable water are to public health," wrote the researchers, part of the Stanford History Education Group at Stanford University. "We need high-quality digital literacy curricula, validated by rigorous research, to guarantee the vitality of American democracy."

The study is based on results from nearly 3,450 9th to 12th grade students who took a series of six media literacy exercises, including examining the Russian video. They also were asked to distinguish between news and ads on Slate's website, to examine whether a nonprofit's page on global warming was reliable, compare two webpages, and analyze a tweet from an advocacy group.

The study sample generally mirrored, though it didn't entirely match, the demographic composition of U.S. schools, and it is not a nationally representative one, instead being pulled from 16 districts across some 14 states. Still, the results are sobering: Students did very poorly overall.

For each of the six tasks, at least two-thirds of students were rated "beginning," rather than "emerging" or "mastery." Students performed especially poorly on the global-warming nonprofit task: The website had been set up by a fossil fuel group, but most students focused on superficial features like its presentation, nonprofit status, or ".org" URL. All but 3 percent of students were rated wrong on that task.

Here's a closer look at the findings and what they mean.

There are significant gaps between groups of students.

Mirroring other academic indicators, students qualifying for free and reduced-price lunches, a proxy for poverty, did significantly less well than other students. The results also showed that black students scored significantly lower than white students; that students whose mothers held more formal education also did better than those who did not; and that scores generally improved for the upper secondary grades compared to 9th graders.

Students living in urban locales also did better than students in rural locales, an intriguing finding that could point to more attention to media literacy in urban centers-or simply better funding and more well-equipped teachers.

Media literacy efforts haven't been enough.

The clear implication from this is that despite an explosion in media literacy awareness and even professional development, schools haven't cracked the media literacy nut yet.

This isn't to criticize hard work by a lot of people. There are a number of groups offering training and support, and media literacy is by now intertwined in all kinds of policy documents. Aspects of media literacy fall into the information literacy standards promulgated by library-science professionals and the ISTE standards for teachers and students, created by a group that supports effective instructional-technology use in schools.

And the Common Core State Standards, still the backbone of K-12 academic expectations in most states, require students to "gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources [and] assess the credibility and accuracy of each source." (Groups like the National Association of Media Literacy Education have also highlighted other ways the common core can support media literacy efforts.)

It is to suggest, though, that such efforts don't yet appear to have translated into widespread understanding.

The report criticizes commonly taught checklists to evaluate online content, because they tend to focus students' attention on one website or news source. In fact, as prior research by SHEG demonstates, expert evaluators tend to read "laterally," opening many browser tabs and cross checking the original source against many others.

There are many civics education implications here.

This is probably the most important takeaway. When students can't identify the quality of a source, how can they make good decisions about how to vote, or form their own opinions on important topics like health care, housing, and economic policy?

It's doubly concerning given that there are now entire cable-news networks and partisan news sites built around presenting a skewed accounting of facts. Social media hasn't helped: The atomized nature of online interactions makes it easy to share doctored or fake information. And increasingly, as another recent report coined it, "truth decay" is eroding the notion of objective facts: Americans can't even agree on a set of basic facts that underpin their arugments or conclusions anymore.

A second thing to worry about is the gap in media literacy skills between needy and black students relative to their peers. To my mind, this bolsters an emerging discourse among civics education advocates who are worried about a "civics gap." This refers to a phenomenon in which underserved groups have the least access to effective civics preparation. It's not hard to understand why this is a problem. Communities need to be able to effectively advocate for lawmakers and policy and legislation that improves their members' lives, and to do that you need to be able to marshal facts and make good arguments.
Image: Getty

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Students Are Really, Really Bad at Spotting Fake News, Misleading Websites

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The video posted on Facebook was provocative: Grainy footage showed scenes of people cramming papers into boxes; a voiceover claimed it showed ballot-stuffing in the 2016 presidential election. "Have you ever noticed that the ONLY people caught committing voter fraud are Democrats?", text at the bottom of the post prompted.

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How to make Reading Instruction more Efficient (K - G3 focus)

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How to make Reading Instruction more Efficient (K - G3 focus)

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Warning - OPINION PIECE!

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Opinion

Scaling back small-group instruction would have dramatic improvements in literacy

Third grade reading proficiency matters-enormously. It is eerily predictive of academic and career success; students who don't reach this benchmark are four times less likely to graduate from high school on time. Unfortunately, K-3 literacy instruction, on which so much depends, is often a misguided, inefficient mess. While it consumes a generous portion of the school day, it typically neglects the most vital elements of literacy. That's why our success rate, despite some progress, is still abysmal: only about half of our 3rd graders perform at grade level on their own state assessments. It is even lower for poor and minority students.

This is both horrific and unnecessary. According to literacy researcher Richard Allington, studies show that "virtually every student could be reading on grade level by the end of 1st grade." In my experience, most educators acknowledge the need for intensive, systematic phonics instruction. They also know that students need to read and talk and write far more than they currently do, across the curriculum. There is wide agreement that all of these elements must be in place for K-3 students to acquire the fluency, knowledge, and vocabulary needed to become literate and articulate. We've yet to capitalize on this consensus. Or to see what prevents us from acting on it: the structure and substance of the typical K-3 literacy block and our overhyped commercial literacy programs. Their failure can often be traced to the pervasiveness of small-group, ability-based instruction.

The most successful K-3 teachers I've observed use small groups sparingly. That's because their whole-class instruction consistently incorporates the most proven (but rarely implemented) elements of successful teaching. They master simple methods for ensuring that all students are attentive, and they conduct frequent, ongoing assessments of the class's progress throughout the lesson-and then re-teach accordingly. An Education Week article last year adds credence to this approach, reporting that whole-group instruction is "almost always" more effective than the small-group, ability-based model.

These facts point to an opportunity for dramatic improvements in 3rd grade literacy. Do the math: In a two-hour reading block, five groups of students will receive about 20 minutes of reading instruction per day. In a classroom that uses small groups more sparingly, students will receive about 80 minutes-three to four times as much.

Three to four times as much. This would allow for huge infusions of instructional time into the essential components of literacy. Teachers could use this additional time to incorporate more:

* Intensive, sustained, systematic phonics. We could substantially accelerate students' mastery of the phonetic code in K-1-and still have time for kids to read and listen to far more fiction and nonfiction texts.

* Reading/general knowledge. If most students have mastered decoding in the 1st grade, they could spend record amounts of time in 2nd and 3rd grade reading literature, history, and science texts to build their knowledge base and vocabulary, which are critical to effective comprehension.

* Vocabulary instruction. Most of a rich vocabulary is acquired through abundant reading. But research also shows that we can reliably supplement this with targeted, embedded vocabulary instruction.

* Discussion. To become confident, articulate speakers, students must engage in frequent, purposeful discussions about what they read. We could multiply the length and frequency of such discussions, which animate an appreciation of reading and are excellent preparation for writing.

* Writing and writing instruction. Writing has an unsurpassed capacity to help us think logically, express ourselves clearly, and understand, analyze, and retain content. It often promotes dramatic, measurable improvements across the curriculum and is crucial to success in innumerable careers.

Let's be candid here: These core elements of literacy seldom get the time they deserve in most K-3 classrooms-or our inordinately praised commercial programs. A shift to larger amounts of well-executed, whole-class instruction would at least double the amount that students receive in these critical areas. The benefits, for K-3 and beyond, would be immense.

Of course, many will argue that students don't need more time with their teacher; they can learn to read and write on their own, at our now-ubiquitous independent learning "centers," which are set up with materials for students to work independently while the teacher works with small groups. But are they learning? "According to the studies," writes literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, "No." Time spent away from the teacher, he writes, should not be considered a "productive part of the school day." I consistently observe students languishing at these unsupervised centers, ambling slowly from station to station, aimlessly turning pages or talking quietly with a partner instead of reading. And that explains, as Michael P. Ford and Michael F. Opitz found nearly two decades ago, why only about a third of the overall literacy period has any academic value.

What should we do? Take Shanahan's advice: "Brush up your skills in working with larger groups," and use the windfall of precious time to multiply the amount of instruction we provide in the most indispensable elements of K-3 literacy. Then as night follows day, 3rd grade literacy rates will rise.

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How to Make Reading Instruction Much, Much More Efficient

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Opinion Third grade reading proficiency matters-enormously. It is eerily predictive of academic and career success; students who don't reach this benchmark are four times less likely to graduate from high school on time. Unfortunately, K-3 literacy instruction, on which so much depends, is often a misguided, inefficient mess.

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The multi-age grouping approach is seen as a key feature of personalized learning, but the jury is still out on its impact

Lincoln Elementary decided to take its personalized-learning approach to what the Belvidere, Ill. school saw as the next logical step: creating multi-age classrooms, initially by combining kindergarten and 1st grade, for the 2018-19 school year.

The benefits, as Principal Beth Marchini and her teachers saw it, were obvious.

The school's youngest struggling learners could get extra time to master kindergarten material. More advanced "lowers" (the new term for kindergartners) could jump into 1st-grade-level math or reading as soon as they were ready. And high-flying "uppers" (formerly known as 1st graders) could serve as mentors and role models for the lowers, who were brand-new to school.

The multi-age-grouping approach should be a key feature of personalized-learning initiatives, some personalized-learning advocates say. But the jury is still out on the impact it actually has on student learning.

A year in, Marchini sees promise in the approach, which is now also being tried with combined 2nd and 3rd grades.

"While it's not perfect, it's definitely a step in the right direction," she said. "Structurally, we needed to make a change so that we could set up a system where we could begin to remove some of that time element" for mastering material for our kids."

The process has required the school to rethink not just curriculum but scheduling, classroom organization, data, and teaching methods, Marchini and her staff say. "This is messy, and it's not comfortable," she said. "We're really teaching in beta."

For now, there's little to support the idea as having either a positive or negative impact on student achievement. That is the case even though some personalized-learning experts see multi-age grouping as a necessary step for ensuring that instruction is tailored to each student.

"It is more difficult to do effective personalized learning without multi-age. Multi-age creates a structure that's aligned with the strategy," said Jim Rickabaugh, who previously served as director of the Institute for Personalized Learning, a nonprofit based in Pewaukee, Wis., that helps districts navigate personalized learning.

But, he added, a shift in teaching and learning has to accompany the changes in grouping.

"We really think of school as instruction, how we're going to organize for instruction, not how we are going to organize for learning." That challenges the "underlying assumptions of how schools work," he said.

'It's a Lot of Work'

The organizational hurdles associated with moving away from a school system that's centered around grades may be a big part of the reason why the strategy isn't used widely. Nearly 60 percent of K-12 teachers said their school doesn't group students of different ages together, according to a nationally representative survey of nearly 600 educators conducted by the Education Week Research Center this year. Just 30 percent said their school tries the approach "sometimes," and only 12 percent reported consistently using multi-age groups.

Indeed, even teachers that are fans of a more individualized approach to instruction say that putting children of different ages in the same classroom would be a tough logistical lift.

Michele Kitanov, who teaches 6th grade in the Triton Regional school district in Massachusetts, said that years ago, she was at a school that considered multi-age grouping but ultimately decided it wasn't a good fit.

"It's a lot of work, it's a whole different mindset," she said. Nowadays, it might be worth reconsidering that decision, given the growing expectations for a more personalized approach to learning, she said. But pulling off multi-age classrooms would be very difficult, given that "standards are so directed at the grade level," Kitanov said.

To be sure, multi-age classrooms aren't new to the era of personalized and competency-based education. The one-room schoolhouse, a staple of the early American education system, used a multi-age model by necessity. It's also been a hallmark of the Montessori movement, which started more than a century ago, and emphasizes a more personalized approach to learning.

In the 1990s, Kentucky, a pioneer in education redesign, called for schools to group elementary students by ability rather than grade level. But the state moved away from that policy, in part because teachers complained that it was difficult to figure out how to appropriately group students.

"It's an old idea, but it's an old idea that's becoming more relevant because of the personalization push," in K-12 education,said Jonathan Plucker, a professor of talent development at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education in Baltimore.

'Surprisingly Thin' Research

The research on whether multi-age grouping actually contributes to improved student achievement is "surprisingly thin," Plucker said. There isn't much data investigating its impact on schools, either positive or negative, he added. "This is a great example of something that's becoming hot, but because it is so understudied, we can't give good advice to districts."

But Plucker suggests there is a good reason why schools might at least want to give multi-age grouping a shot: Classrooms typically have students whose abilities are at a range of grade levels, even if they are all the same age.

"Our model now is to have a classroom where they are all roughly the same age, but ability and achievement is all over the place," Plucker said. "How do we move to a system where we have a much tighter range of ability and achievement and the students ages' are all over the place? That's the key question with personalization."

Trying to group students by ability, rather than age, isn't easy. But the Kettle Moraine district near Milwaukee has been at it for more than half a dozen years. Schools in the district may combine kindergarten with 1st grade, 2nd with 3rd, and so on, or they may combine 1st grade with 2nd, or 3rd with 4th. Middle schools have classes that span three grade levels. Teachers typically "loop" with their students, meaning that children will stay with them for both grades and get new classmates after the first year.

It was a bumpy adjustment at first-including for families-but it's been worthwhile, said Laura Dahm, who taught in multi-age classrooms in the district for nearly a decade and is now its director of instructional coaches.

"We always say elementary school and youth sports are the only places that are grouped by age," she said. "We work with people of different ages, we sit around the dinner table with people of different ages. We have kids who will walk when they are ready to walk, be potty trained when they are ready to be potty trained. But in kindergarten, they all have to be ready to read on the same day."

The multi-age structure gives students more time to master grade-level content, Dahm said. Older students in the classrooms can serve as mentors, teaching younger students routines like how to line up and store materials in a cubby, so that the teacher doesn't have to do it. And it's easier-and carries less of a stigma-to customize instruction for individual students.

"It started to be less about what does every 2nd grader need and more about what does this child need," Dahm said. "We have really grown to a point where there was no value associated with what grade level you were on."

Older students bullying younger students has not been an issue, she added. In fact, because the teacher spends so much time building up the learning environment in these multi-age classrooms, students tend to "stand up in new ways to 'protect' the climate of the classroom," and are more likely to self-regulate their behavior, she said.

Curriculum Misalignment

The Waukesha STEM Academy, a charter school also near Milwaukee, has gone beyond combining a grade or two. The school has what Principal James Murray describes as a "full-blown competency-based" system for its K-8 students. Students move on in the school's continuum as soon as they are ready.

But it took a lot of work, including enlisting a coder and developer to create the online platforms and adaptive systems needed to track student progress.

"Kids needed the resources to move forward when they were ready," he said. "We built a lot of that from the ground up because we couldn't find anything that was already built at that time. We drew it out on napkins and we started building spreadsheets and wrote codes with it."

The sheer logistical challenges of carefully tracking each student's achievement data to make sure that he or she is in the right spot based on ability is something teachers at Lincoln Elementary in Illinois have grappled with. In fact, even just making sure teachers' schedules line up in a way that makes multi-age grouping possible has been tough.

Morgan Peterson, who teaches a 1st grade of both English and Spanish speakers, said that she was paired last year with the kindergarten teacher next door. By the end of the year, she said, a handful of kindergartners were meeting regularly with her students for reading group. And some of her 1st grade students went down to the kindergarten for extra help.

The arrangement seemed to benefit those students, but there were still plenty of bumps. "There's some misalignment of the curriculum," Peterson said. "In 1st grade, we are working on writing words and writing sentences. And kindergarten is working on writing letters. It's a huge difference; there's a big gap."

This year, the exchanges aren't as easy to facilitate, in part because Peterson's schedule doesn't neatly align with the kindergarten teachers she's paired with. But overall, she thinks the shift has forced her and her colleagues to look more closely at student data and use it to personalize learning.

"This model truly allows us to be more responsive to individual student's needs," Peterson said, "We can get where we want to be, but there's a lot of growing pains and some hurdles along the way."

Published in Print: November 6, 2019, as Older and Younger Learning Together

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Should Older and Younger Kids Be Grouped Together?

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Lincoln Elementary decided to take its personalized-learning approach to what the Belvidere, Ill. school saw as the next logical step: creating multi-age classrooms, initially by combining kindergarten and 1st grade, for the 2018-19 school year. The benefits, as Principal Beth Marchini and her teachers saw it, were obvious.

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Teacher Stress:  Balancing demands and resources

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Teacher Stress:  Balancing demands and resources

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Understanding how teachers' perceptions of their work lead to stress can help leaders find solutions and support those who need it most.
T eaching is widely recognized to be a stressful occupation, characterized by numerous and varied challenges: administrative burdens, long hours, classroom management difficulties, and lack of autonomy, to name but a few. Teachers are isolated from colleagues for much of the day, spending less than 5% of their work time collaborating with peers (Scholastic & the Gates Foundation, 2012). They are also paid less than other workers with similar experience and education, a gap that has grown from 4.3% in 1996 to 17% in 2015, according to the Economic Policy Institute ( Allegreto & Mishel , 2016). Further, teachers face significant social and political scrutiny as to how they do their jobs (Goldstein, 2014).

These demands take a toll, resulting in job dissatisfaction, workplace fatigue, burnout, and reduced occupational commitment. The statistics on teacher turnover are grim: Research estimates that between 19% and 30% of new teachers leave the field within the first five years of teaching, which can reduce the espirit de corps of their campus community and negatively affect student learning ( Guin , 2004; Kraft & Papay , 2014). In the most recent PDK poll, half of teachers surveyed said they had considered leaving the profession within the last year, with low pay and high stress most frequently cited as the reasons (PDK International, 2019).

Of course, teacher stress is not unique to the United States. In fact, research has yielded remarkably consistent findings around the world, with roughly 20-25% of the teaching workforce reporting high levels of stress. For example, this holds true for 25% of teachers in Great Britain (Travers & Cooper, 1996) and Italy (Zurlo, Pes, & Capasso , 2013); 20-22% in Malaysia (Moy et al., 2014) and Germany ( Unterbrink et al., 2007); and 25-26% in Australia (Garrick et al., 2014) and the U.S. (Lambert et al., 2015).

But if it's clear that teacher stress is widespread, it's not always clear how teacher stress should be . Traditionally, educational policy research has focused on working conditions (i.e., school administration, teacher autonomy, and collegiality with colleagues) as the main driver of occupational health ( Béteille & Loeb, 2009; Ingersoll, 2001; Ladd, 2011). That is, teacher stress tends to be viewed as a result of working in a stressful environment, often characterized as lacking sufficient funding or effective leadership. However, if only 20-25% of teachers report high levels of stress, then that would suggest that the working environment itself is only part of the issue. In many schools, some teachers are stressed out while others are not; but if working conditions were all that mattered, then every teacher in the school would be equally stressed. Clearly, then, there must be more to the story.
Appraising the situation and defining teacher stress
Kyriacou's (2001) perspective on teacher stress draws from a theory - originally proposed by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman (1984) - that has become the dominant model of stress among psychological researchers in general. It understands stress to result from a perceived imbalance between demands and resources, which is why it is sometimes referred to as a "balance model" ( Meurs & Perrewé , 2011).

In short, the process of appraisal combines a dose of objective reality with individual interpretation, both a realistic evaluation of the challenges we face a subjective effort to put the best possible light on the situation and the resources at hand, so that we feel that we are able to cope. This may, in part, explain why some teachers are more vulnerable to stress in their classroom, even compared to neighboring teachers working in the same school with the same types of students. One teacher's interpretation of
the situation may be different from the other's; one may see classroom demands as exceeding their available resources, while the other believes their resources (helpful colleagues and parents, say) are sufficient to meet classroom demands.

Assessing which teachers are appraising an imbalance of demands versus resources is a unique challenge given that it requires comparing units of demands to units of resources to determine when an imbalance exists - without such a system, this part of the transactional model could not be tested ( Hobfoll , Schwarzer, & Chon, 1998). To address this challenge, my colleagues and I developed a survey of teachers' classroom working conditions called the Classroom Appraisal of Demands and Resources (CARD; Lambert et al., 2009). The CARD assesses both parts of the appraisal process hypothesized by Lazarus and Folkman (1984): Classroom Demands (primary appraisal) and Classroom Resources (secondary appraisal).

The CARD Demands scale consists of 35 items asking teachers to rate how demanding various aspects of the classroom environment are on a scale of 1 (not at all demanding) to 5 (extremely demanding). As we developed the measure over the past decade, we drew the specific items from aspects of the classroom environment found most frequently to contribute to teacher stress in the literature. For instance, teachers tend to report that the management of student behavior tops their list of stressors (Lewis, Roache, & Romi , 2011). Not that this should lead us to "blame" students for teacher stress; nor is it to downplay stressors related to administrators' behaviors, shortages of instructional supplies, time pressures, testing, and so on. Rather, the point is simply to acknowledge that everyday classroom interactions - students joking with each other, talking back, dozing off, tipping over their chairs, and so on - create intense and immediate demands on teachers. The CARD Demands scale also assesses other frequent demands for teachers, including administrative demands and lack of needed instructional supplies.

The CARD Classroom Resources scale addresses the other side of the appraisal process: What resources can teachers draw upon to meet these demands? This scale includes 30 items measuring the helpfulness of school-provided resources on a scale of 1 (very unhelpful) to 5 (very helpful). Many of the Resource items focus on the helpfulness of other people. Teachers often report that they rely on other people to help them, including school personnel such as administrators, school counselors, school psychologists, teaching aides, and other educational specialists, as well as other adults in the community, such as parent volunteers and mentors. Depending on how helpful these people appear to be in meeting classroom demands, teachers will view some of them as highly valuable resources, others as not valuable at all. The less helpful those people appear to be in responding to the challenges of student misbehavior, for example, the more stress the teacher is likely to feel. This scale also includes measures of the availability of instructional resources.

Measuring Demands and Resources is not sufficient to capture the central theoretical premise that stress results when demands are appraised as resources ( Hobfoll , Schwarzer, & Chon, 1998). To determine this, we calculate the difference between teachers' Demands and Resources scales. Using the scores of the nearly 1,000 elementary teachers have taken the CARD, we are able to group teachers into three categories: (a) Resourced teachers who generally appraise their classroom resources as exceeding their classroom demands, (b) Balanced teachers who generally appraise their classroom demands and resources as equal, and (c) Demanded teachers who consistently appraise their demands as exceeding their resources. This last group of teachers are likely among those 25% who are most at risk for stress. Research across 18 studies using the CARD has demonstrated that Demanded teachers indeed experience symptoms of stress, including reduced job satisfaction, more burnout, and lowered occupational commitment (McCarthy et al., 2016).
Coping and stress interventions for teachers
Psychologists typically distinguish between two main types of coping strategies. First is -focused coping, which aims to change the stressful situation. For example, a teacher might use classroom management techniques to address a student's behavior, or might ask an administrator to intervene with the student's parents. Generally speaking, this strategy is most useful when there's real potential to change the situation.

Second is -focused coping, which aims to manage the emotions that go along with stress, such as worry and frustration. For example, this might include taking a few deep breaths to calm down before calling an upset parent, or attending a yoga class to recharge after a long day of staff meetings - these strategies become particularly important when we know we cannot change the situation.

All teachers can benefit from interventions designed to cope with stress. Most urgently needed, however, are efforts to support those teachers who appraise themselves as chronically over-demanded and under-resourced - i.e., what my colleagues and I call Demanded teachers, or the 20-25% of teachers who are most at risk of experiencing high levels of stress. What can be done to identify those teachers and help them cope?
Identifying teachers at risk
A number of psychological assessments are available for school leaders seeking to understand which teachers might be most vulnerable to stress, including the CARD measure (Lambert et al., 2009). The Perceived Stress measure, which can be completed in a few minutes, is widely used, both in and outside of education, to assess the degree to which life situations are appraised as stressful (Cohen, Kamarck , & Mermelstein , 1983). Also, given that burnout occurs at significant rates among educators, a version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory was developed specifically for them (MBI-Educators Survey; Maslach, Jackson, & Schwab, 1996).

Administrators can also use informal check-ins and peer mentors to keep in touch with their teaching staff and identify which teachers are experiencing the highest levels of stress. However, when using informal assessments rather than standardized measures, it's important to keep in mind that the objective indicators of the demands teachers face (e.g., class size, the number of classes taught, their financial need to work a second job) do not tell the whole story - the real question is whether teachers subjectively perceive their resources to be sufficient to help them meet those demands.
Structural interventions
The old maxim that prevention is the best medicine can be important for schools wanting to reduce stress among teachers. Just as many corporations provide wellness centers for their employees, schools could address the needs of their teachers holistically by including comprehensive wellness programming in every school. School leaders might even borrow from the public health field by putting in place "upstream" interventions that focus on prevention for the entire population, as opposed to treating problems reactively ( Lorenc et al., 2013). Lowering the overall demand level in a school would likely lift many teachers out of the Demanded category.

Rather than waiting for Demanded teachers to experience stress, burnout, and reduced job satisfaction, proactive strategies can be used to carefully tailor teachers' capabilities to their class assignments. Such upstream interventions could be particularly important for novice teachers, who are sometimes viewed as brimming with enthusiasm and energy and ready to take on any challenge. However, new teachers appear to be vulnerable to high stress at about the same 25% rate as more experienced teachers (McCarthy et al., 2019). Schools often have formal or informal policies that provide experienced teachers with the highest-performing students (Grissom, Kalogrides , & Loeb, 2015), while newer teachers are assigned to students who are most challenging to teach. Rather than offering this trial-by-fire approach, school leaders might want to make sure newer teachers, especially, receive as many structural supports as possible, including mentoring by experienced faculty mentors, release time for professional learning, and classroom assignments that set them up for success. Perhaps most important of all, though, is for administrators to be attentive to how demands (e.g., classes and students) are apportioned.

Accountability standards have significantly reduced the flexibility and autonomy of teachers in U.S. schools (Ingersoll, 2009), and teachers' time and methods are often micromanaged (Hargreaves, 1994). These practices fly in the face of research that shows that teachers experience less stress and job dissatisfaction as their autonomy increases (Pearson & Moomaw , 2005; Tuettemann & Punch, 1992). Therefore, another way to reduce stress for Demanded teachers, particularly those with more classroom experience, is by offering them increased autonomy over their classroom. Allowing teachers to manage the day-to-day functioning of their classrooms and perhaps even participate in decision making for their school can not only reduce stress, it also comes at little financial cost. Moreover, under such conditions, teachers can come to see administrators as allies rather than bosses.
Psychological interventions
Aside from structural changes, a number of more targeted psychological interventions could be important for minimizing the number of Demanded teachers on campus. These include mind-body interventions that focus "on the interactions among the brain, mind, body, and behavior, and the powerful ways in which emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and behavioral factors can directly affect health" (National Institutes of Health, 2013). Counselors, psychologists, and social workers with expertise in meditation and other techniques can be employed to deliver such interventions for teachers. For example, a group of graduate students working with me at the University of Texas offer small groups and psychoeducational workshops designed to help teachers understand the causes of stress and mind-body techniques they can use to promote wellness. We find the use of small groups, conducted in the schools, particularly helpful in providing a space for teachers to support each other and overcome the professional isolation they sometimes experience ( Eyal et al., 2019).
Recognizing and supporting vulnerable teachers
Teacher stress is documented across the globe. It takes a measurable toll on the teaching workforce, as many teachers become burned out and decide to leave the profession. Recognizing that stress is a psychological process that results from how teachers appraise their own classroom context may provide avenues for intervention for those 20-25% of teachers most vulnerable to stress. Such interventions include upstream structural efforts to calibrate demands across the school campus to better suit each teacher's capacity and more targeted interventions aimed at teachers who are most Demanded. Both types of interventions together will likely assist not just the teachers most at risk for stress, but teachers throughout the school, as a workforce that is more stable and satisfied will create a more pleasant and effective working environment for everyone.
References
Allegreto , S. & Mishel , L. (2016, August). The teacher pay gap is wider than ever. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.

Cohen, S., Kamarck , T., & Mermelstein , R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24 , 386-396.

Eyal , M., Bauer, T., Playfair, E., & McCarthy, C.J. (2019). Mind-body group for teacher stress: A trauma -Informed intervention program. Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 44 (3), 204-221.

Garrick, A., Winwood , P.C., Mak , A.S., Cathcart , S., Bakker, A.B., & Lushington , K. (2014). Prevalence and organisational factors of psychological injury among Australian school teachers . Australasian Journal of Organisational Psychology, 7.

Ingersoll, R.M. (2009). Who controls teachers' work: Power and accountability in America's . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lambert, R.G., McCarthy, C.J., Fitchett, P.G., Lineback , S., & Reiser, J. (2015). Identification of elementary teachers' risk for stress and vocational concerns using the national Schools and Staffing Survey.
Education Policy Analysis Archives, 23 (43).

Lewis, R., Roache, J., & Romi , S. (2011). Coping styles as mediators of teachers' classroom management techniques. Education, 85 , 53-68.

Lorenc , T., Petticrew , M., Welch, V., & Tugwell , P. (2013). What types of interventions generate inequalities? Evidence from systematic reviews. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 67 (2), 190-193.

McCarthy, C., Lambert, R., Lineback , S., Fitchett, P., & Baddouh , P. (2016). Assessing teacher appraisals and stress in the classroom: Review of the classroom appraisal of resources and demands. Educational Psychology Review, 28 (3), 577-603.

Meurs , J.A. & Perrewé , P.L. (2011). Cognitive activation theory of stress: An integrative theoretical approach to work stress. Journal of Management, 37 (4), 1043-1068.

Moy, F.M., Hoe, V.C.W., Hairi , N.N., Buckley, B., Wark , P.A., Koh, D., & Bulgiba , A.M. (2014). Cohort study on clustering of lifestyle risk factors and understanding its association with stress on health and wellbeing among school teachers in Malaysia ( CLUSTer ) - a study protocol. BMC Public Health, 14 (1), 918-936.

Unterbrink , T., Hack, A., Pfeifer, R., Buhl- Grießhaber , V., Müller, U., Wesche , H., . . . Bauer, J. (2007). Burnout and effort-reward-imbalance in a sample of 949 German teachers. International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, 80 (5), 433-441.

Citation: McCarthy, C.J. (2019, Oct. 28). Teacher stress: Balancing demands and resources. Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (3), 8-14.

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Teacher stress: Balancing demands and resources - kappanonline.org

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Getty Images Understanding how teachers' perceptions of their work lead to stress can help leaders find solutions and support those who need it most. T eaching is widely recognized to be a stressful occupation, characterized by numerous and varied challenges: administrative burdens, long hours, classroom management difficulties, and lack of autonomy, to name but a few.

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Principals and teachers are out of sync on personalized learning

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Principals and teachers are out of sync on personalized learning

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School leaders tend to be more optimistic about personalized learning than classroom educators, survey comparison shows

To better understand and appreciate the difficulties teachers face in making personalized-learning approaches work, Vermont Principal Adam Bunting decided to jump back into the classroom for a brief teaching stint.

He taught a two-week course for 21 students in grades 9-12 at the end of the school year at Champlain Valley Union High School. Students had to produce personalized-learning projects based on their own interests that were also linked to graduation standards. One student project, for instance, examined what it would take to persuade pharmaceutical companies to lower the cost of insulin.

It was an eye-opening experience for Bunting, who is a big fan of personalized learning and works in a state that has had a personalized-learning law in place for six years.

"Oh, this is hard," he remembers thinking. "It wasn't perfect. But it was good for me to be feet on the ground."

That back-to-teaching experience might be something other principals might want to consider, given the differing results of Education Week's national survey of teachers on personalized learning, conducted this summer, and a 2018 survey of principals' perspectives that included some similar questions.

That comparison found that principals tended to have a much more optimistic view of the promise of personalized learning than teachers and lower levels of concern about the potentially negative effects of digitally driven personalized learning.

For instance, when asked how much confidence they had that digital technologies to personalize learning can improve student engagement, 62 percent of principals said "quite a lot" or "a great deal," while 41 percent of teachers noted those levels of confidence. Regarding confidence in improving student learning, the difference was 51 percent to 33 percent, respectively.

There were also significant differences between principals and teachers when they were asked about concerns that using digital technologies to personalize learning could contribute to some problems. For instance, 49 percent of principals are concerned such technologies could lead to students spending too much time on screens, compared with 72 percent of teachers.

Teachers were also more concerned about such technologies leading to students working alone too often, with 48 percent expressing that opinion, compared with 38 percent for principals.

"None of this surprises me," said Betheny Gross, an associate director for the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. "When principals and teachers talk about delivery of instruction, teachers would express more caution about shifting to the tech tools. They like to have control over what's happening in their classrooms."

Skipping Important Steps

Gross is a co-author of " Personalized Learning at a Crossroads," a 2018 report that, among other things, examined the important role principals play in the success or failure of personalized-learning efforts. The report's vision or definition for personalized learning is that it should customize instruction to students' strengths and weaknesses and personal interests-and where appropriate, integrate technology tools-to boost student learning.

But attaining that vision is easier said than done, according to the report, which was based on more than 450 interviews with 300-plus teachers, principals, superintendents, and other district administrators, as well as a survey of more than 900 teachers.

One big finding was that principals largely left it up to teachers to define personalization, which fostered inconsistent approaches from classroom to classroom within a school, and ultimately, confusion among students, too. As a consequence, maintaining academic rigor schoolwide became a problem.

What happens often, the report notes, is that district leaders and principals skip a few very important steps in personalized-learning efforts: explaining to teachers why they should move in this direction, crafting a strategic vision for what that should look like, and then giving teachers the time and training to learn how to make it work.

"Everybody absolutely needs an understanding of why-'We're doing this because we want students to be able to do X, Y, and Z,' " said Gross. "What happens when that strategic vision is not in place is you end up with a lot of haphazard stuff that is not valuable to students or teachers."

John F. Pane, a senior scientist for the RAND Corporation who has conducted extensive research on personalized learning, concurs.

Pane, a co-author of a 2017 report titled " Informing Progress: Insights on Personalized Learning Implementation and Effects," spent time observing classrooms as part of the research. "Some schools I visited just left the teachers to do [personalized learning] on their own," he said. "There was no professional development."

'No Professional Development'

That failure of principals to ensure good training is in place might explain the higher levels of skepticism about personalized learning among teachers. "I think it's very important for [principals and teachers] to be on the same page, to know what actual practices they are going to implement, and what tools they're going to use," Pane said.

Michelle Wheatfill, an assistant principal at C.C. Ronnow Elementary School in the Clark County district in Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, worked in a tech-savvy school before moving to C.C. Ronnow this school year. Her new school is in the beginning stages of a 1-to-1 computing initiative designed to drive more sophisticated use of educational technology.

Wheatfill, who responded to the Education Week principal survey in 2018, said in a more recent telephone interview that in most grade levels there's usually one teacher who wants to push the envelope on classroom innovation. Principals need to do a better job of encouraging and rewarding those teachers for sharing lessons learned about using technology to personalize learning.

Unfortunately, what happens often is teachers get overly worried about students misusing new technologies, she said. "Teachers need to break down that wall and not be scared about what kids do with technology. It's that assumption that cripples them a lot in using it."

Still, many teachers do see the value of digitally driven personalized learning when it is done right.

Kurt Vonnahme, who heads up the math department at Hinsdale Central High School near Chicago, agreed to talk to Education Week after responding to its national survey this year of teachers about personalized learning. While he doesn't see personalized learning as a "silver bullet," he suggested it does have a lot of advantages., especially to help teachers better understand their students.

"That is a huge aspect of personalized learning," he said. "As teachers, if we're working in a traditional way, we just don't have the capacity to do that, particularly if you're a teacher teaching 150 students." Digital tools designed to personalize learning, he said "help us home in on an individual-by-individual basis [and] better understand who that student is."

Published in Print: November 6, 2019, as Principals and Teachers Out of Sync

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Principals and Teachers Are Out of Sync on Personalized Learning, Data Show

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To better understand and appreciate the difficulties teachers face in making personalized-learning approaches work, Vermont Principal Adam Bunting decided to jump back into the classroom for a brief teaching stint. He taught a two-week course for 21 students in grades 9-12 at the end of the school year at Champlain Valley Union High School.

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Is it going to transform public schools, finally bringing education into the age of digitally driven personalization embodied by companies such as Amazon and Netflix? Or is it a billionaire-backed boondoggle, aimed primarily at replacing teachers and extracting data from children? When it comes to "personalized learning," there's no shortage of hyperbole from either proponents or critics.

Here's what you need to know about the realities of one of the biggest, most controversial trends in K-12 education-starting with the most difficult question first.

What exactly is personalized learning?
Inside K-12 schools, the term is used to mean just about anything.
For many educators, it's about using adaptive software that adjusts to each student's skill level. Sometimes, it's about the systematic use of digital data to inform big decisions, like how to group students. Other schools focus on giving students more say over what projects they undertake, or how they present their work. And increasingly, personalized-learning proponents also take a much wider lens, saying schools must nurture each individual child's social, emotional, and physical development.

Some see such scattered and nebulous definitions as reason to worry that personalized learning will go the way of other short-lived reforms. Others are more positive.

"In the same way that Inuits have lots of different words for 'snow,' I think these are all personalized learning," says Larry Berger, the CEO of ed-tech company Amplify and a leading thinker and writer on the topic for over a decade.

What's the hope behind the movement?
Very broadly speaking, the idea is to customize the learning experience for each student according to his or her unique skills, abilities, preferences, background, and experiences.
The hope is that will improve a wide range of student outcomes, from engagement to achievement to wellbeing.

Personalized-learning pioneer Dianne Tavenner told Education Week in 2017 that it's about the type of education good teachers have always envisioned, but haven't always had the tools to make a reality.

"Personalized learning is a way to actually enact the pedagogy we believe in and that kids thrive in," said Tavenner, the founder of Summit Public Schools, a California-based charter network that operates about a dozen of its own personalized-learning schools while licensing its personalized-learning software to hundreds of others.

So is this a new idea or not?
Not really.
The personalized learning movement has two primary wings, each of which is grounded in decades-old (and often warring) philosophies about how children learn. The so-called "engineering model" of personalized learning emphasizes efficient mastery of academic content. The idea is that experts can map out what each child needs to learn, measure what of that each already knows, and then create the optimal path for him or her to learn the rest.

Other approaches to personalized learning are rooted in progressive education traditions. This wing of the movement generally holds that learning happens when schools tap into students' interests and passions, giving them individualized opportunities to ask questions and explore and take risks.

The former approach dates at least back to the 1950s, when psychologist B.F. Skinner was experimenting with "teaching machines" intended to let students answer questions and receive feedback at their own pace. The latter goes back more than a century, to John Dewey. It's often seen today in schools that emphasize more project-based learning.

In both cases, what is new is the way in which technology-from big data to online collaboration tools to social media-is being used to amplify methods educators have been using more or less forever.

Where did the new push for personalized learning come from?
Big-picture, it's a reflection of deeper trends in both society and the K-12 sector.
Technology has already transformed other sectors of society, such as retail. Often, this has taken the form of using digital data to learn more about individuals and their preferences, then target them with information, advertisements, and recommendations. In part, personalized learning is a reflection of the push to apply those tools and ideas to education.

It's also emerged out of rising opposition to standardized tests and the so-called "factory model of education," which critics contend has left both children and teachers feeling like widgets inside the classroom. These broad forces started to come together in tangible form roughly a decade ago.

Beginning around 2009, for example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began committing hundreds of millions of dollars to support research and development around personalized learning.

Then, under President Obama, the U.S. Education Department gave half a billion dollars to encourage districts to embrace the trend, primarily via its competitive-grant program known as Race to the Top. More recently, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the venture-philanthropy group started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, has vowed to give hundreds of millions of dollars per year in support of its vision for "whole-child personalized learning," encompassing students' emotional and physical development as well as their academic learning.

States, companies, other philanthropies, and a network of nonprofits and advocacy groups are also now backing the movement.

Do personalized learning strategies work?
Oh yeah. Big-time.
In 2018, for example, the Education Week Research Center conducted a nationally representative survey of the country's school principals.

More than half characterized personalized learning as either a "transformational way to improve public education" or a "promising idea."

A whopping 97 percent said their schools were using digital technologies to personalize learning in some form or fashion.

Does personalized learning work?
That's precisely the wrong question to ask.
John Pane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation and a leading researcher of the personalized learning movement says the reason why goes back to the incredible variation in how personalized learning actually happens inside real classrooms.

"At this stage, we really need to be looking at the actual components of what people are trying to do and assess them each on their own," Pane said.

That's an argument that proponents generally embrace. They point to the strong research base for some of the core building blocks of most personalized-learning models, including providing students with differentiated instruction and real-time feedback.

Some studies of specific personalized-learning products, used in particular situations and under particular circumstances, have also yielded promising signs.

But other such studies have shown small or even negative results.

And what about personalized-learning models that seek to transform entire schools? Experts estimate there are maybe 1,000 or so such schools in the country. How are they doing?

Summit is one of the best-known, best-funded examples, having received more than $40 million from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. But Tavenner's group has declined to undergo independent third-party evaluation.

The results for other models that have been studied are generally not great.

"The evidence base is very weak at this point," said Pane, who led a Gates-funded study of about 40 personalized-learning schools, finding modest gains and big implementation challenges.

Are there other arguments against personalized learning?
You betcha.
Critics such as independent researcher Audrey Watters warn that personalized learning is a pretext for "massive data collection" and surveillance of students. They point to the rapid adoption of analogous technologies in other sectors (think, for example, Facebook), before the unintended and adverse privacy-related consequences we are now seeing could be ironed out.

That 2018 Education Week Research Center survey also found that a strong majority of the nation's principals worried that the trend was leading to too much screen time for students (85 percent expressed "some," "a lot" or "a great deal" of concern), students working alone too often (77 percent), and the tech industry gaining too much influence over public education (67 percent.)

Where does all that leave schools?

Pane and his team at RAND say K-12 educators, administrators, and policymakers are in the unenviable position of having to make high-stakes educational decisions with "imperfect evidence."

That doesn't mean they should stick their heads in the sand, the RAND team said. Personalized learning holds promise. Careful, cautious attempts at some elements of the trend may make sense. Stick to common sense and the evidence we do have, they advise. Resist pressure to throw out established practices that work just because they're not new and shiny.
But think twice before diving in.
"I would not advise schools to dump massive resources into going fully into personalized learning," Laura S. Hamilton, a senior behavioral scientist and distinguished chair in learning and assessment at the RAND Corporation, told Education Week in 2017. "Experiment with some new approaches that might be a good fit for your particular school or district, but monitor it very closely."

Published in Print: November 6, 2019, as The PL Explainer

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Is it going to transform public schools, finally bringing education into the age of digitally driven personalization embodied by companies such as Amazon and Netflix? Or is it a billionaire-backed boondoggle, aimed primarily at replacing teachers and extracting data from children? When it comes to "personalized learning," there's no shortage of hyperbole from either proponents or critics.

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Should High Schools Rethink the Sequence of Math courses? 

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Should High Schools Rethink the Sequence of Math courses? 

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Education Week

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Most students don't aspire to careers that will require calculus, so high schools must create sequences of math courses that reflect the wide variety of young people's occupational goals, a math advocacy group argues in a report published Wednesday.

"Mathematics education needs to support students' transitions to and through college, whether they're pursuing STEM disciplines or other promising majors that prepare students for careers in other fields like law, politics, design and the media," says the report by Just Equations, a group that's trying to get school districts to consider the equity of their math offerings.

Too often, "irrelevant math hurdles" are becoming stumbling blocks for students who don't aspire to careers in science, technology, engineering, or math. Additionally, schools do poorly at nurturing and recruiting black and Latino students into challenging math classes, the report says.

To serve all students well, schools must start thinking differently about their math courses, write co-authors Phil Daro, a lead author of the Common Core State Standards in math, and Harold Asturias, the director of University of California-Berkeley's Center for Mathematics Excellence and Equity.

The authors propose a model that would eliminate the classic Algebra 1-Geometry-Algebra 2 model in favor of a pattern that would have all students in the same math classes in 9 th and 10 th grade, followed by a set of choices beginning in 11 th grade.

Some of those choices would be aimed at students who will need the highest levels of math, while others would be for students in what the authors call "branch" fields-a term they coined to distinguish these students from STEM students in general, and from those who aspire to jobs that require calculus.
Courses Designed With All Students in Mind
An 11 th grade course for "branch" students might delve into statistics, game theory, and math modeling. They could build students' skills at symbolic notation, and use functions to model real-world situations. They "should not be watered-down versions of STEM topics, but instead topics with their own heft and potential relevance in branch fields" like data science, statistics, probability, digital graphics, decision theory, robotics, and game design, the report said.

All courses and pathways should be rigorous, and prepare students for college without demanding that they master types of math they won't need down the road, the report says.

The report includes examples of course sequences from districts that have ventured into this work.

The five high schools in Escondido Unified School District in California now use common math courses for all 9 th and 10 th graders, and offer a choice of two courses for 11 th grade. Math 3C includes precalculus, while Math 3S is "common-core math with statistics," Abi Leaf, a math content specialist for the district, said during a webinar Tuesday. In their senior year, STEM-oriented students can take AP Calculus their senior year, and other students can choose between Math 4 or AP Statistics.

Escondido teachers and counselors use a "decision tree" to help students think through their math options, starting with questions about their career goals. Leaf said the district has also eliminated remedial classes, and does its best to provide support for students where they need it. Teachers are participating in "teaching studios" to help them get used to "having all students in their classes," and to absorb the district's new "value system" in math, Leaf said.

Even still, after a few years of using the new approach, Escondido is concerned that the Math 3S is "considered a pathway for students of color," Leaf said, with more white students opting for Math 3C. "It's one of the biases of our system that we're working against," she said.
Read about San Francisco's work to "de-track" math.
Oregon has been rethinking its math pathways, too. About 50 high schools are piloting versions of a new model that has common courses in 9 th and 10 th grade, followed by options in 11 th. State content specialists in math and career-tech-ed designed the pathways together, in recognition of students' widely varying goals and needs.

The 9 th and 10 th grade courses cover a year's worth of Algebra, and a half year each of geometry and data science, said Mark Freed, a math specialist with the state department of education. Schools can cover that content sequentially, or integrate it over the two years, he said. Courses in 11 th grade include Algebra 2/precalculus, for students who aspire to careers that would require calculus, and, for other students, a variety of applied math classes, such as "construction geometry," "financial algebra," and "math in computer science."

"The idea is to create math systems that all our students can see themselves in, and see the relevance of math," Freed said. "We have a system that works for [future] math majors. We need one where all students see themselves as 'math people.'"
Choosing Instead of Placing
Rethinking math courses should go hand-in-hand with shifting the way schools think about assigning students to courses, Daro and Asturias wrote in the new report. Instead of "placing" students in classes based on adults' perceptions of their mastery, schools should engage in a dialogue with students, asking what their career goals are and offering information about each math pathway so students and their families can decide the best match.

That approach will likely mean that many students need support to be successful in their chosen math classes, the report said, so schools will have to provide things like summer bridge courses, or classes that students can take alongside their regular math classes-a model colleges call "co-requisite" courses-instead of getting mired in remedial math courses.

Teachers will need to shift instructional strategies as well, from a model that values the students who quickly raise their hands to a model that encourages "curious and thoughtful" dialogue that includes all students, the report says. Teachers and counselors will need to work with students to heal their "damaged math identities," it said, since so many students, ill-suited to the classic math course progression, end up feeling like they're bad at math.

For the new kinds of courses and sequences to work in high school, colleges will have to embrace supportive policies, the report said. Too often, colleges require completion of Algebra 2, or use calculus as a "signal" of students' potential, the report said. Some universities are starting to crack those doors open, dropping the Algebra 2 expectation and using courses like Advanced Placement statistics as signs of a wider variety of math mastery, the report said.

The themes in the new report aren't new. "Catalyzing Change in High School Mathematics," released last year by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, urged schools to end tracking and create new pathways that would have shared courses for the first two years, and then diverge into various options in students' third and fourth years that reflect their goals and interests.

A joint statement in 2012 by NCTM and the Mathematics Association of America urged schools to leave calculus to universities, and cultivate high school students' expertise in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.

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Should High Schools Rethink How They Sequence Math Courses?

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Most students don't aspire to careers that will require calculus, so high schools must create sequences of math courses that reflect the wide variety of young people's occupational goals, a math advocacy group argues in a report published Wednesday.

