In her Editor’s Note in Kappan, Teresa Preston reports on a Populace survey revealing a dramatic shift in public opinion on the importance of career preparation versus college preparation by K-12 schools. Asked to rank-order 57 priorities for public schools, here’s the change from the 2019 to the 2022 survey:
• 2019:
In this SSRN paper, Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) say that in the current debate on the uses and abuses of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs), educators haven’t paid enough attention to some important classroom applications. The authors identify five pedagogical strategies that are not used enough in classrooms because they are time-consuming and hard to implement – and show how the new bots can be helpful:
• Generating examples to help students understand difficult and abstract concepts – The best way to explain new and challenging material is to give students a number of examples. “If students are presented with only one example,” say Mollick and Mollick, “they may focus on the superficial details of that example and not get at the deeper concept. Multiple examples of a single concept can help students decontextualize the idea from the example, leading to better recall and understanding.”
Ideally, examples provide a real-world context, anchor abstract ideas in an analogy or story, ground concepts in engaging details, reveal complexity, highlight nuances, help students think critically, and support the transfer of learning to new situations. These demanding criteria show how difficult it is for teachers to generate enough high-quality examples. That’s where the bots come in. All a teacher needs to do is specify the concept, ask for varied examples, and describe the grade level of students and the style of writing required. Click on the full article below for examples on the concept of opportunity costs.
Of course the teacher needs to evaluate the examples generated: Are they factually correct? Are they relevant? Do they have enough detail? Will students find them interesting? Do they connect the abstract to the concrete? Having narrowed down to a good list of examples and presented them to a class, the teacher might then ask students what the examples have in common, have them compare and contrast several, and ask which different aspects of the concept each example highlights.
• Providing varied explanations and analogies to address student misconceptions – Clear explanations are central to good teaching, helping students build mental maps and achieve deeper understanding. But good explanations must be built on students’ prior knowledge, take into account likely misconceptions, plan a step-by-step approach with organizational cues so students can follow along, and provide concrete details and analogies. LLMs can tackle these exacting demands, quickly generating explanations and analogies for a specific grade level and level of understanding. See the article link for a suggested explanation of the concept of photosynthesis for elementary students.
• Producing low-stakes tests so students can practice retrieving information – Checking for understanding is a proven method of cementing material in long-term memory. But generating high-quality tests, quizzes, and mid-lesson “hinge” questions (to see if students are ready to move on to a new topic) is “an effortful task,” say Mollick and Mollick. LLMs can quickly generate diagnostic retrieval exercises. See the article link for examples of quizzes on U.S. history and high-school biology.
• Assessing students’ knowledge gaps to guide instructors’ next steps – The best way for teachers to know what to do next is asking students questions like these:
• Creating distributed practice exercises to reinforce learning – “Students need to practice retrieving information not just once but multiple times during a course,” say Mollick and Mollick. It’s also important for students to continuously make connections among the different concepts and skills they’ve learned. But even when students know about the value of distributed practice, they continue to “cram” for tests at the last minute, which means teachers must be intentional about distributing practice. To do so, teachers need to know:
LLMs can be very helpful designing and scheduling quick quizzes spread out over days, weeks, and months, providing an effective way to lodge concepts and skills in students’ long-term memory. See the article link for examples of distributed practice during a unit on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution.
from Marshall Memo: An Online Course for Teens on Happiness
In this Washington Post article, Lindsey Bever reports on how the most popular course at Yale – Psychology and the Good Life – has been retooled into a free, online, six-week course for teenagers. It uses TikTok-length videos to highlight common misconceptions about happiness and teach about the behaviors, feelings, and thoughts that produce mental well-being.
There’s an urgent need for this kind of intervention, say mental health professionals, because U.S. adolescents are in a mental health crisis. It was in full swing before the pandemic; in 2019, 44 percent of high-school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, with nearly 20 percent saying they had considered suicide, and 9 percent attempting to end their lives. Covid-19 made things worse, with elevated levels of anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-injury, and suicidal ideation. “The rites of passage for teenage-hood were disrupted,” says psychologist/author Mary Alvord. Young people missed out on parties, homecoming dances, graduation ceremonies, and everyday interactions with their peers.
“We’re not taking care of our young people today if we’re not giving them strategies to navigate all the complex societal pressures that they face,” says Laurie Santos, the Yale psychology professor who taught the original happiness course. “We need to know the appropriate ways to listen to them and to react to them, so that we can understand the message that things like sadness or anxiety or anger might be sending and then channel them in an appropriate direction.”