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Grades versus comments: Research on student feedback (Tom Guskey)

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Grades versus comments: Research on student feedback (Tom Guskey)

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Phi Delta Kappan

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Across the decades, battles have raged over whether teachers should put grades, comments, or both on assessments of student learning. Opinions on this issue vary widely among teachers, school leaders, and even grading and assessment consultants. Some are adamant that assessments, especially formative ones, must be graded and should include comments only. Others point out that, in some schools, the results of formative assessments are included as part of the reporting process, and thus grades are needed. A number of schools, for example, have implemented 80/20 grading policies where 80% of a student's grade is based on the results from summative assessments and 20% on formative assessments (see Brumage-Kilcourse , 2017; Stoskopf , 2016; Trembath , 2017).

The debate on grades versus comments extends to summative assessments as well. Most educators believe that summative assessments are specifically designed for assigning grades to certify student competence and report on their learning progress (Brookhart & Nitko , 2008). Others contend, however, that grades have such negative consequences that they should be eliminated from summative assessments, leaving comments as the sole form of feedback students receive on their learning (Barnes, 2018; Kohn, 1994, 1999; Spencer, 2017).

Like many issues in education, the truth is not as clear-cut as some suggest. The research on this issue is far more complicated and more highly nuanced than most writers acknowledge. By considering the complexities identified in this research, educators can develop feedback policies and practices that are far more effective and much more likely to benefit students.
Early research on grades and comments
One of the earliest studies on how grades and teacher comments affect students' achievement was conducted by psychologist Ellis Page in 1958. In this classic study, 74 secondary school teachers administered an assessment to the students in their classes and scored it in their usual way. A numerical score was assigned to each student's paper and, on the basis of that score, a letter grade of A, B, C, D, or F. Teachers then randomly divided students' papers into three groups. Papers in the first group received only the numerical score and letter grade. The second group, in addition to the score and grade, received the following standard comments with the associated grade:

For the third group, teachers provided the score, a letter grade, and individualized comments that corresponded to the teachers' personal feelings and instructional practices.

Page evaluated the effects of the comments by considering students' scores on the very next assessment given in the class. Students who received the standard comments with their grade achieved significantly higher scores than those who received only a score and grade, and the students who received individualized comments did even better. Based on these results, Page concluded that grades can have a beneficial effect on student learning when accompanied by standard or individualized comments from the teacher. Studies conducted in later years confirmed these results (e.g., Stewart & White, 1976).

The message teachers communicate in their comments may be what matters most.

Page's (1958) study is important for two reasons. First, it illustrates that while a single score and grade written on students' papers do nothing to improve their learning, grades with comments can enhance students' achievement and performance. Second, and perhaps more important, it shows that these positive effects can be gained with relatively little effort. Even standard comments can have a significant positive influence on students' performance.

A crucial but often missed aspect of Page's study, however, relates to the nature of the teachers' comments. All of the standard comments included in the study emphasize two important factors. First, they communicate the teachers' high expectations for students and the importance of students' effort. Second, all of the comments stress to students that the teacher is on their side and willing to work with them to make improvements. Note, for example, that the comment is not " must raise this grade!" but " raise this grade!" In other words, " with you in this!" and " can do it!" Thus, it may not be simply that comments make a difference. The message teachers communicate in their comments may be what matters most.
Grades and mastery
We are expressing the view that, given sufficient time and appropriate types of help, 95% of students . . . can learn a subject up to a high level of mastery. We are convinced that the grade of "A" as an index of mastery of a subject can, under appropriate conditions, be achieved by up to 95% of the students in a class. (p. 4)

Bloom further emphasized that students in the "Not Mastery" or "Not Yet" category receive feedback from teachers that is both "diagnostic and prescriptive." The diagnostic portion identifies for students precisely what they were expected to learn, what they have learned well to that point, and what they need to learn better. The prescriptive portion describes what students need to do next to improve their learning. Hence, Bloom advocated grades comments, so long as both met the criteria he described.
Comments and motivation
A study by Ruth Butler (1988) focused on the difference between ego-involving feedback versus task-involving feedback on students' interest and motivation. The investigation involved 132 5th- and 6th-grade students randomly assigned to one of three feedback conditions: The first group received what Butler labeled ego-involving numerical grades ranging from 40 to 99 that were based on students' relative standing among classmates, rather than on what students learned. The second group received task-involving individual comments related to their performance on the learning task. A third group received both. Results showed that students' interest and performance were generally higher after task-involving comments than after ego-involving grades alone or grades with comments.

Results in this study were not entirely consistent, however, and revealed what researchers label an "interaction" effect. Specifically, the effects were true only for students ranked in the bottom 25% of their class. Students ranked in the top 25% of their class who received grades maintained their high interest and motivation. In other words, the influence of grades on motivation varied depending on the grade students received. The 5th and 6th graders who got high grades continued to have high interest and motivation, and those who got low grades based on their relative standing among classmates experienced diminished interest and motivation. The study did not consider whether this is true for younger elementary students, for older secondary students, or for the 50% of 5th- and 6th-grade students who ranked in the middle of their class.

In essence, Butler's (1988) investigation showed that the effects of feedback offered to low-achieving students depend more on its than on its form or structure. If the study had considered criterion-referenced, task-involving grades based on learning goals or ego-involving comments (such as "You need to work harder" or "This is one of the poorest papers in the class"), the effects might have been quite different. Thus, it would be incorrect to treat this study as a simple validation of comments over grades. As an extensive research review on feedback by John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) makes clear, the quality, nature , and of the comments matter most. The critical implication of the Butler study is this: Before making the sweeping recommendation "No grades; comments only!" we must consider both the nature of the grades the nature of the comments.
Factors that influence the effects of feedback
In a large-scale meta-analysis of the effects of feedback students received on formative assessments, Neal Kingston and Brooke Nash (2011) reviewed more than 300 studies addressing the efficacy of formative assessments in grades K-12 and found an average of only about 10 percentile points improvement (i.e., effect size = .25). This finding challenged the earlier claim that formative assessments yielded average improvements of 25-30 percentile points in student achievement (i.e., effect size = .70 - .90; see Black & Wiliam , 1998a, 1998b; Hattie, 2009), regardless of whether grades or comments were used.

Kingston and Nash (2011) also discovered that the effects of feedback on formative assessments varied greatly from study to study, ranging from a decline of 35 percentile points (i.e., effect size = -1.0) to an increase of 43 percentile points (i.e., effect size = +1.5). When analyzing the reasons for this variation, they found that the magnitude of the effects depended on the subject area of instruction (i.e., generally more effective in language arts than in mathematics or science); the grade level of students (i.e., slightly more effective in lower elementary grades than in secondary classrooms); and the way it was implemented (i.e., professional development for teachers and computer-based formative systems appear more effective than other approaches). Their conclusion about the impact of feedback from formative assessments was, essentially, "It depends."

Given these highly mixed results, there appear to be few absolutes regarding the effects of grades versus comments. Instead, a host of contextual factors seem to influence this relationship and deserve further attention, including:

1. The nature of the assessments (e.g., multiple-choice tests versus compositions, projects, skill demonstrations, or performances).

2. The subject area and content of the instruction (e.g., language arts versus mathematics, science, social studies, art, music, or physical education).

3. The age or grade level of the students (e.g., elementary students versus middle, high school, or college students).

4. The background and previous academic experiences of the students (e.g., high achieving versus low achieving).

5. The economic background of the students (e.g., privileged versus economically disadvantaged).

6. Individual students' beliefs about success or failure and their sense of self-efficacy (e.g., students who perceive their actions can influence the grades or comments they receive versus those who do not).

7. The nature of the grades and comments and what each communicates (e.g., ego-involving versus task-involving).

8. The interaction between grades and comments (e.g., the influence of comments may vary depending on the grade).

Lessons from the research
Given this complexity, what guidance does the existing research offer teachers in their use of grades and comments on student assessments? First, we know that while grades certainly have their limitations, they are not inherently good or bad. They are simply labels attached to different levels of student performance that describe in an abbreviated fashion how well students performed. These labels can be letters, numbers, words, phrases, or symbols. They can serve important formative purposes by helping students know where they are on the path to achieving specific learning goals.

We also know that grades should be based on clearly articulated learning criteria; norm-based criteria. Grades derived from norm-based criteria - that is, ego-involving indicators of students' relative standing among classmates - communicate nothing about what students have learned or are able to do. Hence, they have no formative value whatsoever. Instead, they compel students to compete against their classmates for the few high grades the teacher will distribute ( Guskey , 2006). Such competition is detrimental to relationships between students and has profound negative effects on the motivation of low-ranked students, as the results from the Butler (1988) study clearly show.

Grades help enhance achievement and foster learning progress only when they are paired with individualized comments that offer guidance and direction for improvement.

If grades are to serve this important formative purpose, we must ensure that students and their families understand that grades do not reflect you are as a learner, but you are in your learning journey - and where is always temporary . Knowing where you are is essential to understanding where you need to go in order to improve. Informed judgments from teachers about the quality of students' performance can also help students become more thoughtful judges of their own work ( Chappuis & Stiggins , 2017).

As to comments, we must remember the essential aspects of feedback that Benjamin Bloom initially stressed and later reinforced (Bloom, 1968, 1971, 1976; Bloom, Hastings, & Madaus , 1981):

1. Always begin with the positive. Comments to students should first point out what students did well and recognize their accomplishments.

2. Identify what specific aspects of students' performance need to improve. Students need to know precisely where to focus their improvement efforts.

3. Offer specific guidance and direction for making improvements. Students need to know what steps to take to make their product, performance, or demonstration better and more in line with established learning criteria.

4. Express confidence in students' ability to achieve at the highest level. Students need to know their teachers believe in them, are on their side, see value in their work, and are confident they can achieve the specified learning goals.

The role of feedback
Because assessments of student learning provide the primary evidence used to determine grades, we must ensure all assessments are reliable and accurately measure the learning goals we want students to achieve ( Guskey & Brookhart, 2019). But, as Benjamin Bloom explained more than 50 years ago, assessments can also serve as "formative" sources of information that guide both students and teachers in improving learning.

Formative assessments alone, however, are insufficient, even if they are well-designed, meaningful, and authentic. To improve learning, Bloom emphasized that formative assessments must be followed by high-quality corrective instruction that provides students with guidance in remedying any learning difficulties the assessment identified. Checking on students' learning progress and providing feedback on results is just the start. Students also need guidance and direction from their teachers about what to do to get better ( Guskey , 2008).

Grades help students identify where they are in their journey to mastery of important learning goals. But, just like assessments, grades alone don't help students improve. Comments that identify what students did well, what improvements they need to make, and how to make those improvements, provided with sensitivity to important contextual elements, can guide students on their pathways to learning success and ensure that all learn excellently.
References
Barnes, M. (2018, January 10). No, students don't need grades. Education Week.

Black, P. & Wiliam , D. (1998b). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. (2), 139-144.

Chappuis , J. & Stiggins , R.J. (2017). An introduction to student involved assessment for learning (7th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.

Spencer, K. (2017, August 11). A new kind of classroom: No grades, no failing, no hurry. New York Times.

Stewart, L.G. & White, M.A. (1976). Teacher comments, letter grades and student performance. ournal of Educational Psychology, 68 (4), 488-500.

Trembath , K. (2017, December 1). Teachers react to 80/20 grading policy.

Citation: Guskey, T.R. (2019, Oct. 28). Grades versus comments: Research on student feedback. Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (3), 42-47.

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Grades versus comments: Research on student feedback - kappanonline.org

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Across the decades, battles have raged over whether teachers should put grades, comments, or both on assessments of student learning. Opinions on this issue vary widely among teachers, school leaders, and even grading and assessment consultants. Some are adamant that assessments, especially formative ones, must be graded and should include comments only.

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The San Diego Union-Tribune

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If you're a high school student in San Diego County, it may appear your chances of getting a good grade are better or worse depending on which teacher you have.

Some teachers will give you an A grade if you score a 90 percent for a course, while others will give you an A for 88 percent or 85 percent, a Union-Tribune review of more than 60 course syllabi from high schools around the county shows.

There are teachers who will give an F for 67 percent or below, some for 64 percent or below, others for 59 percent or below, 54 percent or below and even 19 percent or below.

Some teachers choose not to give any D grades at all. Morse High math teacher Alex Powell was one of a handful who indicated on their syllabi that they give no D's.

He said D grades don't help students graduate. D grades also don't qualify a student for admission to California's public universities.

"My goal was to kind of push away the idea that D's were something that they should be getting," Powell said.

There's a wide variation in grading scales that highlights how inconsistent grading systems are from teacher to teacher. Experts say it points to deeper issues - issues of equity and privilege - plaguing age-old grading practices in U.S schools.

A few points difference

Several experts say middle and high school grades are frequently unreliable, arbitrary, subjective and widely varied in terms of what they actually measure. Research studies dating as far back as 1912 show that a single sample of student work can draw scores all over the map from different teachers.

Experts point to the 100-percentage point grading system as a prime culprit.

Percentage ranges for letter grades are often arbitrary, and one number out of a 100-point point scale doesn't communicate much about what or how much a student has learned, said Ken O'Connor, a Toronto-based education consultant who helps schools and teachers change their grading practices.

"Realistically, nobody can tell the difference between 90 percent and 93 in any meaningful way," O'Connor said.

Some common grading practices, such as giving extra credit and averaging grades over time, can perpetuate inequities for disadvantaged students, said Joe Feldman, an Oakland-based consultant who works with schools and teachers on equitable grading practices.

For example, giving extra credit to students who complete extra projects or attend outside events ends up rewarding students whose families have resources for those tasks, Feldman said, while it disadvantages students whose families don't.

Also, the practice of producing one cumulative course grade by averaging a student's performance from beginning to end can discredit improvements that a student made over time and can penalize students who started class behind grade level, Feldman said.

Despite these flaws, grades are used to determine vital parts of students' futures.

Grades determine who gets to take honors courses, who gets to receive scholarships, who gets to graduate, who gets into a desired college and more.

Besides academics, people use grades to label a student's worth, Feldman said.

"A big part of adolescence is identity construction," Feldman said. "And there's no more formalized way that adults tell children who they are than by the grades that students get. And so students will actually define themselves by their grades. They'll say, 'I'm a B student', or 'I'm a C student'."

Despite how much grades impact students' lives, teachers are typically given zero training on grading, teachers and experts say. That's largely why teachers often default to how they were graded when they were students years before, experts say.

Grading is one of the few aspects of a teacher's job over which teachers have virtual autonomy. California law protects the right of teachers to be the final authority in determining a student's grade.

"Teachers are weirdly protective and private about their grades," said Kimberly Lepre, an English teacher at Rancho Del Rey Middle School and a 2017 County Teacher of the Year nominee. "They don't want anyone to judge them based on their grades."

Yet some teachers say they feel conflicted about grading.

"I am constantly unsatisfied with grades and grading policies," said Gina Vattuone, an English teacher at Bonita Vista High School. "I want my grades to be fair and accurate, but I don't know within the confines and constraints of this system what that means."

Vattuone and other teachers say they believe current grading systems and the value society places on grades cause some parents and students to care more about grades than about what they're learning. Lepre said parents will press her with questions about how to raise their child's grade from an A minus to an A.

"I think about the lengths students will go to secure an A grade," Vattuone said. "It doesn't become about the learning or the content. It becomes about these external rewards."

What's in a grade

There are two main reasons why grading practices are widely inconsistent, said Thomas Guskey, a University of Louisville senior research scholar who has written books and research about grading and assessment.

The first, Guskey said, is that educators don't agree on the purpose of grades.

Is the grade to inform students about their performance or their parents? Is it to incentivize students to do schoolwork, or to document their behavior? Is it to sort students into groups in school based on skill level?

When Guskey has asked teachers to rank reasons why they give grades, their responses were "all over the place," he said.

"We just don't agree on why we're doing it," he said.

The second reason, Guskey says, is that teachers don't agree on what should be counted in a grade.

Teachers grade students on much more than just how well they know course content.

Students can also be graded on actions that enable learning, such as homework completion and class participation, and how much they improved over time - distinct considerations often lumped into the same overall grade with content mastery, Guskey said.

Teachers also end up grading students on their behaviors, not just academics.

"Very often grading has been as much about compliance as it has been about achievement," O'Connor said.

For example, it's common for teachers to dock students' grades for turning in work late, even though that doesn't necessarily relate to how well the student knows the content.

The result is that, theoretically, a student who follows class rules but doesn't know the content and a student who knows the content but doesn't follow class rules can get the same grade.

Because teachers include so many other factors into grades besides content knowledge, students' in-school grades can be inconsistent with scores they get on outside standardized tests, such as Advanced Placement tests or the state's annual tests, Feldman said.

"When teachers use traditional grading practices, it's actually making the grades inaccurate, where they're not accurately describing a student's level of knowledge mastery," Feldman said. "Instead it's this hodgepodge of all this disparate data that makes the grade almost meaningless."

Different ways of grading

Some teachers have been experimenting with ways some experts recommend to make grading more equitable.

Several schools in San Diego County give separate "citizenship grades" that are solely about students' behavior, such as tardiness and class participation.

Vattuone and Lepre both allow students to revise their assignments after they have turned them in, to try for a better grade, a practice recommended by Feldman.

They say revisions give students a chance to improve their work and learn from feedback, rather than just getting a grade and moving on from the assignment.

Both teachers say they also don't give zeroes.

Vattuone gives her students a 50 percent on an assignment instead, which she says is still failing but gives students a better chance to improve their grade.

"If you get a zero on a 100-point scale, it's like an anchor. It takes you forever to dig yourself out ... and there's no evidence that it motivates students to do better," Feldman said.

Lepre doesn't penalize her middle school students for turning in late work because doing so can end up punishing students who didn't have adults available at home at the time who could help them, she said.

"I actually don't have that much of a problem with late work," Lepre said.

In her classroom, Lepre currently uses a 1, 2, 3, 4 grading system, where 4 means mastery of the content and 1 means no mastery. Such grading systems outline specific definitions of what mastery looks like at each of the four levels.

Experts recommend this "standards-based grading" because they say it more clearly tells students and their parents how well their students know the content.

Guskey also says having a smaller number of grades - say, four, versus the 101 possible grades in a percentage system - reduces subjectivity and increases reliability.

"I found that when I grade that way, it also gives students a sense of their progress and they can take ownership of their learning," Lepre said.

Guskey, Feldman and O'Connor all said they want teachers to avoid the 100-percentage point system.

"Teachers complain that students only talk about learning in terms of points, but that's how we've taught it to them. And we can un-teach them, by the way," Feldman said. "The amount of stress and anxiety that students feel is a big problem in schools, and our traditional grading contributes to that."

The vast majority of syllabi reviewed showed that most San Diego County teachers use the 100-point system to score students and arrive at letter grades.

Some teachers said that while they might like to experiment with different grading systems, at the end of the day, they still have to input a letter grade into their school grade books.

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Teachers, experts question traditional ways of grading

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If you're a high school student in San Diego County, it may appear your chances of getting a good grade are better or worse depending on which teacher you have.

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A 4 minute , awareness-raising video

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Screen time is up as reading scores drop

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Screen time is up as reading scores drop

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Is there a link?

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American students have never had more access to digital devices for reading in and out of school. Now emerging research and troubling results on the test dubbed the Nation's Report Card raise questions about what effect all this digital access could have on students' longterm reading skills.

A little more than 1 in 3 American students read proficiently in grades 4 or 8, according to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, released at the end of last month. Reading scores in both grades declined significantly across states, races, and income levels, in public and private schools.

Students have actually lost ground since 2017 on both of the NAEP's main reading content areas: literary experience, such as fiction analysis, and reading for information, such as finding evidence to support an argument. Both grades declined significantly in both areas from 2017 to 2019, but the drop was larger for literary skills. In fact, 8th graders perform worse now than they did in 2009 in literary experience.

The results have spurred a flurry of questions about what could drive such a broad-based drop. The 2019 administration marks the second time most students have taken a digital version of the NAEP itself, but Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP, said the neither the testing mode nor changing demographics explain the drop in performance.

"I really think it's important to just take a look at that and say, well, maybe it's more something in the culture rather than specific policies," said Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, noting that states' demographic and policy changes in education do not explain the widescale declines.

"My suspicion rides on the ubiquity of screens and our attempts to make those useful in educating kids, and the concomitant increase in their use outside of school," Malkus said. "It could just be that actually technology is not the answer for education, but that it's sort of the enemy ... wearing down the attention span that it takes to develop a sense of reading for pleasure."

Getting Into the Habit

The nonprofit Common Sense Media's annual census of children's media use, released the same week as the NAEP, found that 94 percent of English/language arts teachers surveyed said they used digital programs for core curriculum activities several times a month. And 8- to 12-year-olds-the age group that includes grade 4- spend on average five hours a day outside of schoolwork on screens. The report also found that fewer children were developing a habit of reading, with only 38 percent of students reporting they enjoyed reading "a lot"-down from 41 percent in 2015.

The concerns come amid a broader debate over children's increasing screen time, from television and video games to online and mobile devices. In the journal JAMA Pediatrics, a new analysis of 58 studies covering more than 480,000 children and teenagers found more television, video game, and leisure internet time were linked to lower performance in reading and math, though screen time across the board did not hurt students' academics.

In a 2018 Education Week survey, a wide majority of American principals reported students spending too much time on screens, though they were more likely to report a good balance for using digital platforms in their own schools.

"Children have become much more immersed in their technologies than we ever thought they would be," said Patricia Alexander, an education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies print and digital reading development, "And yet essentially what we're doing ... is to put tablets in the hands of kindergartners and assume they will know how to regulate their use of them. And none of that sits well with the data."

Heavy Digital Users

According to background information collected with the NAEP, more than 9 in 10 U.S. students in grades 4 and 8 have access to a computer, tablet, or smartphone for reading at home. The vast majority have more than one.

An Education Week analysis of NAEP background data found that in both grades 4 and 8, spending more time using a computer or digital device for English and language arts work was associated with lower reading proficiency on the test. For example, students who used digital devices for reading work less than 30 minutes a day scored on average 8 scale points higher than those who used computers in language arts for longer periods of time. These light digital users scored 26 scale points higher than the students who spent the longest reading periods on digital devices, four hours or more a day. To put that into context, one year of school equals roughly 12 points on the NAEP's 500-point scale.

That translates into twice as many heavy digital users as light users scoring below basic on the NAEP, and nearly twice as many light digital users scoring at NAEP's advanced proficiency level. It's not clear whether using more digital reading platforms lowers students' reading skills, or poor readers are receiving more hours of remedial work via computers, or both.

And the link between more digital time and lower scores in language arts was even stronger, based on a separate study of 2017 NAEP data from high-poverty schools.

"Schools have spent millions and millions of dollars installing and updating and maintaining technologies because they believe they are critical for students to do well and learn," Alexander said. "The problem is that what we're finding now is all of this digital is actually changing the minds of students, the habits of students in a very broad way that is not necessarily facilitative of deep learning."

Studies have found higher screen time linked to worse sleep habits and eyesight, poorer attention, and lower academic progress-but in general, these studies have looked at screen exposure more broadly, rather than reading habits in particular.

However, three research analyses in the past two years have coalesced concerns around differences in how students read in print versus online.

For example, students at all ages tend to favor reading in print more than online, and report growing tired more quickly when reading digitally, which some studies have credited to increased eyestrain from reading smaller or backlit text. But the biggest difference between digital and print reading seems to come from digital interactivity. Including hyperlinks, videos, and other interactive elements encourages students to jump around on the story and among texts on different pages, rather than reading linearly.

One meta-analysis comparing digital and traditional storybooks found some attention-getting elements, like sound effects, improved comprehension for young children, but that interactive features like pop-up dictionaries or sidebars distracted students and hurt comprehension. Both the potential good and bad effects were stronger for disadvantaged students.

Differences Across Platforms

A study of reading behavior changes found that as students move to reading online, they tend to read faster, browsing and skimming more and looking for key words. They read less of a longer text and tend to reread less, and as students spend more time reading digitally, they become more likely to read print text in the same way. By contrast, the habits associated with print reading, such as deeper and more concentrated periods of reading, with students annotating and highlighting as they read, did not transfer to reading digital text as easily.

In three separate meta-analyses in the last two years, researchers have found the habits associated with reading digitally can decrease students' skills in following a narrative, and comprehending text deeply-exactly the skills measured under NAEP's literary experience content.

But that electronic libraries have given low-income students vastly more access to reading materials than most poorly resourced families and schools have without them. And Alexander noted, while computers have been used in schools for decades, widescale, extensive use of computers and tablets in reading classrooms has boomed only in the last decade, meaning that it's still too early to tell how learning to read on digital devices may change children's reading skills and habits in the long term.

"Here's what we do know about reading: You read better when you read in print, meaning you remember more of what you read, you understand it deeper. ... We keep trying to understand why, because in study after study, this is happening," Alexander said.

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Screen Time Up as Reading Scores Drop. Is There a Link?

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American students have never had more access to digital devices for reading in and out of school. Now emerging research and troubling results on the test dubbed the Nation's Report Card raise questions about what effect all this digital access could have on students' longterm reading skills.

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...but what should be done about it?

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The latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation's report card, were just released-and things aren't looking good for the country's young readers.

Reading performance has dropped significantly among both 4th and 8th graders since the last release two years ago. Just 35 percent of 4th graders are considered proficient by NAEP standards as of this year. That's down from 37 percent in 2017. And 34 percent of 8th graders scored at the proficient level or higher for this year, down from 36 percent in 2017.

But that's only part of the story. In what should be very worrisome to literacy experts, teachers, and anyone concerned with inequity in education, the lowest performers showed the biggest declines. In fact, the highest-performing students were the only ones to hold steady over the last two years-all other groups did worse.
For a full analysis of the 2019 NAEP results, see reporting from Education Week's Sarah Sparks.
Even putting those declines aside, the results sound dismal, right? Only about 1 in 3 students are proficient readers, the scores say.

It's important to remember that proficient on the NAEP test isn't a proxy for grade level-in fact, it's a tougher goal than that. Students have to demonstrate "competency over challenging subject matter" to reach proficient. (See more on the meaning of "proficient," and confusion over it, here. And for more background on the the history of the NAEP test and who takes it, see this primer.)

The NAEP results also analyze performance by state. Just one state-Mississippi-made improvements in 4th grade reading over the last two years. (The District of Columbia was the only place to make progress in 8th grade reading.)

Sometimes it helps to take the long view. Looking back over a 10-year span, 4th graders are doing significantly better (just 33 percent were proficient in 2009), while 8th graders have shown no progress.

An even longer view-looking back to 1992-shows improvements among both 4th and 8th graders in reading. (Keep in mind, though, that some students were excluded in the early years of the test, so comparisons are imperfect.) Despite those gains, "reading is clearly not increasing at the rate we would hope, and this deserves special attention," said Carissa Moffat Miller, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, according to my colleague Sarah Sparks.

Here's a chart with the trend in reading results for 4th graders.

So what does this tell us about early reading instruction in the U.S.?

As always, advocates and policy makers will use these NAEP scores to call for policy changes-including to how reading is taught. But what can we really learn about reading instruction from looking at them?

The NAEP reading test is focused on reading comprehension. In this example from the 4th grade reading test, students first read a passage about how male emperor penguins care for their young. Then they're asked:

There's a framework for how reading works that's been confirmed in many research studies over the years called The Simple View of Reading. You can read about in this reading research explainer, which is part of a recently launched Education Week series called Getting Reading Right. That ongoing project will look at the cognitive science behind how student learn to read and compares that to what's being taught in schools.

The Simple View of Reading says there are two essential components of reading comprehension: decoding ability and language comprehension. Comprehension is the product of those two things, meaning if either one is low, the student won't be able to comprehend well. Or as Sarah Schwartz and Sarah Sparks explain in the research review, "If a student can't decode, it doesn't matter how much background knowledge and vocabulary he understands-he won't be able to understand what's on the page. But the opposite is also true: If a student can decode but doesn't have a deep enough understanding of oral language, he won't be able to understand the words he can say out loud."

Here's the rub: A test of reading comprehension such as NAEP doesn't tell us whether it's decoding or language low scorers are having trouble with. Are students struggling to decode the words? Or are students decoding words well, but lacking the background knowledge and vocabulary to know what they mean? Or is it some combination of both? We simply can't tell from NAEP. The same is true of state standardized tests, which students start taking in 3rd grade. They measure comprehension, not its components.

This is all worth keeping in mind as the NAEP spin starts coming.

Surely, advocates for phonics instruction in Mississippi will point out that the state's gains coincide with its renewed commitment to early reading, including the push for teacher-preparation programs to teach the science of reading. And sure, that's a plausible theory-but it's not much more than that given the limitations of the national test.

The NAEP data do tell us something about how students are doing. But figuring out how that should translate to instruction? More digging needs to be done.

See also: When Bad Things Happen to Good NAEP Data

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National Reading Scores Are Down. What Does It Mean?

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The latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation's report card, were just released-and things aren't looking good for the country's young readers. Reading performance has dropped significantly among both 4th and 8th graders since the last release two years ago.

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Cult of Pedagogy

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Most teachers instinctively know that if students' emotions are off-kilter in any way, if their stress levels are high or their social lives are a mess, they won't be able to concentrate on academics. And yes, schools usually hire guidance counselors to support students with these issues, but most of the time they can barely squeeze this work in between all the other things they're responsible for. Research is telling us that children and teens are experiencing more anxiety and depression than ever before, and those numbers keep going up, so clearly the need for social-emotional support in schools is growing.

Many of us do what we can to pay attention, to tune into our students' emotional needs, build relationships with them, create safe spaces in our classrooms, and weave lessons about communication, anger management, self-advocacy, and mindfulness into our academic content.

Still, we're pretty sure this isn't enough.

Some schools are tackling this issue by providing mental health services as part of larger wraparound programs. Other schools are adding on separate SEL curricula, doing book studies, and giving extra SEL training to their teachers.

Another creative approach is to designate a space in school that can meet some of these needs. But in this case, we're not talking about a counseling center or meditation room-although these would be welcome additions to any school. This space does not appear to have anything to do with social-emotional needs at first glance: You'd see a 3-D printer, piles of Legos, books, index cards, art supplies, laptops. You'd see students cutting paper, taping pieces of cardboard together, editing videos. It looks like a makerspace, because that's what it is. But it's more than that.

What is the Success and Innovation Center?

The Success and Innovation Center (SIC) is a unique space at Mt. Blue High School in Farmington, Maine. Director Dan Ryder describes it as a problem-solving studio, a stigma-free space where students can go at any time during the school day to work on problems they're having inside or outside the classroom.

"It takes the best principles of human-centered design and the best principles of social-emotional learning and fuses them together so that through our space, the act of making and creating can also help with the other parts of ourselves besides just academic learning."

Here's how the center came into being: Several years ago, Ryder had already established a small makerspace in his own English classroom. "I started the makerspace in my room not because I wanted kids making things, but because I had adopted design thinking as my lens through which I was doing everything, and we needed to prototype solutions to stuff. So I kind of went into making in my classes from that place of doing need-finding, empathy work, really understanding what someone is like, looking at body language, listening to someone's words and how does their diction relate to what they're feeling, how do our feelings actually align to our actions, and what happens when they're out of alignment?"

One early project in Ryder's English classroom was to have students design sanctuary spaces for their classmates as a way of developing the idea of safe spaces, inspired by Laurie Halse Anderson's book, Speak.

Over time, Ryder noticed that students who weren't typically interested in or successful at school started to become much more engaged in these design-thinking projects. Soon more and more students were coming by his classroom makerspace to use it, and he dreamed of expanding into a larger space that all Mt. Blue students could access at any time.

An "ideal neighborhood" created by students as part of a design thinking project.

Meanwhile, his colleague Becky Dennison had been working to help high school students transition into college. She was imagining a dedicated space for facilitating these transitions at Mt. Blue.

Eventually, Ryder and Dennison realized that their two separate visions for a student-centered space could actually work together. "I'm like, wait, this place could be a problem-solving studio," Ryder says. "We were using all sorts of techniques in talking about this Success Center, we were using all sorts of methods that I was using with the design thinking kids. So I just brought it up while we were sitting around the table, I'm like, couldn't we do both? You know, couldn't it serve both purposes?"

Ryder and Dennison decided to join forces, they applied for and won a federal GEAR UP grant to fund the idea, and the Success and Innovation Center was born.

A student creates a makeshift stand for an iPad to film an instructional video.

How the Center Works

As a general rule, the SIC is open to students on a flexible, as-needed basis, without a lot of restrictions. "(Students) can get a pass, I'll write you a pass, you can come in from your study hall," Ryder explains. "Your teacher can call down or send me an email and say, hey, can so and so come and work down in the SIC? They could use some help on something or they just need a space that's not this classroom right now to work."

He describes his role-and the way access to the SIC works in general-as similar to that of a library and librarian. "(A librarian) can push out, do work with classes, classes come down and work there in the library, sometimes it's a one-on-one, sometimes it's a small group, sometimes it's split. I based my work and my role on that type of a model."

On a typical day, there might be one group of students studying for a test, while another student edits a video for a project, another writes code to program a robot, two more work on essays, and another drafts and practices an entrepreneurial pitch.

A snapshot from one class period in the SIC: One student works on an editorial about racism in US high schools, another does some coding with a Sphero, a third student draws a Space Marine chaplain on paper, and a fourth creates an oceanic biome on the iPad Paper app.

So how do social-emotional needs get met? So far it just sounds like a regular makerspace, right?

The way Ryder explains it, the social-emotional stuff often happens as a byproduct of the other work students are doing. Although some students do come in specifically to talk about personal problems, many more show up to work on something academic; the personal benefits just happen to trickle in while that work is happening.

"We really try to brand ourselves and market ourselves to the student body as 'Here's where you go when you're having any sort of problem, academic, emotional, vocational, personal, whatever it is,'" he says. "A problem doesn't have to be a bad thing. A problem can just be a question you have or something you're working on."

"Whatever is going on with them," he continues, "it's not working. So we try to find solutions that meet the kids' needs and hold them accountable. We get the academic rigor in there and make sure that that's not falling to the wayside. And in that process-by just being a kind of third party that is invested in only the student but not in anything else-we get to have some conversations and meetings and planning around these kids where I get to ask the kind of design questions around well, what is it that we're really trying to achieve here, and what does so and so really need?"

Ryder says the SIC works best when run by two full-time adults: One who can "do a deep dive" with students on whatever problem they happen to be wrestling with, and the other to serve as a sort of facilitator, to coordinate student activity and document their comings and goings. The two can also balance out the work based on their individual strengths: One might be stronger on academic work, while the other might do best when handling the social-emotional needs.

Students used Makey Makeys to add interactivity to museum-style
exhibits of ideal neighborhoods, created for a project in one of their classes.

Creating a Similar Space in Your School

Ryder's advice for teachers who want to establish something like the SIC in their own schools is to start by thinking of it like a library, where "students are encouraged to come in and access resources, and your librarian interacts with them and it's very much about, hey, what can I do to be helpful to you today? How can I help you find the thing that you need? Because that's what most librarians do; they're really there to help navigate a need."

With that mindset, he warns teachers not to get too consumed with filling the space with lots of expensive equipment. What's more important is staffing the room adequately. "There's a lot of things you don't have to have, like 3D printers. Okay, don't have a 3D printer. Who cares? What you need, I feel really strongly that one person isn't enough. You really need two people."

And not just any people, he says. "Two individuals who lead with empathy. When they're coming through the door, the goal is not to get them to think the way you think or to do the thing you want them to do, the goal is to understand where they're coming from. So if you lead with empathy and you approach a space like this from a lens of possibility, then like you don't need piles and piles and piles of things."

"It's not all perfect," Ryder concludes. "We just feel really strongly that what we're doing is filling a space that we otherwise don't think is getting filled on campus."

To learn more about the Success and Innovation Center, check out the #SICMBC hashtag on Twitter. For more from Dan Ryder, follow him on Twitter at @WickedDecent or read his book, Intention: Critical Creativity in the Classroom.

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How One Makerspace is Meeting Students' Social-Emotional Needs

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Using sentence stems to scaffold classroom discussions guides students to speak, actively listen, and build on each others' ideas.

I used to think that the perfect classroom had students sitting in rows, hands folded, with their eyes on me. "All eyes on me" was in fact my favorite teacher line. Having an attentive audience was one of the reasons teaching was fun for me.

Fast-forward 35 years to my last year of teaching before I transitioned to being an instructional coach-my students were at tables or sitting knee-to-knee in small groups. They weren't quiet, and they were facilitating their own learning. The chatter was rigorous and the ideas were flowing. How did we get there? I taught my fifth-grade students talk moves -sentence stems and key phrases that help students speak, actively listen, and build on each other's ideas.

Introducing the Talk Moves

I presented the talk moves over four days. After I introduced each talk move, we practiced what it would sound like in our classroom. For example, when students wanted to expand their peer's thinking, that sounded like "What do you mean by that?" or "Can you give an example?"

On the fourth day, after students had learned the talk moves, a group of four students modeled them. The rest of the class observed and then gave the group feedback by naming the talk moves they saw their peers use.

I kept a bulletin board in the classroom with the talk moves up all year long. This gave my students key phrases to activate their talking, thinking, and listening-like "I respectfully disagree because ___." Building the routines takes time, but in the long run it saves time by engaging students and making the time much more productive. As the school year progressed, we would sometimes need to revisit the talk moves to reflect on how the talk looked-students sitting facing each other, in a circle or knee-to-knee-and what it sounded like when it was working well. The bulletin board was used as a reference guide most every hour of our day.

The Talk Moves

Time to think: When I introduced this to students, we quickly discussed why it's important to allow each other time to think-having that think time helps students articulate their thoughts. To practice this talk move, I gave students time to jot down a few ideas before they started talking, and during conversations they could say, "I need time to think." Allowing for quiet moments and thought to become routine will encourage think time to happen as students later work in small groups or with a partner. I also brought to students' attention when I used this move as a teacher. I'd say, "Notice, I just used think time."

Say more: Too many times people talk and don't listen. This talk move gets students listening as they ask their classmates for clarification. Having students ask questions like "Can you say more about that?" "What do you mean by that?" or "Can you give an example?" encourages active listening and back-and-forth discussion between students.

So, are you saying ___? Summarizing helps students check their understanding and verify with speakers that they communicated what they intended to. Some helpful sentence stems: "Let me see if I understand what you are saying: ___" and "Are you saying ___?"

Who can repeat or rephrase that? Students have to listen carefully if they are going to repeat what someone else said. Having students ask each other, "How can we say that differently?" or "Can you put that in your own words?" also deepens content understanding.

What is your evidence or reasoning? As students explain their thought process, they deepen their own thinking as well as their classmates'. In all subjects, students should be making claims and backing them up with evidence. They can ask each other questions like "What is your evidence?" "Why do you think that?" "Is there anything in the text that makes you think that?" and "Where did you get that information?"

Challenge or counterexample: When students are introduced to a conflicting example, it pushes their thinking and deepens their understanding. They can gently challenge each other's thinking by asking questions like "Does it always work that way?" "How does that idea work with a different example?" and "What if it had been ___ instead?"

Agree and disagree: Conflict isn't always easy, but it's important for students to learn how to respectfully express their opinions and know that it's OK to change their mind when they are introduced to new information. These sentence stems can help facilitate constructive communication: "I respectfully disagree because ___," "I agree with ___," and "Are you saying the same thing as ___?"

Add on: Sentence stems like "I would like to add on to that," "Adding on to what [another student] said, ___," and "Can I push that idea a bit further?" helps students work together to build upon their prior knowledge.

Explain what someone else means: Having students put their peers' responses into their own words gives more students ownership over the answer, exposes them to different ways about thinking about the answer, and allows you to check for understanding. You can get this talk move started by asking, "Why do you think he said that?" and students can initiate it by saying, "I can explain what ___ means by that" or "I can put that into my own words."

Teaching students to talk productively in the classroom is the most important change I've made in my teaching career. I've used talk moves with students in all areas of the curriculum. As an instructional coach, I find that teachers benefit from using talk moves in professional development, too. We all need to talk, process, and share to be truly learning.

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What Productive Talk Looks Like in the Elementary Grades

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Using sentence stems to scaffold classroom discussions guides students to speak, actively listen, and build on each others' ideas.

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Students learn more from Inquiry-based methodology

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Experiment had 17,000 students in 4 countries

Introducing math and science through inquiry and problem-based instruction can pay off throughout elementary school, according to a massive international series of studies.

Education economists Emma Näslund-Hadley and Rosangela Bando, of the Inter-American Development Bank, and Paul Gertler of the University of California, Berkeley, conducted 10 randomized controlled experiments with more than 17,000 students in Argentina, Belize, Paraguay, and Peru, four countries working with the Inter-American Development Bank to implement inquiry-based math and science programs.

The researchers randomly assigned preschool, 3rd, and 4th grade classes to use either inquiry-based instruction or the standard math and science instruction in their schools-which generally involved teacher lectures, memorization, and practice. (While students in most countries were assigned by class, in Peru students were taught in small groups of four to seven students, and so they were assigned individually.)

The studies were laid out last week in a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research. The findings come as more schools in the United States and throughout the Americas explore problem- and inquiry-based programs, particularly in science and math. These are the largest-scale randomized trials on the approach, and the first to look at preschool students as well as those in elementary grades.

Difference in Practice

A typical lesson looked very different in the standard and inquiry-based classes.

"When kids did hands-on experiments in [a standard] science class, the teacher was doing the experiment in front of the class-no opportunity for hands-on learning," Näslund-Hadley said.

In a unit on ratios in Belize, for example, a teacher in a typical math class would explain the definition of a ratio and demonstrate basic problems; students then spent the rest of the period practicing problems, before being quizzed.

In the inquiry class, by contrast, the teacher compared the number of students wearing short- and long-sleeved shirts and similar examples within the classroom to start students thinking about the concept, then paired off students to come up with their own definitions of what a ratio could be. The class worked though exercises on how ratios might be used in real life, such as using colored rods of different lengths to measure their desks and look at the relationships between the unit length and the number of rods needed to measure. Then the teacher and class discussed their findings and decided on a revised definition of the ratio concept.

Inquiry- or problem-based learning has taken off in recent years in U.S. schools in the wake of Common Core State Standards and Next-Generation Science Standards, as well as in schools around the world.

The researchers compared the range of scores on standardized math and science tests in each group before starting to implement the inquiry-based instruction, and then again seven months later. They found that in the classes that used inquiry-based instruction at least four days a week for during that time, students improved significantly more in math and science than students in the regular classes. The average student in inquiry classes performed 0.14 of a standard deviation higher than the average student in a standard class in science and 0.18 of a standard deviation higher in math by the end of the school year.

Students across grades and across countries showed similar benefits from the inquiry-based classes, including the preschoolers.

"It's fascinating because when we have discussed the possibility of doing this research with governments in the region, they said, 'Oh, the children must be too young to do anything like this,' " Näslund-Hadley said, "and now they've actually noted that that is possible for younger children to think like a scientist."

"Clearly it is possible to work scientific and mathematical thinking from a very, very early age without making it ... rote memorization," she said.

At that rate of improvement, the researchers estimated the average student in inquiry-based math and science classes for four years would perform nearly two-fifths of a standard deviation better than their peers in math and more than one-fifth of a standard deviation better in science. Standard deviation is the measure of how a given set of test scores vary.

Gender Gaps and Costs

While both boys and girls improved in inquiry-based classes, the researchers found that boys improved faster, widening the gender achievement gap. Overall, boys in inquiry classrooms improved by .22 of a standard deviation over peers in math, compared to girls improving .15 of a standard deviation more than peers in standard classes. The same held in science, with boys improving .18 of a standard deviation, compared to a tenth of a standard deviation for girls.

"That was highly shocking," Näslund-Hadley said. "It's not that girls lost ground from the inquiry; they grew more than boys [in standard classes.] The bump in improved learning was so much greater for the boys.

"What we saw with respect to gender was the teachers appear to have implicit gender biases and tend to focus more on the boys in the classroom," she said. In projects that involved more group and class discussions and collaboration, that problem was exacerbated. Näslund-Hadley said the countries have since been working to provide more training before and during implementation to encourage teachers to involve students more equitably.

Still, the studies found inquiry- or problem-based instruction could prove more cost-effective than standard instruction, particularly for improving achievement for low-income students. (Average incomes in the countries range from just over $4,000 a year in Paraguay to $12,440 a year in Argentina, in U.S. dollars.)

Using the inquiry-based instruction, the researchers found the cost of increasing math test scores by a tenth of a standard deviation in a year was just over $18 per student in math and under $18 per student in science.

"It's interesting to observe that it not only works, but works in a variety of contexts. That makes the investment more worthwhile," said Bando of the Inter-American Development Bank. She noted that the bank has since been working with the governments to provide the framework and materials for the curriculums for free.

Published in Print: October 9, 2019, as Study: Inquiry-Based Lessons Led to Bigger Gains

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Students Learn More From Inquiry-Based Teaching, International Study Finds

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Introducing math and science through inquiry and problem-based instruction can pay off throughout elementary school, according to a massive international series of studies.

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What The Science Says...

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How do children learn to read?

For almost a century, researchers have argued over the question. Most of the disagreement has centered on the very beginning stages of the reading process, when young children are first starting to figure out how to decipher words on a page.

One theory is that reading is a natural process, like learning to speak. If teachers and parents surround children with good books, this theory goes, kids will pick up reading on their own. Another idea suggests that reading is a series of strategic guesses based on context, and that kids should be taught these guessing strategies.

But research has shown that reading is not a natural process, and it's not a guessing game. Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code-teaching systematic phonics-is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words.

Of course, there is more to reading than seeing a word on a page and pronouncing it out loud. As such, there is more to teaching reading than just teaching phonics. Reading requires children to make meaning out of print. They need to know the different sounds in spoken language and be able to connect those sounds to written letters in order to decipher words. They need deep background and vocabulary knowledge so that they understand the words they read. Eventually, they need to be able to recognize most words automatically and read connected text fluently, attending to grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure.

But knowing how to decode is an essential step in becoming a reader. If children can't decipher the precise words on the page, they'll never become fluent readers or understand the passages they're reading.

That's why we've put together this overview of the research on early reading, in grades K-2. It covers what's known about how we should teach letter-sound patterns, and what we don't know for sure yet. It touches on what else should be part of early reading programs. And it explains why we know that most children can't learn to read through osmosis or guessing.

Here's what the evidence shows.

Don't children learn to read the way they learn to speak?

Infants learn to speak by listening to and repeating sounds made by adults and connecting them to meanings. They don't consciously distinguish individual sound units (called phonemes) when hearing spoken language. Some research suggests infants learn probabilistically-for example, hearing the sound "ball" at the same time as the sight of a round, bouncy object over time makes the child associate the two-while other studies suggest children map meaning to a word after experiencing it just once or twice. Within the first two years, typically developing toddlers' brains focus on the most common sounds in their native languages and connect those sounds to meaning. A child develops understanding of speech through exposure to language and opportunities to practice the "serve and return" patterns of conversation, even without explicit instruction.

By contrast, children do not naturally develop reading skill through exposure to text. The way they learn to connect oral and written language depends on what kind of language they are learning to read.

Alphabetic languages, like English or French, use letters to stand for sounds that make up spoken words. To read an alphabetic language, children must learn how written letters represent spoken sounds, recognize patterns of letter sounds as words, and match those to spoken words whose meanings they know. This differs from Chinese, for example. It uses a tonal spoken language, conveying meaning with small differences in stress or pitch. Its writing system is partially logographic- in which written symbols correspond directly to a word or concept-and also includes words that couple symbols for meaning and symbols for sound. Someone reading Chinese hanzi characters could not "sound out" unfamiliar words character by character.

What is systematic, explicit phonics instruction, and why is it important?

Connecting printed letters on a page to written sounds isn't intuitive. While some young children may make those connections themselves, most do not. One set of studies from 1989-90 illustrates this phenomenon well.

In these studies, conducted by Brian Byrne and Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, researchers taught young children between ages 3 and 5 to read whole words aloud, like "fat" and "bat." These children didn't already know their letter names.

Then, the researchers tested whether the children could transfer their knowledge to reading a new word. They gave them the word "fun," and asked whether the word was "fun" or "bun." Very few of the students could do this successfully. They couldn't break down the original word into phonemes and then transfer their knowledge of those phonemes to a new word.