Santos filmed the lectures for the updated version of her Yale course before a group of high-school students and asked for their reactions and questions. Here are some of the key concepts in the teen course she and her colleagues created:
“Yale’s Hugely Popular Happiness Course Is Revamped for Teens” by Lindsey Bever in The Washington Post, January 29, 2023
In this Boston Globe article, Maitland Jones Jr. revisits his highly publicized firing after many of his NYU students complained that he was giving too many low grades in his organic chemistry course. For years, says Jones, he had engineered the difficulty of his tests so the average grade was 65, or a B/B-. There were complaints, but Jones believed that getting a 65 wasn’t the end of the world – and certainly wouldn’t prevent a student from getting into medical school. “It has always seemed to me,” he says, “that getting about two-thirds of difficult material right was actually pretty good in an introductory course.”
But over the last decade, students’ grades on his tests declined, and then plummeted during the pandemic. Jones made his tests easier, but grades were still low. As Covid waned, he continued to give less-demanding tests, but students’ grades didn’t rebound. A bi-modal distribution emerged: there were single-digit grades and zeroes, and at the upper end of the distribution, where high-achieving students had previously been scoring in the 90s, there were a number of 100s.
The very low grades were obviously a cause for concern, but Jones was also unhappy about the 100s. Why? Because with a score of 100, students believed there was nothing more to learn. Previously, when students scored in the 90s on a harder test, they would scrutinize the questions they got wrong – questions designed to get them working at the limits of their knowledge – and learned from them by further study, coming to office hours, re-watching lecture videos. High-scoring students were stretched by that process, says Jones, and serious learning took place.
Reflecting on the bitter complaints he received about his tough grading policies at NYU, Jones is concerned about students’ ability to handle difficulty and failure. “I fear that many of today’s students have little or no experience in climbing out of holes,” he says, “or recovering from adversity. Possibly, they have never felt they were in a hole. Digging out of holes is a critical life skill.”
When Jones was in college, he hit the wall in difficult math courses. “I could struggle and pass,” he says, “but not easily. I could not internalize the concepts and had to survive by blindly learning how to solve certain kinds of problems. Anything else was out of reach. It was clear that for me, heading toward math and physics was a bad idea. I wish that weren’t true, but it was.”
For students who were getting zeroes or single-digit scores in his organic chemistry course, the first step is “not complicated,” says Jones: “Go to class. Sit in front. Go to office hours with your problems… Take notes.” And don’t be afraid to say you’re struggling and ask for help. “If you follow those suggestions and things still don’t work, do what I did and change direction. You are not a bad person if you don’t fully grasp chemistry; go find what does work for you. Among other things, college is for discovering what you were born to do.”
“I Got a 65 on My Chemistry Exam. Is My Future Ruined?” by Maitland Jones Jr. in The Boston Globe, February 14, 2023
In this Edutopia article, Laura McKenna interviews cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia) on what students need to learn about taking good notes, mastering complex texts, and studying for tests. Some excerpts:
• Misplaced confidence – Willingham’s university students were sure their study strategies worked: underlining, highlighting, reading texts two or three times. When he taught them better strategies, they didn’t follow up. Asked why, they said, “Yeah, I know you told me that. And I tried it, and it just seemed stupid. It didn’t feel like it was working at all.”
What’s going on? Willingham suggests an analogy with pushups. Doing them properly – with your toes on the ground and your arms lifting your whole body – is difficult for a novice. Doing them with your knees on the ground is easier and you can do a lot, so it seems like a good way to build strength and stamina.
But it’s not; to improve, it’s best to do regular pushups, perhaps supplemented by the super-hard version – launching yourself into the air and clapping your hands. “Students gravitate toward cognitive strategies that are the mental equivalent of pushups on your knees,” says Willingham. “It feels like things are going great, and it’s also not that difficult, so it seems like a great strategy – but a more challenging approach will pay off more in the long run.”
• Learning strategies early – By the time they’re high-school seniors, says Willingham, we expect students to be able to study independently, commit material to memory, resist distractions, avoid procrastination, and be resourceful when they’re stuck. “But the brain doesn’t come with a user’s manual,” he says, “and independent learning calls for many separate skills.” This is especially true with strategies for remembering important material. Students should be learning these strategies as early as fourth or fifth grade.
• Taking lecture notes – Students think classroom lectures are like watching a movie, where the plot unfolds sequentially. “Lectures are not structured that way,” says Willingham, “they’re structured as a hierarchy, not a narrative.” A tree is a better analogy – a trunk and several branches with causal connections among the main arguments and facts. The challenge with note-taking is not to write everything down but to see and record those connections.
“That’s actually serious mental work,” he says. “You have to listen to content which is new to you – and usually quite complicated. You have to decide what’s important enough to write down, and then decide how you’re going to phrase it. You have to then either type it or physically write it out. You’re shifting attention between the instructor and your notes and visual aids. And crucially, you don’t get to decide how quickly or slowly you do it. The teacher is setting the pace.” No wonder so many students are on cognitive overload.