But children could succeed on this task if they were first given some explicit instructions. When children were taught how to recognize that certain letters represented certain sounds, and taught how to segment words to identify those individual letters and sounds, they had much greater success on the original transfer test. Neuroscience research has since confirmed and helped explain these findings. When learning how to read new words in an unfamiliar made-up language, participants had more long-term success if they were first taught which symbols correspond to which sounds, than if they tried to remember words as wholes. Brain imaging of these readers finds that the two teaching strategies tap into different neural pathways in the brain. Readers taught to connect print to meaning directly could recall words initially more quickly, but less accurately; readers taught to connect print to sound and then to meaning read aloud more quickly and correctly, better recalled the correct meanings of words, and transferred their knowledge to new words.

Decades of research has shown that explicit phonics instruction benefits early readers, but particularly those who struggle to read.

That's because small strengths or deficits at the start of reading compound over time. It's what reading expert Keith Stanovich in 1986 dubbed the "Matthew Effect in Reading," after the Bible verse in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer: "The combination of deficient decoding skills, lack of practice, and difficult materials results in unrewarding early reading experiences that lead to less involvement in reading-related activities," Stanovich wrote. "Lack of exposure and practice on the part of the less-skilled reader delays the development of automaticity and speed at the word recognition level. Slow, capacity-draining word-recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to comprehension. Thus, reading for meaning is hindered; unrewarding reading experiences multiply; and practice is avoided or merely tolerated without real cognitive involvement."

My reading curriculum includes letter-sound instruction. Am I providing enough phonics?

Not all phonics instruction is created equal.

The most effective phonics programs are those that are systematic. The National Reading Panel found this in 2000, and since then, further research reviews have confirmed that this type of instruction leads to the greatest gains in reading accuracy for young students.

A systematic phonics program teaches an ordered progression of letter-sound correspondences. Teachers don't only address the letter-sound connections that students stumble over. Instead, they address all of the combinations methodically, in a sequence, moving on to the next once students demonstrate mastery. Teachers explicitly tell students what sounds correspond to what letter patterns, rather than asking students to figure it out on their own or make guesses.

In one series of experiments, Stanford University neuroscientist Bruce McCandliss and his colleagues made up a new written language and taught three-letter words to students either by asking them to focus on letter sounds or on whole words. Later, the students took a reading test of both the words they were taught and new words in the made-up language, while an electroencephalograph monitored their brain activity. Those who had focused on letter sounds had more neural activity on the left side of the brain, which includes visual and language regions and is associated with more skilled reading. Those who had been taught to focus on whole words had more activity on the right side of the brain, which has been characteristically associated with adults and children who struggle with reading. Moreover, those who had learned letter sounds were better able to identify unfamiliar words.

Early readers benefit from systematic phonics instruction. Among students in grades K-1, phonics instruction led to improvements in decoding ability and reading comprehension across the board, according to the National Reading Panel. Children at risk of developing future reading problems, children with disabilities, and children from all socio-economic backgrounds all benefited. Later research reviews have confirmed that systematic phonics instruction is effective for students with disabilities, and shown that it also works for English-language learners.

Most studies of phonics instruction test its immediate effectiveness-after the intervention, are children better readers? Among students in older grades, the results are less clear. A recent meta-analysis of the long-term effects of reading interventions looked at phonics and phonemic awareness training, mostly in studies with children in grades K-1. Both phonics and phonemic awareness interventions improved reading comprehension at an immediate post-test. But while the benefits of phonemic awareness interventions persisted in a follow-up test, the benefits of phonics interventions faded much more over time. The average length of all interventions included in the study was about 40 hours, and the follow-up assessments were conducted about a year after the interventions were complete, on average.

Some of my students didn't need phonics instruction to learn to read. Why are you saying that all kids benefit?

Depending on the estimate, anywhere from 1 percent to 7 percent of children figure out how to decode words on their own, without explicit instruction. They may spot the patterns in books read to them or print they see in their environment, and then they apply these patterns. These include children with a neurotypical form of "hyperlexia"-a condition in which children may begin decoding as early as 3- but this is more frequently associated with children who have autism-spectrum disorders and often have separate problems with reading comprehension.

It may seem like these children are reading words as whole units, or using guessing strategies to figure out what comes next in the story. But they are attending to all of the words' individual letters-they're just doing it very quickly.

A systematic phonics program can still benefit these students, who may have gaps in their knowledge of spelling patterns or words that they haven't encountered yet. Of course, phonics instruction-like all teaching-can and should be differentiated to meet the needs of individual students where they are. If a student can demonstrate mastery of a sound, there's no need to continue practicing that sound-he or she should move on to the next one.

There's another answer to this question: Students may look like they're decoding when they're actually not. For example, a child may see an illustration of an apple falling from a tree, and correctly guess that the sentence below the picture describes an apple falling from a tree. This isn't reading, and it doesn't give the teacher useful information about how a student will tackle a book without pictures.

Can cueing strategies help students to read?

Many early reading classrooms teach students strategies to identify a word by guessing with the help of context cues. Ken and Yetta Goodman of the University of Arizona developed a "three-cueing system," based on analysis of common errors (or "miscues") when students read aloud. Ken Goodman famously called reading development a "psycholinguistic guessing game," and cueing systems teach students to guess at a new word based on:

* Meaning/Semantics, or background knowledge and context, such as vocabulary a student has already learned;

* Structure/Syntax, or how the word fits in common grammar rules, such as whether the word's position in a sentence suggests it is a noun, verb, or adjective; and

* Visual/Graphophonics, or what a word looks like, such as how upper- and lowercase letters are used (suggesting a proper noun, for example) or common spelling patterns.

Cueing systems are a common strategy in whole-language programs, and also are used in many "balanced literacy" programs that incorporate phonics instruction. Cueing systems were designed by analyzing errors rather than practices of proficient readers, and have not shown benefits in controlled experiments.

Moreover, cognitive and neuroscience studies have found that guessing is a much less efficient way to identify a new word, and a mark of beginning or struggling readers, not proficient readers. Skilled readers instead sound out new words to decode them.

Balanced literacy programs often include both phonics and cueing, but studies suggest cueing instruction can make it more difficult for children to develop phonics skills because it takes their attention away from the letter sounds.

I know phonics instruction is supposed to be explicit and systematic. But beyond that, how should I teach it? Does the research say anything about what content I need to cover, and how should it be sequenced?

There is a general path that most children follow as they become skilled decoders. Research can tell us how children usually progress along this path, and which skills specifically predict better reading performance.

Before starting kindergarten, children generally develop some early phonological awareness-an understanding of the sounds that make up spoken language. They can rhyme, break down multi-syllable words, and recognize alliteration.

A next step in the process is understanding that graphemes-combinations of one or more letters-represent phonemes, the smallest units of spoken language. It's easier for students to learn these letter-sound correspondences if they already have early phonological skills like rhyming and alliteration, along with knowledge of the names of the letters of the alphabet.

And while vocabulary is important for reading comprehension, research has also found that it's a component in decoding ability. One study found that when children know a word's meaning, they can more quickly learn how to recognize it automatically, because the visual letters, corresponding sounds, and meaning all map together when a reader recognizes a word.

There are other early skills that relate to later reading and writing ability as well, regardless of IQ or socio-economic status. Among these are writing letters, remembering spoken information for a short time, rapidly naming sequences of random letters, numbers, or pictures, and other phonological skills-like the ability to segment words into phonemes.

To decode words, students need to be taught to blend together the phonemes that graphemes represent on the page. For example, a young reader must learn to recognize that /r/, /o/, /d/ are three sounds that together form the word "rod," but also that the word "rock" also contains three sounds, /r/, /o/, /k/ This is a process that builds on itself rapidly. Though there are some 15,000 syllables in English, after a child has learned the 44 most common sound and letter combinations, they will begin to sound out words as they read. These include both the basic letter and vowel sounds, but also common combinations such as "th," "sh," and "-ing." There are two main ways to demonstrate to children that words are made up of sound-letter correspondences. In one method, students learn the sounds of the letters first and then blend these phonemes together to sound out words. That's synthetic phonics-they're synthesizing phonemes into greater whole words. The other method, analytic phonics, takes an inverted approach: Students identify-or analyze-the phonemes within words, and then use that knowledge to read other words.

Take the word "bat." In synthetic phonics, students would first learn the /b/ sound, then the /a/ sound, then the /t/ sound and blend them together to sound out "bat." In analytic phonics, students would learn the word "bat" alongside words like "cat," "mat," and "hat," and would be taught that all these words end in the "at" sound pattern.

So there's synthetic phonics and analytic phonics-is one way better than the other?

A few studies have found synthetic phonics to be more effective than analytic phonics. Most notably, a seven-year longitudinal study from Scotland found that synthetic phonics taught in 1st grade gave students an advantage in reading and spelling over analytic phonics. Still, when examined as a whole, the larger body of reading research doesn't surface a conclusive winner. Two landmark research reviews haven't found a significant difference in the effectiveness of the two methods. Other more recent research is still inconclusive.

Do these strategies apply to words that don't follow traditional sound-spelling patterns? What about words like "one" and "friend"-can those words still be taught with phonics?

Yes, but not alone; spelling and semantic rules go hand-in-hand with teaching letter sounds. Words like "lime" and "dime," have similar spelling and pronunciation. But some words with similar spelling have different pronunciations, like "pint" and "mint." And others have different spellings and similar pronunciations, like "jazz" and "has." Brain imaging studies find that when readers see word pairs that are inconsistent, they show greater activity in the areas of the brain associated with processing both visual spelling and spoken words. This shows that young readers use systems of understanding of both printed shapes and sounds when they see any written word. When those two systems conflict, the reader may call on additional rules, such as understanding that words at the end of lines of a rhyming poem (such as "has" and "jazz") likely rhyme even if their spelling would not suggest it.

Some research has found that teaching common irregular words, like "one" and "friend," as sight words can be effective. Still, in these studies, children were also taught phonics along with sight words-and that's important. Understanding phonics gives students the foundation to read these irregular words. Take "friend." While the "ie" doesn't produce the same sound it normally does, the other letters in the word do. Research has suggested that children use the "fr" and the "nd" as a framework when they remember how to read the irregular word "friend."

When should children start to learn how to sound out words? Is there a "too early"?

Even very young children can benefit from instruction designed to develop phonological awareness. The National Early Literacy Panel Report (2009), a meta-analysis of early literacy studies, found that teaching preschoolers and kindergartners how to distinguish the sounds in words, whether orally or in relationship to print, improved their reading and writing ability. The children in these studies were generally between the ages of 3 and 5.

Studies suggest progress in phonics is less closely linked to a child's age than to the size and complexity of his spoken vocabulary, and to his opportunities to practice and apply new phonics rules. There is some evidence that "decodable" books, designed to help students practice specific letter-sound combinations, can benefit the earliest readers. But it is mixed, and students very quickly progress enough to get more benefit from texts that provide more complex and irregular words-and often texts that students find more interesting.

How much time should teachers spend on teaching about letters and sounds in class?

There isn't yet a definitive "best" amount of time to spend on phonics instruction. In several meta-analyses, researchers haven't found a direct link between program length and effectiveness.

The National Reading Panel report found that programs focusing on phonemic awareness, the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the smallest units of speech sounds, that lasted less than 20 hours total had the greatest effect on reading skills. Across the studies that the researchers looked at, individual sessions lasted 25 minutes on average.

But the authors of the NRP are quick to point out that these patterns are descriptive, not prescriptive. The studies they looked at weren't specifically testing the effectiveness of different time lengths, and it may be that time wasn't the relevant factor in these shorter programs performing better.

Eventually, a skilled reader doesn't need to sound out every word that she reads. She sees the word and recognizes it immediately. Through reading the word again and again over time, her brain has linked this particular sequence to this word, through a process called orthographic mapping.

But neuroscience research has shown that even if it feels like she's recognizing the word as a whole, she's still attending to the sequence of individual letters in the word for an incredibly short period of time. That's how skilled readers can tell the difference between the words "accent" and "ascent."

What else-aside from phonics-is part of a research-based early reading program?

Phonics is essential to a research-based reading program. If students can't decode words, they can't derive any meaning from them. But understanding the alphabetic code doesn't automatically make students good readers. There are five essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The National Reading Panel addressed all five of these components. The researchers found that having students read out loud with guidance and feedback improved reading fluency. Vocabulary instruction, both explicit and implicit, led to better reading comprehension-and it was most effective when students had multiple opportunities to see and use new words in context. They also found that teaching comprehension strategies can also lead to gains in reading achievement, though most of these studies were done with students older than 2nd grade.

For younger students, oral language skills; understanding syntax, grammar, vocabulary, and idioms; and having general and topic-specific background knowledge are also essential for reading comprehension.

This is one of the premises of the Simple View of Reading, a framework to understand reading first proposed by researchers Philip B. Gough and William E. Tunmer in 1986. In the simple view, reading comprehension is the product of decoding ability and language comprehension. If a student can't decode, it doesn't matter how much background knowledge and vocabulary he understands-he won't be able to understand what's on the page. But the opposite is also true: If a student can decode but doesn't have a deep enough understanding of oral language, he won't be able to understand the words he can say out loud. Since Gough and Tunmer first proposed this framework, many studies have confirmed its basic structure-that comprehension and decoding are separate processes. One meta-analysis of reading intervention studies finds that phonics-focused interventions were most effective through grade 1; in older grades-when most students will have mastered phonics-interventions that targeted comprehension or a mix of reading skills showed bigger effects on students' reading skills.

For young students, early oral-language interventions can help set them up for success even before they start formal school.

The National Early Literacy Panel found that both reading books to young children and engaging in activities aimed at improving their language development improved their oral language skills.

If children don't learn to read naturally from being exposed to reading, why are parents and teachers encouraged to read to infants and preschoolers?

The amount of time adults read with preschoolers and young children does predict their reading skills in elementary school. One of the most important predictors of how well a child will learn to read is the size and quality of his spoken language and vocabulary, and children are more likely to be exposed to new words and their meanings or pick up grammar rules from reading aloud with adults.

In a series of studies in the late 1990s of 5-year-olds who had not yet learned to read, Victoria Purcell-Gates found that after controlling for the income and education level of the children's parents, children who had been read to regularly in the last two years used more "literary" language, longer phrases, and more sophisticated sentence structures. Moreover, an adult reading with a child is more likely to explain or expand on the meanings of words and concepts that the child does not already know, adding to their background knowledge.

Reading with trusted adults also helps children develop a love of reading. "The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process [of emergent literacy], and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one," notes cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf.

What about independent choice reading?

In a choice reading period-also known as sustained silent reading or Drop Everything and Read-students get to pick a book to read independently in class for a set amount of time. The premise behind this activity is that children need time to practice reading skills on their own to improve.

There is a lot of correlational research that shows that children who read more are better readers. But many of these studies don't quantify how much reading students are actually doing. While they may specify a time frame-15 minutes of sustained silent reading, for example-the studies don't report whether kids spend this time reading. That makes it difficult to know how effective choice reading actually is.

More importantly, these studies don't provide experimental evidence-it's not clear whether reading more is what makes students better readers, or if better readers are likely to read more. The National Reading Panel found that there wasn't evidence that choice reading improved students' fluency.

Does it make a difference whether children learn to read using printed books or digital ones?

In the last decade or so, access to Internet-based text has continued to expand, and schools have increasingly used digitally based books, particularly to support students who do not have easy access to paper books at home. Yet some emerging evidence suggests children learn to read differently in print versus digitally, in ways that could hinder their later comprehension.

Researchers that study eye movements find that those reading digital text are more likely to skim or read nonlinearly, looking for key words to give the gist, jump to the end to find conclusions or takeaways, and only sometimes go back to find context in the rest of the text. In a separate series of studies since 2015, researchers led by Anne Mangen found that students who read short stories and especially longer texts in a print format were better able to remember the plot and sequence of events than those who read the same text on a screen.

It's not yet clear how universal these changes are, but teachers may want to keep watch on how well their students reading electronically are developing deeper reading and comprehension skills.

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How to Cite This Article

Schwartz, Sarah and Sparks, Sarah D. (2019, October 2). How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says. Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/how-do-kids-learn-to-read.html
For a fully annotated version of this article, view on desktop. A previous version of this article misstated the year Keith Stanovich coined the term "Matthew Effect in Reading." It was 1986.
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How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says

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The debate on how to teach early reading has raged for a century. But for the last few decades, the cognitive science has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code-teaching systematic phonics-is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words.

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John Spencer

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It was the first Friday of the first week of my first year as a teacher and I was determined to have students engage in a hands-on learning activity. My students were going to solidify their understanding of the five themes of geography by creating collages that represent each of them. I had spent weeks asking friends and family for old magazines. I had hit up every back-to-school sale and purchased an absurd amount of glue and cardstock and tempera paints.

This was going to be epic.

But it wasn't epic. Not even close. Three of my classes finished early, which meant most students wandered around talking while I frantically looked for places for the paint to dry. In one class, a group of students decided to smear paint on their faces. In another class period, most of the students didn't even get started on the mini-project.

The next year, I tried the same activity but this time with clear procedures and expectations. Things ran smoothly. However, I left with a nagging sense that it was a wasted class period. Yes, students had fun. But did they really learn anything?

As a pre-service teacher, I had a professor who shared Edgar Dale's Cone of Learning. The idea is that students remember only 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, 50% of what they see and hear, 70% of what they say and write, and 90% of what they do as they perform a task. It should be noted that Dale never actually included those percentages and that he created the cone as a simple visual representation of using multiple modalities in teaching.

I had designed this collage activity as a way to increase the retention of this knowledge. I believed that hands-on learning would make things "stickier." However, I had actually created an activity that involved hands-on learning without minds-on learning.

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When Hands-On Learning Isn't Really Learning

When I was in the fourth grade, we created sugar cube models of the California missions. We didn't talk about colonization or even consider the Native American perspective. Instead, we glued sugar cubes on top of sugar cubes on top of sugar cubes. Most of us ended up taking our missions home, which meant other kids had immaculately designed missions that their parents had created. Meanwhile, mine was a half-melted mess because apparently sugar cubes melt when you decided to use hot glue.

I didn't learn anything about the California missions from making this model. I'm sure that there were some small skills I might have gained, in terms of crafting. However, unlike a true STEM challenge, I didn't design anything new. There was very little creative thinking that went into the project. Jennifer Gonzalez calls these projects Grecian Urns, based on an activity her child did in school that involved constructing an urn modeled after ancient Greece without actually exploring the history of the Greek city-states.

I recently had a teacher candidate talk to me about her practicum. "I'd like to do project-based learning or try out a game-based learning mini-unit but we are spending three weeks on maps. They spend most of the time coloring in the map with colored pencils."

By contrast, there are many learning tasks that aren't "hands-on" that lead to deeper knowledge. When I taught a self-contained middle school class (all subjects), we spent forty minutes a day on silent reading. My students engaged in deep, imaginative world-building in fiction. They understood profound truths through the power of story. When reading non-fiction, they geeked out on ideas and understood concepts at a deeper level. There was nothing "passive" about reading because their minds were actively engaged. The same is true of Socratic Seminars, debates, and discussions.

And yet, I still believe in using hands-on learning for student projects. When hands-on learning is tied directly to the standards, students often understand the concepts at a deeper level. When the tasks are inherently meaningful, hands-on learning becomes a bridge between the abstract and concrete.

So, we need to go beyond having students color in maps with colored pencils. But how do you craft meaningful hands-on learning experiences? Here are a few diagnostic questions to help guide the planning process.

Is the hands-on learning tied to specific standards?

When I taught eighth grade, my students created model roller coasters that they designed using upcycled materials. This project required a conceptual understanding of forces and motion, which they had to label in their visual plans and in their explanation of how the roller coaster worked.
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When they engaged in various STEM challenges, we tied each challenge to the NGSS standards and to the STEM process and ISTE standards. This way, we could assess via observation, student conferencing, and rubrics. Students also engaged in self-reflection and self-assessment.

Are students thinking critically?

As a quick divergent thinking exercise, I have given students a set of items and asked them to design something new. At times, they had a specific item they had to create (like a bridge in science). Other times, they had to do rapid prototyping and create a quick "pitch" in the form of a persuasive advertisement (which we tied to persuasive writing in language arts).

This process was fast. Students brainstormed individually, followed by a group brainstorm, a moment to clarify the idea, and rapid prototyping in the moment. You can check out the prompt below.
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Note that this mini-project has a specific goal of developing divergent thinking:

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This is a sharp contrast to the collage project which involved very little analysis and no true creativity. Which leads to my next question . . .

Are students engaged in creative thinking?

When I first had students create projects, I created detailed project papers with step-by-step instructions for how to accomplish the project. I set all the deadlines, broke down all the tasks, and created all the concepts. In other words, I engaged in all the ideation for my students. When students got frustrated and said, "I don't get it," I would respond by creating clearer instructions. Although I believed my students were artists, I had handed them a paint-by-numbers set of directions.

As we shifted toward design thinking, I began to let go over control and instead trust students to generate their own ideas. With design thinking, students ask their own questions, engage in their own research, generating their own ideas, create their own prototypes, and ultimately revise their work until they launch it to an audience:
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Suddenly, we had twelve projects that were different from each other. Students were coming up with concepts I hadn't even considered.

I love the way Chris Lehmann puts it:

Is there meaningful discourse occurring within the activity?

The best hands-on learning experiences include conversations that help students make sense of the content through peer conversations. There are natural points of reflection and discussion that help students wrestle with ideas. Moreover, there are moments of peer assessment, where peer discourse helps students build metacognition. For example, in the LAUNCH Cycle, students engage in peer discussions when they pose questions, share their research findings, generate ideas, clarify ideas, plan their projects, and engage in peer feedback.

Similarly, when you create a hands-on game or simulation, the deeper learning often occurs in the midst of it as you engage in meaningful discourse. For example, when my students learned about the Industrial Revolution, I created an assembly line and manipulated the labor market. We talked about supply and demand, organized labor, environmental impact, and social changes that occurred as a result of industrialization.

When this happens, students move through the metacognition cycle:
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However, this can be challenging to plan. On one hand, it helps to provide students with specific structures for peer assessment. There are definitely times when we want to embed reflective questions into our lesson plans to help facilitate this discourse. On the other hand, too much structure can disrupt deep work and prevent students from hitting a state of flow. As a teacher, I have never gotten this balance right. I'm always moving between too much structure and not enough structure. But I've realized that this dance back and forth is the art of teaching. Every group is different. Each class has its own idiosyncratic rhythm. Students arrive with different needs and personalities and skill levels. The beauty is in the imperfection.

Does it matter to the students?

This is, perhaps, the most obvious question. However, it's easy to overlook. The best hands-on learning projects are the ones that matter the most to students. Students tend to care more when there is an authentic audience and a connection to the broader world. They also care more when they have ownership of the process.
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Here, they ask their own questions, engage in their own research, generate their own ideas, select their own materials, and revise with their own feedback. As a teacher, I get to be the guide, helping them with reflection and providing moments where I can do a mini-lesson to solidify a necessary skill.

However, it doesn't have to be a larger design thinking project. Game-based learning can be an excellent hands-on method for teaching students new concepts. For example, I used to teach economic systems (communism, capitalism, and socialism) with a modified version of Monopoly. My students learned about the causes of World War I through a game similar to Risk. It might even be a hands-on simulation, like a prey and predator game of tag or a simulated assembly line used to teach the industrial revolution.

Revise the Lesson

The five themes of geography collage was a hands-on activity that lacked the minds-on components. It was a fun activity but it didn't really engage students on an intellectual level. But I actually didn't reject the activity in its entirety. Instead, I met with two other teachers who helped me brainstorm ways to revise the mini-project for the next year. The first thing we did was turn the collage into a collage concept map, where students used colored pencils to draw connections between the themes. Suddenly, they were not only finding pictures that represented the themes but they were also finding unlikely connections and engaging in connective thinking. Next, they explained their collages to a peer using their phones to record the audio. These short discussions helped incorporate meaningful discourse. I used sample questions and sentence stems to guide my ELL students in this process. It might not have been our most noteworthy mini-project. However, it was still a powerful way to solidify what they had learned in geography.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It Might Be Hands-on Learning, But Is It Minds-on Learning?

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It was the first Friday of the first week of my first year as a teacher and I was determined to have students engage in a hands-on learning activity. My students were going to solidify their understanding of the five themes of geography by creating collages that represent each of them.

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Research-based review

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J Sch Health. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2017 May 1.

Published in final edited form as:

Abstract

BACKGROUND

Insufficient sleep in adolescents has been shown to be associated with a wide variety of adverse outcomes, from poor mental and physical health to behavioral problems and lower academic grades. However, most high school students do not get sufficient sleep. Delaying school start times for adolescents has been proposed as a policy change to address insufficient sleep in this population and potentially to improve students' academic performance, reduce engagement in risk behaviors, and improve health.

METHODS

This paper reviews 38 reports examining the association between school start times, sleep, and other outcomes among adolescent students.

RESULTS

Most studies reviewed provide evidence that delaying school start time increases weeknight sleep duration among adolescents, primarily by delaying rise times. Most of the studies saw a significant increase in sleep duration even with relatively small delays in start times of half an hour or so. Later start times also generally correspond to improved attendance, less tardiness, less falling asleep in class, better grades, and fewer motor vehicle crashes.

CONCLUSIONS

Although additional research is necessary, research results that are already available should be disseminated to stakeholders to enable the development of evidence-based school policies.

Keywords: adolescents, school health, sleep, school start times, policy

BACKGROUND

Sleepy adolescents have doubtlessly been a problem for a long time. However, it is only since the late 1980s that this issue has progressed from teachers' anecdotes of students falling asleep in class and parental complaints of daily struggles to get their children out of bed to scientific investigations into the causes and consequences of insufficient sleep.

Most adolescents may need at least 9 hours sleep per night1-3; however, fewer than 8% of high school students report getting this amount.4 Less than a third of students report 8 or more hours of sleep, and this proportion decreases as school grade level increases so that fewer than a quarter of high school seniors get this amount.4 Healthy People 2020, a national initiative designed to guide disease prevention and health promotion efforts to improve the health of all Americans ( http://www.healthypeople.gov/), contains 4 objectives related to sleep, including one for adolescents.5 This objective is to "increase the proportion of students in grades 9 through 12 who get sufficient sleep (defined as 8 or more hours of sleep on an average school night)."

Insufficient sleep in children and adolescents has been shown to be associated with a wide variety of adverse outcomes in multiple aspects of their lives from poor mental and physical health to behavioral problems and poor academic grades. Insufficient sleep has been linked to excess weight,6-13 decreased physical activity,14 and increased food intake, possibly due to alterations in appetite-regulating hormones.12 Results of investigations into longitudinal changes in weight attributable to sleep duration, however, have been mixed.10,15

A solid body of literature has found that insufficient sleep in this young population is tied to poor mental health, including depression, depressive symptoms,8,16-22 and suicidal ideation.8,18,20,22-25 In addition, a few studies have shown an association between insufficient sleep and unhealthy risk behaviors including alcohol use,17,19,20,22 tobacco smoking,20,22 marijuana use,20,22 use of other illicit/prescription drugs,22 unhealthy weight control strategies,26 and recent sexual activity.20 Other factors that have been found to be associated with insufficient sleep include risk-taking behaviors,27 bullying,28 school violence-related behaviors,29 and physical fighting.20 Short sleep duration has also been found to be associated with a higher risk of unintentional injury.30 Finally, students who do not get enough sleep also may be more likely to have problems paying attention and poor academic performance,17,21,31-36 although not all research agrees.37,38 One of these negative studies failed to find a correlation between school night sleep duration and grade point average.37 However, class grading and subsequently grade point averages are not standardized and may vary by subject, teacher, and school. That study also did not adjust by sex of student, which was a strong predictor of grade point average. Ming et al. found that "students with a sleep length of less than 7 hours on both weekdays and weekends exhibited poorer performance, while those who made up this sleep loss on weekends did not."38 That study also relied on a non-standardized measure of academic performance and did not adjust for variables such as grade in school, which is strongly related to prevalence of insufficient sleep.

Adolescents tend to get insufficient sleep because of a combination of late bedtimes and early rise times. External factors that contribute to later bedtimes among adolescents include an increase in schoolwork; participation in afterschool activities, including employment; fewer parent-set bedtimes; and late-night use of technology in the bedroom.39-43 Biology also plays a part in later bedtimes among adolescents. One of the early changes associated with puberty is alteration of a child's circadian rhythms, such that adolescents are more alert in the afternoons and evenings and require morning sleep.44 Their natural body clocks can keep adolescents awake until 11 PM or later, in spite of going to bed earlier and good sleep hygiene, such as avoiding stimulating activity at night and minimizing caffeine intake in the afternoon or evening.39 School-based sleep promotion programs have been tried as a means of improving sleep hygiene among adolescents. However, these programs may improve knowledge of sleep without having a significant effect on behavior.45,46

Rise times, on the other hand, are primarily determined by a single factor-school start times.43 Delaying school start times for adolescents has been proposed as a policy change to address insufficient sleep in this population and potentially to improve students' academic performance, reduce engagement in risk behaviors, and improve health. In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement urging middle and high schools to adjust start times to permit students to obtain adequate sleep and improve physical and mental health, safety, academic performance, and quality of life.3 This paper reviews studies examining the association between school start times, sleep, and other outcomes including academic performance, mental health, and motor vehicle collisions among adolescent students. This paper, and especially the table provided, is intended to be a resource for educators, parents, and other stakeholders who wish to learn more about the impact of changing school start times for adolescents.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Methods

An outline of the steps in identification of articles and reports included in the literature review is presented in the Figure . To be included in the review, analyses had to include the variable of "school start time" either by comparing different schools with different start times (cross-sectional) or the same schools before and after changes in start times (longitudinal). Since the focus of this review is on the effect of school start times on adolescent students, studies that focused on elementary school (pre-middle school) students were excluded. Additionally, reports had to be available in English, but could include schools either in or outside the United States. Articles for the literature review were initially identified through a PubMed search for "school start time" OR "school start times" (Step A). Some exclusions from this initial search included a study that compared students in public or private schools to homeschooled students,47 a comparison of adolescent sleep during summer and during the school year,48 and one that modeled the effect of modifying school start times on the frequency of encounters between child pedestrians and motor vehicles.49 Another broader PubMed search for "sleep" AND "adolescent" AND "school" resulted in approximately 3200 articles (Step B). Titles and abstracts were reviewed to identify studies that might meet primary inclusion criteria. Full-text review of candidate articles confirmed inclusion of articles for this review. Reference lists of articles identified in Steps A and B and reviews of the topic of school start times were reviewed for identification of additional reports (Step C). Several of the earliest studies with results presented in abstract form only were identified in this manner,50-54 as were some studies from the education or economics literature that were not indexed by PubMed.55-59 A Scopus search for "school start time" (all fields) found 320 documents (Step D), of which 3 satisfied the inclusion criteria and had not been identified in previous steps. Finally (Step E), one additional non-duplicative report was identified in the reference list for articles in Step D. Final searches in Steps A, B, and D were conducted July 1, 2015. For this review, 38 reports were reviewed for years of study, study design, sample size, students' ages, location, school start times, outcomes, and key reported findings. Five of these reports are listed more than once in the table. Three reports included multiple study populations whose data are analyzed separately.59-61 Three reports included cross-sectional and longitudinal components, with data for each component presented separately.55,57,61

The primary limitation to this review is its reliance on indexing by PubMed and Scopus, which could lead to omission of reports not indexed by these databases. To address this limitation, we also examined the reference lists on previous articles on the topic of school start times (Steps C and E). Five of the 38 reports were identified in this manner. Publication bias and over-representation of studies with significant results is also possible, however, some studies included in this review had results that did not agree with the majority.

Types of School Start Time Studies

We reviewed 38 reports on the impact of changes in school start time (see Table ). Unfortunately, the earliest reports,50-54 which have been cited frequently, were only published in abstract form. However, since they seem to have provided the impetus for much of the subsequent research and are fairly detailed, we have included them in this review. The studies presented in this review can be categorized as either cross-sectional or longitudinal. The cross-sectional studies simply compared characteristics for students at two or more schools having different start times, such that School A had an earlier start time than School B and compared how students at the two schools with respect to such outcomes as sleep duration, school attendance, academic performance, and morning traffic accidents among teens.

Table

Study

Author(s)(Year)
Year(s) of Study

Study Design

Sample Size

Age

Location

School Start Times

Outcomes

Key Findings

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

26
(same students)

Grades 9-10

Rhode Island

Year 1-9th grade: 8:25
Year 2-10th grade: 7:20

Sleep schedules (sleep diaries and data
from electronic wrist monitors), multiple
sleep latency tests, polysomnography.

Cross-sectional
(students in 18
schools)

572

Grade 5

18 schools
throughout Israel

Early risers: 7:10 (2+
times/week)
Regular risers: 8:00

Sleep duration, bedtime, rise time
(weekdays and weekends), sleepiness,
daytime functioning, sleep difficulties.

Cross-sectional
(3 districts)

NR

Grades 10-12

Minnesota

Later SST corresponded to later rise time (p <
.0001), same bedtime, and longer weeknight sleep
duration (p < .0001). Later SST also associated
with less daytime sleepiness (p < .0001), less
struggling to stay awake during academic tasks (p
< .01 for A vs C), fewer tardies (p < .001), less
falling asleep in morning classes (p <.005), fewer
depressive symptoms (p < .001 for A vs C), less
time spent at work during school week (p < .05),
and higher self-reported grades (p < .05).

Cross-sectional
(3 districts)

NR

Grades 7-8

Minnesota

3120

Grades 9-12

Rhode Island

7:10 - 7:30

School Sleep Habits Survey (study,
work, sleep, and school habits and
preferences)

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

31
(same recruits,
2 sleep schedules)

Great Lakes,
Illinois

Sleep duration.

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

>12 000 (7 HS)

Grades 9-12

Minneapolis,
Minnesota

Pre-change: 7:15
Post-change: 8:40

Class grades, attendance, tardiness,
graduation rates, rates of continuous
enrollment.

Cross-sectional
(Minneapolis HS vs
District B)

467 (Minneapolis
HS)
169 (District B)

Grades 9-12

Minneapolis,
Minnesota

Minneapolis HS: 8:40
District B: 7:30

Cross-sectional
(2 schools with
different SSTs)

193 (School 1)
587 (School 2)

Grades 10-11

Altoona (1) and
Chippewa Falls
(2), Wisconsin

School 1: 7:50
School 2: 8:35

Weeknight sleep duration, Epworth
Sleepiness Scale91.

Mean weeknight sleep duration was longer in
School 2 compared to School 1 (p = .039).

Longitudinal (before
vs after SST change)

3 HS, 5 MS

Grades 7-11

Arlington County,
Virginia

Cross-sectional

2454

5-z19 years

Nationally (USA)
representative

NR

Sleep duration, bedtime, rise time
(weekdays and weekends).

Cross-sectional
(2 schools with
different SSTs)

205

Grades 7-8

Urban New
England school
district

Early school: 7:15
Late school: 8:37

School Sleep Habits Survey35 (sleep
duration, bedtime, rise time-weekdays
and weekends, sleepiness, sleep-wake
behavior problems, sleep hygiene scale),
official academic performance,
attendance, tardiness.

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

Grades 6-12

Kentucky

Year 1 (Y1): 7:30 (HS)
Year 2 (Y2): 8:30 (HS)

Bedtime and rise time (weekdays and
weekends), number of naps, Epworth
Sleepiness Scale91, how time spent
before and after school, motor vehicle
crash rates among 17- and 18-year-old
students.

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

297 (pre-delay)
977 (post-delay)

Grades 9-12

Wilton,
Connecticut

Pre-delay: 7:35
Post-delay: 8:15

Condensed School Sleep Habits
Questionnaire35.

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

201 (mostly
boarders)

Grades 9-12

Rhode Island

Pre-change: 8:00
Post-change: 8:30

Bedtime and rise time (weekdays and
weekends), sleepiness-related behaviors,
health center visits, absences/tardies.

Cross-sectional

Mean age 9.2
± 1.8y

Hong Kong

Bedtime, rise time, time-in-bed
(weekday, weekend, & long holidays),
napping

Cross-sectional

6165

U.S. Air Force
Academy
freshmen

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Early (2004-2005, 2005-
2006): 7:00. Middle (2006-
2007): 7:30. Late (2007-
2008, 2008-2009): 7:50.
For each schedule, some
students had a first period
class while others did not.

Academic grades by scheduling
characteristics.

Grades 10-12

7:15-8:40

ACT scores, attendance rates

No association between SST and ACT scores or
attendance rates.

Cross-sectional

Approximately 400
public high schools

Grades 10-12

Kansas (public
high schools in the
state)

Mean (SD): 7:59 (0:15)

No association between SST and scores on reading,
mathematics, science, and social studies
assessments.

Cross-sectional

75 schools

Virginia suburbs of
Washington D.C.

Scores on standardized end-of-course
exams.

No association between SST and test scores.

47

Grade 8

Israel

Early class: 7:30
Late class: 8:30

Sleep duration, bedtime, rise time, sleep
efficiency (data from electronic wrist
monitors), attention tests.

Later SST associated with longer sleep duration (p
< .01) and improved attention (p < .01).

Cross-sectional

1941 (students
from 2 public high
schools, 1
vocational high
school, and two
extracurricular
high school
programs whose
students came from
various high
schools throughout
the state)

Grades 9-12

New Jersey

Sleep duration, bedtime, rise time,
napping, perceived sleep adequacy, night
awakenings, prolonged sleep onset

NR

16-18 years

Virginia Beach and
Chesapeake,
Virginia

Motor vehicle crash rates in each city.

Crash rates among 16-to 18-year-olds were higher
(p < .01) in Virginia Beach (which has earlier
SSTs).

Cross-sectional

3441

15-18 years

Gaziantep, Turkey

Early: 7:00-8:00 (morning)
Late: 12:00-12:40 pm
(afternoon)

Bedtime, rise time, sleep latency
(weekdays & weekends), ideal night
sleep time, napping, sleep hygiene

Cross-sectional

Grade 10

Norway

Compared to control school students, students at
intervention school slept >1 hour longer on Sunday
night (p < .05), had a smaller difference between
Saturday and Sunday night sleep duration (p = .04),
and shorter sleep latency on Sunday night. Students
at the intervention school had fewer lapses on
reaction time tests (p = .02) and faster reaction
times (p = .02) on Monday than Friday compared
to the control students. No differences in sleepiness
or positive or negative affect.

Cross-sectional
component

Grades 6-8

Wake County,
North Carolina

7:30-8:45 (53% of students
start at 7:30, 22% start at
8:15)

Grades 6-8

Wake County,
North Carolina

End of year standardized test scores in
reading and math; time spent watching
television and doing homework

Longitudinal (before
vs after SST change
in 2006)

13-17 years

Wellington, New
Zealand

School Sleep Habits Survey35 (study,
work, sleep, and school habits, and
preferences), technology use, Epworth
Sleepiness Scale91, morningness-
eveningness preference, sleep/fatigue
problems

Grade 12 students after the SST delay (2008) had
longer sleep duration (p < .01), earlier bedtime (p <
.01), later rise time (p < .001), less sleep
discrepancy (sleep duration on school nights vs.
non-school nights)(p < .01), and less sleepiness (p
< .01) compared to Grade 12 students before the
delay or Grade 11 students (2008).

525 (baseline)
553 (2-year follow-
up)

Grades 4-5
(mean age
10.8y)

Shanghai, China

Sleep duration, bedtime, rise time,
daytime sleepiness (Chinese version of
Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire)

Cross-sectional

2373 (early)
343 (delayed start)

Grades 8-9

Mid-size city in
northwestern
Switzerland

Early: not specified
Delayed: 20 minutes later

Cross-sectional

302 (U.S.)
385 (Australia)

Grades 9-12
(mean age
16.0y) (U.S.)
Years 9-11
(mean age
15.6y)
(Australia)

U.S.: ~7:45
Australia: 8:20-9:00

Boergers, Gable, and
Owens (2014)67
2010-2011

Longitudinal (before
vs after SST change)

197 (boarding
students)

Grades 9-12

Rhode Island

Pre-delay: 8:00
Post-delay: 8:25

School Sleep Habits Survey35 (study,
work, sleep, and school habits and
preferences), caffeine intake
questionnaire

After SST delay, mean wake times (school days)
were later (p < .001), mean school night sleep
duration was longer (p < .001), school night
bedtimes did not change. The percentage who slept
≥8 hour on school nights increased from 18% to
44% (p < .001). There were no changes in
nonschool night sleep patterns. After delay,
sleepiness scores (p < .001), depression scores (p <
.001), and caffeine use decreased (p < .05). No
changes in number of hours engaged in athletics,
extracurricular activities, and homework were
reported. No changes in self-reported grades were
reported. Weekday sleep duration decreased to
baseline after reverting to pre-delay SST.

Cross-sectional
(students in 3
schools)

669

12-16 years

Madrid, Spain

8:00, 8:15, 8:30

Cross-sectional

4801 (students
from 12 senior HS
and 12 junior HS)

11-20 years

Shanghai, China

Dichotimized: Before 7:00
vs. 7:00 or later

Adolescent Sleep Wake Scale93,
bedtimes, wake-up times, sleep duration
(weekdays & weekends), parents' sleep
habits

SST before 7:00 associated with sleeping <8 hours
(p = .015).

16-18 years

Early (Chesterfield): 7:20
Late (Henrico): 8:45

Weekday motor vehicle crash rates
during the school years (September-
May) 2009-2010 and 2010-2011.

Cross-sectional

821
(students from 4
HS)

15-19 years

Osijek, Croatia

Students with earlier SST performed better
academically and had earlier chronotypes (morning
preference) (p < .001). No difference in sleepiness.

Cross-sectional

9089

Grades 9-12

5 HS in Minnesota,
2 HS in Colorado,
1 HS in Wyoming

After delay, SST varied
from 8:00 to 8:55

Sleep duration, bedtimes, rise times
(weekdays and weekends), sleep-related
tardiness, sleeping during class.

SST associated with percent of students sleeping
≥8 hours/school night ( R ² = .8878, <50% for
schools starting before 8:30, 66% for school
starting at 8:55).

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

446 (pre-delay)
459 (post-delay)

Grades 9-12

Jackson Hole,
Wyoming

Pre-delay: 7:35
Post-delay: 8:55

Sleep duration, bedtimes, rise times
(weekdays and weekends).

Average school night sleep increased from 7.5h to
8.2h. Average weekend sleep decreased from 9.3h
to 9.0h.

Longitudinal
(before vs after SST
change)

NR

Grades 9-12

5 HS in Minnesota,
2 HS in Colorado,
1 HS in Wyoming

Attendance, academic performance, car
crashes.

Cross-sectional

7216 (245 schools)

13-18 years

Nationally (USA)
representative

Mean: 8:01
Range: 7:05-9:22

Weeknight bedtime, sleep duration
(weeknight and weekend), weekend
compensatory sleep

Only Abstracts Available

Cross-sectional

61

Grades 10-12
(Mean age
17.1 years)

NR

Early school: 7:30
Late school: 8:00

Sleep duration, bedtimes, rise times
(weekdays and weekends).

Later SST corresponded to later rise times (p <
.05), but no difference in bedtimes. Sleep duration
difference not significantly different.

Cross-sectional

102

Grade 12

NR

Early school: 7:40
Late schools: 8:30

Sleep duration, bedtimes, rise times
(weekdays and weekends).

Earlier SST corresponded to shorter weeknight
sleep duration (p < .035), more sleep problems (p =
.04), and later weekend rise times (p = .03).

Longitudinal (before
vs after SST change)

7

Grade 9-10

Rhode Island

Late (Grade 9): 8:25
Early (Grade 10): 7:20

Sleep duration, sleep start time, sleep
offset time (measured with actigraphy)

Cross-sectional

97 (early school)
119 (late school)

Grades 11-12

NR

Early school: 7:20
Late school: 9:30

Sleep duration, bedtimes, rise times
(weekdays and weekends).

Earlier SST corresponded to shorter weeknight
sleep duration (p = .002).

Longitudinal (before
vs after SST change)

15 (May have
included students
in Carskadon et al.53)

Grade 9-10

Rhode Island

Late (Grade 9): 8:25
Early (Grade 10): 7:20

Changing school start times is often a major endeavor that involves coordination between school faculty and staff, transportation resources, parents, students, and administration, and can take years to accomplish. Cross-sectional studies can be conducted without having to wait for a school or school district to undertake a change in school start time. However, as with all cross- sectional studies, only associations between school start times and other variables can be shown-not cause and effect. Other school characteristics, such as socioeconomic status of students, can also have effects on sleep and other outcomes but is often not reported.

In the longitudinal studies, data are collected on students and schools before and after a change in start time. Some data that are regularly collected by schools, such as attendance and grades, can be obtained retroactively by researchers. Other data, such as those obtained from student sleep surveys, need to be collected before the start time change is implemented, and including these data can increase the duration of the study. Some studies evaluate characteristics of the same students before and after the change. Others evaluate the student population (either the entire school or specific grades in school) before and after the change. This second method, for instance, could compare outcomes in 9th-grade students in the year before the start time change with the same outcomes in 9th-grade students in the year after the change. Both of these methods have their drawbacks. Although it would seem to be preferable to evaluate the same students before and after a change, individual students can undergo significant changes from year to year that could exaggerate or diminish the effect of changing start times. However, by being able to evaluate changes in variables for individual students, researchers are able to address questions such as, "Did the students who got more sleep after the start time's change have improved outcomes?" Although longitudinal studies may provide stronger evidence of causation than cross-sectional studies by addressing the issue of temporality, it is important to assess whether appropriate control conditions are used, whether analyses account for covariates (eg, age, sex, or socioeconomic status), and whether other explanatory variables are considered (eg, implementation of graduated drivers licensing).

Sleep and Sleepiness

Since delaying school start times is primarily intended to address the problem of insufficient sleep among adolescents, most of the studies focused on the association between school start times and sleep variables. Not surprisingly, students at schools with later start times got out of bed later on school days than those at earlier starting schools.35,36,50,53,55,56,60,62-69 The association between school start times and bedtimes, however, was mixed. Of 19 studies that evaluated the association between school start times and bedtime, there were no start time-associated differences in weekday bedtimes in eleven studies.35,50,53-55,60,62,67,68,70 However, six studies observed a later bedtime among students in schools that started at later times. It should be noted that in the study by Wolfson and colleagues, this bedtime difference was observed only in the autumn.64 Two studies unexpectedly reported earlier bedtimes after a delay in start times.65,69 In the study by Owens et al., some students stated that after seeing the benefits of getting more sleep with the delay in school start times, they sought to further increase their sleep by going to bed earlier.65 In Paksarian et al, bedtimes were delayed by only 10 minutes for each 30 minute delay in school start times.71 In 29 reports, a later start time was found to be associated with longer weekday sleep duration,34,36,38,51-56,60-79 including the studies that noted later bedtimes. In contrast to the majority of studies that observed longer sleep duration in later starting schools, two studies comparing students from schools with different start times did not observe a significant difference in sleep duration.35,50 For one of these, the difference in sleep duration did not meet the authors' effect size criterion, although the difference would not have been expected to be large since the difference in school start times was only 20 minutes.35 The other study observed longer sleep duration for students at the later starting school, but the difference was not statistically significant.50 Another study observed a significantly longer sleep duration for 7th- and 8th-grade students of only one of two later-starting districts.60 Sleep duration for the second later-starting district was also longer than for the early-starting district, but the difference was not statistically significant.60 Paksarian et al. observed longer sleep durations with later school start times (11 minutes for each 30 minute delay in school start times), but only for schools that started before 8:01 AM.71 In further analysis, the authors found the longer sleep duration for boys only (20 minutes for each 30 minute delay in school start times) and that there was variation by urbanicity, with an increase in sleep duration for boys in major metropolitan areas and a decrease for boys in nonurban counties.71 The authors suggested that the different association according to urbanicity may be due to differences in mode of transportation to school and time spent traveling to school, but they did not have data to investigate the possible role of transportation in their study. Although nearly all the studies reviewed used self-reported sleep data either from sleep diaries or survey questions, the two studies that used data from electronic wrist monitors (actigraphs) worn during sleep confirmed the general finding of longer weeknight sleep duration for students with later start times.62,70 Eleven of the positive studies found that students got at least one additional minute of sleep for every two minutes of difference in start time (eg, at least 30 minutes more sleep when start time was one hour later),34,55,56,60,61,64,65,68,70,72,78 although six other studies observed smaller, yet statistically significant, differences.