The best note-taking strategy, says Willingham, is not trying to be a courtroom stenographer but getting down what you’re thinking: “That will ensure that the notes are actually serving the purpose,” he says. “You’re actually going to be listening, processing, and understanding, and that’s going to help you remember better.”
• Reading matter – Textbook chapters, like classroom lectures, are hierarchical, and students need strategies like SQ3R to attack them. Two key skills: (a) Quickly scanning the passage’s subheadings and generating a few questions; and then (b) actively engaging with the text, looking for answers to your questions and predictions, not just slogging through.
• The retrieval effect – Reviewing and highlighting notes the night before a test gives students “the illusion of mastery,” says Willingham. It’s far more effective to read a passage, cover it, and test yourself. “Actively trying to retrieve things from memory is a good way to cement things into memory,” he says. It gets the student thinking about the meaning and uses a proven strategy to commit material to memory.
But studying this way is difficult, like doing pushups with hand-clapping. “Thinking about what things mean is hard,” says Willingham. “Quizzing yourself is hard when you are still learning the content. It’s unpleasant. It feels like it’s not going very well as you’re doing it, but it’s really, really good for memory.” Reading over your notes and re-reading a textbook chapter is like knee pushups: “It doesn’t really support memory, but it makes you feel like you’re learning.”
• Distributed practice – Cramming the night before a test is a formula for long-term forgetting, says Willingham. A better strategy is spreading the work over several nights, a little bit of study and retrieval every day. But adopting this approach demands a lot from students: understanding why it works, time management, self-discipline, and a commitment to long-term understanding versus doing well on a test and then forgetting almost everything.
• Distractions – Many students think they can study while keeping up with social media and listening to music. “The research is pretty clear on this,” says Willingham: “There’s always a cost to multitasking… Demanding tasks, like texting your friend, have huge costs.” Once again, students’ brains fool them; they think they can get their work done with lots of other things going on, but the work suffers.
Music is a little more complicated, says Willingham. It’s a distraction, but it also stimulates brain activity, heart rate, and alertness. Whether it helps or hurts study time depends on the difficulty of the work and the student’s energy, focus, and motivation.
• Stand-alone study skills classes? Willingham is skeptical of this approach. Instead, he suggests, starting around fourth grade, asking specifically how students are expected to work independently – for example, reading independently, taking notes, studying for a test – and then teaching the specific skills and strategies that work.
“Why Studying Is So Hard, and What Teachers Can Do to Help” by Laura McKenna in Edutopia, February 10, 2023; Willingham’s new book is Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy; he can be reached at willingham@virginia.edu.
In this Read by Example article, Wisconsin principal/author Matt Renwick lists seven questions that school leaders and instructional coaches might ask themselves as they work with colleagues who seem resistant to improving their practice:
• Do I know them as a person? “We are in the people business,” says Renwick. “That means relational trust is paramount.” He likes Heather Fisher’s idea of taking a staff list and writing by each name one thing you know about the person’s life outside school – for example, a non-educational hobby, what their grown children are doing. “These nuggets of knowledge serve as talking points during informal conversations,” says Renwick. “They feel noticed and you come across as more humane and caring.”
• Do I show curiosity? Too often, says Renwick, we make assumptions based on previous conversations and events. “Believing I always have more to learn,” he says, “demonstrated through genuine questions and requests for clarification, avoids creating more problems.”
• Have I recognized this person’s strengths and successes? “If the first communication I have with an educator is about how they could improve,” says Renwick, “what I am also potentially communicating is, ‘You are someone who needs improvement,’ or ‘You need my support to be successful’ It should not be surprising when resistance arises.” It’s wise to recognize strong points, especially if they align to a new initiative.
• Is my feedback a reasonable next step? A suggestion that is beyond a colleague’s current capabilities is not helpful. Better to look for smaller actions that are do-able and can be built on over time.
• Is the school’s vision and instructional rationale clear? Beyond higher test scores, do colleagues understand aspirational goals such as students becoming independent readers, writers, and communicators?
• Does what I do align with what I say? For example, a principal talks a lot about the value of students being readers and writers; does the school’s budget support classroom libraries, and is student writing a priority in the schedule?
• Do staff members have input on important schoolwide decisions? An instructional leadership team is a helpful forum in which colleagues can make their voices heard, drawing on current data, research, and the school’s priorities. One hundred percent buy-in won’t happen, says Renwick, but dissenters can be encouraged to join the team and share their views.