In addition to reporting longer sleep durations, students with later start times were less likely to report daytime sleepiness or falling asleep in class in nearly all studies that assessed these outcomes.34,36,55,56,60,64,65,69,72,74 Two studies observed no difference in sleepiness based on school start times. In the Norwegian study,78 start times were delayed from 8:30 AM to 9:30 AM on Mondays only. The lack of association could have been due to either the change being in effect only one day a week or the earlier start time already being late enough. In the Croatian study,80 the students at the earlier starting schools were predominantly boys, while girls made up most of the population at the later starting schools. That study found that girls had later chronotype (evening preference) and more sleepiness. In addition, the schools in the Croatian study alternated their schedule weekly, with schools starting in the morning one week and in the afternoon the next. Even with a delay in start time, falling asleep during class appears to remain a major problem, however. In Wahlstrom and colleagues' survey of students post-start time change, 27% reported falling asleep in a morning class in the previous 2 weeks, and 29% fell asleep in an afternoon class.61

Other methods for assessing students' degree of sleep-deficiency were used in various studies. Students in a study by Carskadon and colleagues underwent polysomnography (a type of sleep study that measures multiple factors such as electrical activity in the brain, heart rate, movements of the eyelids and legs, and respiratory airflow) and multiple sleep latency tests.62 After an advance in start time from 8:25 AM to 7:20 AM, students had a shorter REM sleep latency (time between sleep onset and onset of REM sleep) on polysomnography and a shorter sleep latency (time to sleep onset during a standard testing protocol).62 Both of these results indicate sleep-deficiency. Differences in sleep patterns between weeknights and weekend nights can also indicate insufficient weeknight sleep as students try to make up for lost sleep on the weekends. Seven reports that evaluated weekend sleep patterns found more "catch-up" sleep on the weekends for earlier start times,51,61,64,66,69,74,78 although one found no difference in this outcome.71 One study assessed weeknight and weekend sleep and observed longer weeknight sleep duration and no change in weekend sleep patterns after a delay in school start time, which could be interpreted as a decrease in "catch-up" sleep.67 However, the difference between weeknight and weekend sleep was not analyzed. Three studies that included information about daytime naps noted that students with earlier school start times reported more napping,38,66,75 presumably in an attempt to make up for insufficient nighttime sleep. Sleepy adolescents may also attempt to lessen sleepiness with caffeine. One study asked students about caffeine consumption and observed that caffeine use decreased after a 25 minute delay in school start time.67

Academics and Cognition

An outcome of particular interest to school administrators, teachers, and parents is academic performance; however, evaluating how delayed start times affect school grades or academic performance is difficult for several reasons. Class grading is not standardized and varies by subject, teacher, and school. Standardized tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the ACT are not taken by all students and are more likely to be taken by students planning to attend college. Finally, students with very good academic performance before a delay in school start time do not have much room for improvement. Given these limitations, however, some evidence suggests a positive association between later school start time and academic performance, although the association may be relatively weak55 and not universal.59,67,80

The first cross-sectional school start time study by the University of Minnesota found higher self-reported grades for students in later starting schools.60 Mean self-reported grades for the two districts that started before 7:30 AM were 6.4 and 6.5 (on a scale from 1 = mostly F's to 9 = mostly A's) compared to 7.1 for the district starting at 8:30 AM (p < .05). However, the increase in grades observed from this group's subsequent longitudinal study was small and not statistically significant.55 In their latest longitudinal study including 8 schools, the same group noted that most schools saw an increase in grade point average after delaying school start times.61 Arlington Public Schools (Arlington County, Virginia) observed an improvement in 10 th grade students' 1 st period grades after a 45 minute delay in high school start times, with no change in 7 th grade students' 1 st period grades after a 20 minute advance in middle school start times.81 Hinrichs' investigation into ACT scores and school start times in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which included school districts that did not delay school start times, controlled for various covariates and found no association between school start times and ACT scores.59 The annual ACT participation rate among Minnesota high school graduates varied from 59% to 66% during the study period (1993-2002).59 Hinrichs also evaluated the association between school start times and standardized test scores in Kansas (Kansas State Assessments) and the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC.59 Again, he found no association between school start times and academic achievement in these analyses.59 Wolfson and colleagues observed higher grades after delaying school start times for 8th grade, although not for 7th-grade students.64 Another study linked school start times and standardized test scores for middle school students (grades 6-8) from 1999 to 2006 in the eighteenth largest public school district in the United States.57 In the cross-sectional component of that study, an hour later start time corresponded to higher test scores on both math and reading (on the order of 3 percentile points).57 The longitudinal component of the same report looked at schools that had changed school start times over the course of the study and found that a one hour delay in start time corresponded to a 2 percentile increase in math and 1.5 percentile increase in reading.57 Among older students, U.S. Air Force Academy freshmen, students assigned to a first period course and therefore an earlier start to the school day had poorer grades.58 A longitudinal study of nearly 200 boarding school students did not see a change in self-reported grades after a 25 minute delay in school start times.67 In Milic et al.'s study in Croatia, students with an earlier school start time performed better academically than students at the schools with later start times.80 However, in addition to the difference in the make-up of the student populations (more boys at earlier schools and more girls at later schools) in that study, students were also aware of the school schedule at enrollment and the response rate was low.

Several studies have investigated the association between school start time and cognitive outcomes. Two studies found that students with later start times reported fewer problems concentrating and paying attention.70,72 In contrast, a study in Spain measured attention level via a sustained attention task among students at three schools with different start times (8:00, 8:15, and 8:30) and observed the highest average attention level at the school starting at 8:15.77 However, it should be noted that the mean inductive reasoning score, a measure of intelligence which is positively associated with attention, was significantly lower for the latest-starting school than the other two schools.77 The Norwegian study that delayed start times on Mondays included reaction time tests and found that students at the school with delayed start time had significantly fewer lapses and faster reaction times on Monday than Friday compared to no difference among students at the control (no delay) school.78

Several studies asked students how much time they spent on homework. There was no consistent association between school start time and homework time. Wahlstrom and colleagues found that students with later school start times reported less hours of homework,60 whereas Edwards observed the reverse57 and Boergers and colleagues saw no difference.67 Interpretation of these results in difficult. An increase in time doing homework could indicate an improved ability to concentrate or less efficient studying. Since the value of homework is hotly debated, this outcome should not be taken out of context.

Attendance/Tardiness

School attendance is also important for academic success. A recent report found that short sleep duration was strongly associated with odds of school absences.82 Several studies included in this review found that earlier start times were also related to more frequent tardiness and more absences. In one study, even with delaying start times from 8:00 AM to 8:55 AM, nearly a third of students reported being late to class because of oversleeping in the 2 weeks before the survey.61 However, one study of schools in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area found no association between school start times and overall attendance rates.59 The report by Arlington Public Schools stated that "maturity, rather than starting time, has the biggest impact on attendance rates."81 However, when comparing 10 th graders before and after the delay in high school start times, attendance rates were lower after the delay. Despite this finding, academic performance improved for those students. The report also noted that the attendance reporting procedures changed during the course of the study.

Depression

Sleep is strongly linked with many psychiatric disorders, including depression and anxiety.83 Although sleep problems may be symptoms of mental health disorders such as depression, there is also evidence of a causal relationship between insufficient sleep and depression, as well as mood in general.84,85 Due to this observation, some school start time studies included depression symptoms as part of their student assessments. Students at later-starting schools appeared to experience fewer depression symptoms (lower depression scores).55,60,65,67 Incidentally, shorter REM sleep latency, such as was observed by Carskadon and colleagues after an advance in start time,62 is also often observed in major depression.86 One study found no difference in students' positive or negative affect with delayed school start time.78 However, in that study, the start time was delayed on Mondays only.

Motor Vehicle Crashes

Four studies also investigated motor vehicle crashes among young drivers (aged 18 years or younger) in areas served by schools with different start times. In a Kentucky county, Danner and Phillips saw a 16.5% decrease (p < .01) in motor vehicle crash rates for 17- and 18-year-old students in the 2 years following a 1-hour delay in school start time by county high schools.74 During the same time period, crash rates for this age group increased by 7.8% in the rest of the state.74 In their 2011 report, Vorona and colleagues compared crash rates for teen drivers aged 16 to 18 years in 2 neighboring, demographically similar cities (in eastern Virginia) with different start times. In 2007 and 2008, the teen crash rates were significantly higher in the city with an earlier school start time.87 For both cities, teen crashes peaked during the morning commute time.87 The group went on to perform similar analyses for two adjacent counties in central Virginia with different school start times.88 During the 2009-2010 school year, crash rates among 16-18 year olds were higher (p < .05) in the county with the earlier school start times.88 The following year, crash rates among 16-17 year olds were higher (p < .05) in the same county, but difference was not statistically significant when 18 year olds were included in comparison (p = 0.09).88 Finally, Wahlstrom and colleagues investigated crash rates among 16- to 18-year-old students in 4 areas near schools that underwent delays in start time. Two areas saw major decreases (≥65%) in teen crash rates after the delays, while one saw a small decrease (6%), and another saw a small increase (9%).61

Other Outcomes

There are a handful of other outcomes that have been reported by only one study each. One study saw that students at schools with later start times spent less time at work during the school week (p < .05).60 More time working has been linked to poorer academic performance.89 However, the start time study was cross-sectional and other variables such as socioeconomic status may explain the difference in time spent at work. In the cross-sectional component of his study, Edwards found that students at schools that started later reported less time watching television.57 When he limited his analyses to schools that changed start times over the time course of the study, he confirmed that students at schools that delayed their start times reported significantly less time watching television.57 Among 197 boarding school students, no change in time spent in athletics or extracurricular activities was reported after a 25 minute delay in start time.67 Finally, in a small study of 15 students who transitioned from grade 9 (school start time 8:25) to grade 10 (school start time 7:20), self-reported conduct problems and aggressive behaviors decreased with the change to an earlier start time.54 However, within each grade, these behaviors were associated with shorter sleep duration, which indicates that at least some of the decrease in these behaviors may be due to maturation.54

CONCLUSION

Delaying school start times for adolescents has been proposed as a policy change to address insufficient sleep among adolescents, a largely sleep-deprived population, and potentially to improve students' academic performance, reduce engagement in risk behaviors, and improve health. Nearly all studies to date provide evidence that delaying school start time accomplishes the goal of increasing sleep duration among these students, primarily by delaying rise times. Most of the studies saw a significant increase in sleep duration even with relatively small delays in start times of half an hour or so. Later school start times also generally corresponded to improved attendance, less tardiness, less falling asleep in class, fewer depression symptoms, and fewer motor vehicle crashes. Although not all studies found that later start times corresponded to improved academic performance, no studies found a negative impact of later school start times on academics.

IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOL HEALTH

In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement urging middle and high schools to adjust start times to permit students to obtain adequate sleep and improve physical and mental health, safety, academic performance, and quality of life, and suggested that middle and high schools not start before 8:30 AM.3 Schools and school districts cannot make evidence-based policy decision without data. Therefore, research results such as those presented in this review, as well as the recent recommendations by the American Academy of Pediatrics, should be disseminated to school districts, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders. The field still needs rigorous research, including trials with controls, if possible. Many questions remain, such as the issue of how late is late enough? Much of the focus has been on high school students, but biological changes begin earlier, so further research into middle-school students is warranted. More qualitative research about overcoming obstacles to delaying school start times would also be valuable.

Schools contemplating a change in school start time may consider partnering with researchers before a decision is even made. Baseline data on student sleep characteristics, tardiness due to sleepiness, and prevalence of falling asleep during class may be used in the initial decision of whether to delay school start times. Parents and administrators may not realize the extent of the problem of insufficient sleep among their students and this data may help persuade them that some action is necessary. If school start times are delayed, everyone would benefit from collection of detailed data before and after a time change. Not only would other schools or school districts contemplating a change benefit from expanded evidence, the district that undertook the start time change would be able to evaluate the impact of the change and communicate their findings to their stakeholders. Data collected should include not only sleep-related variables and academic achievement measures, but also measures of mental health (such as depression and anxiety symptoms), behavioral problems, risk behaviors, safety statistics such as motor vehicle crash rates and pedestrian injuries, and information on mode of transportation and travel time. Several obstacles to implementing start time delays are often cited, including costs of changing bus schedules, possible impact on athletics and extracurricular activities, and school faculty and staff resistant to change. However, as recently reported by Owens et al.90 in their examination of school districts that have delayed school start times, many anticipated problems fail to materialize or are only temporary. Several school districts have seen savings in transportation costs after changes made to facilitate delayed start times.90 Success stories describing how districts creatively overcame obstacles to school start time changes should be shared (for example http://www.startschoollater.net/success-stories.html) to provide ideas to other districts contemplating change.

Footnotes

Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Contributor Information

Anne G. Wheaton, Epidemiologist, Division of Population Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Hwy. NE, Mailstop F-78, Atlanta, GA 30341-3717, Phone: (770) 488-5362, Fax: (770) 488-5965, vog.cdc@9opi.

Daniel P. Chapman, Epidemiologist, Division of Population Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Hwy. NE, Mailstop F-78, Atlanta, GA 30341-3717, Phone: (770) 488-5463, vog.cdc@2cpd.

Janet B. Croft, Branch Chief, Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch, Division of Population Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4770 Buford Hwy. NE, Mailstop F-78, Atlanta, GA 30341-3717, Phone: (770) 488-2566, vog.cdc@0cbj.

REFERENCES

13. Hjorth MF, Chaput JP, Ritz C, et al. Fatness predicts decreased physical activity and increased sedentary time, but not vice versa: support from a longitudinal study in 8- to 11-year-old children. Int J Obes (Lond) 2013 [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

28. Kubiszewski V, Fontaine R, Potard C, Gimenes G. Bullying, sleep/wake patterns and subjective sleep disorders: Findings from a cross-sectional survey. Chronobiol Int. 2014 [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

47. Meltzer LJ, Shaheed K, Ambler D. Start later, sleep later: school start simes and adolescent sleep in homeschool versus public/private school students. Behav Sleep Med. 2014:1-15. [[ PMC free article] [ PubMed] Google Scholar]

79. Chen T, Wu Z, Shen Z, Zhang J, Shen X, Li S. Sleep duration in Chinese adolescents: biological, environmental, and behavioral predictors. Sleep Med. 2014 [[ PubMed] Google Scholar]

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School Start Times, Sleep, Behavioral, Health, and Academic Outcomes: a Review of the Literature

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Insufficient sleep in adolescents has been shown to be associated with a wide variety of adverse outcomes, from poor mental and physical health to behavioral problems and lower academic grades. However, most high school students do not get sufficient ...

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First Person

What do you find to be the biggest obstacle to effectively differentiating instruction?

Got your answer? Was it "time?"

If so, your reply mirrors the most common response I receive from the teachers I coach on differentiation.

Differentiating instruction, a process that involves recognizing individual students' varying learning needs and interests and actively planning lessons around them, is key to helping all students learn and grow. It's become an important part of personalized learning that many teachers are adapting in a variety of ways.

But it isn't always easy. When I began my journey to differentiate instruction for my own students, lack of time was my greatest obstacle, too. However, over time (pun intended) I came to realize that, more often than not, the issue is not a lack of time but rather how time is spent.

Time Is More Than Hours and Minutes

"The key is not spending time, but investing it," author Stephen R. Covey once said. A video on the concept of time by Entrepreneur Magazine echoes that sentiment. The video's narrator explains that the reason time-management strategies tend to fail is that they are designed to manage clock time, and humans live in real time. For example, one may have a planning period from 11 a.m. to 11:40 a.m. each day, but how many of those 40 minutes are actually spent planning?

Similarly, one may "teach" for 360 minutes each day, but how many of those minutes are spent using evidence from formative assessments (one of the key components of differentiation) to inform our next steps?

Is it possible that we teachers aren't using our time as efficiently as we could?

This rhetorical question is not a critique of teachers. Teaching is hard. It's almost impossible to be "on" every minute of every day. In my days as a classroom teacher, there were many times that I sat down behind my desk for a few minutes simply because I needed to sit down. (This almost always happened just as an administrator popped into my classroom, making me immediately feel guilty.)

However, when I talk about efficient use of time, I am referring to the chronic "time killers" that reduce our productivity, such as checking social media on smartphones, online shopping, and water-cooler chats with colleagues. For the average worker, these time killers cumulatively add up to one day of lost work each week.

To get a better handle on how we spend our time, we should track and analyze how every minute of a day is spent and then create a plan to work more productively. But that's only the beginning of differentiating instruction. To do so successfully requires additional steps, such as understanding what differentiation really entails and collaborating with colleagues.

The Link Between Differentiation and Teacher Collaboration

Much has been written about the need for educators to break out of their silos and collaborate with other teachers. A quick Google search for "teaching in silos" produces close to 500,000 hits, including many explanations for why working in silos is detrimental to educators.

Planning for instruction in isolation isn't helpful, because it's: 1) simply not efficient, and 2) less effective in producing positive student outcomes. Moreover, if a person is task-oriented as opposed to goal-oriented, he or she is statistically less likely to be successful, according to two Cornell University researchers. Therefore, when teachers sit down to differentiate, they are often frustrated by the feeling that differentiation is just "one more thing" they have to do.

Conversely, when teachers sit down in teams to identify student needs and create action plans to meet them, they find that their plans organically result in differentiated instruction. The process no longer feels like one more thing, but is the outcome of solid planning and aligns to almost all other education initiatives that work to ensure student success (such as standards-based grading or common assessments).

However, according to a recent study from the RAND Corporation, teachers still overwhelmingly say that they do not have enough time to collaborate with their colleagues. Only 31 percent of teachers surveyed reported that they have sufficient time to collaborate with other teachers, despite many having the opportunity to meet with their colleagues on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.

In order to ensure that team time is most productive, I recommend that teacher teams-comprised of grade-level or department colleagues-use a structure that guides their meetings and helps them stick to agenda items that are directly connected to student-driven differentiation (see the roadmap for student-driven differentiation I created as one example). A roadmap or other such framework can help teacher teams focus their time to identify desired learning outcomes, analyze student performance, construct plans to meet the needs of students at varying levels, and, most importantly, incorporate the input of teachers' other collaborators in learning: our students.

By using a structure to guide our team time, we can guarantee that our energy is spent effectively, and that we are doing all that we can to meet the needs of our students.

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Want to Differentiate Instruction? Use Your Time Wisely

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First Person What do you find to be the biggest obstacle to effectively differentiating instruction? Got your answer? Was it "time?" If so, your reply mirrors the most common response I receive from the teachers I coach on differentiation.

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Watch this space!!!

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A group of families in Wake County, N.C., have pushed for months to get the district to stop using a controversial new curriculum. Now the company behind the curriculum is suing one of the most vocal parents for defamation.

It's a surprising move that some say could have broad implications for parent advocacy around curriculum and instruction. A win by the company "would certainly cast a shadow on the idea that parents have a right to participate in their own children's education, to criticize schools for buying particular textbooks, to voice their concerns about instruction and curriculum," said Tom Loveless, an education researcher formerly at the Brookings Institution, who is not involved in the case.

The Mathematics Vision Project, a nonprofit provider of open source math curricula, filed a complaint this summer against Blain Dillard, a parent in the Wake County public school system. MVP has accused Dillard, an outspoken opponent of the math program, of libel, slander, and "tortious interference with business relations."

The company alleges that Dillard has launched "a crusade against MVP" through his online criticism of the curriculum and advocacy with school officials and employees.

In a written statement to Education Week, Jeffrey Hunt, Dillard's lawyer, wrote that the lawsuit "has no legal merit."

"It is alarming that a parent would be sued for defamation for expressing opinions and making truthful statements about his son's high school math curriculum," Hunt said. "The lawsuit appears to be an attempt to silence Mr. Dillard and other critics of MVP, and to chill their First Amendment rights to speak about MVP's services."

The district is entering its third year using the MVP curriculum, which received a favorable evaluation from the curriculum reviewer EdReports. The open source curriculum emphasizes problem-solving and collaboration-students learn by working through problems, and teachers are expected to act as facilitators.

For months now, parents have spoken out against lessons that they say are confusing and poorly structured, lodging complaints with the district and making statements at school board meetings. Parents said their children weren't getting enough direct instruction and were encouraged to rely on their classmates for help. As a result, they said, students who used to get As and Bs were now getting Cs and Ds, which would have long-lasting effects on their grade point averages and college prospects.

Barbara Kuehl, an author and consultant at MVP, said that the organization's materials encourage a variety of methods. "Our curriculum not only supports well-timed direct instruction, we advocate for it," she said. Kuehl declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing pending litigation.

Setting a Precedent?

Pushback from parents over a new curriculum, and particularly a discovery-based program, is nothing new, said Loveless.

"There have been all kinds of programs that have been oriented around that philosophy, and they have been quite controversial," Loveless said.

What is new? A curriculum provider suing parents over such complaints.

From a business perspective, it's "dicey" for providers to start suing parents, Loveless said. "They're salespeople. They want to sell their product, and they want to sell it to school districts. If you're suing parents, I don't see how that would be productive."

In a Facebook group that Dillard created for advocacy around MVP, parents in support of him have called the complaint a SLAPP lawsuit-a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

"Essentially, [a SLAPP suit] is just a meritless lawsuit that's brought to try to silence, intimidate, or harass a critic," said Evan Mascagni, the policy director of the Public Participation Project, an anti-SLAPP advocacy organization.

Mascagni noted that he couldn't speak to this specific complaint filed by MVP. In general though, businesses often bring these lawsuits to retaliate against negative online consumer reviews, he said.

Joseph Shapiro, the lawyer representing MVP, said he could not provide any additional information about pending litigation.

District Involvement

Sandy Joiner, another Wake County parent who has been active in the movement against MVP, thinks the district should be taking a stance in support of Dillard. "[School officials] should be very worried about a curriculum vendor that they chose, who's suing parents in their district," she said.

If MVP wins the suit, the implications for Wake County could be broad, said Loveless. "That district in particular would have to clarify to parents: What rights do they have that they can exercise in terms of freedom of dissent without being sued?"

Amid the controversy around the curriculum and the lawsuit, the district is still using MVP.

Tim Simmons, a spokesman for the Wake County schools, said the district was not aware ahead of time that MVP was filing the complaint against Dillard.

"We don't have any control over how that process turns out," he said. "What we do have control over is making sure that the students have the materials that they need and the teachers have the support they need for this particular curriculum."

In June, the district released an internal review of the curriculum -a response to formal complaints that parents had lodged with the school system. That review cited a small increase in state test scores for the 2017-18 school year, the first year that schools used the MVP curriculum.

The review committee, consisting of 12 district staff and seven community stakeholders, found that the implementation of the curriculum hadn't violated laws or district policies. The district's review suggested keeping the curriculum in place for the 2019-20 school year-but with a few changes. The district plans to provide additional supports for teachers and students and also will hire an external third party to conduct another review of the curriculum. In August, the school board voted to keep the curriculum in place.

"The court action doesn't change any of those decisions made in June," Simmons said.

Curriculum Complaints

In an interview with Education Week earlier this year, Dillard said that he got involved in advocacy around MVP after his son started to struggle in math class. (He declined this week to comment on the lawsuit specifically, referring Education Week to his lawyer.)

Dillard doesn't object to creative problem-solving, he said earlier this year, but he felt that students weren't getting enough instruction in the fundamentals to figure out how to solve the problems they were presented with in class. The curriculum "demonizes the practices of rote memorization and lecture," he said. Dillard also thought that the district had been too slow to respond to initial parent complaints.

In March, Dillard started writing a public blog, Wake MVP Parent, where he posted results from his public records requests to Wake County, his own analyses of district math achievement data, and results from informal polls he conducted with district staff.

In the complaint, MVP alleges comments Dillard made online and in person included false statements that harmed the nonprofit's business interests.

The complaint cites two instances in which Dillard said that data on math score improvements after use of MVP had been fabricated or falsified. Also implicated in the complaint are several of Dillard's blog posts, including his analysis of student achievement data and his results of informal teacher polling.

Joiner, the Wake County parent, was shocked when Dillard told her about the lawsuit.

"I didn't really believe it. I thought he was kidding," Joiner said. She recently started a GoFundMe and Facebook fundraiser for Dillard's legal expenses.

"A lot of parents are working in this group together," she said. "We're all speaking at board meetings, sending emails to Wake County staff, emails to MVP. We're all trying to advocate. It seems really odd that they would single him out."

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Parent Who Criticized His Son's Math Program Is Sued By Curriculum Company

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A group of families in Wake County, N.C., have pushed for months to get the district to stop using a controversial new curriculum. Now the company behind the curriculum is suing one of the most vocal parents for defamation. It's a surprising move that some say could have broad implications for parent advocacy around curriculum and instruction.

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"I Went From 3rd Grade Dropout To ULTRA SUCCESSFUL" | Rick Rigsby

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Sexting. Cyberbullying. Googling test answers. Taking a picture of a quiz and sending it to friends who have the same class later in the day. Paying more attention to Instagram notifications than biology class.

Smartphones have transformed the way we communicate, but there's no question they can be a major headache for teachers and administrators.

That's why a flurry of schools have recently put in place restrictions or bans on students' use of cellphones in school. The changes represent a pivot away from the more open student cellphone policies that districts instituted in previous years. But not everyone thinks the new restrictions are a step in the right direction.

The recent changes are fueled by frustrated educators, who worry that by allowing students to spend so much time on their devices, they are feeding an addiction and stunting students' development of face-to-face communication skills.

That was a big reason why the Forest Hills district, near Grand Rapids, Mich., decided at the start of this school year to ban cellphones throughout the school day, even during lunch.

"We really wanted to provide a clean break for students and not have the frenetic energy that can happen if kids start texting each other or social-media posts start going," said Dan Behm, the superintendent. The district piloted the ban last school year and found that students said they were less anxious when they weren't so attached to their devices, Behm added.

More than 30 schools, or in some cases, entire districts have enacted or stepped up some sort of cellphone restrictions beginning in either the 2018-19 school year or the start of this academic year, according to an Education Week analysis.

California recently passed legislation that allows school districts to restrict or prohibit device use in class, although it's not a requirement. And at least four other states debated putting significant limits on the devices.

Other countries have had more success enacting widespread bans. Ontario, a Canadian province, is restricting student cellphone use during instructional time. (The restrictions, which are scheduled to go into effect later this year, include an exception for classroom activities and health and other emergencies.) And in 2018, France passed a law outlawing the use of cellphones in schools for students up to age 15.

But banning cellphones can come with its own vexations. Enforcement can be difficult, and districts are wary of taking on liability for holding a student's confiscated phone. Many teachers like using some cellphone-based applications in class, such as online microscopes and polling applications.

What's more, some experts say it's better to keep cellphones in school and help train students how to use them responsibly, rather than just banning their use.

Plenty of educators agree.

Brian Toth, the superintendent of Saint Mary's Area school district in northwestern Pennsylvania, said he'd never consider nixing student cellphone use in school-even though some of his teachers have asked him to do so.

Toth said the devices can be a great teaching tool. Educators in his district check for student understanding using cellphone applications like Kahoot, or they send their students on scavenger hunts that also rely on cellphone technology. And the district's instructional-technology coach focuses on teaching students to use their devices responsibly.

"Anybody who wants to ban it is just hiding from reality," Toth said. "It's just common, everyday practice these days that you have a cellphone."

Parents' Big Concerns

Restricting cellphone use is a lot easier said than done. There are big concerns, for instance, about school safety. How could parents get in touch with their children during a school shooting or a dangerous weather event?

One school in Wisconsin had a low-tech solution: Families could call the front office, just like they did before cellphones were so ubiquitous, said Jo-Ellen Fairbanks, the assistant principal of Portage High School, which requires students to keep their cellphones in their lockers during the school day.

And during an emergency, students are best off making sure they concentrate on following through with a safety plan, not staring at their cellphone screens, said Adam Gelb, the assistant principal of San Mateo High School near San Francisco, which recently required students to keep their cellphones in a pouch that renders them inoperable during the school day.

"Nowhere in any [safety protocol] does it say get on your cellphone and notify a family member," he said.

But some parents want to be able to reach their children at any time-even if it means texting them in class, educators say.

Reaction from families to a recent ban on cellphones in the Warwick district near Providence, R.I., has been mixed. Some are supportive. Others "have said, 'You can tell us what to do when you pay our phone bill,' " said Karen Bachus, the chairwoman of the school board.

What's more, enforcing a ban can bring with it its own set of administrative hasssles. The nation's largest school district, New York City, dropped its cellphone ban in 2015, in part because it was being enforced more harshly in lower-income schools than more advantaged ones.

The Marshall school district, in the southwestern corner of Minnesota, also dropped its cellphone ban several years ago.

What the policy largely prompted was kids texting under their desks or hiding their phones under big sweatshirts, said Principal Brian Jones.

A total ban "sounds great, I just don't think it's realistic. I don't like to have unenforceable policies," Jones said.

What's more, he added, "for some students, the anxiety of not having that device with them caused more harm than good. It reminded me of the cartoon [Peanuts and] Charlie Brown and Linus with his blanket."

Now, the district allows students to use their phones after school, during lunch, and at some times during the school day, if it is for educational purposes. "They've got to learn how to self-regulate once they leave us," Jones said.

'Have a Plan, Not a Ban'

That philosophy jibes with recommendations from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that focuses on children, technology, and media.

In an April survey, Common Sense found that 80 percent of schools implement some kind of cellphone policy. About a quarter of teachers find cellphone policies difficult to follow, while roughly two-thirds find them easy to follow, according to the survey. High school teachers were more likely to report that implementing cellphone policies was difficult.

Educators should "have a plan, not a ban," said Elizabeth Kline, the organization's vice president for education. "There isn't a real reason to have a ban, but there is absolutely a big need to have clear guidelines and guidance for both students and parents around personal devices."

Cellphones can be an important teaching tool, Kline pointed out. Kids can create their own videos using cellphones, and teachers can integrate special apps for understanding concepts or investigating questions.

There's also a big equity issue, she said. Some students may not have laptops-or even internet connectivity-at home. So their cellphones may be the only way they can complete some technology-focused assignments.

Still, expectations need to be clear.

"If you're using the phone for learning, then the whole class has to agree that they are not going to be snapchatting in the middle of a lesson on velocity," Kline said.

And educators need to make sure they model those behaviors, which means not checking their own text messages during class, she said.

Extremes Miss the Point

Kline emphasized that by absolutely prohibiting cellphones, districts could miss out on an opportunity to teach their students how to use the devices responsibly and in moderation.

"There are moments at school or at home that should be device-free moments," Kline said. "Letting kids go wild with no norms or rules is not the right thing to do. Both extremes are missing the point."

The Novi district, in the Detroit suburbs, strives for that balance.

Cellphones must stay in lockers all day at the middle school and are not allowed in elementary schools. But at the high school level, students are allowed to have phones in class, under limited circumstances. The teacher sets a color-red, for no phones allowed; yellow, which signifies that phones can be out if the class isn't moving forward with new content; and green, which is typically used when the devices are part of a lesson.

To be sure, the district, like most in the country, still sees its share of problems stemming from cellphones, including a lunchroom of students texting each other instead of engaging in conversation. ("Like adults do in restaurants," said Steve Matthews, the superintendent.) But the distict also wants to instill social-media lessons, including showing students how to be careful about what they tweet out or share on social media.

"There are times it would be easier to just ban [phones] altogether, but we don't want to communicate to kids that school isn't relevant to their lives," Matthews said. "We're trying to help them use it in an appropriate and meaningful way."

Published in Print: September 11, 2019, as Schools Say No to Cellphones: Should They?

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Schools Say No to Cellphones in Class. But Is It a Smart Move?

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Sexting. Cyberbullying. Googling test answers. Taking a picture of a quiz and sending it to friends who have the same class later in the day. Paying more attention to Instagram notifications than biology class. Smartphones have transformed the way we communicate, but there's no question they can be a major headache for teachers and administrators.

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Materials for teaching Next Generation Science Standards draw early praise

When Susan McClarty's district made the switch to open educational resources, the 6th and 7th grade science teacher at Centennial Middle School in Broken Arrow, Okla., initially struggled to find quality materials aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. "We were kind of wading through water, trying to create something out of nothing," she said.

But last school year, her school participated in a field test for a new, open-source middle grades science curriculum: OpenSciEd. The units were easy to use and emphasized hands-on discovery, she said, and using them took the pressure off of teachers to shape a coherent curriculum.

McClarty is one of the many teachers who have found it difficult to find materials that answer the NGSS' call for science instruction based on questioning and discovery.

Now, OpenSciEd is slowly rolling out one of the first full, OER curricula that claims alignment to these standards. Three units are currently available to the public: 6th grade thermal energy, 7th grade metabolic reactions, and 8th grade sound waves. All three were rated high quality by the peer review panel at Achieve, a nonprofit organization that helped states write the NGSS.

OpenSciEd, backed by funders including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, plans to release the remaining units in groups of three every six months. The full sequence is projected to be out by winter 2022.

Twenty states and D.C. have adopted the NGSS since they were unveiled in 2013. The standards flip the traditional model of science on its head: Instead of memorizing facts, students ask questions about why the world around them works the way it does. Through this questioning, students discover the principles of science that explain these phenomena.

For example: the OpenSciEd unit on sound waves doesn't start by explaining what a sound wave is. Instead, it asks a question: Why do car windows vibrate when the stereo is turned up?

NGSS still requires teachers to cover content: physical science, life science, earth and space science, and engineering. But lessons are also supposed to draw connections between these subjects, exploring big ideas about the way science works. These "crosscutting concepts" include themes like cause and effect, systems, and patterns.

Students are also building the skills that scientists and engineers rely on, like planning and carrying out investigations and analyzing and interpreting data. These three dimensions-disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices-are supposed to be integrated across the curriculum.

"Students are engaged in the practices as they learn the disciplinary core ideas-and they use those crosscutting concepts as a lens to really understand what is happening with that phenomena, or what is happening with that design problem they're trying to address," said Matt Krehbiel, Achieve's science director. The requirement that these three dimensions work together is partly why materials have been so hard to develop.

A consortium of creators, led by the nonprofit curriculum developer BSCS Science Learning Team and the Next Generation Science Storylines Project out of Northwestern University, started work building OpenSciEd materials in 2017. As part of the development process, OpenSciEd ran field tests with teachers in 10 states during the 2018-19 school year.

"There's a lot of companies that are putting a sticker on their old curriculum that [says] they meet the new standards," without actually changing any of the content or philosophy, said Kris Grymonpre, a 7th and 8th grade teacher at John W. McCormack Middle School in Boston who participated in the pilot.

OpenSciEd's lessons feel different, he said. "I don't ever tell kids the answer ... . It's all about, 'What do you think?' Let's get the students' ideas up on the board."

Focus on Inquiry

Each OpenSciEd unit begins with a phenomena that sparks student inquiry, and centers at least one of each of the crosscutting concepts and science and engineering practices. Life science, physical science, and earth and space science topics are distributed throughout each of the grade levels. The curriculum is sequenced so that content knowledge builds and links back to previous topics, creating a "connecting tissue" across units and years, said James Ryan, OpenSciEd's executive director.

The initiative currently has funding to complete the 6th-8th grade curricula, said Ryan, and eventually hopes to design a full K-12 offering.

Achieve's peer review panel rated all three units available now as high quality, an "incredibly high bar" to clear, said Krehbiel. Of the more than 250 units from a variety of OER publishers that the group has reviewed, only 14-including the three OpenSciEd units-have received this designation.

Designing a curriculum centered on inquiry that addresses all three NGSS dimensions fully is quite a challenge. EdReports, a national nonprofit curriculum reviewer, has evaluated six full sets of commercial science materials. Only one has met their requirements. (The organization only evaluates full curricula, and hasn't reviewed OpenSciEd.)

The major problems? Often, curricula don't spell out how they're integrating or assessing the three dimensions, said said Sam Shaw, the director of science reviews at EdReports.

And while phenomena may be present, they're not always driving instruction.

"If [the phenomenon is] positioned solely for engagement at the beginning of the lesson, and kids move on to activities that aren't related to that phenomenon, they're never actually figuring it out or having the opportunity to utilize the three dimensions in context," he said.

Teachers who participated in the OpenSciEd field tests noted the materials' coherence. Grymonpre, the Boston teacher, was impressed by the throughline of science and engineering practices in the pilot unit on sound waves: Early in the unit, students make a model of how they think a speaker works. They continue to alter it as they learn, and end the unit with a working model. "That's exactly what the new standards want," he said.

'Paradigm Shift'

OpenSciEd also provided professional development during the pilot-a step that was critical to teachers being able to use the materials well, said Maria Citrin, a 7th grade teacher in Boston Public Schools.

"I don't know if kids are really going to get into this," Citrin remembered thinking on her first day of training in summer 2018. She wasn't sure that one phenomenon-how some cups are better than others at keeping hot drinks hot and cold drinks cold-could carry students' interest through an entire unit on thermal energy.

"The trainer kept saying, 'Trust the process, you'll see where this is going to go,' " Citrin said.

Field test teachers completed an initial four-day, in-person PD, with two-day follow-ups for each new unit. The sessions are meant not only to walk teachers through individual lessons, but to develop an understanding of science as a process of inquiry, said Katherine McNeill, a professor of science education at Boston College who led the design of the PD.

By the end of the training, Citrin said, she was excited about a question-driven classroom. Her students were invested, too, once they realized their curiosity could shape the day's lesson. "You cannot tell us the answer!" Citrin remembered them saying during one experiment in which the class investigated why food coloring moved at different speeds through liquids of different temperatures.

The teacher training instructions are also open-source, and will be released concurrently with units. Still, it takes time and planning to implement PD that expects so much change in teachers' practice, said Rebecca Morales, the science instructional specialist in the Broken Arrow district. When Morales introduced OpenSciEd tools to teachers in the district who weren't involved in the pilot, she started by just showing videos of instruction and having conversations. "This is such a paradigm shift that it takes eating very small bites of the elephant," she said.

And even with a free curriculum, there are still financial considerations for implementation, said Mary Starr, the executive director of the Michigan Math and Science Leadership Network, the OpenSciEd lead for the state. Michigan is using grant and leadership development funds to build up a group of professional learning experts who can train teachers on the curriculum. But Starr worries that nationally, schools and districts might not use the money saved on curriculum to invest in robust PD.

Paying to print workbooks and assemble materials kits for hands-on experiements also involves cost, she said. "There's some amount of shifting of labor [from] purchasing from a publisher, where you would be able to purchase a whole set ... and it would be delivered on your doorstep."

Published in Print: September 4, 2019, as Open-Source Science Curriculum Makes Debut

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Teachers Nationwide Now Have Access to Open-Source Science Curriculum

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When Susan McClarty's district made the switch to open educational resources, the 6th and 7th grade science teacher at Centennial Middle School in Broken Arrow, Okla., initially struggled to find quality materials aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. "We were kind of wading through water, trying to create something out of nothing," she said.

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How to avoid common Pitfall of Collaborative Working

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How to avoid common Pitfall of Collaborative Working

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John Spencer

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We've all been there before. You're working with a few other people and everything just seems to click. It might be on a ballfield or court. Or it might be in a jam session or a rehearsal for live theater. If you're lucky, it might be a collaborative team of teachers. You bounce ideas back and forth and offer honest feedback from a place of trust and mutual humility. The mood shifts from intense concentration to laughter to deep discussion and maybe even vulnerability.

In these moments, you realize that together you are creating something you could never create on your own.

However, we've all experienced the downside of small-group collaboration, where things move slowly with constant discord or flat disengagement. Deep down inside you wish you were working alone. In some cases, team dynamics can be downright toxic.

As teachers, we've seen both extremes as well. We've had students in small groups experiencing the collective sense of flow as they work together to accomplish a goal. You watch in amazement as they generate creative ideas, offer meaningful feedback, and create something together that they could never create on their own. In these moments, you realize that your students have moved beyond cooperation and into genuine collaboration.

But we've all had those moments when group work didn't work - when one student dominated or when members simply checked out or when collectively they simply didn't get started.

Creative collaboration is a critical component to project-based learning and design thinking. But it's not as simple as assigning members to teams and then walking away. Collaboration is hard work because it's deeply relational and all relationships have challenges. In other words, collaboration is hard because people are hard. However, as teachers, we can be proactive in the way we design creative collaboration to help mitigate some of the common pitfalls in student collaboration.

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The Four Biggest Pitfalls of Collaborative Grouping (And How to Avoid Them)

The following are some of the biggest pitfalls I've experienced in group collaboration. As an educator who has used project-based learning for over 15 years, I've made some big mistakes. I'd like to share the mistakes and some of the ways to avoid the mistakes through better design.

Pitfall #1: One Student Does All the Work

Remember those group projects in high school where you did all the work and other students still got all the credit? Researchers have a term for this. It's cognitive loafing, where team members assume someone else will take care of the work and thus they pull back and do nothing. Why bother working if you know you can get full credit without the work? But actually, it's a little more complicated. There are a lot of reasons why students might disengage from creative collaboration:

Fear and Insecurity: They feel that their skills are too low. Here, a member either doesn't want to be discovered or doesn't want to bring the whole group down. What looks like laziness is actually fear masquerading as indifference. The core issue here is often a lack of self-efficacy. Even if they want to do the project, these students believe they are incapable of completing the tasks successfully.

Difficulty: A group member might not have the skills to do a particular task and so it's easier to let someone else with expertise handle it. After all, if the group shares a grade, this non-participating member might not want to get in the way of the two students who are aiming for an A.

Confusion: A group member doesn't know what to do. There's a lack of clarity in terms of tasks and this lack of clarity pushes a student to disengage from the group.

Lack of motivation: They simply aren't interested in the project. This is the type of student who wouldn't be doing the group project even if it were an individual project. Perhaps it's boring or maybe they lack the creative endurance needed to go through the harder parts of the project.

No Buy-In: A group member who doesn't have a sense of ownership will have a hard time sticking with a project. It can feel like they're following other people's instructions and they have no sense of agency or autonomy. This issue will be addressed in Pitfall #2.

Solution: Build Interdependency into Your Projects

Often, the default in a project is for one member to work independently while other members are dependent on the single member, merely filling in the gaps when asked to help. The solution is to have students work interdependently. If independent learning is fully autonomous and dependent learning involves students simply depending on another person, interdependence is the overlap, where students have autonomy but they must have mutual dependence on one another.

When students work interdependently, each member is adding value to the group project. Each member has something of value to add to the group. So, what does this look like? One example is the following brainstorming strategy. Notice that students must listen to one another depend on each other for new ideas. Even the "low" student has something valuable to add to the group. This is a core idea of interdependence. Each member has something valuable to add.

Similarly, when doing research, every student can add additional information to the group's shared knowledge. They can read texts that are varying reading levels and interest levels and then share what they learn during an interdependent research debrief. However, as a teacher, you sometimes need to integrate differentiation into mixed-level groups. You might provide specific scaffolds for students, such as sentence stems or tutorials. You might even pull students aside for small group interventions or do quick direct instruction lessons for students who need extra support.

In some cases, you might assign roles that correspond to skill levels. When students move from inquiry to research, they often need to narrow down their questions to determine which ones will actually guide the research process. Here's what the process looks like. See if you can spot the interdependency and differentiation.

Students generate questions independently. They might need sample questions or sentence stems, but they can all create questions.

Once they have their questions, they can send them to a Google Document or submit them on a Google Form. Or if you want to go old school, students can have chart paper and smelly markers. Seriously, Mr. Sketch markers are the best. I don't care about being Google Certified or Apple Certified but if Mr. Sketch ever does a certification, I might just do it.

Students analyze the questions to see if they are actually research questions. Each member has a role:

Member #1: Is this question fact-based?

Member #2: Is this question on-topic?

Member #3: Is this question specific?

Member #4: Quality control

Members #1-3 can put a star by each question that fits their criteria. So, member #1 looks at each question and puts a star by questions that are fact-based. Meanwhile, member #4 is available to help and observe. Then member #4 double-checks all the questions with three stars and circles or highlights it if it's an actual research question.

Note that a struggling student might still be able to do the job of member #1 or 2 while a more advanced student can do #3. Meanwhile, the group member who typically dominates and achieves at a top level learns to trust other members and wait and observe. However, they can still provide expertise as the quality control person who has the final say.

When students work interdependently, they become more confident, which addresses fear and insecurity. When the tasks fit their ability, confusion and difficulty become less significant. It also helps promote buy-in, which can lead to more resiliency. However, even with interdependency, there is the risk of one student dominating the collaborative process.

Pitfall #2: One Student Dominates the Creative Process

This second pitfall similar to pitfall #1 but instead of one person doing all the work, this is where one person determines the entire creative vision for the group. In some cases, a single student is highly talented and it makes sense to the other members to let that person make key decisions. In other situations, a single member is more forceful or even manipulative and bulldozes other members.

In many groups, the student who dominates isn't even aware of the behavior. This student might feel that they are passionately defending an idea or engaging in meaningful dialogue. However, if other group members don't have a voice in the collaborative process, it becomes easier to disengage. It's not a lack of motivation or even self-efficacy. Instead, it's a sense of powerlessness. If your ideas aren't being honored, why bother trying to collaborate?

Solution: Incorporate Individual Voice into Collaboration

This solution is similar to the first point about interdependency. It's the idea that even within a collaborative project, students should have individual ownership of specific tasks. So, in the brainstorming structure, students have the opportunity to generate their own ideas first and share those with the group rather than working together on a group brainstorm where louder members might dominate.

Other times, it might involve breaking up specific tasks and allowing each member to work independently within the project. So, if students are prototyping on a STEM challenge, each member might work on specific components of the prototype and then meet up multiple times to seek out and offer feedback and ultimately create a cohesive single prototype. This process provides internal processing time for introverts who need that additional personal mental space.

It also helps to incorporate a shared leadership model. Here, you break a project up into multiple components and ensure that each student has an opportunity to own the leadership for a different component. For example, if it's a shared documentary, one person might take the lead on key editing decisions, while another owns the storyboarding leadership and another owns the visual storytelling elements.

Note that this varies by age. High school students are sometimes able to negotiate roles and clarify responsibilities in a self-directed way while early elementary students might need assigned roles with role sheets and modeling from the teacher. Although this can take time, it saves time in the long run as students eventually master the essential soft skill of shared ownership.

Pitfall #3: Groupthink

The first two pitfalls involved a single person dominating the process. By contrast, groupthink occurs when the entire group makes collectively bad decisions. Irving Janis first coined the term "groupthink" in 1972 to describe what happens when group cohesion gets in the way of necessary critical feedback. Janis analyzed the disaster of the Bay of Pigs operation and contrasted that to Kennedy's approach to the Cuban Missile Crisis, where members in his cabinet were encouraged to think divergently, question one another, and play devil's advocated. Note that Adam Grant has since critiqued this (there's a great section on this idea in ) suggesting that it's often overconfidence in leadership and a lack of intellectual humility rather than group cohesion that leads to groupthink.

We see this to a lesser degree in group projects. Here, team members get tunnel vision and fail to see the whole picture. Often, these teams get along really well and there's a collective overconfidence about how awesome their work is. They no longer engage in vital critical feedback and they fail to think divergently.

Solution: Use Intergroup Peer Feedback

It's easy in a classroom setting for groups to work in silos - figuratively, of course, because silos would make for really awkward classroom design. Collaborative teams can easily work through an entire project without ever intentionally working with any of the other groups. This is too bad because other group members might have fresh ideas, necessary perspectives, and critical feedback that could help a group take their projects to the next level.

An easy solution is to have students send one member to another group during a small part of the project. They might, for example, do some research for another group during the research phase. Or during the ideation phase, you might have do a gallery walk and have every group rotate around and offer ideas with sticky notes.

Other times, you might have every group member disperse and find a partner from another group. After partnering up, they go through the 20-minute peer feedback process:

When this is done, each group member goes back and debriefs the feedback with their original group. After each member shares in a round-robin, the group, as a whole, talks about trends they see and discusses possible critical feedback they might want to address.