“7 Questions I Ask Myself When Working with Educators Resistant to Change” by Matt Renwick in Read By Example, February 11, 2023; Renwick can be reached at renwickme@gmail.com.
(Originally titled “Revamping the Curriculum as Teachers, for Teachers”)
In this article in Educational Leadership, Pennsylvania high-school teacher Marilyn Pryle describes how her English department decided to revamp their curriculum. While their school was getting good test scores, there were problems, including: “None of us knew what the other grades were doing,” 25-year-old anthologies, and a parent social media page critiquing book choices and singling out teachers by name. In short, says Pryle, “We needed order, transparency, and support.”
Budget cuts had eliminated the central office ELA director, but Pryle convinced the superintendent to make her a teacher-on-assignment for 2021-22 and have her lead this process:
• Teacher survey – A poll of the 12-person department confirmed the grade-to-grade coordination problem, along with a lack of diversity among book authors and insufficient focus on global skills, authentic speaking and writing, media literacy, self-awareness, and cultural competence.
• Mission – Pryle had teachers write the top three goals of the department on index cards and used those to draft a statement of purpose and a chart of the steps they would follow.
• Curriculum mapping – Pryle substitute-taught for each teacher for half a day, freeing them up to write month-by-month descriptions of the texts they were teaching, activities, essential questions, and assessments. By December, she had curriculum charts for all classes.
• Standards – Pryle then spent two months looking at whether each teacher’s curriculum choices covered Pennsylvania’s ELA standards. “As the sole analyst,” she says, “I could immerse myself in the meaning of each standard and look for trends both in our strengths and our weaknesses as a department.” By spring, teachers met and looked at Pryle’s individual notes on standards covered and missed. The biggest gaps were public speaking, which pointed to the need to develop Socratic seminars and fishbowl discussions; and using technology, which got teachers thinking about publishing students’ work using apps like Blooket, Google Sites, and Goodreads.
• Representation – Pryle presented spreadsheets of authors color-coded by race and gender, showing graphically a canon that was overwhelmingly white, male, and straight. “Our teachers found this analysis eye-opening,” she says, and there were lively discussions about keeping and letting go of “the classics.” Pryle didn’t issue a mandate, but there were some immediate changes: Passing was added as a counterpoint to The Great Gatsby, Things Fall Apart complemented Heart of Darkness, and To Kill a Mockingbird was replaced by The Nickel Boys.
• Revisions – For the remainder of the school year, teachers worked on adding activities and assessments to address standards gaps, especially oral presentation, technology, and diversity. “Some changes were big and most were smaller,” says Pryle, “but all of them were in the right direction.”
• Approval – The superintendent convened a committee composed of Pryle, the assistant superintendent, an elementary principal, three school board members, and himself. The overall reaction to the proposed changes was positive, but some board members pushed back on the age-appropriateness of some texts, including a few that had been taught for years. “I found this a bit frustrating,” says Pryle. “We know what we’re doing! How dare we be questioned!” But she bit her tongue, seeing that teachers couldn’t defend working in silos. She answered every question and the committee approved all the curriculum changes, followed by the full school board a week later, giving “an incredible morale boost” to Pryle and her colleagues.
• Onward – Pryle is now back in her classroom, teaching world literature to sophomores six periods a day. “I am not the same teacher as when I left,” she says. “I now fully know what my colleagues teach, what they emphasize, and how my class fits with theirs. I know how our classes and departmental mission shape our students. And what I don’t know, I can look up.” The ELA curriculum continues to evolve, with fresh thinking and texts every year.
A postscript: district leaders were so impressed with the work of the ELA department that they decided to replicate it for math, releasing a lead teacher for a year to conduct a similar effort.
From Harvard Business Review:
Lead with Compassion
Being a compassionate leader isn’t just a nice thing to do—it’s a powerful lever of employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention, especially in challenging times. Here are some ways to practice and develop this essential, evidence-based leadership skill. First, start small. Demonstrating compassion doesn’t always require huge gestures. A simple encouraging comment, a brief check-in, or an expression of gratitude can go a long way. Next,be intentional about offering help. When an employee is struggling on a personal level, Instead of asking yes or no questions like, “Do you need help?” or “Is there anything I can do?” (which often sound like invitations to say “no”), try asking, “What can I do to be helpful to you today?” Then, go beyond your inner circle. Don’t limit your compassion to direct reports, close friends, or even your immediate team. Be generous with your attention and expand your influence. Finally, celebrate compassion in others. When an employee or colleague goes above and beyond to help someone else, let people know. This will help establish compassion as a virtue in your organizational culture.
This tip is adapted from ““Leading with Compassion Has Research-Backed Benefits,” ,” by Stephen Trzeciak et al.