Pitfall #4: An Inability to Resolve Conflict

Sometimes group members fight with one another and they simply can't resolve their conflict quickly. This is especially true in projects where there is already mutual buy-in and interdependence. Sometimes the conflict is personal. Personalities will clash. Students can get careless with their words. In these moments, you might need to step in and engage in conflict resolution. I've known teachers who have specific conflict resolution structures to guide them in the process. Others have used peer mediators.

Other times, the issue is less about personality and more about clashing creative visions. When I was a kid, I used to watch VH1 Behind the Music. Nearly every band broke up due to "creative differences." Part of this is ego, with member feeling that their ideas are better than others (addressed in the second pitfall) but sometimes there is a genuine difference in the creative direction of a project.

However, whether it's a personality issue (he's not doing his fair share of the work or she's dominating the conversations) or a creative difference, conflicts tend to fester due to a lack of trust. Conflict resolution requires hard conversations and often vulnerability. But that can't exist without trust.

Solution: Spend time building trust

Trust is vital for interdependent work, with member depending on other members to complete their tasks. It can feel risky and even vulnerable to let go of control. Trust is also vital in order to give and receive critical feedback. I recently created a sketch video showing the grid I developed to help students see the connection between trust and feedback:

In some cases, you might need to do team-building activities before you even start with a project. I'm not saying we go full-blown into trust falls or bust out the ice breakers (I'm an introvert, which means I'd rather let the ice melt slowly over days or weeks instead of shattering it all at once). However, spending a little time earlier on in team-building can help students develop long-term trust throughout the project. It also helps to establish group norms and expectations.

Trust takes time to develop, which is why, as an eighth-grade teacher, I often had teams work for an entire quarter on multiple projects before changing up the grouping. The same thing is true of the collaborative teams I have at the university level.

The Need for Structure

Notice that these solutions work in tandem to boost collaboration. Trust leads to interdependence but interdependence can help develop trust. The following sketch video explores key elements of successful creative collaboration:

They also often require structure. This was a hard lesson for me. In my goal of empowering students, I worried that using specific structures would make the projects less authentic. However, outside of school, we often use structures in our shared work. True, you might keep it informal, but you might use a Mastermind Structure for peer feedback. You might not state it outright but you use a round-robin structure when sharing your ideas with one another. Some structures can crush creativity and feel cumbersome. But others can boost creative collaboration and actually facilitate ownership and interdependency.

And yet, and even when we, as educators, plan things well, collaborative work will never be perfect. Students will argue with one another. They'll check out and wander around the classroom. Collaboration takes practice and that includes mistakes. But that's the beauty of it. Even when the pitfalls happen, they are opportunities for students to learn and grow and ultimately develop the vital soft skill of collaboration.

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The Four Biggest Pitfalls of Collaborative Grouping (And How to Avoid Them)

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We've all been there before. You're working with a few other people and everything just seems to click. It might be on a ballfield or court. Or it might be in a jam session or a rehearsal for live theater. If you're lucky, it might be a collaborative team of teachers.

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Skills to teach students in the first few days of School

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Skills to teach students in the first few days of School

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"Kids literally take their teachers assignment and Google it," November said. "They don't understand that Google doesn't speak English or any other language." He's tested his theory in classrooms, asking students to research the Iran Hostage Crisis. Students inevitably Googled the event and cited the first few pages that came up. But every resource was written from a U.S. perspective on an event that affected two very different countries.

"Your kids are not thorough," November said to the hundreds of educators gathered. "They don't see what they don't see, so it's really important that teachers challenge what's missing." Even more important is for students to learn the syntax of searching. To find sources from Iran students need to type "site:ir" in order to direct a search engine to explore that part of the internet. Even using that trick doesn't solve the problem because Iranians don't call that event "Iran Hostage Crisis," they call it " Conquest of the American Spy Den."

"It's my observation that we are not instilling a discipline and rigor of the grammar and syntax of the tool they are going to use more than anything else for homework," November said. And worse, when he asked kids about the kinds of assignments teachers give, students said 85 to 90 percent of the answers could be found with a quick internet search.

"I think we should give kids problems that you can't look up on the internet," November said. "Or, if you do, build the capacity to do it well." With the Iran Hostage Crises example, a teacher could require that students use sources from Iran, and could spend time brainstorming the right questions to ask a search engine to get the best information. These skills will help students throughout the rest of the school year and should be covered early.

"In the first 5 days I think we should front load really high level research skills," November said. That means teaching students to " power search" using Google operators, the words that define how Google searches. "A lot of kids have never used the advanced system of Google algorithms," November said. Without it, the internet is a vast space with little organization. November compared power searching to the Dewey Decimal System in a library - without it people are just wandering around a building hoping they find the right book.
MEANINGFUL CONTRIBUTIONS
Another important concept to impart within the first few days of school to students: you can make meaningful contributions to the world, no matter how old you are, November said. He described MathTrain, a website created by middle school math teacher Eric Marcos. Marcos asks his students to make math tutorials to help one another and posts them on the site. Some of the tutorials have been viewed over 50,000 times by people all over the world. When students learn their work can make an impact, they're not only more motivated, but they work harder.

"A global audience can be more motivating than a teacher in the classroom," November said. And kids love to connect with other kids, so why not give them that experience early in the school year and make it a regular occurrence. Most kids say they will ask a friend for help with something they don't understand before asking the teacher, November said. So why not let kids teach each other and help them see that what they are learning can help others.

"The best teachers were kids who had really struggled with the material and really understand what it's like to learn," November said. "Sometimes teachers suffer from knowing too much. The material they teach is easy to them and it can be hard to empathize with the stumbles of a new learner. Kids who have struggled with the material understand the pitfalls and can often explain them in ways other kids will understand.
ASK THEM ABOUT THEIR PASSIONS
The school year is often broken into so many units of study, standards to cover and snippets of time, that kids rarely get to work on one sustained project for very long. November is a big proponent of letting kids define and work on a project that has very few parameters and no rubric, and that will be presented at the end of the year.

"They resist because they have all this anxiety over the unknown," November said. "They are seeking safety in your rubric." But insisting students give it a try can yield strong projects, and more importantly it gives students the experience of defining the project and deciding when it's good enough. In a computer science class November taught, the most resistant student ended up building a massive database of resources for people with disabilities in her town. She couldn't finish it by the end of the year, so she came in during the summer to complete the work.

"That's the difference when students define their own problems with intrinsic motivation," November said. They care so much they're begging for the computer lab to stay open during the summer.
BUILD A LEARNING ECOLOGY
One great way to teach students how to learn is to show them how teachers learn and what their sources are. November favors Diigo, but there are lots of sites that help people organize what they've read online and share those resources. For teachers who are actively improving their knowledge of the subject matter they teach, why not share that digital library with students and show them what lifelong learning looks like?

"I think teachers should demonstrate how they learn in the first five days," November said. Typically we demonstrate what we already know and have learned. That has to change. We have to teach students to learn to learn."

A great way to do that is through social media, one of the best ways for teachers to connect professionally and find ideas to further their own craft. If Twitter is such an important tool for educators, why keep it from students who also want to know how to connect and build a network?

"We should teach them to follow the best minds in the world on whatever their passion is," November said. He remembers showing a boy interested in becoming an entrepreneur the Harvard Business Review's Twitter page. The magazine follows heavyweights in their fields, who are accessible to students in ways they never were before the internet, if student know how to look.

"Before the internet there were two important things to teach: content and skills, like writing," November said. "Now there's a third skill which is to build out your network to the world."

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Four Skills to Teach Students In the First Five Days of School | KQED

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Alan November explains how he would use the first five days of school to lay the groundwork for a year of learning that goes far beyond the test.

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Karen Maeyens (UFM)

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The value of asking questions | Karen Maeyens | TEDxUFM

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Most of my 9-week grading periods ended the same way: Me and one or two students, sitting in my quiet, empty classroom together, with me sitting at the computer, the students nearby in desks, methodically working through piles of make-up assignments. They would be focused, more focused than I'd seen them in months, and the speed with which they got through the piles was stunning.

As they finished each assignment I took it, checked it for accuracy, then entered their scores-taking 50 percent off for being late-into my grading program. With every entry, I'd watch as their class grade went up and up: from a 37 percent to a 41, then to 45, then to 51, and eventually to something in the 60s or even low 70s, a number that constituted passing, at which point the process would end and we'd part ways, full of resolve that next marking period would be different.

And the whole time I thought to myself, This is pointless. They aren't learning anything at all. But I wasn't sure what else to do.

For as long as teachers have assigned tasks in exchange for grades, late work has been a problem. What do we do when a student turns in work late? Do we give some kind of consequence or accept assignments at any time with no penalty? Do we set up some kind of system that keeps students motivated while still holding them accountable? Is there a way to manage all of this without driving ourselves crazy?

To find answers, I went to Twitter and asked teachers to share what works for them. What follows is a summary of their responses. I wish I could give individual credit to each person who offered ideas, but that would take way too long, and I really want you to get these suggestions now! If you've been unsatisfied with your own approach to late work, you should find some fresh ideas here.

First, a Few Questions About Your Grades

Before we get into the ways teachers manage late work, let's back up a bit and consider whether your overall program of assignments and grading is in a healthy place. Here are some questions to think about:

1. What do your grades represent? How much of your grades are truly based on academic growth, and how much are based mostly on compliance? If they lean more toward compliance, then what you're doing when you try to manage late work is basically a lot of administrative paper pushing, rather than teaching your content. Although it's important for kids to learn how to manage deadlines, do you really want an A in your course to primarily reflect the ability to follow instructions? If your grades are too compliance-based, consider how you might shift things so they more accurately represent learning. (For a deeper discussion of this issue, read How Accurate Are Your Grades?)

2. Are you grading too many things? If you spend a lot of time chasing down missing assignments in order to get more scores in your gradebook, it could be that you're grading too much. Some teachers only enter grades for major, summative tasks, like projects, major writing assignments, or exams. Everything else is considered formative and is either ungraded or given a very low point value for completion, not graded for accuracy; it's practice. For teachers who are used to collecting lots of grades over a marking period, this will be a big shift, and if you work in a school where you're expected to enter grades into your system frequently, that shift will be even more difficult. Convincing your students that ungraded practice is worthwhile because it will help their performance on the big things will be another hurdle. With all of that said, reducing the number of scored items will make your grades more meaningful and cut way down on the time you spend grading and managing late work.

3. What assumptions do you make when students don't turn in work? I'm embarrassed to admit that when I first started teaching, I assumed most students with missing work were just unmotivated. Although this might be true for a small portion of students, I no longer see this as the most likely reason. Students may have issues with executive function and could use some help developing systems for managing their time and responsibilities. They may struggle with anxiety. Or they may not have the resources-like time, space, and technology-to consistently complete work at home. More attention has been paid lately to the fact that homework is an equity issue, and our policies around homework should reflect an understanding that all students don't have access to the same resources once they leave school for the day. Punitive policies that are meant to "motivate" students don't take any of these other issues into consideration, so if your late work penalties don't seem to be working, it's likely that the root cause is something other than a lack of motivation.

4. What kind of grading system is realistic for you? Any system you put in place requires YOU to stay on top of grading. It would be much harder to assign penalties, send home reminders, or track lateness if you are behind on marking papers by a week, two weeks, even a month. So whatever you do, create a plan that you can actually keep up with.

Possible Solutions

1. Penalties

Many teachers give some sort of penalty to students for late work. The thinking behind this is that without some sort of negative consequence, too many students would wait until the end of the marking period to turn work in, or in some cases, not turn it in at all. When work is turned in weeks or even months late, it can lose its value as a learning opportunity because it is no longer aligned with what's happening in class. On top of that, teachers can end up with massive piles of assignments to grade in the last few days of a marking period. This not only places a heavy burden on teachers, it is far from an ideal condition for giving students the good quality feedback they should be getting on these assignments.

Several types of penalties are most common:

Point Deductions In many cases, teachers simply reduce the grade as a result of the lateness. Some teachers will take off a certain number of points per day until they reach a cutoff date after which the work will no longer be accepted. One teacher who responded said he takes off 10 percent for up to three days late, then 30 percent for work submitted up to a week late; he says most students turn their work in before the first three days are over. Others have a standard amount that comes off for any late work (like 10 percent), regardless of when it is turned in. This policy still rewards students for on-time work without completely de-motivating those who are late, builds in some accountability for lateness, and prevents the teacher from having to do a lot of mathematical juggling with a more complex system.

Parent Contact
Some teachers keep track of late work and contact parents if it is not turned in. This treats the late work as more of a conduct issue; the parent contact may be in addition to or instead of taking points away.

No Feedback, No Re-Dos
The real value of homework and other smaller assignments should be the opportunity for feedback: Students do an assignment, they get timely teacher feedback, and they use that feedback to improve. In many cases, teachers allow students to re-do and resubmit assignments based on that feedback. So a logical consequence of late work could be the loss of that opportunity: Several teachers mentioned that their policy is to accept late work for full credit, but only students who submit work on time will receive feedback or the chance to re-do it for a higher grade. Those who hand in late work must accept whatever score they get the first time around.

2. A Separate Work Habits Grade

In a lot of schools, especially those that use standards-based grading, a student's grade on an assignment is a pure representation of their academic mastery; it does not reflect compliance in any way. So in these classrooms, if a student turns in good work, it's going to get a good grade even if it's handed in a month late.

But students still need to learn how to manage their time. For that reason, many schools assign a separate grade for work habits. This might measure factors like adherence to deadlines, neatness, and following non-academic guidelines like font sizes or using the correct heading on a paper.

Although most teachers whose schools use this type of system will admit that students and parents don't take the work habits grade as seriously as the academic grade, they report being satisfied that student grades only reflect mastery of the content.

One school calls their work habits grade a "behavior" grade, and although it doesn't impact GPA, students who don't have a certain behavior grade can't make honor roll, despite their actual GPA.

Several teachers mentioned looking for patterns and using the separate grade as a basis for conferences with parents, counselors, or other stakeholders. For most students, there's probably a strong correlation between work habits and academic achievement, so separating the two could help students see that connection.

Some learning management systems will flag assignments as late without necessarily taking points off. Although this does not automatically translate to a work habits grade, it indicates the lateness to students and parents without misrepresenting the academic achievement.

3. Homework Passes

Because things happen in real life that can throw anyone off course every now and then, some teachers offer passes students can use to replace a missed assignment.

Most teachers only offer these passes to replace low-point assignments, not major ones, and they generally only offer 1 to 3 passes per marking period. Homework passes can usually only recover 5 to 10 percent of a student's overall course grade.

Other teachers have a policy of allowing students to drop one or two of their lowest scores in the gradebook. Again, this is typically done for smaller assignments and has the same net effect as a homework pass by allowing everyone to have a bad day or two.

One teacher gives "Next Class Passes" which allow students one extra day to turn in work. At the end of every marking period she gives extra credit points to students who still have unused passes. She says that since she started doing this, she has had the lowest rate ever of late work.

4. Extension Requests

Quite a few teachers require students to submit a written request for a deadline extension rather than taking points off. With a system like this, every student turns something in on the due date, whether it's the assignment itself or an extension request.

Most extension requests ask students to explain why they were unable to complete the assignment on time. This not only gives the students a chance to reflect on their habits, it also invites the teacher to help students solve larger problems that might be getting in the way of their academic success.

Having students submit their requests via Google Forms reduces the need for paper and routes all requests to a single spreadsheet, which makes it easier for teachers to keep track of work that is late or needs to be regraded.

Other teachers use a similar system for times when students want to resubmit work for a new grade.

5. Floating Deadlines

Rather than choosing a single deadline for an assignment, some teachers assign a range of dates for students to submit work. This flexibility allows students to plan their work around other life activities and responsibilities.

Some teachers offer an incentive to turn in work in the early part of the time frame, such as extra credit or faster feedback, and this helps to spread out the submissions more evenly.

Another variation on this approach is to assign a batch of work for a whole week and ask students to get it in by Friday. This way, students get to manage when they get it done.

Other names mentioned for this strategy were flexible deadlines, soft deadlines, and due windows.

6. Let Students Submit Work in Progress

Some digital platforms, like Google Classroom, allow students to "submit" assignments while they are still working on them. This allows teachers to see how far the student has gotten and address any problems that might be coming up. If your classroom is mostly paper-based, it's certainly possible to do this kind of thing with paper as well, letting students turn in partially completed work to demonstrate that an effort has been made and show you where they might be stuck.

7. Give Late Work Full Credit

Some teachers accept all late work with no penalty. Most of them agree that if the work is important, and if we want students to do it, we should let them hand it in whenever they get it done.

Some teachers fear this approach will cause more students to stop doing the work or delay submission until the end of a marking period, but teachers who like this approach say they were surprised by how little things changed when they stopped giving penalties: Most students continued to turn work in more or less on time, and the same ones who were late under the old system were still late under the new one. The big difference was that the teacher no longer had to spend time calculating deductions or determining whether students had valid excuses; the work was simply graded for mastery.

To give students an incentive to actually turn the work in before the marking period is over, some teachers will put a temporary zero in the gradebook as a placeholder until the assignment is turned in, at which point the zero is replaced with a grade.

Here's a twist on the "no penalty" option: Some teachers don't take points off for late work, but they limit the time frame when students can turn it in. Some will not accept late work after they have graded and returned an assignment; at that point it would be too easy for students to copy off of the returned papers. Others will only accept late work up until the assessment for the unit, because the work leading up to that is meant to prepare for that assessment.

8. Other Preventative Measures

These strategies aren't necessarily a way to manage late work as much as they are meant to prevent it in the first place.

Include students in setting deadlines. When it comes to major assignments, have students help you determine due dates. They may have a better idea than you do about other big events that are happening and assignments that have been given in other classes.

Stop assigning homework. Some teachers have stopped assigning homework entirely, recognizing that disparities at home make it an unfair measurement of academic mastery. Instead, all meaningful work is done in class, where the teacher can monitor progress and give feedback as needed. Long-term projects are done in class as well, so the teacher is aware of which students need more time and why.

Make homework optional or self-selected. Not all students need the same amount of practice. You may be able to get your students to assess their own need for additional practice and assign that practice to themselves. Although this may sound far-fetched, in some classes, like this self-paced classroom, it actually works, because students know they will be graded on a final assessment, they get good at determining when they need extra practice.

With so many different approaches to late work, what's clear is that there are a lot of different schools of thought on grading and assessment, so it's not a surprise that we don't always land on the best solution on the first try. Experiment with different systems, talk to your colleagues, and be willing to try something new until you find something that works for you.

Further Reading

20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half
This free e-book is full of ideas that can help with grading in general.

On Your Mark: Challenging the Conventions of Grading and Reporting
Thomas R. Guskey
This book came highly recommended by a number of teachers.

Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School
Starr Sackstein

Come back for more.
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The problem of late work never seems to go away. Teachers use these eight smart solutions to manage it with their students.

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Early on in my project-based learning journey, I made a vow to go 100% project-based. My students would learn everything through exploration and discovery. I would remain the guide on the side observing the process and helping out only when necessary. After leading students through a highly-structured documentary project, I decided to pull back entirely. This would be more student-centered and authentic.

Then it tanked.

Not a week later or a month later. Two days into the project, I realized my mistake. My students didn't have enough background knowledge to navigate the complexity of the project. I had skipped the concept attainment lesson with the goal of learning through the project. However, my students didn't have a conceptual understanding of the topic. Still, I pushed forward, though the inquiry phase and into research, where I realized that most of my students were unable to do online research. At that moment, I took a timeout. I used direct instruction to build some conceptual understanding of the topic. I then used direct instruction and guided practice to help students learn how to do research.

I learned something valuable through those mistakes. Authentic projects can coexist with direct instruction. If authenticity involves making the learning real and relevant to students, then there might be moments when direct instruction might be the authentic choice. Yes, we want the learning to be student-centered, but as teachers, we still have moments when we need to use direct instruction. True, it's important to be a guide on the side. However, you're still the expert and sometimes you need to teach students the concepts and skills they need in order to thrive in an authentic project.

Listen to the Podcast

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If you're new to PBL, here's a quick explanation of the model:

The Buck Institute for Education (PBL Works) identifies the following seven project design elements:

1. Challenging Problem or Question

2. Sustained Inquiry

3. Authenticity

4. Student Voice & Choice

5. Reflection

6. Critique & Revision

7. Public Product

Note that project-based learning can work in tandem with other pedagogical models, like inquiry-based learning, design thinking, and problem-based learning. But the key idea remains that students are learning through projects and as a result, they engage in deeper learning.

When you look at those seven design elements, they don't initially seem compatible with direct instruction. However, there are some key reasons to use direct instruction within your PBL units plans.

1. Direct instruction is necessary to build background knowledge and conceptual understanding.

I began this article with the story of a failed project. My biggest mistake was assuming that students had the background content knowledge they needed to engage in the sustained inquiry and research phases of their project. Although my goal was to honor student agency and choice, I failed to provide the opportunity for students to wrestle with the concepts. From an equity perspective, I need to give every student the opportunity to gain background knowledge.

This is a key reason we still need direct instruction within PBL. According to John Hattie's research, inquiry-based learning had only a .31 effect size on student learning. However, Hattie clarified that inquiry is still vital for learning. Inquiry-based and problem-based learning are ineffective in learning surface-level information. However, they are highly effective in learning deep information. Hattie argues that inquiry should occur after students have gained prior knowledge.

We can build this prior knowledge through direct instruction. It might involve an outline of core concepts or the front-loading of vocabulary. Often, it includes a concept attainment lesson. Note that concept attainment lessons don't have to be long, drawn-out lectures with slide after slide of text. Some of the best concept attainment lessons are actually discussions, guided experiments, simulations, or game-based learning activities.

By starting with an interactive approach to direct instruction, you can actually pique students' interest in the project while also helping them gain a deeper conceptual understanding of the topic.

2. Direct instruction can reduce cognitive load.

Greg Ashman wrote an interesting article about the downside of inquiry-based learning and student achievement. In his article, he makes the distinction between epistemology (what it means to know something) and pedagogy (what it means to teach something). Scientists can engage in open inquiry because they have a wealth of prior knowledge (addressed in the last point). However, students who lack that prior knowledge often struggle with cognitive load. This was a key issue raised over a decade ago by Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark, who linked a minimalist approach to PBL to cognitive overload. However, a year later, Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, and Chinn pointed out that the researchers had conflated unstructured discovery learning with project-based learning, problem-based learning, and inquiry-based learning.

The bottom line is that direct instruction can reduce the cognitive load for students. This might include an initial concept attainment lesson or a smaller direct instruction activity embedded within the project.

3. Direct instruction can help facilitate skill development.

Creative projects require students to master certain creative skills. This might involve research, problem-solving, brainstorming, or peer assessment. However, you might need to introduce these skills through direct instruction. I've heard teachers say "don't waste time showing kids how to make a video. Let them make a video." However, a video is challenging to make. Whether they learn it through a tutorial or a guided lesson, they need some direct instruction in order to master the skill. Similarly, a short direct instruction lesson can help students learn the best practices for making slideshows or podcasts.

When my students did Scratch video game projects, we used a Gradual Release of Responsibility approach starting with direct instruction, guided practice, a mash-up game (where they combined two games) and finally their longer video game they created from scratch. Similarly, when my current students learn to write lesson plans, craft assessments, or design their Professional Educator Blogs, I use direct instruction to help facilitate skill development.

Initially, I viewed this as less authentic than "real PBL." But then I realized that in nearly every creative skill I learned, I sought out experts who guided me through direct instruction. I watched videos on YouTube to learn about techniques.

4. Direct instruction can help facilitate guided inquiry.

The Buck Institute includes "sustained inquiry" as an element of project-based learning. However, inquiry doesn't necessarily mean students are on their own asking whatever question they're curious about and finding the answers. Heather Banchi and Randy Bell conceptualize inquiry on a continuum from a more guided to open approach. Note that their approach focuses on science but the process can be generalized to other content areas:

Level 1: Confirmation Inquiry
The teacher has taught a particular science theme or topic. The teacher then develops questions and a procedure that guides students through an activity where the results are already known. This method is great to reinforce concepts taught and to introduce students into learning to follow procedures, collect and record data correctly and to confirm and deepen understandings.

Level 2: Structured Inquiry
The teacher provides the initial question and an outline of the procedure. Students are to formulate explanations of their findings through evaluating and analyzing the data that they collect.

Level 3: Guided Inquiry
The teacher provides only the research question for the students. The students are responsible for designing and following their own procedures to test that question and then communicate their results and findings.

Level 4: Open/True Inquiry
Students formulate their own research question(s), design and follow through with a developed procedure, and communicate their findings and results. This type of inquiry is often seen in science fair contexts where students drive their own investigative questions.

I explore these ideas in this short video (warning: there is a Harry Potter reference)

Here's where direct instruction comes in. As teachers, we may need to engage students in a direct instruction activity to help facilitate structured inquiry and guided inquiry.

5. Direct instruction can work as an embedded intervention

When project-based learning runs smoothly, you will have students working independently. However, you might have students who need additional support. It might be an ELL student who needs a small vocabulary or grammar mini-lesson. Or it might be a student who is struggling with a particular skill set within the project. In these moments, you can do small group direct instruction as a support for students.

6. Direct instruction can reduce project fatigue.

This sounds odd but even in a highly engaging project, students often need a break from the routine that sets in within a project. When engaging in creative work, it's common to experience project fatigue. Even if they love the project, students will often get tired of doing research, working on prototyping, or revising their work. A highly engaging period of direct instruction can create a sense of mental space while also building background knowledge or helping with skill development.

So, what does this actually look like within a larger project? Consider the phases of the LAUNCH Process. This is a design thinking framework you can use to structure the phases of a PBL unit:
L: Look, Listen, and Learn
In this first phase, students look, listen, and learn. The goal here is awareness. It might be a sense of wonder at a process or an awareness of a problem or a sense of empathy toward an audience. You might use a concept attainment lesson at the start of a project However, you might also pull aside a small group and do a direct instruction mini-lesson to clarify misunderstandings.

A: Ask Tons of Questions
Sparked by curiosity, students move to the second phase, where they ask tons of questions. You might do guided inquiry here and use direct instruction in a way to facilitate the inquiry process. But you might also pull aside a small group and do a skill-based inquiry lesson with sentence stems to guide students who are struggling with the question process.

U: Understanding the Process or Problem
This leads to understanding the process or problem through an authentic research experience. They might conduct interviews or needs assessments, research articles, watch videos, or analyze data. In this research phase, you might do some direct instruction on a part of the research process. For example, we also used the five c's of critical research:

Initially, I might need to do some direct instruction and have students practice the research process. However, I might also need to pull aside a small group and do direct instruction as a small group intervention.

N: Navigate Ideas
Students apply their newly acquired knowledge to potential solutions. In this phase, they navigate ideas. Here they not only brainstorm, but they also analyze ideas, combine ideas, and generate a concept for what they will create.

In this area, you likely won't need to embed direct instruction into the project. However, you might need to do some direct instruction to help students understand the brainstorming process. If it's a longer unit, you might do some direct instruction on how to do project management.

C: Create a Prototype
In this next phase, they create a prototype. It might be a digital work or a tangible product, a work of art or something they engineer. It might even be an action or an event or a system. Typically, you'll have students working independently in this phase. However, they might need to learn a particular prototyping skill. If it's a documentary, you might need to do optional mini-lessons showing how to film videos and operate a camera or how to use a program like iMovie or Final Cut for editing. If it's an engineering project, you might need to show students how to use a 3D printer or how to navigate 3D modeling programs.

H: Highlight and Fix
Next, they begin to highlight what's working and fix what's failing. The goal here is to view this revision process as an experiment full of iterations, where every mistake takes them closer to success. Here, you might need to do direct instruction as a review of skills for the previous prototyping skill. You might also need to clarify misconceptions through a small group direct instruction intervention. But this is also where you might take a break from your project and do a direct instruction lesson to help break up the monotony and reduce project fatigue.

Launch to an Audience
Then, when it's done, it's ready to launch. In the launch phase, they send it to an authentic audience. Here, direct instruction might involve a mini-lesson on marketing or a whole class discussion on what it means to launch.

I tend to brace against the idea of lecturing. It conjures up images of a crowded hall and a professor droning on and on while we sit in the audience feverishly taking notes. But lectures aren't inherently bad. After all, I love a good podcast or TED Talk. I regularly deliver keynotes for conferences, school districts, and universities. Great direct instruction is often an act of storytelling. It's exciting and fun. The following are a few ideas for how to keep direct instruction engaging for students:

Keep direct instruction interesting. Some of the best direct instruction involves storytelling. It's engaging and motivating. You might have visuals or videos you use to tap into student interests.

Make direct instruction interactive. You might use game-based learning or simulations to teach a concept. You might add pair-share and discussion activities to break up what would traditionally be a lecture. Or you might add a TPR (total physical response) to the front-loading of vocabulary. But the idea is to give students the opportunity to make sense out of the information and build on their prior knowledge.

Tie the direct instruction to the larger project. Help students to see that the direct instruction will help them understand the concepts or develop the skills they will need in their project.

Ultimately, there's a time and a place for direct instruction within PBL. A student-centered approach does not require us to ditch all things "teacher-directed." Sometimes, the most authentic, student-centered approach might just be a quality direct instruction mini-lesson. Direct instruction can feel less authentic. However, it might just be what students need in order to gain the skills and conceptual understanding needed to access a project - and if that's not authentic, I don't know what is.

Are you thinking about getting started with project-based learning? If so, you might want to check out the PBL toolkit. It includes resources, a free eBook, and a sample project.

If you're interested in learning more about PBL, fill out this form below and get the toolkit. You might also want to check out this PBL webinar or the PBL Master Course and use the coupon code Spencer to get 20% off.

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Direct Instruction Is Still Necessary in a PBL Classroom

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Early on in my project-based learning journey, I made a vow to go 100% project-based. My students would learn everything through exploration and discovery. I would remain the guide on the side observing the process and helping out only when necessary. After leading students through a highly-structured documentary project, I decided to pull back entirely.

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What the research tells us

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Education Week - Peter DeWitt's Finding Common Ground

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Today's guest blog is written by Thomas R. Guskey, senior research scholar at the University of Louisville.
In articles and presentations on student feedback, educators are admonished today to use No grades, comments only! Grades, they are told, make students complacent and unmotivated. Comments, however, are said to improve motivation and enhance achievement.

To support this contention, writers and consultants typically cite a study conducted by Ruth Butler from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1988. But it seems clear that few have read the original study and understand its focus or the nuances of its findings. Instead, they cite other authors' summaries and conclusions, without careful attention to these crucial details.

Butler's (1988) study actually focused on differences in the effects of ego-involving feedback versus task-involving feedback on students' interest and motivation. The investigation involved 132 5th and 6th grade students randomly assigned to one of three feedback conditions. The first group received "ego-involving numerical grades" ranging from 40 to 99 that were based on students' normative performance on academic tasks. So instead of being determined by what students learned, the grades were based on students' relative standing among classmates and designed "to follow a normal distribution" (p. 4).

The second group received "task-involving individual comments" related to students' performance on the learning task, and a third group received both. Results showed that students' interest and motivation were generally higher after "task-involving comments" than after "ego-involving grades" alone or grades with comments.

Results in this study were not entirely consistent, however, and revealed what researchers label an "interaction" effect. Specifically, the effects were true only for low-achieving students, that is, students ranked in the bottom 25 percent of their class and received low grades. High-achieving students ranked in the top 25 percent of their class who received relatively high grades maintained their high interest and motivation.

In other words, the influence of "ego-involving grades" on interest and motivation varied depending on the grade students received. The 5th and 6th grade students who got high grades continued to have high interest and motivation. Those who got low grades based on their relative standing among classmates experienced diminished interest and motivation. Whether this is true for younger elementary students, for older secondary students, or for the 50 percent of 5th and 6th grade students who ranked in the middle of their class was not considered in the study.

What does this tell us?
Given the context, these results make intuitive sense. "Ego-involving grades" are personal. They are about the student-in this case, about each student's ranking compared with classmates'-not about the learning task. "Task-involving comments," however, provide students with information about their performance on the learning task. They are "related specifically to the performance of the individual child" (p. 4) and offer direction for improvement.

In essence, Butler's (1988) investigation showed that the effects of feedback offered to low achieving 5th and 6th grade students depend more on its substance than on its form or structure. If the study had considered criterion-referenced, "task-involving grades" based on learning goals, or "ego-involving comments" such as "You need to work harder," or "This is one of the poorest papers in the class," the effects on the interest and motivation of these low-achieving students might have been quite different. The critical implication of the study is this: Before making sweeping recommendations like No grades; comments only! we must always consider both the nature of the grades and the nature of the comments.

Grades
Although grades certainly have their limitations, they are not inherently good or bad. Grades are simply labels identifying different levels or categories of student performance. When based on clearly articulated learning criteria, grades can provide valuable feedback by describing in shorthand, abbreviated fashion how well students performed.

To serve this important feedback purpose, however, we must ensure that students and their parents understand that grades do not reflect who you are as a learner, but where you are in your learning journey-and where is always temporary. In Butler's terms, grades must be task-involving rather than ego-involving. Knowing where you are is essential to improvement. Informed judgments from teachers about the quality of students' performance can also help students become more thoughtful judges of their own work.

But alone, even accurate, task-involving grades don't lead to improved student learning. Students get no direction for improvement from a letter, number, word, phrase, or symbol attached to evidence of their learning. Only when grades are paired with individualized comments that offer guidance and direction for improvement do they enhance achievement and foster learning progress.

According to early research by Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues (Bloom, Madaus, & Hastings, 1981), the most effective comments have four essential elements. First, they begin with the positive. Comments should first point out what students did well and recognize their accomplishments. Second, they identify the specific aspects of students' performance that need to be improved.

Students need to know precisely where to focus their improvement efforts. Third, they offer specific guidance and direction for making improvements. Along with knowing what to improve, students need help in discerning how. They need to know what steps to take in order to make their product, performance, or demonstration better and more in line with established learning criteria. Finally, comments should express confidence in the student's ability to learn excellently and achieve at the highest level. Students need to know their teachers believe in them, are on their side, see value in their work, and are confident they can achieve the specified learning goals.

Conclusion
Like many issues in education, the truth regarding these different forms of student feedback is not as clear-cut as some would have us believe. The research evidence on this issue is far more complicated and more highly nuanced than most writers and consultants acknowledge. By considering the complexities identified in this research, educators can develop feedback policies and practices that are more effective and much more likely to benefit students.
Connect with Thomas Guskey on Twitter. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock. References
Bloom, B. S., Madaus, G. F., & Hastings, J. T. (1981). Evaluation to improve learning. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Butler, R. (1988). Enhancing and undermining intrinsic motivation: The effects of task-involving and ego-involving evaluation on interest and performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58(1), 1-14.

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Grades Versus Comments: What Does the Research Really Tell Us?

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In articles and presentations on student feedback, educators are admonished today to use "No grades, comments only!" Unfortunately, they do not seem to know the whole story, nor do they seem to know what the research really says, guest blogger Thomas R. Guskey, a senior research scholar at the University of Louisville.

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Common Sense Media

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The patterns of daily life in the U.S. and around the world have been forever altered by the ubiquity of mobile technology. To truly understand the impact of technology on family relationships, we need to dig deeper into the media habits and attitudes of parents and teens worldwide.

The New Normal: Parents, Teens, Screens, and Sleep in the United States

The latest addition to the New Normal research series explores how smartphones and other mobile devices have changed families' morning and evening routines and in-person relationships. For the first time, parents and teens reveal their habits around screens and sleep, from where they keep phones at night to how often digital notifications wake them up (and why). Take a look at the infographic for a summary of how devices affect daily life for parents and teens today.

How to get involved:

Around the World:

International reports are part of a joint research initiative between Common Sense and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California to reveal new insights into families' digital media use across regions and cultures. The ongoing series also compares global findings to data from two similar studies conducted by Common Sense in 2016 in the United States, The Common Sense Census: Plugged-In Parents of Tweens and Teens and Technology Addiction: Concern, Controversy, and Finding Balance.
October 1, 2018
United Kingdom
The New Normal: Parents, Teens, and Mobile Devices in the United Kingdom surveyed 1,200 U.K. parents and teens about their mobile device use and digital media habits. In addition to mobile devices being a daily source of distraction -- and, at times, conflict -- the results show the variety of ways that digital devices can affect the parent-teen dynamic. Despite reporting concerns about feelings of addiction, parents and teens in the U.K. are optimistic about the benefits of smartphones and other mobile devices. This study also presents initial comparisons among populations in the U.K., the U.S., and Japan using data from previous reports in this series.
September 25, 2017
Japan
The New Normal: Parents, Teens, and Digital Devices in Japan surveyed 1,200 parents and teens in Japan and detailed the media habits and attitudes of Japanese parents and teens age 13 to 18. The results show how central a role smartphones and tablets play in Japanese families today and how their use affects the parent-teen dynamic. The report also compares U.S. and Japanese teens and parents to better understand the challenges facing families all over the globe.

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The New Normal: Parents, Teens, and Devices Around the World | Common Sense Media

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The patterns of daily life in the U.S. and around the world have been forever altered by the ubiquity of mobile technology. To truly understand the impact of technology on family relationships, we need to dig deeper into the media habits and attitudes of parents and teens worldwide.

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The benefits of portfolios to demonstrate learning

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The benefits of portfolios to demonstrate learning

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The irony of standardized testing is that it seeks to equalize assessment in a way to level the playing field for all students. Regardless of where students are in a state or the country, these exams, not made by classroom teachers, are supposed to show what students really know and can do against a decided upon value.

Of course, most educators understand that they do nothing of the sort.

Standardized tests actually privilege the few who may be good at test-taking or have the opportunity to work with tutors or worse. They are often misleading and biased in a number of different ways, including the social and cultural experiences they often reference.

Despite larger educational systems insisting that testing is the only way to show that students have met criteria for graduation, there are other ways that would better illustrate the depth and understanding of student learning that would also give students more agency and lessen anxiety and stress.

If we truly want to know what students know and can do, we should have a universal portfolio system that allows students to gather evidence of learning over time. This can be done on a national and state level, and educators at every level should be included in the process to develop the success criteria and skill set that should be demonstrated over time. Much the same way standards are developed on the state level and in the way that the Common Core has failed, if we gather the right stakeholders and make decisions together, all students will benefit.
Here's how portfolios benefit students and the learning process:

Once criteria have been determined, students could start collecting learning in their earliest educational experiences. Students can be issued an online account where work can be scanned in and collected each year. This information can be shared with parents, students, and future teachers to help inform instruction. Rather than random test scores that often don't highlight the depth of student learning, these online portfolios will be available to present classroom teachers and future ones right away.

Students can be taught to select work they are proud of and express why they have selected it. Schools and/or states can determine how many pieces should be selected each year, and students will have ownership over what they feel best displays the learning. Obviously, teachers will be supporting students throughout this process.

After students make their selections, they will write standards-based reflections that discuss what the piece demonstrates and what they learned throughout the process. For younger students, teachers can and should provide feedback as well against standards.

At the end of each school year, students should discuss goals set and met and new goals to be worked on in the following year. Students can learn this language young and will be able to see their progress in their body of work. In the goals, students should talk about the areas in which they see they have progressed and then make decisions about what they want to work on moving forward.

Each content area should have its own subfolder in the portfolio.

In addition to content-specific goals and learning related to academics, students should also be able to demonstrate interpersonal skills like communication and collaboration as well as self-regulation.

Rubrics can be developed that are input with the work to help assess current student levels. Additionally, shifting to a system like this will allow us to de-emphasize grades and focus more on learning.

Graduation criteria, as well as college- and/or career-readiness criteria, should be included. One thing my school used to do was have exit presentations in high school where students had to defend their learning and express why they felt they were ready for their next learning journey. We can implement these kinds of presentations at the end of each school year instead of testing. Students will get comfortable sharing what they have learned and also get comfortable asking questions to help clarify that learning. Students, teachers, and leaders would sit on the panels during these presentations.

Throughout the school year, rather than have parent/teacher conferences the traditional way, students will be taught to lead their own conferences, and parents will sit with children to review the portfolio work. Advisory teachers will be there to support. In the younger grades, students should be included in the conferences.

Since learning is so nuanced, so too should be the means in which we assess it. Let's offer students the opportunity to be seen as whole people who can demonstrate different skills and knowledge in a plethora of ways over a period of time.
Do you use portfolios already? How do they support learning in your spaces? If you don't, what is the biggest obstacle holding you back? Please share *picture made using pablo.com

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Instead of Standardized Testing, Consider Portfolio Assessment

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Since learning is so nuanced, so too should be the means in which we assess it. Let's offer students the opportunity to be seen as whole people who can demonstrate different skills and knowledge in a plethora of ways over a period of time.

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In his report, "Teacher Leadership and Deeper Learning for All Students," Berry profiles a public high school in Los Angeles serving a high-needs population. With very few resources, but a dedicated staff of teacher-leaders, Social Justice Humanitas Academy (SJHA), shows that deep, rigorous learning can take place in all communities and with all kinds of learners. The report quotes a student who noted a palpable difference between SJHA and middle school:

"At first when I came here I was a little thrown off by the amount of respect I received. . . . I wasn't just treated as a student, I was treated as a person. In middle school it was always like, 'You're the student, I'm the teacher. I have more power over you.' And here it's not like that. And I feel like that's what makes students grow. It's transformational. . . . you grow to respect other people."

Teachers at SJHA serve as advisers to the same group of high school students throughout their four years at the school. They also mentor several more students who have been identified as needing extra support. Classes are not taught in silos, but rather teachers collaborate on interdisciplinary approaches so students can see connections between things they learn. The high school offers fewer courses, but they are more aligned with one another, and staff have time to effectively collaborate. And learning at SJHA is personalized, not with adaptive software, but by checking in with students every five weeks, looking at a variety of data sources, and determining what supports each student will need to continue growing as a learner.

If all of these commitments sound like a lot, they are. Teachers at SJHA work very hard to meet their students' needs and are stretched thin, much like teachers in more traditional contexts. The difference is that those same teachers worked to develop the strategy to support students and are committed to its continued success. They chose their principal, who also teaches a few classes a week. They aren't using textbooks they hate or following curriculum because someone else told them to; they made those decisions together. And by having that agency and ability to be flexible and change the plan to meet different learners, teachers are also showing students what it means to lead.

The school has also achieved some amazing results by traditional measures. Their graduation rate is 94 percent and students go on to attend some of California's top universities. Discipline issues are nearly nonexistent, with a .2 percent suspension rate last year. And, perhaps most importantly, 93 percent of students say they feel safe at school, despite gang violence in the surrounding area.
HOW DO WE DEVELOP TEACHER-LEADERS?
There is a lot of great research on what works in educational practice. However, the U.S. school systems overall haven't been good at implementing those best practices because, in many cases, they try to layer on top of existing and failed systems. Authentic collaboration is rarely found in U.S. schools -- according to Berry, 50 percent of teachers say they've never even seen another colleague teach.

Consequently, some of the best available examples of how to improve teacher quality and promote teacher leadership lie in models offered by other high-performing places, like Finland and Singapore. While quite different from one another, they both give teachers much more time to collaborate and have systemized practices for teachers to observe, discuss and improve one another's teaching through activities like Lesson Study.

"Teachers, like every other human being, are products of their past," Berry said. No matter how good professional learning is, it's got to be really good when it comes to helping teachers make transformational changes to their practice, because before that they were students in a system that taught them very differently."

Overcoming a tendency to fall back on what's familiar in the classroom is particularly hard when there are so few U.S. examples of teacher-led deep, rich learning. Berry cites research showing that even in some of the most successful schools using these strategies, a deficit of inspirational models makes the work feel daunting.

To promote teacher leadership, Berry writes that seven qualities must be in place.

1. A vision and strategy for teacher leadership, "with stated goals and clear images of tasks to be done, must be in place," Berry writes. Teachers must feel part of creating this vision in order to buy in.

2. A supportive administration. "Principals must be willing to share power with teachers and must have the skills to cultivate them as leaders," Berry writes. He points out that most educational leadership programs focus on supervising teachers, not supporting them as leaders.

3. There need to be appropriate human and fiscal resources. Additionally, the personnel within schools need to think more flexibly about how to allot the dollars that do exist. SJHA receives $6,000 per pupil, but uses those resources differently from most public high schools. "Top-performing nations invest more of their education personnel funds in teachers (as opposed to administrators and supervisors), which means that more classroom experts can have opportunities to lead without leaving the classroom," Berry writes.

4. Work structures that enable authentic collaboration are crucial. While more resources help on this point, there are creative ways to stretch limited dollars.

5. Supportive social norms and working relationships are key to teacher leadership. This requires a commitment to all students and respect for different areas of expertise. "All too often, policymakers develop incentives to motivate teachers and administrators," Berry writes. "Instead, policies and programs should be in place to value teachers spreading their expertise to one another, allowing teaching to be exercised as a team sport."

6. Organizational politics must allow for blurred lines between roles. Teachers can only take on leadership roles at the expense of principals and district-level administrators. This also requires teacher unions to act more as "professional guilds" and for districts to follow the example of some for-profit businesses that are flattening bureaucracies.

7. The school and system must be oriented toward risk-taking and inquiry. Just as students need hands-on applied learning rooted in inquiry, so, too, do teachers need powerful driving questions to push their work forward. "School systems must be able to interrogate themselves about the extent to which they create opportunities for teachers to learn and lead in ways that spread teaching expertise and improve student outcomes," writes Berry.

"We're still climbing a very big hill and we're pushing a boulder up this very big hill," Berry said. His organization's strategy is to highlight exemplars of strong teacher leadership, like Social Justice Humanitas Academy, and the strong student outcomes that collaborative teacher-led schools can produce.

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7 Qualities That Promote Teacher Leadership in Schools | KQED

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Empowering teachers to lead and learn from other teacher-leaders can improve the learning experience for students.

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There's a $40,000 difference between what the average teacher in New York makes, and what the average teacher in Mississippi makes.

The National Education Association has released its annual analysis of teacher salaries. The national average public school teacher salary for 2017-18 was $60,477-a 1.6 percent increase from the previous year. NEA estimates that the national average salary for the 2018-19 school year is $61,730-a 2.1 increase from the prior school year.

But there's a wide discrepency between states. New York, California, and Massachusetts retained their spots at the top of the list, while Mississippi and West Virginia stayed at the bottom of the rankings. New Mexico rounded out the three states with the lowest teacher salaries-replacing Oklahoma, which saw an increase in average salaries because of teachers' nine-day walkout last spring.
See How the Strikes and Protests Affected Teacher Salaries
The NEA's annual report collects salary information from state departments of education. The 2018-19 numbers are all estimates, and are typically revised slightly the following year.

Here are the NEA's rankings for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, both for this school year and last school year:

These rankings do not account for regional cost-of-living differences. Last year, an analysis from NPR and EdBuild showed that the rankings changed when cost of living is taken into account -for instance, New York dropped to No. 17 on the list.
Image via Getty More on Teacher Pay:

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Which States Have the Highest and Lowest Teacher Salaries?

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There's a $40,000 difference between what the average teacher in New York makes, and what the average teacher in Mississippi makes. The National Education Association has released its annual analysis of teacher salaries. The national average public school teacher salary for 2017-18 was $60,477-a 1.6 percent increase from the previous year.

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Can we do both?

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First Person

Like many secondary English/language arts teachers, I strive for a balance of whole-class texts-including novels and other genres-and allowing students the choice of what to read. The interplay between these two kinds of reading experiences, I believe, propels my students forward.

The backdrop for my quest for balance is a fairly longstanding and fractious debate among English and literacy educators about whether choice reading or whole-class novels should be the dominant format for student reading in school.

Strict adherents to a "reading workshop" model believe it's counterproductive to force students to read an entire novel they didn't choose and that won't be at an appropriate reading level for every single person. On the other side of the spectrum, there are teachers who believe that they are best equipped to choose worthwhile literature for students to read, and to lead them through that process.

By now, though, a body of research shows a strong relationship between voluntary reading, at school or at home, and academic achievement. Voluntary reading is a strong predictor of reading achievement and correlates to increased brain and language development. A wealth of resources is available to support teachers of any grade level to facilitate choice reading in their classrooms.

At the same time, pedagogy around whole-class novels is evolving. My book, Whole Novels For the Whole Class: A Student Centered Approach, as well as 180 Days, by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle, and Kate Roberts' A Novel Approach, all provide detail on how whole-class novel studies can be reimagined: Let go of some of the control traditionally exercised by teachers, and select texts that connect meaningfully to students' lives, rather than sticking to classics.

In my classroom, the distinctions between whole-novel studies and choice-reading cycles have actually become less clear than they once were. I celebrate this, because I think it reflects that reading is happening in an organic, continuous way. This continuity of practice builds strong readers who internalize the habit of reading, carrying it well beyond 8th grade.

Building Reading Momentum

Carmen, for example, started 8th grade "behind grade level" and vocal about her lack of interest in reading.

In late September, we launched our first whole-novel study. The book was American Street, a poignant and gripping story of immigration, and we had the wonderful opportunity to meet author Ibi Zoboi after we read it. The story caught Carmen's interest. "This is actually good," she said with surprise.

Carmen read the book mostly in class-sometimes listening to the audio recording through an app on her phone and sometimes reading with a small group. (I offer audio support to all students during whole-novel studies, and we have audio-recordings for most book club and additional texts. Students read along as they listen.) She only completed some of the required sticky note annotations, but she finished reading in time to enter formal discussions with the rest of the class, and brought to that experience her authentic responses to the story.

Next we went right into a whole-novel study of The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Carmen and Abigail, her friend and classmate, discovered that they loved reading this book aloud to one another and writing their notes together after each vignette. The two made a good team and met their deadline. Like a lot of students, Carmen enjoyed Cisneros' poetic language and many of the vignettes, but she was frustrated with how much the book jumped around without a clear narrative. The whole-class discussions at the end of the reading were crucial in helping students construct an understanding of what the book as a whole conveyed.

Then we began a choice-reading cycle. For the next week, Carmen and Abigail could be found all over the school reading aloud back and forth in The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. Carmen connected strongly to this book. She loved the free verse poetic narrative, and this was her first time reading a protagonist who, like herself, is Dominican American. About 200 pages into the book, December break arrived. Carmen finished the last 100 or so pages on her own at home.

When we launched our third novel study after break, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Carmen surprised me. She started reading it by herself, and chose not to use the audiobook. Abigail joined a small reading group led by my co-teacher, and Carmen continued solo. She finished the book a week ahead of schedule. Her annotations revealed an authentic conversation with the book as she read, peppered with ideas on themes and conflicts, elements we had studied in class. I was impressed.

Carmen has developed a love of reading and stronger muscles to engage with texts, thanks to the chance to read books of her choosing by diverse authors, and the social experience of reading and discussing interesting novels with her peers. If she hadn't read and loved American Street with the class, and pushed herself to read House on Mango Street carefully with Abigail, I doubt she would have devoured The Poet X as avidly as she did. Reading The Poet X helped her develop confidence and drive to take on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian independently.

Three Practices to Promote Engagement and Equity

Aside from the rich variety of diverse, developmentally meaningful books I'm able to offer my students, these practices support my integration of whole-class novels and choice reading:

Make reading a continuous thread. I set a routine of daily reading, which is consistent regardless of the unit we are in-the structure can be used for whole novels, choice reading, and often both simultaneously.

I allot between 10 and 30 minutes for reading, generally at the start of class, and much of our other work is anchored in this core practice. My goal is that meaningful reading happens daily, and we never drop this thread.

Hold no one back. When the class studies a novel together, I create a pacing calendar. However, students don't need to stick to the schedule, and many comfortably finish reading more quickly. After that, I have additional books that connect to the class novel waiting for them. However, the choice of what to read next is really theirs.

Some students juggle two books-once they meet the daily page requirement for the study book, they transition to reading their choice book. The study book is in the priority position, and we focus as a community on the style and themes of that text, but a lot of choice reading is happening as well.

Offer choice in how students access the reading. Many readers use audio-recordings when the whole-class novel or other selection is beyond their independent comfort level. This allows a range of readers to come together around a powerful, relevant novel, and it also helps struggling readers gain valuable listening experience. Providing the choice to everyone sends a message that being read to is inherently valuable and minimizes stigma students might experience for needing help.

I imagine our reading as a maze of intersecting pathways; some we travel as a community, and others we forge as individuals and small groups. Choice reading and whole-novel studies feed one other in an additive process that keeps students engaged and moving forward.

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Whole-Class Novels vs. Choice Reading: Why Not Do Both?

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First Person Like many secondary English/language arts teachers, I strive for a balance of whole-class texts-including novels and other genres-and allowing students the choice of what to read. The interplay between these two kinds of reading experiences, I believe, propels my students forward.

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Artificial intelligence was a big theme at this year's ASU+GSV Summit, where many ed-tech companies touted AI's potential to transform schools and society.

At least some of them boasted that they're already using it-or that they're on the cusp of doing so.

While the ed-tech sector's interest in AI is no surprise, it's important to recognize that in the K-12 landscape, discussions of the fast-emerging technology are generally playing out on two very different tracks.

The first-and probably the one of great interest to businesses-is how AI might transform the work of schools in areas such as grading, administrative tasks, assessment, and even instruction.

The second track is focused on AI's role in K-12 classrooms: How should teachers talk about the technology with students? What should students know about AI-basically, the process of developing machines to function intelligently, like humans-in order to be ready to deal with it in the workforce and in their daily lives?

It's this second area that is the focus of Christina Gardner-McCune. She's the co-chair of AI4K12, an initiative that is developing guidelines for how artificial intelligence should be taught in schools.

Gardner-McCune, who is an assistant professor in the computer and information science and engineering department at the University of Florida, spoke on a panel at ASU+GSV about what an AI-focused curriculum in schools should look like. ASU+GSV, which was held last week in San Diego, has become a major gathering of education company officials, entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, and others.

AI4K12 is sponsored jointly by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit that seeks to build understanding of AI, and the Computer Science Teachers Association. AI4K12 has received financial support through a grant from the National Science Foundation.

For many students today, "AI is this black box, it's this mystery or superpower," said Gardner-McCune, in an interview at the conference.

"Our goal is to explain 'What is artificial intelligence?' How does it work, and what can I do with it?"

AI4K12 is crafting guidelines designed to work across different grade spans throughout K-12. The initiative says that the standards will be built around five big ideas that students should learn about in AI. Gardner-McCune described them this way:

Perception. How do computers see and make sense of the world outside? What happens when a device-such as a cell phone-uses facial recognition? Or when another tool uses object-recognition?

Representation and reasoning. How does AI "think?"How does it make sense of problems? Students should come away with an understanding of how AI creates representations of the world.

Learning. How do computers learn? They learn from receiving massive amounts of data, and so what they learn depends on what's in the data, and what decisions a designer or developer is actually asking the computer to make. This topic can lead to conversations around bias and ethics, says Gardner-McCune. How is data being collected, and should it be collected at all. Who does it benefit or disadvantage?

Natural interactions. How do humans design AI so they can interact with it? How can concepts that humans understand-about social distance and motion, for instance-be incorporated with AI tools and platforms?

Social impacts and ethics. This focuses on helping students understand the ethical and societal implications of AI, and the implications of how those systems are designed. It also looks at questions about how data is used and collected, the transparency of AI systems, and "how do we work with AI as an assistive technology?" said Gardner-McCune.

The process for developing AI standards - the authors say they are more accurately described as guidelines - is expected to last two years, she said. In October of last year, AI4K12 released a draft of its big ideas. The organization hopes to release a portion of its work supporting the big ideas for public review at the ISTE and CSTA conferences this summer. More work and public review will follow, with the goal of unveiling a full set of vetted guidelines by June of 2020.

Over roughly the past year, AI4K12 has sought input on the development of standards from a variety of sources in the K-12 community, industry, government, and other areas, Gardner-McCune said. The organization also formed a working group, made up of 16 K-12 teachers across four different grade spans (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12) and AI experts in industry and academia to help it develop the guidelines, Gardner-McCune explained.

In addition, the organization has sought input on the process and standards at AI and education conferences, and it has reached out to teachers about how to integrate AI topics across the K-12 curriculum, she said.

AI Literacy

One of the biggest questions about teaching AI in K-12 schools is where it would fit during the school day.

Gardner-McCune says that the AI4K12 wants to see the topic woven into lessons across different grade spans, in ways that are useful for students of different ages.

Many education companies want to pitch their products to school principals, in the hope that testing a product in a single school can open doors to a district-wide purchase. But this approach can anger central-office administrators, who want product decisions routed through them. How can companies navigate the principal-central office relationship? In our April 18 webinar, we'll take a look at how vendors can work with principals without burning bridges. Sign up for the webinar here.

In early grades, a big goal is to help students understand what AI is in relation to their own senses, and their own ways of making sense of problems. They can also grasp the forms of AI they're already connecting with, such as Apple's Siri, or Amazon's Alexa-and that they're programs, not actual people responding to them, suggested Gardner-McCune.

By late elementary and middle school, students can begin early experiments in building AI-like technology and applications that are of interest to them, she said.

"We're imagining it's going to be integrated across the curriculum," she said. "Once you get into high schools, we'd love for it to be integrated, but there's also the opportunity to have dedicated classes [focused on it], as well."

The rise of AI has stoked a lot of fear about whether the technology will end up displacing workers whose skills are made obsolete by machines.

The unease extends to K-12 schools, where some educators worry that AI could undermine traditional instruction, if schools were to seize on tech-based strategies for lessening their reliance on teachers.

Those questions aside, Gardner-McCune says the goal of schools and educators should be to create "AI-literate citizens," who can reason about how the technology should be used.

That means understanding AI is about more than just "machine learning," she said, and that it's not about the dystopian view of "killer robots."

The responsibility for designing AI systems that improve society, rather than doing it harm, falls on human designers of the technology, said Gardner-McCune. Creating good standards can ensure today's students are up to the task.

"When you create an AI artifact-even something as small as a chatbot...You realize there's a lot of choice people have in making those decisions," she said, "and you realize that computers are still kind of dumb.

"It's a risky thing to say. But they still take a lot of decisionmaking on the part of designers and developers to actually create the technology we're using."
This post has been updated. The backers of the AI4K12 effort describe its work as an effort to create "guidelines" for how to teach AI in schools, rather than academic standards. Photo of Christina Gartner-McCune at ASU+GSV, April 2019, by Sean Cavanagh.

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What Should K-12 Students Know About Artificial Intelligence? New Guidelines Are in the Works - Market Brief

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Artificial intelligence was a big theme at this year's ASU+GSV Summit, where many ed-tech companies touted AI's potential to transform schools and society. At least some of them boasted that they're already using it-or that they're on the cusp of doing so.

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House systems can benefit schools

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Principal Hayes believes these mentoring activities are to thank for helping reduce bullying and other behavioral problems. Since the house system was introduced at Lake Canyon, suspensions went from nine to zero, she said, and instances of students being sent to the office for discipline greatly decreased.

A sense of inclusion and engagement in a common enterprise can have academic benefits as well as social-emotional ones, according to Jennifer Kloczko, the principal of Stoneridge Elementary School in Roseville, California. Two teams of her teachers traveled to observe Lake Canyon's house system in action as they launched their own. "When kids are really excited about school," Kloczko said, "they are happier and they tend to learn more." It's a proposition supported by scholarly research tying a heightened sense of belonging to increased achievement.
HELPING KIDS TRANSITION
Another touted benefit of houses is easing transitions. Last year the incoming kindergarten students at Lake Canyon were welcomed by sixth-graders who had planned a new tradition. The big kids formed a cheering tunnel, placed a Hawaiian lei in one of the house colors around each little one's neck, and invited them to play. Jeff Gilbert, the principal of Hillsdale High School in the San Francisco Bay Area, credits his school's house system with helping ninth-graders acclimate to a student body of nearly 1,500 and what can be an overwhelming roster of classes and teachers.

Each Hillsdale ninth-grader spends five periods a day-math, English, social studies, science and advisory-with their 111 housemates. Four teachers coordinate with one another in mostly adjacent classrooms as they teach those subjects, and each takes responsibility for advising 28 of the house's students, whom they follow through the end of sophomore year.

"You talk about students all the time," Gilbert said. "You know every family, and you know every student. You stop dealing with them in these sort of large abstract cohorts." In addition to allowing for "much more individualized responses," he said, the house system helps replicate the coherence of the elementary experience. "Our honors students know our special ed students," he said. "It's not always perfect, but those cliques and those tensions have dramatically reduced."

Modern elementary and secondary house systems aren't just a California thing. The 735 kindergarten through fifth-grade students at Richard J. Lee Elementary School in the small Dallas suburb of Coppell, Texas, eat lunch with their houses. Ottway Elementary in Greenville, Tennessee, provides students with lanyards marked by the colors and names of the school's four houses, each named for a rare gemstone. And at Jackson Road Elementary School in Griffin, Georgia-where houses have not just missions, colors, chants and symbols but also hand signs and mottos-each classroom contains four colored containers. Students who earn a house point are given a bean to place in their house's container which, along with the others, gets periodically emptied into a larger one near the front office.
BENEFITS TO SCHOOLS
Educators at schools like these claim additional systemic advantages. Gilbert said he thinks Hillsdale's house system empowers teachers and in so doing gives the high school an edge in recruitment and retention. Kloczko said Stoneridge's houses help attract parents in Roseville's choice system: "It makes us special." And according to Hayes, the staff at Lake Canyon is more united "because now they have another small group ... they are collaborating with."

Of course, the specific successes of Lake Canyon might have something to do with the way the school rolled out the idea. In the spring of 2016, Hayes, Seamons and six others traveled to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, a nonprofit middle school created to serve as a model school for educator training programs. After observing a house system in action there, the group volunteered to form a committee, calling themselves "the Hags" for "House Advisory Group."

They introduced staff to the concept before school let out for summer and asked for help choosing the six character traits that would determine the house identities. "We really wanted a buy-in from the rest of the staff," Seamons said. "They were familiar with the Harry Potter books," Hayes added, "so it wasn't a completely foreign concept," but she made sure to hammer home the potential benefits. She was also careful not to demand too much extra work from teachers, setting aside about 25 minutes out of each 90-minute staff meeting for planning house meeting activities.

"There was no rhyme or reason" to the way Lake Canyon split students, teachers and staff up into six groups. They didn't even pay attention to gender, but Hayes said, "It all kind of worked out." (One thing the committee did massage: placement of children with special needs to ensure proper support.) Some people anticipated problems with students wanting to switch houses, but Hayes said that hasn't really happened. "With the older kids, maybe their best friend is in a different house, and that's an issue at lunch perhaps," Seamons said, "but not really."
TOOLS FOR IMPLEMENTATION
One focus the Hags maintained throughout was positivity. In order for the house system to function as an effective way to reinforce desired behavior, unlike at Hogwarts, teachers and staff at Lake Canyon only award points, never taking them away. Seamons said teachers also take steps to emphasize the "friendly" part of "friendly competition," because students need to be taught "how to compete successfully."

Dan Green helped launch a house system at California's Goleta Valley Junior High in 2003. In a paper on the topic, he wrote that some teachers worried competition might decrease collegiality and self-esteem. Administrators there responded by carefully calibrating the point system "to award participation, effort and growth just as much as achievement," Green reported.

Lake Canyon's experience would seem to provide a roadmap for successful implementation, but it might not be that simple. Hayes paid for things like the banners and T-shirts with a portion of federal funds the district won in 2012. At Stoneridge, Kloczko relied on the financial support of the school's Parent Teacher Club, as well as nine teachers who fundraised to attend the Ron Clark Academy. Gilbert said Hillsdale received a smaller learning community planning grant in the late 1990s and another grant in 2002.

Aside from some expense, "it requires a long-term commitment," Hayes said, as well as whole-school involvement.

There also doesn't yet seem to be reliable data on the efficacy of houses. Lake Canyon's suspensions decreased, yes, but causation is difficult to establish since the school launched a restorative justice discipline model around the same time.

Hayes was careful to add a final caveat: For a house system to succeed, there has to be something substantive behind it, an underlying ethos being reinforced. At Lake Canyon, that's a list of 33 "soft skills" such as "do not brag" and "be courteous."

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How Being Part of a 'House' Within a School Helps Students Gain A Sense of Belonging | KQED

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Principal Hayes believes these mentoring activities are to thank for helping reduce bullying and other behavioral problems. Since the house system was introduced at Lake Canyon, suspensions went from nine to zero, she said, and instances of students being sent to the office for discipline greatly decreased.

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4 things teachers shouldn't be asking their students to do

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4 things teachers shouldn't be asking their students to do

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First Person

Spiderman's Uncle Ben could have been speaking directly to teachers when he said, "With great power comes great responsibility."

As teachers, we can make kids do almost anything we want. They're smaller than us. We have all kinds of power over them, from getting them in trouble at home to taking away the things that make school tolerable, like going outside for recess or sitting with their friends in class. But just because we can make our students do what we want doesn't mean we should.

Children aren't just smaller versions of adults. They are their own kind of being. They need to move, talk, question, and explore more than we do, because they're in the midst of that mind-boggling explosion of cognitive, physical, and social-emotional growth that marks childhood in our species. When it comes to behaviors like staying quiet or sitting still, it doesn't make sense to hold young children to norms better suited to adults, because the way they experience the world is fundamentally different from the way grownups do.

In school, we often ask children to do things that are unreasonable given their developmental level. Worse still, we sometimes ask them to do things we would never expect of adults.

Take these four examples.

1. Silence

Many schools expect a monastic code of silence while students are traveling the halls. The rationale makes sense at first glance, and it's one I've explained to my class many times: "Other students are working right now, and we don't want to disturb them."

Still, if I were a kid, I'd wonder: "If that's true, why aren't teachers silent in the hall?"

Every time I run into a colleague in the hallway, we talk together while we walk to wherever we're going. We chat about anything and everything, from the chances we'll get a snow day tomorrow to the latest season of "True Detective." This kind of conversation doesn't seem to bother the kids working in classrooms off the hallway. Why would the voices of kids be any different?

Chatter in the hallways, or even the squeaking of wet shoes on the floor as a class returns from recess or P.E., doesn't seem to bother most students. In fact, the only occasions when I've seen kids completely distracted by what's happening out in the hall are those times when a teacher is reprimanding his or her class-often at a far greater volume than whatever commotion their students were causing to incur the reprimand.

We should take a close look at the times we expect kids to be silent in school. We need to distinguish between those times it's truly for the good of the students, and when it has more to do with the appetite for control so deeply inculcated in adults placed in charge of children.

2. Sitting Still for a Long Time

Teacher Alexis Wiggins shadowed high school students for two days, doing whatever the students did, and was shocked at what she experienced.
"I literally sat down the entire day, except for walking to and from classes. We forget as teachers, because we are on our feet a lot-circling around the room to check on student work, kneeling down to chat with a student ... we move a lot. But students move almost never. And never is exhausting."
For young kids, sitting still is even harder. There's a lot we can do to make it easier on them.

* Build in strategies like Total Physical Response for learning vocabulary, so students are moving while they learn.

* Take brain breaks-including dance parties. There are plenty of great videos on websites like GoNoodle, or you can make up motions to classic children's songs like Raffi's "Biscuits in the Oven" and "Tingalayo."

* Let students get up-without raising their hand for permission-whenever they need to get a book from the class library, grab a pencil, or just stretch their legs for a minute.

* Above all, keep the teacher talk time to a minimum. A useful guideline is that students should be able to listen attentively for their age in minutes-five minutes for a kindergartner, 15 for a sophomore in high school. Save most of your words for conversations with students one-on-one or in a small group. Children, like adults, learn the most when they're engaged in meaningful work-not sitting and listening while the teacher does all the talking and thinking.

3. Forced Apologies

I have definitely been guilty of this one. I'll break up a heated argument, then immediately demand that one or both kids apologize to one another, while their faces are still flushed with emotion from their recent conflict.

The early-childhood program my daughter attended never made the children tell each other, "I'm sorry," because an apology extracted by an authority figure isn't a true expression of remorse.

Forced apologies don't seem to offer much satisfaction to the child who receives them, either-seeing the other child mutter "sorry" while glowering at his shoes pretty much never makes the recipient of the apology feel better.

Turbulent emotions take a long time to settle. We need to give kids that time.

4. Zero Tolerance for Forgetfulness

My friend and 1st grade teacher Cameron McCain has a great line when teachers start grumbling about our students: "It's like we're dealing with a bunch of 7-year-olds around here!"

His point is well taken. I get frustrated when Josh, who has been in my class for 17 months now, still forgets to check out a book or do his lunch choice when he gets to school. But like most adults I know, I'm a lot like Josh. I once turned on the coffeemaker without putting the coffeepot in first. (I didn't realize what I'd done until hot, fragrant coffee started splattering onto my kitchen floor.)

I forget sometimes that not only are my students human, they're really young humans. When they lose their lunch tag for the third day in a row, or ask the exact same question two other kids asked 30 seconds ago, we need to take a deep breath and offer them a sizeable dollop of grace.

Kids Are Kids. That's Exactly Who They Should Be

We need to think hard about the demands we place on our students. Just because they obey the strictures we lay down doesn't mean those edicts are fair.

We can't expect the children in our care to behave like miniature adults. They need to move around more than we do. They need to make more noise than we do. They need to experience new concepts with their fingers, senses, and imaginative ability to consider not just the world as it is, but as it could be. Their curiosity, enthusiasm, and sense of wonder will never lend itself to straight lines and silent deskwork.

We spend so much time bending them to our way of doing things. We should pay more attention to theirs.

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4 Things Teachers Shouldn't Be Asking Their Students to Do

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First Person Spiderman's Uncle Ben could have been speaking directly to teachers when he said, "With great power comes great responsibility." As teachers, we can make kids do almost anything we want. They're smaller than us.

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There doesn't seem to be a consensus...

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Newsela | How young is too young for cellphones in school?

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Debate continues about the use of cellphones in elementary and middle schools.

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France is to ban cellphones in ES and MS

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Newsela | France to ban students from using their mobile phones on campus

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France's plan to ban students from using mobile phones is met with criticism

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The role of mindset in motivating students for math

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A challenging math problem can make some students break into a cold sweat and others excited to wrap their brains around a puzzle.

A wealth of research suggests that a student's academic "mindset"-whether she believes math skill is an inborn, fixed trait or that it can be grown through practice-can make the difference in how she engages with the subject. Now, a forthcoming study in the journal Trends in Neuroscience and Education gives some of the first biological evidence that presenting math in a way that encourages a growth mindset changes not just students' motivation to learn, but the the way their brains tackle problems.

Researchers from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom used an EEG, which measures electrical impulses, to track brain activity as college students worked through either standard math problems or those previously shown to encourage a student's growth mindset, such as approaches that:

Have multiple methods, pathways, and representations.

Give students opportunities to conduct their own inquiries.

Ask the problem before teaching the method to solve it.

Ask students to explain the math in a visual representation, such as a chart.

Use a task that can engage students of both higher and lower math ability.

Ask students to reason out and convince someone of their findings.

Unlike similar studies, researchers did not tell participants anything about the concepts of growth or fixed mindsets, but they did survey the students using mindset-related questions from the Program for International Student Assessment, such as "I am strongly motivated to solve the problem," "I intend to put in a good effort solving this problem," and "Doing well at this problem means a lot to me."

Students who were given standard math problems were more accurate than those who saw the adapted problems, but they showed less and less interest in continuing the test as they answered more questions. By contrast, the students answering the adapted math problems became slightly more motivated as they worked.

At the same time, researchers found stronger patterns of activity associated with motivation and engagement-shifting activity to the left side of the prefrontal cortex-in the brains of students who were working through the "growth" adapted math problems. In prior studies, this pattern of "motivation-related" brain activity tends to decline when students work through challenging problems, but it increased with the growth-adapted questions.

"By presenting mathematical problems formulated according to [math growth mindset] theory to learners, it is possible to increase learner motivation ... by engaging the brain's stimuli reward pathways," the researchers concluded. "This provides evidence that, by only making simple changes to how mathematical problems are presented, it is possible to increase the motivation of mathematical learners."

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Brain Science Backs Up Role of 'Mindset' in Motivating Students for Math

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A challenging math problem can make some students break into a cold sweat and others excited to wrap their brains around a puzzle. A wealth of research suggests that a student's academic "mindset"-whether she believes math skill is an inborn, fixed trait or that it can be grown through practice-can make the difference in how she engages with the subject.

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The key role teacher leaders play

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After decades of top-down school management, new models of collaborative teacher leadership have begun to emerge.
It is increasingly implausible that we could improve the performance of schools . . . without promoting leadership in teaching by teachers.
-Judith Warren Little (1988)
Just over 30 years ago, Judith Warren Little, one of our nation's most prominent scholars of the teaching profession, issued a clarion call for teachers to lead school reform. At the same time, though, she argued that it will not be possible for teachers to lead effectively unless and until we see significant changes in how power and authority are distributed within schools.

Today brings us promising signs that principals and teachers may finally be ready to step away from the long-standing hierarchical leadership structures that characterize public education. To be sure, teachers have always served as grade-level chairs or department heads, although "for teachers these assignments were not always viewed meaningfully in terms of leadership" (Little, personal communication, January 2019). However, the prospects for meaningful teacher leadership look far brighter now than ever before.

For example, in response to the demands of standards-based school reforms, growing numbers of teachers have taken on significant leadership roles related to curriculum implementation, professional development, and induction and mentoring. Further, countless teachers have stepped forward to organize and lead professional learning communities (PLCs) in their grades or subjects, sharing practices and using test score data to improve outcomes for their students (Berry, Byrd, & Wieder, 2013). Moreover, the majority of administrators have come to recognize that they can't provide all the leadership their schools need, and sizable numbers of teachers say they are willing and eager to contribute. According to a nationwide poll, 3 out of 4 principals believe their jobs have become "too complex," and 1 in 4 teachers are "very/extremely" interested in both teaching and leading in hybrid roles (MetLife, 2013).

The top-down, fix-the-teacher education reforms of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are losing favor.

I am no Pollyanna. I'm fully aware that, in early 2019, enormous obstacles continue to face the teaching profession in the United States - low salaries, high turnover, and too many underprepared recruits entering the classroom, to name just a few. Even the Wall Street Journal, rarely an advocate for educators' professional aspirations, recently noted that because of "small raises, budget frustration and opportunities elsewhere," teachers are leaving their jobs in "record numbers" (Hackman & Morath, 2018). Similarly, given the accountability measures still in place in many states and the strict lesson plans and pacing guides in place in many districts, I see few opportunities today for the emergence of what I call "teacherpreneurs," or teachers who seize the initiative to design their own curricula and lessons and create their own classroom tools and materials to better serve their students (Berry et al., 2016). I understand also that most educators remain isolated from one another. A recent RAND survey found that only 53% of the nation's teachers or agree that they have sufficient opportunities to collaborate with their colleagues, and only 38% agree they have sufficient time to do so - and even among teachers who strongly agree they have opportunities to collaborate with colleagues, 69% report they or (approximately once per month) observe a colleague's classroom (Johnston & Tsai, 2018).

Even so, I am optimistic. Consider four developments that bode well for teacher leadership in the years ahead: (1) evidence on the positive effects of teacher leadership continues to mount, (2) increasingly, local and state policies are codifying and recognizing teacher leadership, (3) teacher leaders are becoming more proficient at using educational technology and sharing their expertise through digital media, and (4) researchers are deepening their knowledge about how teachers learn to lead effectively.
New evidence on the effects of teacher leadership
Researchers, using a variety of methods, have found strong evidence of the positive effects of teacher leadership. Three sets of studies are particularly instructive, and as I will point out later, have begun to pave the way for educators to do a better job of cultivating teacher leadership.

First, Matthew Ronfeldt and colleagues (2015), drawing on several years of data from more than 10,000 teachers in Florida's Miami-Dade Public Schools, found that teachers improve their practice at greater rates when they work in schools with better quality collaboration. Joint work on student assessments was often significantly predictive of achievement gains across math and reading. Teacher collaboration matters for student learning, and it matters for how teachers learn to lead.

Second, John Papay and colleagues (2016) found higher student scores on reading and math tests when higher- and lower-performing teachers were "encouraged to scrutinize each other's evaluation results, observe each other teaching in the classroom, discuss strategies for improvement, and follow up with each other's commitments throughout the school year." And in a related study, Matthew Kraft and John Papay (2016) found that teachers working in schools with strong professional working environments were much more likely to improve over several years - 38% more than peers in schools with weak environments (see Figure 1).

New policies codifying teacher leadership
Over the last several years, many states and school districts have created policies that encourage teachers to lead from the classroom. For example, 17 states have adopted teacher leader standards, 22 states now offer a license or endorsement, and 24 provide formal supports and/or incentives for classroom practitioners who lead (Diffey & Aragon, 2018), and more than a dozen states now offer ways for teachers to demonstrate what they know and can do in efforts to lead their own professional learning. As a result, at least five approaches to developing and supporting teacher leadership have begun to emerge:

First is the creation of distinct new leadership roles and opportunities, including well-known career ladder programs in districts such as Baltimore, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C. In Washington, for example, teachers who have demonstrated teaching effectiveness have opportunities to be appointed by administrators to serve in various leadership roles (such as curriculum writer), mentor less experienced teachers, and earn additional bonuses for teaching in high-need schools. In the charter sector, Green Dot's Animo Data Fellows program trains teachers to be data experts at their schools; and in several Uncommon Schools, a few teachers carry a reduced teaching load, giving them time to observe and provide feedback to a group of their peers at least once a week (Teach Plus, 2015).

Second, state education agencies are creating programs to spur teacher leadership. For example, Tennessee has created new leadership opportunities for teachers as part of a larger set of teacher evaluation reforms that have shifted from just assessing teachers to growing their practice (Douglas, 2015). The number of teachers reporting that their teaching evaluations improved their teaching doubled between 2012 and 2017, and 59 districts are now experimenting with teacher leadership models designed to increase student achievement (Olsen, 2018).

Similarly, Iowa has piloted a formal teacher leader program, with an investment of over $300 per student (adding up to roughly $150 million) to launch the effort. Over the last several years, approximately 10,000 Iowa teachers have served in some formal leadership role, with a recent evaluation suggesting the effort has improved the "application of professional development to classroom practice" and "the degree to which teachers collaborate with and learn from one another" (American Institutes for Research, 2018). As one superintendent reported, these efforts have given classroom practitioners "the courage and opportunity" to lead, and administrators are now finding ways to "fund teacher leadership rather than another program or professional development provider" (Berry & Eubanks, forthcoming).

Third, the Teacher Powered School (TPS) movement, while still nascent, has grown to about 120 sites in 19 states where classroom practitioners, working in teams, have autonomy to design and run schools. Instead of drawing on a few teachers to lead in the current hierarchical structure, TPS seeks to transform the structure as teachers lead in ways that personalize learning for their students. The vast majority of the public (85%) and teachers (78%), according to a 2014 national poll, believe creating such schools is a good idea (Education Evolving, 2014).

Fourth, the National Education Association has launched a wide array of programs - including the Teacher Leadership Institute - to develop the leadership capacity of paraeducators, teachers, and instructional coaches in ways that dramatically benefit students, public schools, and the well being of communities. Granted, for decades the leadership of the nation's largest teachers union has called for professionalism (Chase, 1998). Perhaps now, though, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 decision - which ruled that unions can't compel nonmembers to pay dues - teacher associations will shift their organizing power from mostly "bread and butter issues" to helping its members improve their teaching, while still tending to social justice reform in public education (Anderson, 2018).

Finally, over the last several years there has been a dramatic rise in teacher networks such as those hosted by EdCamp, the National Blogging Collaborative, the National Geographic Society, the National Network of State Teachers of the Year, Teach Plus, Hope Street, TeachingPartners, and the Teachers Guild, as well as my own organization, the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ). In spite of the highly bureaucratic organizations in which most teachers work, these networks are beginning to break down long-standing barriers that have isolated individual practitioners. With colleagues at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we have estimated that about 1 in 3 teachers now participates in at least one teacher network (Wendy Sauer, personal communication, April 2017).
Teacher leaders using technology to redesign schools
Teachers everywhere are finding creative ways to use digital technology to redesign their schools in ways that emphasize 21st-century competencies, such as collaboration, problem solving, and self-directed learning. Over the last several years, for example, the Next Generation Learning Challenge has identified and provided support to dozens of such schools. Similarly, teachers all over the world are connecting their students online, trying out new virtual reality (VR) tools, and experimenting with other previously unimaginable forms of teaching and learning. And some of the same e-tools are being adapted to the world of teachers' professional development, too, helping them break out of the professional silos that have long characterized education.

For example, companies like LearnZillion (http://learnzillion. com) deliver blended professional development to educators, with a focus on teaching them to produce and use their own online curriculum resources. In 2014, roughly 9 in 10 teachers used the internet to find or share lesson plans (e.g., on Pinterest and YouTube, often featuring classroom videos they've created themselves, in order to share best practices; Scholastic, 2015), 2 in 3 went online to get professional advice, and 6 in 10 used the internet to collaborate with colleagues they wouldn't otherwise have met.

Further, 3 in 4 of today's teachers choose to seek out informal professional learning opportunities, which has given rise to a fast-growing microcredentialing movement, in which teachers are able to demonstrate and document new skills and competencies through digital badging (CTQ & Digital Promise, 2017). In other words, technology is allowing teachers to learn from and connect with each other in all sorts of new ways, helping them "strengthen their identities as agents of change" (Cheung et al., 2018).
New evidence on how teachers learn to lead

To develop teacher leaders, it's not enough just to appoint a few teachers to be instructional coaches.

To develop teacher leaders, then, it's not enough just to appoint a few teachers to be instructional coaches, who provide others with one-to-one support. Rather, this kind of learning is more of a "socially distributed phenomena" that develops over time, among members of a group. As teachers gain efficacy, they must have opportunities to reflect on what they master in the context of structured collaboration (Szczesiul & Huizenga, 2015).

Most current teacher leadership models rely on a traditional human capital approach, with a primary, if not sole, focus on cultivating the skills of the individual teacher. This strand of research offers new ways to inform how school districts also can develop social and professional capital by cultivating, identifying, and leveraging collective expertise (Berry, 2016).
Five key issues
The top-down, fix-the-teacher education reforms of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are losing favor (Hess & McShane, 2018), and some of the nation's most influential education philanthropies are calling for more "collaborative visioning" and tools and processes to assess "collective impact" in closing achievement and opportunity gaps in our nation's schools (e.g., Srinivasan & Archer, 2018). The embrace of improvement science, in which teachers and administrators work together to strengthen their school, is becoming more prevalent in both rhetoric and action (Sparks, 2018).

Next-generation reform needs to include efforts to document the contributions teacher leaders, and how t heir influence spreads in a system of continuous school improvement.

Yet, there remains much more work ahead. As Judith Warren Little pointed out 30 years ago, in a comment that is still germane today, "The prospects for teacher leadership [will] remain dim if no one can distinguish the gains made for students when teachers in large numbers devote their collective attention to curriculum and instruction" (Little, 1988). In the long run, she argued, the success of teacher leadership will depend on how schools address five related issues. I reuse her headings here (in italics), along with my own thoughts on the prospects for teacher leadership in 2019 and beyond:

Every day, teacher leaders make critical contributions to the success of their colleagues and students. However, their efforts are not widely known to policy makers and the public (or even, in many cases, their own administrators). Americans have high levels of trust and confidence in teaching professionals in general (see the 2018 PDK poll), but much needs to be done to help the public understand the value of teacher leaders in particular. Next-generation reform needs to include efforts to document the contributions teacher leaders make, what gives rise to it, and how their influence spreads in a system of continuous school improvement.

Teacher leadership ought to be understood as a way of helping one's colleagues improve, not as a means of fixing those who are underperforming. To that end, states and districts should invest in new tools for analyzing social networks to document the ways teachers influence their colleagues and to what end. Improving schools depends on understanding how teachers share their expertise with each other; who does so effectively; and, as Little puts it, how to make "more public the exemplars of rigorous, rewarding professional relationships."

Many school communities have created new labor- management agreements that ease up on old, highly restrictive rules governing how unions, districts, teachers, and administrators work together. For example, the NEA has (in non-bargaining states) negotiated agreements with districts to recognize and reward teachers who attain microcredentials, which may spur many teachers to take a more active role in seeking out and directing their own professional learning. Local NEA affiliates, such as in Jefferson County (Ky.) and Clark County (Nev.) have led their districts in using microcredentials, and new technological tools to support teacher-led learning and recognition for it. These school communities are setting the stage for unions and districts to work together in creating the variegated leadership roles and responsibilities needed for the profession's future, rather than the fixed career paths of the past.

School districts must rethink school schedules to create time for teachers to both teach and engage in collaborative efforts to improve instruction. Most districts do not have the resources to offer teachers several weeks of professional development (such as the Summit Public Schools, in California and Washington, have been able to do). But countless schools have found ways to rearrange their schedules and assignments to give teachers at least three to five hours a week to collaborate and lead in authentic ways. And new teaching evaluation processes can help create incentives to share teaching expertise, such as by recognizing teachers as accomplished only if they can demonstrate how they help their colleagues improve.

The policies that connect the leadership work of teachers and administrators.

I suspect that teacher leadership won't really take off until school leadership programs (in universities, districts, and nonprofits) begin to prepare teachers and principals Only by experiencing authentic collaboration with teachers can administrators become confident in teachers' capacity to lead and in their own ability to cultivate teachers' leadership skills. One hopeful sign is that a number of states, including South Carolina, Georgia, and Arkansas, have begun to experiment with CTQ in building ground-up models of collective leadership where teachers and administrators are cocreating strategies to address the problems of practice they identify. For them, school leadership is no longer just the province of the principal and a few teachers. As Allen Kirby, principal of Walker Gamble Elementary in Clarendon County (S.C.), told me recently, "All the knowledge that is needed to transform teaching and learning is already in the building." And Jessica Boyington, a teacher colleague of Allen's who crafted her own hybrid teaching role, responded, "And this is why everyone wants to teach for their entire life at this school."

I am optimistic that new organizational models, emerging in the private sector and fueled by the new economy, will challenge existing organizational life in our public schools. The complex work of school reform, now and in the future, needs to be driven by new approaches to governance, relying on informal networks rather than the assumption that a few individuals should "own, know, or control what everybody else does" (Heimans & Timms, 2014). Over the last 30 years, considerable progress has been made in elevating teacher leadership. New research and technologies are supporting teachers' capacity to lead and overcome long-standing school structures and cultures that impede their leadership work. Frustrated with decades of centralized reforms, teachers are beginning to take ownership of school improvement efforts grounded in the daily work of their classrooms. It's time for them - along with leaders of schools, districts, charter networks, and state education agencies - to take advantage of the opportunities that have emerged since 1988.
References
Hackman, M. & Morath, E. (2018, December 28). Teachers quit jobs at highest rate on record. Wall Street Journal.

Heimans, J. & Timms, T. (2014, December). Understanding 'new power.' Harvard Business Review.

Sparks, S.D. (2018, February 6). A primer on continuous school improvement. Education Week.

Citation: Berry, B. (2019). Teacher leadership: Prospects and promises. Phi Delta Kappan, 100 (7), 49-55.

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Teacher leadership: Prospects and promises - kappanonline.org

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After decades of top-down school management, new models of collaborative teacher leadership have begun to emerge. It is increasingly implausible that we could improve the performance of schools . . . without promoting leadership in teaching by teachers.

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Why "exceeds standard" is not an appropriate label for level 4

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Why "exceeds standard" is not an appropriate label for level 4

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Why the Label 'Exceeds Standard' Doesn't Work

Today's guest post is written by Thomas Guskey, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Kentucky.

Educators implementing standards-based approaches to grading and reporting often struggle with how to label different levels of students' performance. Four levels of performance is the most common number identified. Most educators in the U.S. and Canada consider three levels to be insufficient in discriminating important differences in students' performance. When the number of levels climbs to five or six, however, the consistency of teachers' rating diminishes rapidly.

In choosing labels for these levels, many begin by describing level 3 as "Proficient." This level of performance means the student has achieved the learning target and mastered the standard. Level 2 is typically considered "Progressing" or "Approaching" mastery of the standard, and level 1 is deemed "Struggling" or "Needs Improvement." The challenge comes in labeling the highest, level 4. 2

Some educators believe that level 4 should designate a truly exceptional level of achievement - the student whose performance "knocks your socks off." They use this level to recognize students who do something special related to the standard or demonstrate genuinely outstanding performance regarding the standard.

Others believe level 4 should describe performance at a more complex or more advanced level with regard to the standard. They use the label "Exceeds Standard" to indicate the student has gone beyond or above what was expected. In other words, these students have achieved at a higher and more sophisticated level. But while seeming reasonable, serious communication problems often arise when educators try to clarify the meaning of "Exceeds Standard" to students, parents, and fellow educators.

Evidence gathered from parents and families shows that many find the label "Exceeds Standard" to be vague and difficult to interpret. The message it implies to them from educators is: "More than we expect, but we cannot tell you precisely what that is until we see it!" Such imprecision troubles parents, especially those who encourage their child to strive for the highest grade possible in every subject.

From a practical perspective, "Exceeds Standard" presents additional difficulties. In most standards-based environments, mastering a standard means hitting the target. It signifies achieving the goal and learning what was expected. Olympic archers who place their arrows in the center of the bulls-eye from a distance of 70 meters, for example, have "hit the target." They have achieved the goal and accomplished precisely what was expected.

How then could an Olympic archer ever "exceed" the standard? How would the archer achieve at a more advanced or higher level? Maybe we could make the bulls-eye smaller or move the target further away from the archer, making it more difficult to hit the bulls-eye.

The problem with that, however, is it changes the standard. As soon as you make the task more difficult or move the learning expectation to a higher and more advanced level, you have changed the standard and altered the goal. Students who achieve at that level have not really "exceeded the standard." More accurately, they have mastered a different standard. If you want archers to hit smaller bulls-eyes from a greater distance, then that becomes the new standard for archers.

Some argue that "Proficient" can imply placing arrows near the bulls-eye while "Exceeds Standard" means actually hitting the bulls-eye directly. But does "Proficient" then mean "almost" hitting the target? Is "getting close" sufficient? And if it is, then how close is good enough? Who makes that decision?

This interpretation problem also affects educators' who want to equate these distinctions to percent correct on assessments. On an assessment designed to measure students' ability to solve single-digit addition problems, for example, they might designate students who get 80% correct to be "Proficient," while those students who answer correctly 90% or more are rated, "Exceeds Standard." But have students who get 90% correct truly "exceeded" the standard? 3

Others counter that the assessment for this standard should include double-digit addition problems as well. Students who answer the double-digit problems correctly can then accurately be rated as "Exceeds Standard." But again, this miscommunicates what is measured. With the inclusion of double-digit addition problems, the assessment clearly measures a different standard. The same holds true if "Proficient" requires students to "apply" what they have learned, while "Exceeds Standard" involves the higher level skills of "analyzing" or "synthesizing." The point is that you are now measuring a different standard.

The nature of specific standards makes things even more complicated. If the standard relates to students' ability to safely cross a busy street, for example, would anyone consider 80% to be "Proficient"? Or even 90%? What about being honest or telling the truth? And in these examples, how could students ever reach "Exceeds Standard"?

This does not imply that exceptional performance should go unrecognized. Not at all. A grade that denotes truly distinguished performance can be useful in many instances. But if such a grade is included in the grading system, then it must be associated with clear criteria that identify precisely how such a grade can be attained. Those criteria must be clearly communicated to students and parents alike, accompanied by illustrative examples of students' performance or samples of students' work, and agreed upon by fellow teachers.

With these criteria articulated and openly communicated to all stakeholders, labels such as "Distinguished," "Exceptional," or "Exemplary" generally serve intended communication purposes far better than "Exceeds Standard."

Connect with Tom Guskey on Twitter at @tguskey.

Check it out here:

Why the Label 'Exceeds Standard' Doesn't Work | Education Week

PostedOctober 17, 2014 7:30 A M by Peter DeWitt

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Why the label "Exceeds Standard" doesn't work | Thomas R. Guskey & Associates

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Educators implementing standards-based approaches to grading and reporting often struggle with how to label different levels of students' performance. Four levels of performance is the most common number identified. Most educators in the U.S. and Canada consider three levels to be insufficient in discriminating important differences in students' performance.

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Private schools in wealthy areas such as California's Silicon Valley have cut educational screen time amid rising parent and pediatrician concerns about the impact of devices on students' psychological and social development.

Such measures are likely to spread to other areas, thanks to advocacy from parent groups, says Joe Clement, co-author of the book Screen Schooled.

"Schools are mandating that kids have to be online to do their work," Clement says. "Parents are concerned that the limits they set in their house are being overrun by what the school is telling kids to do."

Edtech vs. entertainment

Parents' worries are legitimate, "but there's a real difference between kids on social media compared to kids using digital resources in educationally appropriate ways," says John Watson, founder and CEO of Evergreen Education Group, a K12 research organization that runs the Digital Learning Collaborative.

Examples of poorly implemented digital-learning initiatives exist. "But looking at those examples and saying we should be pushing to limit screen time in schools is throwing the baby out with the bathwater," Watson says.

Schools typically do not track class screen time, though teachers sometimes do, Watson says. "Most teachers don't want kids to come in and just stare at their laptops," Watson says. "They want to do a mix of engaging with students one-to-one, in small groups, and sometimes on their computers, and that makes total sense."

In rural areas or the inner city, schools are sometimes the only places students can access the internet, Watson says. "Parent groups in places like Silicon Valley saying, 'We need to limit this,' are from places of incredible privilege," he adds.

Best practices for administrators

Baltimore County Public Schools has implemented guidance from a county school health council on educational computer use. Every classroom in the district features a poster recommending the following:

* computer time takes up less than half of learning time during the school day

* students take activity breaks from computer work every 20 minutes

* students leave devices inside during recess

"Today's students are born into a world where technology creates 24/7 access to people, to ideas and to information," says district spokesperson Brandon Oland. "Even so, we stress balance in technology use."

A new Maryland law now requires health and education departments to develop best practices for digital device use in the classroom by June 2019.

Schools can institutionalize practices for how students work on devices to increase effectiveness, says Watson, of Evergreen Education Group. For example, at one 1-to-1 school, when a teacher in any classroom says, "red stage," students put the devices in their backpacks, while "yellow stage" means they place closed devices on their desks, and "green stage" means they open them.

Hours per day students spend consuming online media including games, videos and social media, but not counting online school assignments

Source: Common Sense Media

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Rethinking edtech amid parent concerns over K12 screen time | District Administration

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Private schools in wealthy areas such as California's Silicon Valley have cut educational screen time amid rising parent and pediatrician concerns about the impact of devices on students' psychological and social development. Such measures are likely to spread to other areas, thanks to advocacy from parent groups, says Joe Clement, co-author of the book Screen Schooled .

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Bethel Middle school in Waynesville , North Carolina, took the bold step last month of smartphones in class, from start of day until final bell. Administrators said the devices cause distractions that prevent students from learning.

Last September, s chool districts across also banned cell phones in the classroom in an effort to reduce distractions. says . Portage High School confiscated more than 200 phones during the past school year, and classroom performance improved, Principal Robin Kvalo

Monte Del Sol Charter School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has had a cell phone ban since 2016. Teachers, parents and students say that since the ban went into effect, students are more focused in class and even talk to one another at lunchtime.

A bill that would limit smartphone use in classrooms was introduced last month by Utah's House Education Committee.

But it's not just the U.S. Last fall, the French Parliament enacted legislation that banned students up to age 15 from taking the devices to school-or, at the very least, requiring that they be turned off during class.

British education leaders were considering a similar move as of last month. They have pointed to a London School of Economics that found banning phones in schools resulted in a 6 percent rise in test scores.

Relaxed rules

The first of what we know of today as smartphones began appearing in 2007 with the Apple iPhone, followed by Android devices in 2008. By the end of the decade, smartphones quickly became ubiquitous. These days, nearly 70 percent of high school students and 25 percent of middle schoolers have their own phones and use them daily.

The same applies to college students. found that 95 percent of students bring their phones to class every day, 92 percent use their phones to text message during class time, and 10 percent admit that they have texted during an exam on at least one occasion.

When first introduced, many teachers saw iPhones and Android devices as distracting threats, and schools chose to ban them entirely or limit their usage to hallways and outside the building. But as education apps were developed, educators began to see that they could be used as teaching aids-including having students program their own apps.

Districts began to think that judicious use of phones for classroom research could engage students who have grown up with technology in the palms of their hands.

After all, when the smartphone in your pocket is many millions of times more powerful than all the computers used to send man to the moon, it makes sense to use it to full advantage.
Read: Rethinking edtech amid parent concerns over K12 screen time
At the same time, the BYOD movement began, allowing students to actively use mobile phones as learning devices in school. Soon, there was no shortage of that offered tips and on teachers can effectively use smartphones in the classroom.

And, with the ever-present threat of emergency events at schools, many parents want to contact their children throughout the day, so early smartphone bans were relaxed to allow the devices in the classroom.

Last month, for example, Sarasota County Schools in Florida began to from a ban on cellphones in schools. School leaders will propose letting students have phones in their bags, but not visible during class.

A recent from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that the percentage of public schools that banned cell phones and other mobile devices dropped from nearly 91 percent in 2010 to nearly 66 percent in 2016.

Full circle?

But as is often the case with technology introductions, smartphones in the classroom may be a case of too much of a good thing. Although these devices have immense potential to improve learning, researchers say their persistent presence may come at a cognitive cost. Even when the devices are not in use, they say, these devices can be such a distraction that students can't focus. A recent by the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research shows that "the mere presence of one's own smartphone may occupy limited-capacity cognitive resources, thereby leaving fewer resources available for other tasks and undercutting cognitive performance."

Supporting such observations, a research study published last summer seems to prove that smartphones and mobile devices contribute to cognitive distraction. , conducted by Rutgers University Psychology professors Arnold Glass and Mengxue Kang, split a group of 118 college students into two groups. Each group was taught the same material by the same instructor, in the same classroom at the same time of day. One group was allowed to have smartphones or other mobile devices open during class, while the other wasn't.

The researchers report that the group that had the devices scored, on average, a half-letter grade lower on exams, which might be the difference between passing and failing in some cases. Students who didn't use a device but were in the same classroom with those who did also scored lower, apparently due to distraction from surrounding devices.

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The great smartphone debate | District Administration

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Bethel Middle school in Waynesville , North Carolina, took the bold step last month of smartphones in class, from start of day until final bell. Administrators said the devices cause distractions that prevent students from learning. Last September, s chool districts across also banned cell phones in the classroom in an effort to reduce distractions.

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Why Teacher Student Relationships Matter

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Why Teacher Student Relationships Matter

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New findings shed light on best approaches

Students spend more than 1,000 hours with their teacher in a typical school year. That's enough time to build a relationship that could ignite a student's lifetime love of learning-and it's enough time for the dynamic to go totally off the rails.

Education watchers have long known that the relationship with a teacher can be critically important to how well students learn. But emerging research is giving a clearer picture than ever of how teachers can build and leverage strong relationships with their students.

"People sometimes mistake a kind of casual familiarity and friendliness for the promotion of really deep relationships that are about a child's potential, their interests, their strengths, and weaknesses," said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who studies the effects of emotions and mindsets on learning.

"A lot of teachers ... have really strong abilities to engage socially with the students, but then it's not enough," she said. "You have to go much deeper than that and actually start to engage with students around their curiosity, their interests, their habits of mind through understanding and approaching material to really be an effective teacher."

In a forthcoming longitudinal study with Bank Street College of Education, Immordino-Yang is tracking how the highly effective teachers of low-income students set classroom norms and feelings of trust and safety for students-but also leverage that foundation to promote students' deeper thinking and engagement.

Why are teacher-student relationships important?

"The relational part of teaching may very well be its most underrated aspect. ... When teachers are good at building relationships with students, the skill is seen more as cover for a lack of content knowledge or wherewithal to instruct with rigor," James Ford, the 2015 North Carolina State Teacher of the Year and the program director for the Public School Forum of North Carolina, told Education Week. To the contrary, he added, "Our first job as teachers is to make sure that we learn our students, that we connect with them on a real level, showing respect for their culture and affirming their worthiness to receive the best education possible."

A Review of Educational Research analysis of 46 studies found that strong teacher-student relationships were associated in both the short- and long-term with improvements on practically every measure schools care about: higher student academic engagement, attendance, grades, fewer disruptive behaviors and suspensions, and lower school dropout rates. Those effects were strong even after controlling for differences in students' individual, family, and school backgrounds.

Teachers benefit, too. A study in the European Journal of Psychology of Education found that a teacher's relationship with students was the best predictor of how much the teacher experienced joy versus anxiety in class.

How does a teacher's approach affect that relationship?

In a 2018 study, Arizona State University researcher Victoria Theisen-Homer found different teacher-training programs prioritized different kinds of relationships with students:

* An instrumental focus involved a limited, one-way relationship in which teachers cull bits of information about students specifically to motivate them to behave well and focus on teacher-directed tasks. The relationships "were structured as a controlled means to a particular end: student compliance," she found. "Students learned that their value was tied to the degree to which they worked hard and behaved in line with what mostly white authority figures demanded."

* A reciprocal focus required teachers to gather complex information and develop a holistic understanding of their students, inviting the students to grapple with content and problems together. "These students not only learned to think for themselves, but also had adults who affirmed and responded to their thoughts and experiences. Such interactions prepared them to engage with authority figures, and to someday hold positions of authority themselves," Theisen-Homer said.

The study also found in an analysis of two of these programs that teachers trained in the instrumental focus were more likely to go on to teach in low-income, high-minority schools, while those trained in reciprocal relationships ended up in schools with more high-income and white students. It was not clear why teachers ended up sorting in this way, but it raised concerns about differences in the kinds of relationships high- and low-income students might experience with teachers.

"Sometimes teachers don't understand the importance that their relationship with each student has on that student's identity and sense of belonging," said Vicki Nishioka, a senior researcher with Education Northwest who studies teacher-student relationships. "What gets in the way of that is a more authoritarian kind of discipline and interaction approach with students, which really doesn't work."

For example, a 2016 study randomly assigned teachers to increase their positive interactions with students. Students of teachers who boosted their ratio to five positive comments and interactions for every negative one had significantly less disruptive behavior and more time on task academically than the students of a control group of teachers.

How can teachers improve their relationships with students?

In a word: Empathy. Across several recent studies, researchers have found that teachers who cultivate empathy for and with their students are able to manage students' behavior and academic engagement better.

Nishioka finds that trying to suppress biases or stereotypes about students can sometimes make them worse, but practicing perspective-taking-actively imagining how a student might perceive or be affected by a situation-can reduce bias and deepen teacher-student relationships. She recommended teachers:

* Talk to students to understand differences in their perceptions and expectations in class.

* Research cultural differences between teachers and students to head off cultural misunderstandings, particularly around norms, styles, and language.

* Teach and model perspective-taking for students in class.

How can teachers maintain healthy boundaries with students?

Experts caution that for teachers and students, "relationship" does not equal "friend," particularly on social media. Many districts have rules against teachers following or friending current students on Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms, in part because it might open teachers to liability if they see inappropriate behavior from students online.

Teachers also should be upfront with students who confide in them that they are required by law to report evidence of abuse and can't keep secrets that could put students in danger.

Teacher and education author Starr Sackstein, whose blog is hosted on the edweek.org website, also recommends that while teachers can and should share personal stories if they are "purposeful and appropriate" to the discussion, they should use these to model for students what level of detail is appropriate for sharing in social conversations.

How can relationships with students support teacher quality?

While student feedback is often incorporated into teacher evaluations in higher education, it is rarely a direct part of K-12 teacher evaluations. But that doesn't mean districts can't use student feedback to improve teaching practice, and in particular, such feedback can be used to help teachers build deeper relationships with students.

For example, the High Tech High Media Arts charter school in San Diego trains students using a six-week course to act as observers. The students met regularly with the teacher to give feedback about their communication skills and engagement in the classroom, and to brainstorm better ways to reach out to students. Teachers and administrators found that going through the training gave students better understanding of the teachers' roles. School staff members said that teachers also "developed deeper relationships with students, interacted with students in a more positive way during class, communicated information about projects and assignments to students more clearly, generated better questions to stimulate student dialogue during Socratic seminars, and created more collaborative learning environments for students."

Published in Print: March 13, 2019, as Why Teacher-Student Relationships Matter

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Students spend more than 1,000 hours with their teacher in a typical school year. That's enough time to build a relationship that could ignite a student's lifetime love of learning-and it's enough time for the dynamic to go totally off the rails.

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Listening to Teachers' stories generates empathy and understanding

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What Happens When We Listen to Teachers' Stories

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Lately, teachers seem to be getting a bad rap. We've seen a year-long wave of teacher strikes provoked by deep budget cuts, punctuated by a nationally publicized comment from the president's son about " loser teachers." In the face of such hostility, what can teachers do? Here's one solution: Tell our stories.

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Report:  how well do science textbooks align with NGSS standards?

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Report:  how well do science textbooks align with NGSS standards?

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The first independent review to weigh whether new science curriculum series are truly aligned to a set of national standards was issued this morning-and mostly, the materials fell well short of expectations.

Four of the series-Discovery's Science Techbook, Carolina Biological Supply Company's Science and Technology Concepts, and two versions of Teachers' Curriculum Institute's Bring Science Alive!-were deemed insufficiently aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards. One series, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Science Dimensions, was considered partially aligned. Only one series, Amplify's Amplify Science, got top marks for alignment, coherence, and usability, according to the nonprofit EdReports, which conducted the reviews.

All six of the series were designed for grades 6-8, and they represent a range of print and digital materials.

Already, some of the publishers of the series are disputing the way EdReports carried out these reviews. Let's dig into the results a bit and see what they reveal about curriculum development for the NGSS and the shape of the current science-materials market.

Who are these folks, and how did they conduct these reviews?

EdReports is a nonprofit that tries to gauge whether published learning materials align to states' expectations for students, including the NGSS and the Common Core State Standards. It's mostly been supported by philanthropies, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given the group more than $15 million over the past decade.

As it has in the past, EdReports relied on teachers to use an in-house framework to judge each curriculum. This time around, about 40 reviewers, mostly practicing teachers or science specialists, participated.

Each series goes through a succession of gateways. Only those learning materials that get a high enough score on the first gateway, which is focused on how well they embody key features of the NGSS, were assessed on the next two, which focus in more detail on the specific coherence of lessons and their usability for teachers.

In the past, not everyone has liked the gateway concept. EdReports' very first math reviews, several years ago, were criticized by publishers and math groups partly for this reason. (The organization changed its methodology slightly after that.)

Remind me. What's in these standards?

The NGSS were rolled out in 2013 and have since been adopted in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Even proponents acknowledge that the standards are incredibly complicated: They expect students to master science and engineering practices, such as analyzing and interpreting data. Students are also supposed to recognize themes that cut across biology, earth and physical science, and chemistry, such as how energy and matter flow into and out of systems. And both the practices and the crosscutting themes are layered on top of core science content, including weather patterns, natural selection, and ecosystems.

(There's rather a lot of jargon and acronyms in the standards to explain all this.)

Publishers have struggled to figure out how to embody all those demands in their materials-for example, should they attempt to put every science practice or crosscutting theme in every unit? Or can they be parceled out over the course of two or three units?

Still, most of the major publishers-including the three biggies, Pearson, HMH, and McGraw-Hill-have put out series supposedly aligned to the NGSS in the past three years.

See also: Teachers Scramble for Texts to Match Science Standards

Where did EdReports think these materials fell short?

The series that reviewers thought fell short didn't make it through Gateway 1 on overall design criteria for the NGSS; they received fewer than half of the 26 points available for that section. (HMH's series, which reviewers deemed partially aligned, got exactly half.)

That doesn't mean they're terrible, but it should be something for teachers to think about, said Morgan Martin, a teacher on special assignment from the Los Alamitos district in California and one of the reviewers.

"I don't think not passing a certain gateway is the red flag [signaling] 'This is the worst thing ever,' she said. "It's just really good for teachers to have information about where the strengths are in the program, and then to know your teaching team and how qualified are you in understanding certain components and whether you're capable of filling in some gaps."

And what are those gaps? They fall into three main buckets.

One of the big problems was that most of the series apparently didn't consistently measure all three dimensions (I warned you that there was gonna be jargon!)of the standards: the science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary content. Discovery's series Discovery Science, for example, had some lessons with objectives that didn't include any of the crosscutting concepts or science and engineering practices, reviewers said.

Another problem has to do with phenomena. Basically, the standards indicate that scientific phenomena should undergird lessons and units. (A phenomenon could be something like why, in dry weather, you get a shock when you shuffle rubber-soled shoes on a woolly carpet and touch a metal doorknob, or why certain organisms in a particular ecosystem appear to be dying out.)

Then, each sub-unit is supposed to help students learn more about what's causing that phenomenon, to use scientific practices to record data about and make sense of it, and to connect it to the crosscutting themes. By the end of each unit, students should be able to generate a hypothesis for what caused the initial phenomenon and back it up with evidence.

EdReports' reviewers felt that some of the series appear to have gotten this a little backwards: The phenomena they included were more for illustrative purposes. For instance, here's what the reviewers wrote about one of the TCI series: "The 'Anchoring Phenomena' are most often used as examples of the content topic or concept as opposed to a driving mechanism for student questions and sensemaking."

Finally, some of the series ran into problems with assessment. HMH's Science Dimensions, for example, had some classroom-based assessments that didn't give teachers enough helpful information to change their teaching. Discovery Science's end-of-unit tests didn't always match the objectives given at the beginning of each unit. And Carolina's Science and Technology Concepts' tests didn't adequately measure all three of the dimensions.

"There was a huge range of quality and types of assessment, and some of the concerns were the ones that were multiple- choice content only, and didn't really look different or new," said Martin.

What do the publishers say about these findings?

In an interview, Carolina Biological Supply Company officials agreed that their series' presentation of the crosscutting themes wasn't as explicit as it could be, and promised they'd change that in future versions of the curriculum.

David Heller, director of product development for Carolina's curriculum division, also felt that the the findings reflect how interpretations of the standards have evolved in the K-12 science field. In the early days of NGSS, curriculum writers knew that phenomena were supposed to get kids questioning and thinking, but "being so explicit about how [lessons] relate back wasn't as much an understood point," he said.

Discovery Education officials claim the review process suffered from some serious flaws. Their main dispute is how EdReports gauged a section of the Techbook's curriculum that allows teachers several choices of how to proceed. EdReports, they say, interpreted the whole section as optional, even though Discovery says it isn't.

Overall, said Marty Creel, the chief academic officer at Discovery Education, the review doesn't reflect the current version of the Techbook.

"The reality in classrooms today is that teachers are pulling from materials all over the place, so to take a snapshot that's 10 months old we think is fundamentally unfair," he said. "We've been making a lot of improvements since and the version they are now reporting on is not one we have actively going into classrooms. So we're kind of scratching our heads about why you'd put out a review on a version that basically no longer exists."

Asked about product updates, EdReports officials said they chose to review these series only after publishers assured them they wouldn't change radically, and that they did keep up-to-date with additions.

"It's kind of a merry-go-round with some curricula that are digital and it's hard to know when to jump on and off," said Eric Hirsch, the executive director of EdReports. "But we would have called off a review if we noticed the merry-go-round was starting to go around too fast. We also know that these materials will change, and that's why we stand ready to re-review."

Two other publishers with low marks both sent statements.

"... There are numerous instances in their report where we believe that EdReports overlooked or disregarded evidence that we shared or where EdReports reviewers fundamentally misunderstood our program," TCI President Bert Bowers said.

HMH's assessment was even harsher. The rating, the company said, " does not reflect errors or problems with alignment on HMH's part, but rather reveals the EdReports' rubric's lack of depth of engagement with NGSS and a philosophical difference in approach to the standards integration.

"We believe the rubric is limited by a disconnection from the research base of NGSS, its writers, and the community of teacher practitioners implementing the standards," it concluded.

Publishers also pointed out that the grading framework changed midway through the process, though EdReports officials said they rescored everything when those revisions were made.

All of the publishers get to submit formal responses to the findings, and those should be uploaded now to the EdReports website.

Educational publishing is a tough business, and publishers are definitely concerned about these early findings, though none would say that on the record. But some did acknowledge the results would make marketing the products more difficult, challenging, and also potentially confusing for consumers.

In past reviews, publishers have made revisions to their products after a low-scoring review and earned higher scores on later ones.

Where do these findings fit in with other science reviews?

That's a good question. This is the first independent review of science materials. Only a handful of states, notably California and Oregon, have issued comprehensive reviews of at least a half dozen series.

Louisiana has rolling curriculum reviews which, like EdReports, are considered pretty tough; so far, they've given just one set of materials a green light, for 4th grade science.

In a way, the lack of thumbs-ups for science learning materials by both EdReports and Louisiana represents the opposite problem from what happened in California, which gave its blessing to 29 of 34 sets of science materials reviewed last fall. Even California officials say that districts will need additional help in narrowing down the list and making good choices, and there are some projects underway to help them do that.

It's also a good reminder that alignment is a bit in the eye of the beholder: Different people can set up different criteria about what constitutes alignment to standards, and reach different conclusions about the results.

And what does the science education field think of these results?

That's for you to tell me! I look forward to hearing from you about your thoughts, comments, and critiques on EdReports' findings. Leave a comment, or email me directly at [email protected]
For more on NGSS curriculum:

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Science Curriculum Reviews Are Out, and Results Aren't Great

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The first independent review to weigh whether new science curriculum series are truly aligned to a set of national standards was issued this morning-and mostly, the materials fell well short of expectations. Four of the series-Discovery's Science Techbook, Carolina Biological Supply Company's Science and Technology Concepts, and two versions of Teachers' Curriculum Institute's Bring Science Alive!-were deemed insufficiently aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards.

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Reading research insights every educator should know

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Commentary

What are the reading research insights that every educator should know?

If your district isn't having an "uh oh" moment around reading instruction, it probably should be. Educators across the country are experiencing a collective awakening about literacy instruction, thanks to a recent tsunami of national media attention. Alarm bells are ringing-as they should be-because we've gotten some big things wrong: Research has documented what works to get kids to read, yet those evidence-based reading practices appear to be missing from most classrooms.

Systemic failures have left educators overwhelmingly unaware of the research on how kids learn to read. Many teacher-preparation programs lack effective reading training, something educators rightly lament once they get to the classroom. On personal blogs and social media, teachers often write of learning essential reading research years into their careers, with powerful expressions of dismay and betrayal that they weren't taught sooner. Others express anger.

The lack of knowledge about the science of reading doesn't just affect teachers. It's perfectly possible to become a principal or even a district curriculum leader without first learning the key research. In fact, this was true for us.

We each learned critical reading research only after entering district leadership. Jared learned during school improvement work for a nonprofit, while between district leadership positions. When already district leader, Brian learned from reading specialists when his district received grant-funded literacy support. Robin learned in her fourth year as a district leader, while doing research to prepare for a curriculum adoption.

Understanding the research has been crucial to our ability to lead districts to improved reading outcomes. Yet each of us could easily have missed out on that critical professional learning. If not for those unplanned learning experiences, we'd probably still be ignorant about how kids learn to read.

There's no finishing school for chief academic officers, nor is there certification on literacy know-how for district and school leaders. Literacy experts have been recommending the same research-based approaches since the 2000 National Reading Panel report, yet there still aren't systemic mechanisms for ensuring this information reaches the educators who set instructional directions and professional-development agendas. Why should we be surprised to find pervasive misunderstandings?

Here are five essential insights supported by reading research that educators should know-but all too often don't:

Grouping students by reading level is poorly supported by research, yet pervasive. For example, 9 out of 10 U.S. 15-year-olds attend schools that use the practice.

Many teachers overspend instructional time on "skills and strategies" instruction, an emphasis that offers diminishing returns for student learning, according to a Learning First and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy report this year.

Students' background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. Curricula should help students build content knowledge in history and science, in order to empower reading success.

Daily, systematic phonics instruction in early grades is recommended by the National Institute for Literacy, based on extensive evidence from the National Reading Panel.

Proven strategies for getting all kids-including English-language learners, students with IEPs, and struggling readers-working with grade-level texts must be employed to ensure equitable literacy work.

Educator friends, if any of these statements make you scratch your head, you probably have some unfinished learning.

Educators urgently need a national movement for professional learning about reading. We should declare a No Shame Zone for this work-to make it safe for all educators to say, "I have unfinished learning around literacy."

Superintendents should ask their literacy leaders if research insights are understood and implemented in their classrooms. They must be prepared to invest in the unfinished learning of their team, from teachers to cabinet. Surely some educators will defend misguided approaches; we all tend to believe we are doing the right thing, until research shows us otherwise. On this point, we speak from experience. We encourage superintendents to lean into the national conversation about literacy, in order to ask the right questions.

Some may characterize this national dialogue as reopening the "reading wars," which pitted phonics against whole language. Frankly, we don't see it. We don't frequently hear educators in our districts vigorously defending whole language, as such. More often, they're simply doing what they believe to work, without knowing better. Instead, we primarily face a battle against misunderstanding and lack of awareness.

For example, some express fears that phonics instruction comes at the expense of students engaging with rich texts, yet every good curriculum we know incorporates strong foundational skills and daily work with high-quality texts. The National Reading Panel got it right: Literacy work is a both/and, not either/or.

The battle against misunderstanding can be won by pairing professional learning with improved curriculum. Quality curriculum that is tailor-built to the research makes good practice tangible and achievable for teachers. Professional development around implementation of such high-quality curriculum is where it all comes together: Teachers are given the what to use, and professional learning explains the why and the how of those materials.

Districts today have many choices among research-aligned, excellent curricula, which was not the case even two years ago. These new curriculum options may be the catalyst we need to improve reading instruction. In each of our districts, we have implemented one of the newly available curricula that earned the highest possible rating by EdReports, a curriculum review nonprofit. Districtwide reading improvement followed.

The gap between good and mediocre curricula is vast. And district teams need a collective understanding of how kids learn to read before selecting new materials. The advances we have personally seen from high-quality curricula have led us to call for a national professional-learning network around curricula to foster cross-district collaboration.

We dream of the potential for children if we embrace this moment of unfinished learning.

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Jared Myracle, Brian Kingsley, & Robin McClellan

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Commentary If your district isn't having an "uh oh" moment around reading instruction, it probably should be. Educators across the country are experiencing a collective awakening about literacy instruction, thanks to a recent tsunami of national media attention.

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Giving up the search

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Education Week - Peter DeWitt's Finding Common Ground

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Today's guest blog is written by Thomas R. Guskey, senior research scholar at the University of Louisville.
It's time that educators recognize a basic truth about reforming the way we grade and report student learning. That truth is this: There are no "best practices" in grading and reporting, and there is no perfect grading and reporting system.

I know that may be shocking to some and probably unsettling to all. It is surely different from what you might have been told in books, blogs, or chats by writers and consultants who claim to know what is truly "best." And, quite honestly, I wish their claims were true. If they were true, it would make it so much easier for all of us who are struggling to improve grading and reporting systems and trying hard to ensure those systems consistently work in the best interest of students. But, regrettably, it's not true.

Susan Brookhart and I recently assembled a group of exceptionally talented scholars to analyze and interpret the vast body of research evidence we have on grading and reporting. Their brilliant work is described in a new book published by ASCD and titled, What We Know About Grading. The conclusion these scholars reached after considering the 100-plus years of research on this important topic confirms that some practices are clearly better than others and provide the basis for making substantial improvements.

We know, for example, that it would be better to replace the appallingly unreliable percentage grading scale that includes 101 distinct levels of performance and offers only the illusion of precision with grading scales that include fewer but more reliably discernable categories of performance. We know it is better to base grades on clearly articulated learning criteria rather than on students' relative ranking among classmates. We know it is better to offer multiple grades that reflect specific product, progress, and process criteria, rather than combining these into a single hodgepodge grade that confounds interpretation. Making these changes will greatly improve the communicative value of any grading and reporting system.

What this extensive body of research evidence does not offer, however, are prescriptions for specific policies and practices that we know will work best for all students under all conditions, which is precisely what "best" implies.

If we implement grading scales with fewer and more reliably discernable categories of performance, for example, we don't yet know the "best" number of categories to include or the "best" way to label those categories. If we provide multiple grades reflecting different types of learning criteria, we don't yet know the "best" criteria to use or the "best" types of product, progress, and process criteria to consider. Although we can take many important steps to make grading and reporting much better, we still have a long way to go in determining what is truly "best."

The major reason we are unable to identify truly "best practices" and describe a perfect grading and reporting system is the powerful influence of context. What the research reveals is that context matters greatly in grading and reporting, just as it does in almost all aspects of teaching and learning.

What works best varies depending on the purpose, the characteristics of the students (i.e., their age, developmental level, learning background, etc.), the culture and other features of the school, and the nature of what is being communicated. These intervening factors snarl effects and complicate implementation.

Nevertheless, not knowing what is truly "best," shouldn't deter us from using the extensive research evidence we have to take positive steps in the right direction in order to make grading and reporting much better. As Mark Manson reminds us:

"Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don't go from "wrong" to "right." Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly less wrong than that, and then even to less wrong than that, and so on. We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without actually ever reaching truth or perfection."

Our goal, therefore, should not be to employ only "best practices" or to implement a perfect grading and reporting system. We don't have the knowledge or understanding to do that. The nuances of the process and influence of context make it impossible.

Instead, our goal should be to use the knowledge base we have to do things better than we are doing now. We need to see grading and reporting more as a challenge in effective communication rather than simply one of quantifying student achievement. We need to stop using grades to sort and rank students and instead use them to guide students in making improvements in their learning.

Most importantly, we need to help students understand that grades do not define who you are as a learner but where you are in your learning journey-and where is always temporary. These changes won't yield grading and reporting systems that are perfect. But they will make those systems much better than they are today-and that alone is important and valuable.

Connect with Thomas Guskey on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Let's Give Up the Search for 'Best Practices' in Grading

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Today's guest blog is written by Thomas R. Guskey, senior research scholar at the University of Louisville. It's time that educators recognize a basic truth about reforming the way we grade and report student learning. That truth is this: There are no "best practices" in grading and reporting, and there is no perfect grading and reporting system.

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(Video)

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K-12 Performance Assessment Terms Explained

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Education Week writers take a stab at common definitions for performance-based assessment terms related to student achievement in this animated glossary.

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The role of a math coach

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Joanna Burt-Kinderman, an instructional coach in Pocahontas County, W.Va., empowers math teachers and students to be collaborative and creative problem-solvers, leading to some of the top math performance in the state.

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Is there an end in sight to the "homework wars?"

Homework is one those never-ending debates in K-12 circles that re-emerges every few years, bringing with it a new collection of headlines. Usually they bemoan how much homework students have, or highlight districts and even states that have sought to cap or eliminate homework.

Now, a new analysis from the Center for American Progress suggests a more fruitful way of thinking about this problem. Maybe, it suggests, what we should be doing is looking at what students are routinely being asked to do in take-home assignments, how well that homework supports their learning goals (or doesn't), and make changes from there.

The analysis of nearly 200 pieces of homework concludes that much of what students are asked to do aligns to the Common Core State Standards-a testament to how pervasive the standards are in the U.S. education system, even though many states have tweaked, renamed, or replaced them. However, most of the homework embodied basic, procedural components of the standards, rather than the more difficult skills-such as analyzing or extending their knowledge to new problems.

"We were surprised by the degree of alignment. And we were also surprised by the degree that the homework was rote, and how much some of this stuff felt like Sudoku," said Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at CAP. "It made the homework debate make a lot more sense about why parents are frustrated."

It is also similar to the findings of groups like the Education Trust, which have found that classwork tends to be aligned to state standards, but not all that rigorous.

Collecting Homework Samples

The CAP analysis appears to be one of the first studies to look at homework rigor using a national survey lens. Many studies of homework are based on one school or one district's assignments, which obviously limits their applicability. Attempts to synthesize all this research have led to some hard-to-parse conclusions. One of the most cited studies concludes there's some connection for grades 6-12 between homework and test scores, but less so for elementary students, and less of an impact on actual grades.

Another problem is that students' experiences with homework seem to vary so dramatically: A Brookings Institution report based on survey data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress concluded that, while on average students aren't overburdened by homework, a subset of students do appear to get hours upon hours.

The CAP analysis, instead, was based on getting a sample of parents from across the country to send in examples of their children's homework. The researchers used MTurk, a crowdsourcing service offered by Amazon.com to recruit parents. Of the 372 parents who responded, the researchers got a pile of 187 useable assignments.Next, John Smithson, an emeritus researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had teams grade them on a taxonomy looking at both the content and the "cognitive demand," or difficulty, of the work. The index fell on a 1 to 10 scale, with a score 4 to 6 range considered as "good" alignment.

The results? On average, math assignments fell within this range, while the ELA ones were slightly weaker, in the 3 to 5 range.

But the real eye-opening graphic is this one, which shows that by far the assignments were mostly low-level.

This makes some logical sense when you think about it. Just as with teaching and testing, it is much easier to write homework assignments prioritizing basic arithmetic drills and fill-in-the-blank vocabulary words than ones that get students to "prove" or "generalize" some tenet. (I suspect prepackaged curricula, too, probably lean more toward rote stuff than cognitively demanding exercises.)

Here's another epxlanation: Many teachers believe homework should be for practicing known content, not learning something new. This is partially to help close the "homework gap" that surfaces because some students can access parent help or help via technology, while other students can't. It's possible that teachers are purposefully giving lower-level work to their students to take home for this reason.

To be sure, Boser said, it's not that all lower-level work is intrinsically bad: Memorization does have a place in learning. But assignments like color-in-the-blank and word searches are probably just a waste of students' time. "Homework assignments," the study says, "should be thought-provoking."

Study Limitations

The study does come with some significant limitations, so you must use caution in discussing its results. The surveyed population differs from the population at large, overrepresenting mothers over fathers and parents of K-5 students, and underrepresenting black parents. Also, the majority of the assignments the parents sent in came from the elementary grades.

The report makes suggestions on how districts can strategically improve the quality of their homework, rather than deciding to chuck it out altogether.

One is to is to audit homework assignments to make sure they're actually useful at building some of the more difficult skills. Another is to extend the "curriculum revolution" of the last decade, which has focused more attention on the quality and alignment of textbooks and materials, to homework. A third is to use appropriate technology so students can access out-of-school supports for challenging homework.

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Is Homework Valuable or Not? Try Looking at Quality Instead

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Is there an end in sight to the "homework wars?" Homework is one those never-ending debates in K-12 circles that re-emerges every few years, bringing with it a new collection of headlines. Usually they bemoan how much homework students have, or highlight districts and even states that have sought to cap or eliminate homework.

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What traditional classroom grading gets wrong

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Commentary

It's time to make grading bias-resistant and fairer

Grades are used to make a number of significant decisions about students, including promotion, retention, college admissions, and scholarships. But parents, teachers, and school administrators concerned about providing equitable opportunities for every child are frequently stunned to learn that many common grading practices are outdated, inaccurate, and harmful to student success. In fact, grading policies-which appear to be an objective, fair, and accurate method to describe a student's academic performance-often increase achievement gaps by infusing grades with teachers' implicit biases or by rewarding or punishing students based on their families' resources.

Because grading is often not addressed in teacher preparation or in ongoing professional development, most teachers choose their own way to grade, guided by their best sense but uninformed by either research or best practices.

As a result, traditional grading practices result in grades that provide unclear and often misleading information to parents, students, and postsecondary institutions. Teachers often combine a range of unrelated student information into a grade, compressing a bucket of information into a thimble-sized container. When teachers collapse academic proficiency, soft skills, behavior, attendance, and effort into a single letter, it is impossible for anyone to discern the student's particular strengths and weaknesses in each of these aspects, rendering the grade vague, confusing, and even invalid.

Traditional grading practices are often also corrupted by implicit racial, class, and gender biases. It is well documented that schools' disciplinary actions often disproportionately punish African-American, Latino, low-income, and special education students. These same biases affect grading. When teachers grade students on subjectively interpreted behaviors in categories of participation or effort, their perceptions and judgments of those behaviors are influenced by that teacher's race, class, and gender. For example, in classrooms taught by white teachers, African-American students are typically rated as poorer "classroom citizens" than their white peers, and thereby are more likely to have a lower grade for those behaviors because of the teacher's biased perceptions.

Grades based on performance outside the classroom can also reproduce cycles of disparities, by rewarding or punishing students based on their income and resources. Students are more likely to complete homework if they have more resources (such as higher educated and English-speaking parents, internet access, and a safe, quiet space at home). Yet teachers often award points to students for their homework performance, which rewards or punishes students based on environmental factors outside of the student's control.

Finally, most teachers use grading practices based on calculations that depress student achievement and progress. Current practices conflict with contemporary understandings of growth mindset and how to encourage students to learn through practice and experimentation. An F early in a student's learning and an A at the end average out to a C, regardless of progress over time and final achievement. This mathematically unsound approach punishes students with early struggles, often those who enter the class with fewer resources and less prior academic success and have the most potential growth ahead of them.

Many teachers entered the profession to provide every student an opportunity to succeed, to minimize the achievement and opportunity gaps. Yet when we continue to use traditional grading practices, we inadvertently reproduce those gaps.

In partnering with urban, rural, and suburban public schools and districts, as well as elite private academies, we at the Equitable Grading Project-a research initiative of the equity-focused education consulting group I lead-have found that once teachers learn about the harms caused by our century-old grading practices, they are motivated to try alternative, more equitable grading practices.

In our review of academic research and observations of teachers' implementation, we have identified key aspects of what we call equitable grading, which is accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational:

* Reflect growth and learning.

Teachers should use a more proportionately structured 0-4 scale instead of a 0-100 point scale that is mathematically oriented toward failure, stop assigning a zero for missing work, and weight recent performance and growth instead of averaging performance over time. By allowing students to retake tests and projects (with the chance to replace previous scores), teachers can reward learning, support a growth mindset, and not disadvantage students who enter classrooms with weaker academic backgrounds.

* Value knowledge, not environment or behavior.

Instead of grading subjectively interpreted behaviors such as a student's "effort" or "participation," teachers should focus grades on required content or standards. Grades should not be used to reward compliance or homework completion, both of which invite implicit and institutional biases.

* Lift the veil on how to succeed.

Standards-aligned rubrics, simplified grade calculations, and standards-based scales and gradebooks make teacher's expectations explicit and facilitate students' understanding, ownership, and power over their grades.

* Build soft skills-without including them in the grade.

Teachers should employ a more expansive range of feedback strategies to incorporate peer and self-evaluation and build self-regulation instead of relying solely on grades as feedback.

These grading practices have a proven record of success. Last year, the Equitable Grading Project partnered with two independent evaluators to study what happens when teachers adopt these practices. In an analysis of 60 teachers in seven high schools in northern California, we found that the rate of students receiving D's and F's frequently decreases with these practices-and decreases more dramatically for vulnerable and underserved student populations. For example, among the teachers who worked with the Equitable Grading Project to implement equitable grading, the rate at which students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch received D's and F's decreased a statistically significant greater amount than students who were not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Our analysis also found that equitable grading practices don't just reduce D and F rates, they are also more accurate. When teachers use equitable grading practices, they assign final grades that are more strongly correlated with students' standardized assessment scores on that content, and the effect is stronger for students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.

Finally, we found that equitable grading improves the learning environment for teachers. In surveys and independent case studies, teachers and students reported that classrooms are less stressful, teacher-student relationships are stronger and more trusting, and students are more motivated to learn after these interventions.

When we talk about equity, grading is rarely mentioned. By overlooking it, we unwittingly perpetuate the very disparities we dedicate ourselves as educators to correct. It is incumbent upon educators at every level-teachers, principals, district administrators, school boards, and state policymakers-to improve grading policies to ensure that they reinforce, not work against, our commitment to equity.

Published in Print: January 23, 2019, as It Is Time to End Inaccurate, Inequitable Grading Policies

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What Traditional Classroom Grading Gets Wrong

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Commentary Grades are used to make a number of significant decisions about students, including promotion, retention, college admissions, and scholarships. But parents, teachers, and school administrators concerned about providing equitable opportunities for every child are frequently stunned to learn that many common grading practices are outdated, inaccurate, and harmful to student success.

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10 Education Issues Everybody Should Be Talking About

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What issues have the potential to define-or re define-education in the year ahead? Is there a next "big thing" that could shift the K-12 experience or conversation?

These were the questions Education Week set out to answer in this second annual "10 Big Ideas in Education" report.

You can read about last year's ideas here. In 2019, though, things are different.

This year, we asked Education Week reporters to read the tea leaves and analyze what was happening in classrooms, school districts, and legislatures across the country. What insights could reporters offer practitioners for the year ahead?

Some of the ideas here are speculative. Some are warning shots, others more optimistic. But all 10 of them here have one thing in common: They share a sense of urgency.

Accompanied by compelling illustrations and outside perspectives from leading researchers, advocates, and practitioners, this year's Big Ideas might make you uncomfortable, or seem improbable. The goal was to provoke and empower you as you consider them.

Let us know what you think, and what big ideas matter to your classroom, school, or district. Tweet your comments with #K12BigIdeas.

No. 1: Kids are right. School is boring.

Out-of-school learning is often more meaningful than anything that happens in a classroom, writes Kevin Bushweller, the Executive Editor of EdWeek Market Brief. His essay tackling the relevance gap is accompanied by a Q&A with advice on nurturing, rather than stifling students' natural curiosity.

No. 2: Teachers have trust issues. And it's no wonder why.

Many teachers may have lost faith in the system, says Andrew Ujifusa, but they haven't lost hope. The Assistant Editor unpacks this year's outbreak of teacher activism. And read an account from a disaffected educator on how he built a coalition of his own.

No. 3: Special education is broken.

Forty years since students with disabilities were legally guaranteed a public school education, many still don't receive the education they deserve, writes Associate Editor Christina A. Samuels. Delve into her argument and hear from a disability civil rights pioneer on how to create an equitable path for students.

No. 4: Schools are embracing bilingualism, but only for some students.

Staff Writer Corey Mitchell explains the inclusion problem at the heart of bilingual education. His essay includes a perspective from a researcher on dismantling elite bilingualism.

No. 5: A world without annual testing may be closer than you think.

There's agreement that we have a dysfunctional standardized-testing system in the United States, Associate Editor Stephen Sawchuk writes. But killing it would come with some serious tradeoffs. Sawchuk's musing on the alternatives to annual tests is accompanied by an argument for more rigorous classroom assignments by a teacher-practice expert.

No. 6: There are lessons to be learned from the educational experiences of black students in military families.

Drawing on his personal experience growing up in an Air Force family, Staff Writer Daarel Burnette II highlights emerging research on military-connected students. Learn more about his findings and hear from two researchers on what a new ESSA mandate means for these students.

No. 7: School segregation is not an intractable American problem.

Racial and economic segregation remains deeply entrenched in American schools. Staff Writer Denisa R. Superville considers the six steps one district is taking to change that. Her analysis is accompanied by an essay from the president of the American Educational Research Association on what is perpetuating education inequality.

No. 8: Consent doesn't just belong in sex ed. class. It needs to start a lot earlier.

Assistant Editor Sarah D. Sparks looked at the research on teaching consent and found schools and families do way too little, way too late. Her report is partnered with a researcher's practical guide to developmentally appropriate consent education.

No. 9: Education has an innovation problem.

Are education leaders spending too much time chasing the latest tech trends to maintain what they have? Staff Writer Benjamin Herold explores the innovation trap. Two technologists offer three tips for putting maintenance front and center in school management.

No. 10: There are two powerful forces changing college admissions.

Some colleges are rewriting the admissions script for potential students. Senior Contributing Writer Catherine Gewertz surveys this changing college admissions landscape. Her insights are accompanied by one teacher's advice for navigating underserved students through the college application process.

Wait, there's more.

Want to know what educators really think about innovation? A new Education Week Research Center survey delves into what's behind the common buzzword for teachers, principals, and district leaders. Take a look at the survey results.

Published in Print: January 9, 2019, as What's on the Horizon for 2019?

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The 10 Education Issues Everybody Should Be Talking About

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What issues have the potential to define-or re define-education in the year ahead? Is there a next "big thing" that could shift the K-12 experience or conversation? These were the questions Education Week set out to answer in this second annual "10 Big Ideas in Education" report.

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We Spend Too Much Time Teaching Students to Argue

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We Spend Too Much Time Teaching Students to Argue

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Commentary

Focusing on proving a point sends a dangerous hidden message

Anyone who has been around American public schools recently has probably noticed that our kids spend a lot of time learning to argue. First graders practice by writing claims about the Big Bad Wolf; they might misspell "evidence," but they learn if they are going to call the wolf big and bad, they better be able to back it up. Third graders construct arguments about whether it is harder to be an older or a younger sibling. High school students write persuasive essays on the same topics their parents argue about online.

Argumentation is a focus of the Common Core State Standards for English. The Next Generation Science Standards and many social studies standards also emphasize argument. When you add it all together, it yields a curriculum that pushes students to frequently frame their work in terms of claims, evidence, and reasoning. In my work with teachers across New England, I have watched this emphasis expand over the past decade.

For years, I was passionate about teaching these skills to the high school students in my own English classes. I had read the research cited in the common core, which indicates that argumentation skills will help students advance and excel in any career path. I wanted my students to be the most powerful thinkers and communicators in any room.

As the years went by, however, a problem became clear: Too many students seemed to be learning that the first step to crafting an argument is finding evidence to support a pre-formed opinion. As the internet became ubiquitous, this instinct became more and more dangerous.

There are few things more perilous than an inability to perceive reality. For his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, Laurence Gonzales analyzed accident reports from fatal incidents and found that disaster follows when people look at the world, and, instead of seeing what is there, see what they expect to see. Hikers leave the trail because a break in the trees looks like a turn that they were expecting, and end up helplessly lost. Rafters who have run a river in low water fail to notice that the water is high this year, because they are "seeing" the river of their memory, until the current sucks them into violent rapids. Expectations skew their view of reality, with terrible results.

Was I teaching argumentation to empower my students? Of course. But by teaching them to focus on finding evidence to support claims, I was achieving the opposite effect. I was making them susceptible to an epidemic of our time: the tendency to select facts that support a certain perception of reality, rather than discerning what reality is by analyzing observations and facts.

With this in mind, I shifted my focus to the work that needs to happen before one makes an argument-the work of looking at the world. I designed projects that would allow students to look deeply at an issue. They would gather data for a long time, researching in academic or professional journals, conducting interviews, making observations. Once a wealth of information had been gathered, they would examine it by asking two questions: What do I see here? What is this telling me? Only after looking at patterns in the data would they begin to craft an argument.

In this approach to teaching, the skill my students practiced most was not cobbling together arguments intended to support their assumptions, but rather seeing reality as accurately as possible. I didn't stop teaching my students to express their views with evidence, clarity, and eloquence. But the skill I wanted them to master was looking at texts or data or the world itself with keen powers of observation and listing their observations before asking, "What does this all mean?"

Now it is 2018, and not a day goes by without a chorus of lamentation about the fracturing of our society, the evaporation of our sense of shared reality. I don't know all the answers, but I do know that one thing teachers can do is to ensure that the time students spend in school is spent practicing, over and over, the components of problem-solving: gathering and analyzing information, making observations, defining problems, collaborating with others, testing possible solutions, and learning from failure.

If we are to survive as a nation, then our students must learn that the goal is not to win an argument. The goal is not to define reality according to the terms of one's beliefs. The goal is to see what is around us and respond wisely.

Students shine when they work this way. I've seen teenagers in Vermont, after analyzing student data from their school, define the most critical problem not as "too many students use drugs," but as "it is almost impossible for people in our rural area to access psychiatric care." I've seen students argue for novel ways to prevent bullying, to increase attendance at girls' sports events, to slow the spread of Lyme disease, to route traffic more safely in the school parking lot. Although all these students made powerful arguments, their goal was not to argue; their goal was to solve problems.

Teachers can drive this change, and parents can play a role, too. At back-to-school night this fall, parents all over America can ask their children's teachers these questions: What kinds of problems will my child work on in this class? Will my child have opportunities to define problems that need solving?

The more that our classrooms are set up with this focus, the more hope there is that our students will come to regard themselves as American innovators working together to overcome challenges, partners in the face of a reality that we all perceive together, rather than as members of rival factions trying to score points in an endless argument.

If we can succeed in this, then perhaps our children can teach us to follow their lead.

Published in Print: October 3, 2018, as Are We Making Students Argue Too Much?

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We Spend Too Much Time Teaching Students to Argue

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Commentary Anyone who has been around American public schools recently has probably noticed that our kids spend a lot of time learning to argue. First graders practice by writing claims about the Big Bad Wolf; they might misspell "evidence," but they learn if they are going to call the wolf big and bad, they better be able to back it up.

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Children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. Here's why

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Children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. Here's why

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Change is in the air as the island state rethinks its approach to education. Image: REUTERS/Edgar Su

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Children in Singapore will no longer be ranked by exam results. Here's why

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Change is in the air as the island state rethinks its approach to education. Image: REUTERS/Edgar Su Stay up to date: Education, Skills and Learning Follow Image: Statista Image: World Economic Forum Don't miss any update on this topic Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

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How to Make Your Shift to Future-Focused Learning Successful

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How to Make Your Shift to Future-Focused Learning Successful

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In future-focused learning, learners strive together to find and solve real-world problems that matter, and I'm thrilled to take part in seeing this remarkable transformation happen in schools all over the world. Making the shift to future-focused learning should be a joyful and curious experience for both you and your learners, after all.

This November, we invite you to join us Monday Nov. 19th to Tuesday Nov. 20th. in beautiful Richmond, British Columbia for a special 2-day workshop entitled Future-Focused Learning: 10 Essential Shifts of Everyday Practice. It's designed to help guide you in your own shifts of practice and explore future-focused learning in a fun collaborative atmosphere with like-minded educators from all over the world.
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Prepare for Your Own Shift to Future-Focused Learning

Today's students will inherit a legacy of global challenges that we see and read about each day, along with new challenges that we cannot yet imagine. But K-12 educators can prepare this generation to overcome these obstacles now, in classrooms. In this workshop, participants will learn how to foster ethical and responsible global digital citizens who take positive action and solve problems that matter.

Learn 10 shifts of practice that transform teaching and learning at the classroom level.

Explore how these shifts can provide exciting challenges for your learners and transform your practice.

Experiment with micro-shift activities for transforming learning comfortably and effectively.

Learn best practices for essential questions, personalized learning, higher-order tasks, making learning intentions clear, and mindful assessment.

Discover how these shifts form a self-directed plan for meaningful and consistent professional growth.

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This 2-day workshop includes a copy of our best-selling book Future-Focused Learning. You'll discover ten core shifts of practice, alongside smaller, actionable steps, that will take the great work you are already doing and make it exceptional. Shift instruction to focus on student-centered learning competencies to support critical thinking and digital skills.
Join us November 19th-20th in Richmond, BC for this exclusive 2-day workshop, and let us show you how to make your own shift to future-focused learning. Get the workshop details here.
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How to Make Your Shift to Future-Focused Learning Successful

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In future-focused learning, learners strive together to find and solve real-world problems that matter, and I'm thrilled to take part in seeing this remarkable transformation happen in schools all over the world. Making the shift to future-focused learning should be a joyful and curious experience for both you and your learners, after all.

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The Essential Characteristics of a Modern Innovative Educator

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The Essential Characteristics of a Modern Innovative Educator

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Consider the remarkable individual we call the "modern innovative educator." For such a one, gone are the days of teaching from the hip. Today's children are, in many ways, different from any other student since the technological climate has changed so exponentially. Now our students need strategic, well-thought-out solutions that respect the culture in which they live. That's what is meant by modern innovative teaching.

We can narrow the characteristics that define this teacher down to 5 of the most crucial and relevant. Which ones do you have, and how do your students benefit most from you having them?

They Look Differently at Behaviour

The modern innovative educator thinks differently about a learner's challenging behaviour. As a result, this new lens meets kids where they are. Ross Greene 's work in changing the way we look at challenging behaviour suggests other ways of motivating them.

In-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, and coercive means as well as bribes do not solve challenging problems. In fact, they only mask them and make life easier (in the short term) for the teacher. Greene sets out to get schools to adapt a more humane way of dealing with students that have difficulties. Of course, it requires planning, time, and effort, but the results speak for themselves. Here is a success story from his website.

They Deal With Distraction Proactively

The teacher of today understands and knows how to combat the Age of Distraction . Our kids are distracted by gadgets, the media. and screens. Thus, a modern innovative educator realizes that something else is needed to increase students' attention spans.

Mindfulness practices in the curriculum make children aware of thought processes and emotional changes the moment they happen. Reflective learning also helps students connect previous learning to current experiences. We now have much more complete information of how the pre-frontal cortex develops and contributes to a learner's well-being. As such, modern educators know better than to expect their students to simply produce high test scores.

In addition to this, they also see the need for all learners to have well-balanced and healthy emotional lives. Carol Dweck's : The New Psychology for Success is another book that gives us insight into learning well.

They Challenge the Norm

You don't just stick with the status quo in modern innovative teaching. Why be content to do the same old thing all the time, getting the same old results? Innovative teachers are willing to go out and learn new tricks, expanding their own toolkit. They are lifelong learners themselves, and their outward joy of learning shows and inspires others.

The modern innovative educator learns for the sake of learning. They think of how to do things better and they practice. Additionally, they embrace systems that allow learners to take ownership of their learning. A great example is Solution Fluency , the flagship process for solving any problem you can think of.

They Can Navigate the Online World of Information

A modern innovative educator can navigate along the informational highway safely and effectively, and models such skills for all learners. Students nowadays need examples of using safe practices when browsing the Internet for school or leisure. This is also a huge part of practicing Global Digital Citizenship.

Such an individual gathers the best, most valid and reliable information to create solutions. They use collaborative tools to team with others and bring about changes that enhance the world for them and future children.

At the same time, modern teachers know their students need to learn to not fear the online world. Instead they must learn to use the information they find to the best of their ability. This is where the skills learned in practicing Information Fluency become indispensable.

They Know About Student/Tech Trust

A modern innovative educator excels at building trust with their students. By trusting students, they put the responsibility of learning where it belongs. In this way when they are gone from their learners' lives, those same learners continue to learn and love doing it. This empowers them with self-assessment and collaborative skills. They know what homework they need to do, based on their individual assessment.

Modern innovative teaching is also not so steeped in technology that it forgoes low-tech and no-tech solutions. It navigates the entire gamut of tools at its disposal. The modern innovative educator understands that technology is not the end, but rather only one of the means to empowering any learner to become their best selves.

Additional Reading

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The Essential Characteristics of a Modern Innovative Educator

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Consider the remarkable individual we call the "modern innovative educator." For such a one, gone are the days of teaching from the hip. Today's children are, in many ways, different from any other student since the technological climate has changed so exponentially. Now our students need strategic, well-thought-out solutions that respect the culture in which they live.

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Personalized-Learning Case Studies: Lessons From 3 Schools

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Personalized-Learning Case Studies: Lessons From 3 Schools

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Personalized learning is hard.

That much is clear, based on the lessons emerging from a wide variety of new models being tested in schools across the country.

But what specific hurdles do schools and educators encounter when they try to customize instruction for each student? How are leaders in the personalized-learning field responding? Is it working?

To help other K-12 educators and policymakers consider such questions, Education Week cast a spotlight on three schools, each affiliated with a prominent personalized-learning model, and each wrestling with a common implementation challenge.

Training Teachers for a Radical Change

Belmont-Cragin Elementary School | Chicago
In Chicago, the Belmont-Cragin Elementary School embraced an intensive approach to professional development, but teachers' road to implementing an entirely new instructional model turned out to be rocky. At The Urban Assembly Maker Academy in New York City, the focus has been on getting students to take responsibility for making their own way through the curriculum, which has required more hands-on direction from adults than originally anticipated. And in Fresno, Calif., the challenge has been meeting students who are academically behind where they are, while still pushing them towards graduation.

To close big achievement gaps between its students, Belmont-Cragin Elementary School in Chicago partnered with nonprofit LEAP Innovations in 2016-17 to boost its personalized learning practices. Key to the model is a six-month professional development regimen to prepare teachers for the new approach. But even with such a prolonged, intensive, and intentional agenda, Belmont-Cragin found that training teachers to put in place personalized-learning models remained a big challenge.

The school, which serves 585 students in pre-K through 8th grade, had huge gaps between students who were mastering grade-level content and students who were not. In one classroom, the gap ranged from the 70th percentile to the 7th percentile.

As part of its involvement in the LEAP Pilot Network, which pairs cohorts of schools with ed-tech companies and coaches, Principal Stacy Stewart rolled out new routines, guidelines, and procedures across the school and built in common planning time. But still, teachers "would stay in our own classrooms and focus on our own kids," said Jannette Moya, a 4th-grade teacher. "We would share what we were doing virtually, then it would stop there."

Teachers felt they needed more time in the day and follow-up training to do what they had been taught-but they were nervous about asking for help. At the same time, they were struggling to adjust to a new way of thinking about collaboration.

Stewart began having some teachers observe others during instructional time, with step-in assistance from student-teachers, followed by a question-and-answer session and the sharing of resources. And she encouraged cross-talk at weekly data-analysis meetings, whichresulted in one of the most significant shifts in the way the school educates its students.

Now, if Moya reports that some of her students are able to understand a literacy block at grade level in Spanish, but not in English, the special-education teacher can take them to his classroom for literacy lessons-no special-education status required.

"It helps us to service the kids more where their gaps are," Moya said.

Meanwhile, data from Lexia, an adaptive ed-tech tool that supports literacy instruction, showed that teachers needed more guidance in recording interventions for struggling students. From Stewart's dashboard, it looked like only 20 percent of struggling students were receiving additional small-group lessons. Teachers were taught to better differentiate between what was standard teaching, and what was above and beyond and worthy of documentation.

Stewart also brought in coaches from LEAP and Lexia throughout the school year for extra counsel-support that continues when needed.

"All of it is non-evaluative, and that's the most important part," Stewart said, meaning it won't count against teachers in their evaluations. "These teachers believe in the work, but it's not easy for them."

In 2017-18, collaboration has grown stronger. Teachers often gather in one classroom during common planning times to swap ideas, and they regularly observe each other, regardless of grade level.

"We have grown to where we feel comfortable enough to ask for what we need, and now we're working on next steps," said Moya. "We need to have an open mind, to have the mindset that there's still room to improve."

Self-Paced Learning Twists and Turns
The Urban Assembly Maker Academy | New York City
When The Urban Assembly Maker Academy in New York City, one of a network of 21 small public schools focused on cutting-edge career and technical education, opened its doors in 2014-15 to only 9th graders, it gave students more responsibility than typically needed for organizing their time. As a result, more than 70 percent regularly waited until the last minute to start work on a project-then never turned it in.

"Kids show up in 9th grade used to every adult telling them exactly what to do and when to do it," said Luke Bauer, principal of the school, which added one grade each year and now has 410 students in grades 9-12. "It's not their fault. Being able to manage their time, set goals for themselves, and know how and when to get support can be tricky."

The school, a recipient of a Carnegie Corporation Opportunity by Design grant, isn't the only competency-based model to struggle with teaching students to effectively pace themselves.

One of the RAND Corporation's recent studies found students at schools receiving Next Generation Learning Challenges grants for personalized-learning initiatives also failed to complete work at an acceptable pace. The report found the grading systems used were difficult to explain to parents and community members.

Bauer recalled experiencing those issues initially, which he said was "a little morale-killing for a new school."

Andrew Calkins, the director of the learning challenges program, said students may struggle with pacing because for the first time they're being asked to manage their own learning. "These are exactly the skills that students need to be developing today," he said.

These days, more than 70 percent of students at The Urban Assembly Maker turn in their work on time. The turnaround is due mainly to a strong advisory program. Weekly check-ins called "self-awareness days" pose multiple questions to students, such as "Have you come across any challenges in your projects?" and "What resources could you use to figure out those challenges?"

Students also are given a checklist with key benchmarks and dates-for planning purposes only-to meet project deadlines.

Because an inconsistent number of standards required for mastery in different subjects led to confusion when students transferred to other schools, the school ultimately simplified its grading process and converted an overall rubric score to a traditional 0-100 scale.

As for difficulty explaining competency-based grading systems to parents, Josh Lapidus, a 9th-grade social studies teacher, said the barrier has been language that leans too academic.

The school is using a new program in 2017-18 called JumpRope, an interactive, standards-based platform school leaders believe more clearly articulates aggregate data that sum up student performance.

Lapidus advises other schools interested in adopting a self-paced approach to accept the iterative nature of steady-and sustainable-change.

"It's not going to be a perfectly smooth transition," he said. "Time spent developing good standards and good rubrics is time well spent."

When Students Are Below Grade Level

Aspen Valley Prep Academy | Fresno, Calif.
To give some of its students a slice of independence, Fresno's Aspen Valley Prep Academy wanted to provide 6th through 8th grades some flexibility to work on material of their own choosing. So the preK-8 school, where more than 80 percent of students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, began using Summit Learning's personalized-learning software during the 2016-17 school year.

The platform, developed by California's Summit Public Schools charter network, in partnership with engineers from social-networking giant Facebook, is one of the highest-profile personalized-learning technologies in the field.

But Aspen Valley Prep found that implementing the software wasn't easy; with more than half of students who transfer into the school testing below grade level, there were roadblocks.

"The traditional system keeps pushing these kids through because of their age, yet they are never held accountable for learning what they haven't learned," said Hilary Witts, the director of Summit Learning at the Aspen Valley where she taught math and science to middle grades. "With so many gaps, they can't access grade-level curriculum."

Because the software platform is flexible, Witts inserted additional gap-filling learning resources so that students could go back several grade levels if necessary.

That had its challenges as well. English teacher Melani Harley recalled an 8th-grade student, frustrated and almost in tears, who loved to read but couldn't pass a grade-level punctuation content assessment because he couldn't distinguish between a noun and a verb. She gave him 6th- and 7th-grade content, but that wasn't enough. She had to go back to a 4th-grade level-the grade, she eventually discovered, that he had failed despite being moved ahead with his class-to help him catch up.

Throughout the personalized-learning movement, there are signs that such pressures are getting in the way of giving students the types of choices Aspen Valley Prep aspires to. Recent studies by the RAND Corporation for example, have consistently found that students in personalized-learning schools report being given limited choice over the material they learn and the instructional approaches they receive. As part of the Summit Learning approach, Aspen Valley Prep assigns a mentor to each student. They meet one-on-one, at least once a week, to talk about assignments, goal setting and life skills.

"These meetings tend to become really personal," said Harley.

As a result, staff said, the school has seen a cultural shift in the classroom in recent months.

"The students know where they're at, they're not embarrassed to know where they're at, and they're not embarrassed for other people to know where they're at," Witts said. "This program has totally revolutionalized their thought process."

The hope is that will consistently lead to more students becoming more accountable for their own learning-while also getting more choice over what and how they learn.

Published in Print: November 8, 2017, as Case Studies: Lessons From 3 Schools

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Clarification: An earlier version of this story should have said that as part of the Summit Learning approach, Aspen Valley Prep assigns a mentor to each student.

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personalized learning: vision vs. reality series

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Personalized-Learning Case Studies: Lessons From 3 Schools

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Personalized learning is hard. That much is clear, based on the lessons emerging from a wide variety of new models being tested in schools across the country. But what specific hurdles do schools and educators encounter when they try to customize instruction for each student? How are leaders in the personalized-learning field responding?

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What do teachers think about teaching ?

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The 7 Pillars of Classroom Wisdom for Lifelong Learning

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The 7 Pillars of Classroom Wisdom for Lifelong Learning

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Your classroom is your temple of learning, and within its walls sage classroom wisdom abounds. In this haven, your young pupils learn the paths of critical thinking and lifelong learning. Here they attain the skills that serve them faithfully long after they've left you. Who better to prepare them for such a journey than a Zen master of teaching like you?

As a teacher you'll spend your career imparting your passion for learning to all your kids. You'll inspire them, challenge them, exasperate them, and ultimately open their eyes. What's more, they'll thank you for these gifts down the road, although maybe not in person. The point is you can provide sound classroom wisdom for them right now-it's never too late. Explore the 7 pillars below to provide a foundation for lifelong learning.

The 7 Pillars of Classroom Wisdom

Below are 7 pieces of timeless classroom wisdom that embody what lifelong learning means. These tenets will guide you and your students toward a unification of goals for achieving better learning in and beyond the class.

Ask essential questions

Here's the one piece of classroom wisdom that will always benefit students. Being a lifelong learner means always being willing to ask essential and meaningful questions. These are the questions that drive learners to practice deep thinking and to search for knowledge that matters. Deep questioning leads to exceptional thinking when answers lead to more questions and more in-depth inquiry.

Embrace mistakes

At some point, every learner will make a mistake. Depending on where the student is at personally and academically, it may seem like the end of the world to them. However, it's actually a beginning of sorts. Every student in every classroom has the right to be able to learn from errors, and to know that mistakes don't define us-what we do with them does. Be sure to support "useful failure" in your teaching.

Lift up others

Part of maintaining a safe learning environment is encouraging your learners to be supportive peers. In a classroom of diverse and unique individuals, everyone will both triumph and struggle repeatedly. Some will learn faster than others and some will doubt themselves more. In the end, you are all there to learn. Showing support for each other in tough times makes that journey more rewarding.

Open your mind and heart

We often say that the Essential Fluencies aren't about hardware, but rather about headware and heartware. Lifelong learners always use the head and heart in equal measure, and keep both wide open to new discoveries and experiences. The classroom wisdom you give your learners here is this: be open to transformation. It comes through the process of learning, unlearning, and learning all over again.

Value teamwork

One of the hallmarks of modern learning is the ability to collaborate with real and virtual partners. Many hands make light work-and in the case of your learners, more enjoyable work as well. Collaboration Fluency is a process full of classroom wisdom on building lifelong learning skills through stellar teamwork. Make it part of your daily practices to find ways for your learners to explore group work.

Stay curious

The day we stop being curious is indeed the day we stop learning. Life will present us with choices as to how we react to occurrences and situations that shape that journey. Our students are on a journey of learning in school that continues well beyond the classroom walls. A healthy and positive curiosity mindset is the greatest gift we can give them to continue that journey with.

Be globally minded

The Global Digital Citizen understands that we can govern technology for the benefit of both ourselves and others. It is a citizen that views the world as an interconnected community. Additionally, they realize we share technological and human experiences regardless of culture, status, or political/religious beliefs. These are the kinds of citizens we work for our students to become. And it begins in your classroom.
What are the tidbits of classroom wisdom you would want to share with every teacher and student?
Additional Reading

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The 7 Pillars of Classroom Wisdom for Lifelong Learning

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Your classroom is your temple of learning, and within its walls sage classroom wisdom abounds. In this haven, your young pupils learn the paths of critical thinking and lifelong learning. Here they attain the skills that serve them faithfully long after they've left you.

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A positive article reinforcing the idea that math teaching has changed for the better (and is what we are doing now)

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First Person

I teach people how to teach math, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I've met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math anxiety. In its worst manifestations, math anxiety becomes what my colleagues and I call math trauma -a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.

When people share their stories with me, there are common themes. These include someone telling them they were "not good at math," panicking over timed math tests, or getting stuck on some math topic and struggling to move past it. The topics can be as broad as fractions or an entire class, such as algebra or geometry.

The notion of who is-and isn't-a math person drives the research I do with my colleagues Shannon Sweeny and Chris Willingham on people earning their teaching degrees.

One of the biggest challenges U.S. teacher-educators face is helping the large number of elementary teachers who are dealing with math trauma. Imagine being tasked with teaching children mathematics when it is one of your greatest personal fears.

Math trauma manifests as anxiety or dread, a debilitating fear of being wrong. This fear limits access to life paths for many people, including school and career choices.

While math trauma has multiple sources, there are some that teachers have power to influence directly, including outdated ideas of what it means to be good at math.

For instance, speed and accuracy were important in decades past when humans were the actual computers. But research has confirmed what many people share with me anecdotally: Tying speed with computation debilitates learners. People who struggle to complete a timed test of math facts often experience fear, which shuts down their working memory. This makes it all but impossible to think, which reinforces the idea that a person just can't do math-that they are not a math person.

What's more, students who succeed at tests of timed math facts may believe that being good at math means simply being fast and accurate at calculating. This belief can lead to a fragile math identity. Students fear revealing they don't know something or aren't that fast, so may shy away from more challenging work. No one wins.

The myth that fast recall of basic math facts should be drilled into children has deep and pernicious roots. It comes from the best of intentions-who wouldn't want kids to be good at calculating? But research shows that automaticity (the ability to easily recall facts, like 3 x 5 = 15) is best developed from first making sense of arithmetic operations. In other words, the first step in building a mathematical memory is understanding how that math works.

As an example, the area, array, and equal groups models in the image below represent multiplication and division fact families. These models can help students focus on making sense of the related facts 3 x 5 = 15, 5 x 3 = 15, 15 ÷ 3 = 5, and 15 ÷ 5 = 3. They can be used to assess fact fluency and automaticity.

Skipping the sensemaking step makes for fragile understanding and cognitively expensive memorization. When someone only memorizes, every new fact is like an island unto itself, and is more readily forgotten. In contrast, understanding patterns in math facts compresses the cognitive load required to recall related facts. Sensemaking promotes deep, robust, and flexible understanding, allowing people to apply what they know to new problems.

So what can teachers do to support fact fluency?

First, find the wonder and joy. Games and puzzles that get people playing with numbers, such as KenKen or facts-based card games, create an intellectual need to use math facts that helps kids develop fact fluency. Asking kids to explain their thinking-using words, pictures or objects-validates the importance of their ideas.

Reframe mistakes as explorations. Not having a correct answer doesn't mean all thinking is incorrect. Asking kids to explain their thinking also helps in understanding what they know now, and what they might learn next. Questions about how a kid got an answer can get them thinking about what does not quite work and is worthy of revision. When you ask these questions, it's good to have a poker face; if you broadcast that an answer is wrong or right, it can reinforce the belief that only right answers count.

Second, do no harm. It's important that teachers avoid giving kids messages that they are not math people. This can have a negative impact on kids' beliefs about their own ability to learn. Also, beware claims that kids must suffer to learn mathematics.

Teachers can help parents by clarifying that while mathematics may not have changed, teaching and learning methods have. For many adults, today's math classes are very different from those we experienced as children. U.S. schools have moved away from speed and accuracy-sometimes called "drill and kill"-and toward discussing and making sense of mathematics.

Many parents express concern that, whereas they had to learn "only one way" of solving problems, their children now must learn several. This is a valid fear for parents who struggled to use mathematics that made little sense to them-they envision the problem compounded for their children. They need to know that multiple methods are not intended for rote memorization, but rather to express and honor the different ways children come to understand mathematics.

Mathematics teacher educators are in agreement that changes supporting teaching and learning for sensemaking are helpful. We now seek more meaning in what children are learning, knowing that deeper understanding comes from connecting multiple ways to solve problems. And we learn much better from a sense of joy and wonder than from fear or dread.

This doesn't mean that students won't ever struggle in a math classroom. But it's important to differentiate productive struggle, which helps kids develop persistent mindsets in learning mathematics, from debilitating struggle. We can help our students by normalizing the confusion we experience when we are first learning something new. We can celebrate the clarification that comes with making sense of mathematical work. And we can remind students that anything we struggle to learn becomes a mighty achievement.

If you recognize that you are a survivor of math trauma, take heart. You are not alone, and there are ways to heal. It starts with understanding that mathematics is broad and beautiful-most of us are much more mathematical than we think. Find ways to play with math and look to learn from your students-they are often our best teachers. Doing math-with wonder, productive struggle, and the joy of discovery-is the best way to get better at it.
A previous version of this piece was published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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How to Help Students Heal From 'Math Trauma'

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First Person I teach people how to teach math, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I've met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math anxiety. In its worst manifestations, math anxiety becomes what my colleagues and I call math trauma -a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.

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We are living through some unprecedentedly complicated times. The speed and quantity of information - plus a population headed towards 8 billion humans - means the constant barrage of data is increasing in volume and scope. We can know more, in more detail, about people near and far. And it's stressful. Once, an event like the Thai soccer team getting stuck in a cave would have gotten some coverage in the daily newspaper; in 2018, you could follow along in detail.

Because these stressful news events are often far away and pop up more frequently, it can make us simultaneously informed and disempowered. There's plenty to worry about, which can be dispiriting and depressing. Indeed, over 1 billion earthlings currently suffer from anxiety and depression. That's where giving comes in.

"We've all heard that giving makes you happy and it's better to give than receive. But have you actually thought of why?" asks Jacqueline Way, founder of 365give, in her TedTalk below. She goes on to talk about how scientists have studied giving and what it does to our brains - and it does quite a bit.

"When we give, our endorphins kick in, giving us this natural high feeling. They've actually called it the 'helper's high,'" Way says.

Way details some of the other brain chemicals that are affected by giving. Oxytocin, one of the hormones involved in bonding (sometimes called the "love hormone") kicks in, and serotonin goes up. Meanwhile cortisol, which is caused by stress and has been linked to aging, goes down. Many studies back this up, including one on volunteering. "Researchers found that volunteers also scored highest on their mental health scores. The two were linked so directly that the more a person volunteered, the happier they were," wrote Jenn Savedge in Volunteer to help others (and help yourself) here on MNN.

How to get started

So, why not get some of that goodness each day? Way started doing that with a her child, Nick, when he was 3. She did all kinds of giving, as long as it included something that would help the planet, a person or an animal.

Way and her son made a list and then got started. They donated blankets to an animal rescue, they picked up trash on the beach for three minutes. Way started keeping a blog so she could record what she was doing with her son, and people all over the world were inspired by daily giving. Soon, a friend of Way's who is a teacher brought it to school. After seeing how well it worked, the teacher said: "Jacqueline, my kids are understanding how their actions can make a better world. It's connected them to each other and their community, and most importantly, it's making my classroom happy."

The 365give challenge has challenged thousands of children in dozens of schools, as well as random people who have found the site via Way's TedTalk or otherwise. If you want to improve your mood and outlook, you could join 365give, which has simple parameters:

Do something that helps the planet, a person or an animal. Go to the park and pick up a small bag of garbage, help your neighbor by bringing their empty garbage can back to their garage, tell a friend what you appreciate about them, buy a stranger a coffee. Give someone a hug. It's easy, and you'll feel great once you are done!

On the 365give site, you can map your give and see where others are giving, and share your work on social media.

Personalize the program

You may want to save money each day and then donate it to charity. (Photo: Cozine/Shutterstock)

Or, you could create your own version of the program. You could give a dollar or two a day away to interesting GoFundMe or Kickstarter campaigns, or you could put a dollar a day into a jar, and then donate larger amounts to a charity you love in your community. Or you could focus on non-monetary gifts, like baking cookies for your local volunteer fire department, giving reusable bags away to people at the grocery store, bringing a sandwich to a homeless person you see on your commute, or volunteering time to read to kids.

Consider keeping track by starting a Giving Journal where you can record what you do each day to stay motivated. Or get a few friends to join in with you and share a group text of what you did that day to keep each other going. Knowing what kinds of things your friends or family are giving each day will remind you that some days it might be something small (picking up litter at your bus stop) and others might be bigger (adopting a cat) - but it all counts. And seeing other good deeds will be a feel-great part of your day, upping your happiness as well.

"One good deed begets another" isn't just an aphorism, it's been proven. This article from Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley sums it up perfectly:

"A study by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that when one person behaves generously, it inspires observers to behave generously later, toward different people. In fact, the researchers found that altruism could spread by three degrees - from person to person to person to person. 'As a result,' they write, 'each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met.'"

So, not only is giving good for you and good for whoever or whatever you give to, but it also has positive ripple effects too.

"[Giving] is how we're going to go from anxiety and depression to happy. Together, we can all start small, and we can make the world a better world, a happier world, one give, one day at a time," says Way.

If you really want to save the world, just give

Jacqueline Way, founder of 365give, explains the "helper's high" and why doing good for others is so good for the giver, too.

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If you really want to save the world, just give

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We are living through some unprecedentedly complicated times. The speed and quantity of information - plus a population headed towards 8 billion humans - means the constant barrage of data is increasing in volume and scope. We can know more, in more detail, about people near and far. And it's stressful.

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Trans-disciplinary skills and Values

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Most educators are aware of the "Four C's" (Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication) and their importance in schools for ensuring the development of today's skills in our students ( I appreciate Will Richardson's contention that "curiosity" should be the fifth "C" and is more important than the others ). But there are other essential skills and traits that many schools teach, either through learning in the classroom or by providing extra-curricular activities, which are not as widely acknowledged, but are extremely important.

From my experience being a part of schools and visiting, I have noticed that great schools teach these essentials that are timeless:
1. The Value of Hard Work.
Easily one of my favorite quotes is from Jim Valvano:

"Hard work is no guarantee of success but a lack of hard work is a guarantee that there will be no success."

I have been very thoughtful to use the word "learning" instead of "work" in most cases, but deep learning is hard work. But success, no matter how a student defines it for themselves, is something that doesn't come without a lack of determination and effort. I have seen many people outside of education talk about students learning to be "entitled" within a school, but I believe that creating environments to ensure students have every opportunity to be successful is no more "entitled" than an employer doing things to put their employees in the best situations to be successful.

The major shift happening in education is more on what the students create with these opportunities. My friend AJ Juliani shares, "What are you doing for the students that they can be doing for themselves?" This is a great reminder on who should be doing the "work" in the classroom.

I remember in my first years of teaching a speaker joined our district and shared the following:

"Why is it at the end of the day that students walk out of school with energy and teachers are exhausted?"

It always stuck with me.

Great schools know that if you want to see the success of the teacher, watch what the students are doing, not the teacher. They emphasize the importance of work ethic to their students to create opportunities for themselves in the future.

Which leads to the next point.
2. Time Management.
Time management is not talked about enough in education although it is crucial to current and future success. When someone says, "I don't have time for this" a couple of things can be happening:

a) They don't see value.

b) They are not able to coordinate their time in a way where they can bring it to fruition.

If people see the value but can't find the time, time management is a skill that needs to be developed like any other skill.

Students develop these skills in abundance in many ways. Balancing things like school with extra-curricular activities and a personal life is not easy, but in my time as a student, I learned how to find ways to ensure that I was able to get done what needed to be completed.

Although "time management" is crucial, we have to look at what we are asking our students and decide, "is it adding to the plate or adding to the person?"

For example, the question of "homework" is one that educators have debated for years. I would say that I would lean "against" homework, but I am in no way an absolutist on the topic. I have seen teachers give homework that is meaningful and relevant to students (adds to the person) that goes beyond filling out meaningless worksheets at home (adds to the plate). Childhood only comes once, and I am a huge advocate of kids being kids. I am not sure filling their home life with extra work is beneficial, but I would suggest the book, "Ditch That Homework" by Alice Keeler and Matt Miller if you want to dig deeper into the topic.

Being said, I am not against students doing school work at home. There is a difference. I used to tell my students that they would have a certain amount of time within the classroom to complete projects or assignments, but they would have to learn to manage their time. If they didn't use it wisely, they would have to finish it elsewhere and at another time. Students would have to learn their boundaries and figure out what worked for them and how they could manage within a class.

As an adult, I have noticed that people that thrive in life are often experts at managing their time and make every second count, with personal, professional, and leisure. This is a skill that we need to develop with our students as the positive impact goes way beyond "work."
3. Humility.
I recently shared this article, " Why Humble Leaders Make the Best Leaders " and I loved these key points of "humble leadership":

Do they credit others? If a candidate fails to acknowledge the contributions of others in helping to achieve their successes, it's a red flag.

Do they admit to mistakes? A humble person not only admits to making mistakes; they seek to understand what they did wrong and what they should change going forward. Be especially careful of candidates who blame others and exempt themselves from responsibility.

Do they accept constructive feedback? Does the candidate admit to receiving criticism in previous jobs? How did they respond? Ideally, the candidate will acknowledge the validity of the feedback and demonstrate a thoughtful response...

Do they strive to overcome their weaknesses? We all have skill gaps. Has the candidate recognized their own and sought to improve?

If you read all of those points, these are all skills that great schools teach students, consistently and with purpose.

A mantra I have for myself and share with those that I advise in their careers is "Be humble, or you will be humbled." This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have confidence, but confidence is being comfortable with knowing you have weaknesses, that you can always get better, and that you can learn from every interaction and person you can encounter. These are skills that all students and adults can benefit.
4. Kindness
This might seem like "fluff" but I have noticed schools having a focus on teaching students to not only accept other students but to celebrate their gifts and unique abilities. I remember walking through a school hallway at the end of the day after a professional learning opportunity and noticed students writing notes to every single student in their school and posting it on their locker to share what they appreciated about them. It was a direct result of a teacher's influence and program in school.

Kindness does not equal weakness. Being kind when someone isn't is often a sign of tremendous strength. We start in kindergarten teaching our students the importance of sharing and all through high school, and beyond, great schools teach the importance of collaboration through active listening and honoring the voice of others and being respectful.

Kindness is a tremendous strength that great schools emphasize often.

The experience and traits I share are not the experiences of every single student and parent within schools. There is a reason I continuously said "great schools." Culture is not something we only develop with the adults but with and for our students as well.

Like the "Four C's" these skills and traits should be something that we focus on to develop within our students as these attributes developed, in a positive manner, will have an enormous impact on their future and the positive environment of our schools today.

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4 Skills and Traits Great Schools Teach That Will Always be Essential

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Most educators are aware of the "Four C's" (Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication) and their importance in schools for ensuring the development of today's skills in our students ( I appreciate Will Richardson's contention that "curiosity" should be the fifth "C" and is more important than the others ).

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Check in Check out

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Students can be motivated to improve classroom behaviors if they have both a clear roadmap of the teacher's behavioral expectations and incentives to work toward those behavioral goals. This modified version of Check-In/Check-Out (CI/CO) is a simple behavioral intervention package designed for use during a single 30- to 90-minute classroom period (Dart, Cook, Collins, Gresham & Chenier, 2012). The teacher checks in with the student to set behavioral goals at the start of the period, then checks out with the student at the close of the period to rate that student's conduct and award points or other incentives earned for attaining behavioral goal(s).

Preparation. In preparation for using CI/CO, the teacher:

Procedure. During any class session or other evaluation period when CI/CO is in effect, the teacher follows these 3 steps:

1. Check-In. At the start of the class session, the teacher meets briefly with the student to review the behavioral goals on the Behavior Report Card and to provide encouragement. The teacher also prompts the student to set a behavioral goal on at least one of the target behaviors (e.g., "Today I will not leave my seat once without permission.").

2. Monitoring/Evaluation. During the session, the teacher observes the student's behaviors. At the end of the session, the teacher rates the student's behaviors on the Behavior Report Card.

3. Check-Out. At the end of the class session, the teacher again meets briefly with the student. The student reports out on whether he or she was able to attain the behavioral goal(s) discussed at check-in. The teacher then shares the BRC ratings. If the student has earned a reward/incentive, the teacher awards that reward and praises the student. If the student fails to earn the reward, the teacher provides encouragement about success in a future session.

References

Dart, E. H., Cook, C. R., Collins, T. A., Gresham, F. M., & Chenier, J. S. (2012). Test driving interventions to increase treatment integrity and student outcomes. School Psychology Review, 41, 467-481.

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How To: Manage Problem Behaviors: Check-In/Check-Out

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Students can be motivated to improve classroom behaviors if they have both a clear roadmap of the teacher's behavioral expectations and incentives to work toward those behavioral goals. This modified version of Check-In/Check-Out (CI/CO) is a simple behavioral intervention package designed for use during a single 30- to 90-minute classroom period (Dart, Cook, Collins, Gresham & Chenier, 2012).

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How to Deal with Rebellious (But Smart!) Students in Your Classroom

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How to Deal with Rebellious (But Smart!) Students in Your Classroom

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Rebellion in the Classroom

The common stereotype of the 'problem student' is a child who consistently disrupts lessons, irritates or bullies other students, and routinely fails assignments (and doesn't seem to care about their dismal grades). But what about problem students who perform extremely well academically? Students of this kind are much more complex. They possess all the traits of a child who clearly has no interest in learning, yet their strong test scores and obvious intelligence serve as proof of their talent and skills.

If you find yourself with a child who is clearly intelligent but also insistent on misbehaving, take a look at the tips and strategies listed below for some inspiration on how to deal with these students and unlock their full potential.

Understand the Source of the Problem

This approach works well for all students, not just your smart ones. Finding the root of a student's misbehavior is a huge step towards understanding and putting a stop to it.

Especially in the case of intelligent students, classroom misbehavior may be caused by a lack of engagement. Assignments are simply too easy, and the student will seek out another form of mental stimulation, occasionally in the form of causing trouble for you and your other students. For these students, acting rebellious is a means of proving how smart they are.

For other students, their behavior may be a result of circumstances outside of the classroom, particularly at home. Children who have a difficult home life may project their frustrations and problems onto other students. In some cases, children assume that what they witness at home is par for the course and may not even realize that their classroom behavior is unacceptable.

No matter the cause of your students' misbehavior, taking the time to understand their situation and demonstrating how much you care is crucial to managing their conduct. When you take the time to show that you truly care and want to help, students will generally respond well to such affection. Establishing yourself as a trustworthy and caring individual proves to your students that you are worthy of respect.

Even if you fail to form a close relationship with your problem students, your understanding of the situation will at the very least provide you with some insight as to how to respond to a child's actions in the future.

Avoid a Power Struggle

As difficult as it may seem, keeping your cool and taking the high road is absolutely essential in these situations. Troublesome students - especially those with above-average intelligence - take pleasure in knowing that they have pushed your buttons, and if they sense that they have irritated you, they will only increase their efforts. Even something as subtle as an eye roll or annoyed sigh will betray your frustration, so be extra careful in never letting them see you sweat.

No matter how impudent a student may be acting, you are the adult and you cannot stoop to their level. You can avoid conflicts by using proper language; instead of accusatory 'you' statements, focus on using 'I' statements so that your student does not become defensive.

You'll also need to accept the fact that you won't always get the last word. Having the final say may seem important from a power standpoint, but in effect, it simply prolongs the argument and will diminish your standing in the classroom among all of your students, not just the rebellious ones.

Students feed off the reactions of the elders, and keeping cool will go a long way in calming your students and resolving classroom conflicts.

Keep Them Engaged

If you have a student who frequently aces exams and finishes assignments before the rest of the class but still causes trouble, it is entirely possible that this student is simply bored. Without an academic challenge, the child is left to create his or her own amusement. Whether a student's disruptive behavior stems from boredom or some other cause, engaging and innovative classroom modifications help keep these children focused on their classwork and not on their misbehavior.

If standard classroom assignments are still too easy for your rebellious students, you can also devise entirely new activities specifically tailored for their interests. If your student is an especially avid reader, pick out a few challenging books and tell him or her to read these stories if they finish their assignments early. If your student is more interested in outer space, draw up some astronomy plans and offer them as a reward for good behavior.

While you should be careful not to make it seem like you are rewarding misbehavior with special attention, unique and entertaining assignments for your gifted problem students are an excellent way to boost their interest and cut down on their boredom.

Rebellious and intelligent students pose a unique challenge for teachers, but with engaging assignments and mutual understanding, you can put an end to their misbehavior and encourage their academic growth.

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how to deal with rebellious (but smart!) students in your classroom  | study.com

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How to Deal with Rebellious (But Smart!) Students in Your Classroom | Study.com

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The common stereotype of the 'problem student' is a child who consistently disrupts lessons, irritates or bullies other students, and routinely fails assignments (and doesn't seem to care about their dismal grades). But what about problem students who perform extremely well academically? Students of this kind are much more complex.

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The Food and Drug Administration announced aggressive steps aimed at curbing teen vaping and smoking Thursday, including restrictions on flavored and menthol products that may be especially appealing to minors.

The plan's announcement came as new federal data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey showed increasing rates in youth e-cigarette use, which FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has labeled an epidemic. In addition to concerns about the nicotine in vaping products, public health officials have found they can be a stepping stone to use of traditional cigarettes by young people who might not have otherwise started smoking.

More than 3.6 million middle and high school students surveyed in 2018 reported they had used an e-cigarette in 2018, a sharp increase from the 1.5 million students who reported use in the last 30 days in 2017, the data show. Teens also reported more frequent use of e-cigarettes and flavored nicotine products.

"These increases must stop," Gottlieb said in announcing the FDA plan. "And the bottom line is this: I will not allow a generation of children to become addicted to nicotine through e-cigarettes. We won't let this pool of kids, a pool of future potential smokers, of future disease and death, to continue to build. We'll take whatever action is necessary to stop these trends from continuing."

Gottlieb said he hears regularly from parents and teachers concerned about "the epidemic use of electronic cigarettes and nicotine addiction among kids." And principals have told Education Week that vaping, and particularly the use of small, concealable devices like Juuls, have created new discipline and student health concerns that they struggle to keep up with.

While devices like Juul, a vaping device that could easily be mistaken for a USB flash drive, are intended to help adults stop smoking traditional cigarettes, federal regulators say they've developed a large secondary market among middle and high school students. And anti-smoking groups say many teens don't recognize they are ingesting nicotine when they use them. Both groups point at flavors, like mango and gummy bear, as part of the products' appeal to teens.

On Tuesday, Juul Labs announced voluntary plans to stop sales of flavored products in retail stores and to use more rigorous age verification for online sales.

The FDA plan would impose stricter limitations. Under the FDA plan:

Vaping cartridges in flavors other than menthol, tobacco, and mint could only be sold in locations that restrict access to customers who are 18 and older, which would eliminate many convenience stores.

Heightened measures to ensure age verification for online sales of e-cigarette and nicotine products.

The agency would ban products marketed to children through the use of "popular children's cartoon or animated characters, or names of products favored by kids like brands of candy or soda."

The agency proposes a ban on menthol in traditional cigarettes and cigars, which will surely face some resistance from adult smokers.

Photo: Marshfield High School Principal Robert Keuther displays vaping devices that were confiscated from students in Marshfield, Mass. --Steven Senne/AP
Learn more about Juul, teen vaping:
Follow @evieblad on Twitter or subscribe to Rules for Engagement to get blog posts delivered directly to your inbox.

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To Curb Youth Smoking, Vaping, FDA Announces Plan Aimed at Flavored Products

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The Food and Drug Administration announced aggressive steps aimed at curbing teen vaping and smoking Thursday, including restrictions on flavored and menthol products that may be especially appealing to minors. The plan's announcement came as new federal data from the National Youth Tobacco Survey showed increasing rates in youth e-cigarette use, which FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has labeled an epidemic.

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Changing How Educators See Negative Experiences in the Classroom

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For example, a fourth-grade teacher I'll call Jane had been teaching for nine years and was on the verge of dropping out of the profession from exhaustion. She told me, "I just don't think I can keep this up another year. I love the kids, but it seems like a thousand things a day drag me down and it doesn't seem worth it." She asked me if I had any suggestions and I offered to observe her class for a day to see what was happening to elicit this discouragement. When I arrived in her classroom, I was impressed by its organization and the aesthetic appeal.

As the day began, a string of cheerful students bounced through the door, excited to start their day. Their happiness was palpable, and it made me wonder if I was in the right classroom! Soon I saw her approach the door to greet her students with a smile and offers of hugs, handshakes and fist bumps. Once the class was underway, I noticed two students who seemed to consume all of Jane's attention. The two boys were constantly bickering with each other or other students, dominating Jane's time and attention. Before anything had even happened that morning, I could see tension arise in Jane as she braced herself to deal with the two of them. She was hypervigilant, constantly glancing at them warily throughout the morning, ready to pounce if they got out of line. While it was obviously incredibly stressful to constantly monitor these two, the other students were deeply engaged in learning and I observed several moments of joy and enthusiasm shared by Jane and her other students.

After class was over, we sat down to discuss my observations. The first thing she said was, "Oh no, what a horrible day. I am so exhausted. Sorry you had to watch that." I was flabbergasted because I didn't really think it was that bad at all. "Jane, I was actually about to tell you what a wonderful class you have." She was shocked. "Really? What do you mean? Carl and Joey were constantly bickering and bothering the other students. It was really getting on my nerves." I told her that I thought their behavior was pretty normal for that age and that I noticed so many wonderful learning moments that their disruptions seemed minor. I also explained the negative attribution bias.

She was astonished to learn that she had focused so much on the few challenging students that she had missed out on celebrating the many joyful learning moments that had occurred. I offered a practice to help her change this habit. "Each day, after your class is over, write down all the good things that happened that day. You can even include your students in this process by putting up a paper on the wall and inviting everyone to write good things that happen each day. At the end of the day, look at the list with the class and review them."

She took to this suggestion with relish and created a whole bulletin board devoted to this activity. At the top she put "GOOD THINGS HAPPEN" in large, colorful letters. Students were invited to write and draw about good things that happened on small pieces of paper that were posted each day. To her surprise, the first day there were 15 good things posted and more than half of them had been written by the students. Furthermore, Carl and Joey got excited about this activity and wanted to be part of making good things happen. Jane realized that this was an opportunity for encouraging their pro-social behavior. She began catching them when they were doing the right thing, rather than being constantly alert to their tendencies to get in trouble. Reinforcing their positive behavior with recognition made a big difference, and soon they were as engaged as the rest of her students.

Several months later I checked in with Jane to see how things were going. Beaming, she laughed, "I love my job! We're having so much fun. I can't believe how things turned around." She also told me how her relationships with Carl and Joey had improved. "I actually really like them now. I see that they were just more immature than the others and needed direction and positive attention." Jane had recognized their needs and was able to show compassion to them, rather than reinforcing their negative behaviors.

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Changing How Educators See Negative Experiences in the Classroom

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For example, a fourth-grade teacher I'll call Jane had been teaching for nine years and was on the verge of dropping out of the profession from exhaustion. She told me, "I just don't think I can keep this up another year.

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Power for Some, Peril for Others

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Makerspace Activities Mold Fearless Writers

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Makerspace Activities Mold Fearless Writers

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Makerspace Activities Mold Fearless Writers

Angela Mullennix

Makerspaces are places where students are free to explore, to create, and most important, to make something related to the content they are studying. Working with a variety of no- to low- to high-tech resources, students demonstrate the five C s-collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking, and confidence. Traditionally, makerspaces have been venues for exploration of STEM content, but why limit makerspaces as a tool for engagement and discovery to only select content areas? As an English teacher for secondary and higher education for more than 10 years, I understand the reluctance many students feel when asked to write. What if we thought of writing as making and created makerspaces stocked with various tools for students to write with, write on, and construct their ideas? Out of this question, "make writing toolkits" idea was born.

Currently, I'm an academic lead teacher/instructional coach at a highly unique campus in a public school district outside of Houston, Tex. The campus houses five different programs: an alternative education program (grades 9-12), the discipline program (grades 6-12), an early learning center (6 weeks-preK), a special needs school, and an innovative 18+ transition program. All five programs use the make writing toolkits, which shows that they are a tool that can work with students of all ages.

What's in the Box

The most common question I get about make writing toolkits is, what's in them? Each toolkit comes in a clear plastic 44-quart container. Each container has a variety of sticky notes in different colors and sizes, white t-shirts, white bandannas, white hats, fabric markers, journal books, legal pads, sidewalk chalk, mini white boards, dry-erase markers and erasers, story cubes (a set of nine, six-sided die with simple pictures on each side that are meant to inspire plot points in a story), toy building bricks, molding clay, varied highlighters and permanent markers, binder rings, sticky chart paper, art roll paper, and register tape. Additionally, I created a "make writing binder" for each toolkit. The binder contains images and ideas for teachers who are unsure how to use the toolkit within their content area. After all, the purpose of the make writing toolkits is to help teachers incorporate more writing into their classrooms in engaging, meaningful ways that encourage students to write without hesitation.

Writing Becomes Playful

Unlike a traditional makerspace, which is typically a transformed library or science lab area, the make writing toolkits are mobile. The containers stack on a cart that gets wheeled to the teacher's classroom. Deciding where to store the kits depends on who maintains and replenishes the kits' contents. Otherwise, the toolkits are simple to manage and extremely educator- and student-friendly.

From personal experience, I've noticed that the supplies in the toolkits appeal to the students because students-especially young, apprehensive writers-feel less pressure when writing on and with nontraditional items.

Students have written literary analyses on a t-shirt instead of as a typed paper; used building bricks to write fractions or parts of speech; written math problems on register tape; recreated maps, historical events, or the plot of a story using molding clay; mapped story elements on art roll paper; or taken the sidewalk chalk outside to write on the pavement. Regardless of the method, students always seem to enjoy writing because it is interwoven with play and no longer a chore. Students actually want to express their thoughts; having choice in how that expression happens becomes a powerful learning experience.

Can It Be Assessed?

Aside from what's in the kits, the next most common question I get is about how to assess make writing toolkit products. In order to value the writing students are doing in these makerspaces, the writing must be assessed; it can't just be busy work. You can decide whether the products students create are part of a formative assessment toward a broader goal or if the product itself is the summative evidence of understanding. In the latter case, treat these products as you would any other writing assessment. Use a rubric to establish criteria for success, focusing on demonstration of understanding, not the means of presentation.

Write Fearlessly

I firmly believe that when students move beyond the anxiety associated with writing, they can produce meaningful work that expresses their knowledge. Combining making with learning to write and writing to learn calls on teachers to shift mindsets, from traditional ways of learning that may alienate many reluctant writers to innovative practices that empower all students.

Angela Mullennix is an instructional coach at Cameron Elementary with Moore County Schools in North Carolina. She holds a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of North Carolina-Fayetteville State University and a masters degree in teaching from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. With more than 10 years' experience in preK-12 and higher education, Mullennix has published and presented research on innovative learning opportunities and instructional techniques. Follow her on Twitter: @DocAngMullennix

ASCD Express, Vol. 14, No. 5. Copyright 2018 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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Makerspace Activities Mold Fearless Writers

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Makerspace Activities Mold Fearless Writers Angela Mullennix Makerspaces are places where students are free to explore, to create, and most important, to make something related to the content they are studying. Working with a variety of no- to low- to high-tech resources, students demonstrate the five C s-collaboration, creativity, communication, critical thinking, and confidence.

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4 Amazing Infographic Tools for Producing Visual Learning

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4 Amazing Infographic Tools for Producing Visual Learning

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We are all visual learners. If you want to share vital data or entertain people in a visually appealing and creatively imagined way, infographics are the way to go. With the amazing infographic tools we have available online today, creating them is easier than ever.

Learning Styles Online has this to say about visual learning:
"If you use the visual style, you prefer using images, pictures, colors, and maps to organize information and communicate with others. You can easily visualize objects, plans, and outcomes in your mind's eye. You also have a good spatial sense ..."
This is what developing infographics takes to make them engaging and effective, and having the right tools guides learners through the process as they learn layout and visual design for how best to share content. Like we said, there are plenty of amazing infographic tools out there to get you started.

The ones we've got for you below all let your learners do some powerful stuff, even in their free baseline versions. Explore what they can do and let your learners give them a test drive for some personal or class projects that involve infographics.

4 Amazing Infographic Tools to Explore

Venngage-Venngage lets you choose from more than 100 infographic templates for creating your infographics. Once you've got your template picked, you can add elements and customize to your heart's content. You can also design reports, posters, ads, and social media graphics.

Canva-You can create so much with Canva, including infographics. They use a standard 800px by 2000px format and offer tons of different templates. In addition, you can also choose hundreds of different elements and photos to add for free.

Visme-Visme has, in addition to a remarkable range of templates, a tremendous level of options for customizing them. It lets you add shapes, images, icons, videos, charts, graphs, audio, and even 3rd party content. Visme also does reports, presentations, web content, wireframes, and more.

Piktochart-Piktochart updates their template database constantly so that you never run out of options. It lets you create great infographics, presentations, and printables with lots of add-ons and custom options. Then you can share them with a link, through social media, or by using their slideshow-based presentation mode.

Other Amazing Infographic Tools

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4 Amazing Infographic Tools for Producing Visual Learning

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We are all visual learners. If you want to share vital data or entertain people in a visually appealing and creatively imagined way, infographics are the way to go. With the amazing infographic tools we have available online today, creating them is easier than ever.