Leadership Beliefs That Shape Success

(from Marshall Memo 1149) Leadership Beliefs That Shape Success

In this Leadership Freak article, Dan Rockwell says our beliefs shape what we see,

feel, and do. He lists ten leadership beliefs that nurture a successful organization:

- People can grow.

- Curiosity builds confidence.

- Progress beats perfection.

- Accountability demonstrates respect.

- Feedback fuels improvement.

- Assumptions should be challenged.

- Trust grows through consistency.

- Success is a team activity.

- Problems create opportunities.

- Purpose energizes persistence.

“The Three Powers of Belief” by Dan Rockwell in Leadership Freak, July 30, 2026; Rockwell

can be reached at dan@leadershipfreak.com .

Vulnerability and risk taking

  - Rianna recognized 9th grader Gabe Ali for English Department Student of the Quarter.  She named Gabe’s excitement and curiosity in class and that Gabe helps light up the day.  Thanks, Rianna!

Another teacher named her student of the quarter’s “vulnerability” and "risk taking”... which made me want to lean into that next year.  You can “meet expectations” without that.  But “exceeding” expectations probably involves taking risks and being open.  I’m thinking about how I can provide more opportunities for that in class next year.

Jago: When reading, the whole is much better than a part

 

Heinemann

By Carol Jago

This is the first entry into the Bring Back Whole Book Reading series. Check the landing page for new posts.

Reading whole books can make kids both smarter and nicer. Don’t believe me? In study after study, cognitive scientists have found that students who read stories are not only better able to understand others but also better able to understand themselves. 

This alchemy doesn’t happen when students read excerpts.

It is not hard to understand how short passages came to replace novels. After all, high-stakes assessments feature excerpts to measure reading comprehension. Mirroring that approach seemed a logical way to raise test scores. Except that it didn’t work. According to results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading scores across the board are the lowest they have been in 30 years. Most worrisome are the survey results that show lowest performing students never or hardly ever read for pleasure. In my experience, if students don’t read with pleasure, they can never be persuaded to read enough to become fully fluent readers. Maybe instead of focusing on raising test scores, we should be thinking about raising readers.

No one becomes an avid reader on a diet of text tidbits. Practicing reading skills on paragraph-long excerpts lacks authenticity; it is absent of purpose apart from “doing school.” From a student’s perspective, it is just one more reason to let artificial intelligence do the work for them. On the other hand, reading a whole book — a much more strenuous and time-consuming task — requires students to use their reading skills for real reasons: to watch a character stumble, to figure out a mystery, to enter a world they never imagined. Part of the rationale for employing short passages has been in the hope meeting screenagers where they are. What if we instead invited them to read books that took them to places they have never been?

To be clear, the move away from whole works was well-intended and, in many cases, a practical solution. For one thing, it solved the homework problem. But assigning only short texts robs students of the pleasure that can only be experienced when grappling with longer, more complex literature that more fully reflect the complex world they are navigating. This includes contemporary young adult works with appealing (sometimes lurid) covers. 

In Teens Choosing to Read, Gay Ivy and Peter Johnson describe a study they conducted with middle school students who were reading almost nothing. Their teachers invited these students to read books of their own choosing with no strings attached, providing classroom time for both reading and discussion. Over time, not only did students’ reading scores improve, but students reported that reading helped them manage their stress and feel more in control of their own behavior. Students felt that the books were helping them to become better people. Later interviews with family and teachers corroborated the students’ observations. While adults often worry that the topics in some YA fiction – self-harm, poor decision-making, graphic violence — might be dangerous, these young readers reported that they learned from the mistakes the fictional characters made.

Volume in reading matters. We get good at the things we do. The challenge is finding ways to make reading part of this generation’s everyday habits. To facilitate this, teachers can:

• Provide students with a generous classroom library
• Make reading together an everyday experience
• Talk about the books you are reading
• Offer choice when assigning books
• Give students time to talk about the stories they are reading

Today’s young people are in desperate need of the things that whole books can offer. According to a recent New York Times article, we are in the middle of a youth mental health crisis. Jia Lynn Yang reports that, “Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates.” Many young people feel lost, swallowed up by social media and seduced by AI chatbots.

Teachers report that their students are disaffected, disengaged from school, barely putting in seat time, stuck in neutral. Absentee rates are appalling. Some of this is a continuation of habits formed during the pandemic and/or a result of too much screen time, but the moment for excuses is past. Let’s move on from an excerpt-based curriculum and get back to real reading.

Books are more than tools for teaching children how to read. They are the reason to read. 

Works Cited

Ivey, Gay and Peter Johnson (2023). Teens Choosing to Read. Teachers College Press.

Paul, A. M. (2013, June 3). Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer. TIME Ideas. https://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/ ideas.time.com

link to the time mag article

Yang, J. L. (2025, November 24). Youth mental-health crisis in schools. The New York Times Magazine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/magazine/youth-mental-health-crisis-schools.html

Poem in your Pocket Zine

 Teach the Poem in Your Pocket Zines Lesson

This 826 Digital lesson, designed in collaboration with Academy of American Poets, introduces students to Poem in Your Pocket Day and invites them to create their own pocket-sized zine featuring a poem they wrote (or a poem they love). Teach the lesson to your students and discover how zines can be a powerful medium for self-expression.

7-minute write (edutopia)

 The research confirms her assertion: Writing both records and generates thought, leaping forward in sudden bursts of inspiration before doubt emerges and the author senses the need to loop back and revise, close gaps, and clarify their thinking.

Asking kids to “quick write” for 3- to 10-minutes gives students a low-stakes space to put pen to paper in response to a prompt. Quick writes are versatile, simple, and repeatable; they can be assigned several times a week, and can become a staple of paper notebooks across subject areas.

Middle school English teacher Meghan Rosa uses 7-minute writes “almost daily” as an “idea generator.” Students write the date and provocative statement like “homework should be banned” at the top of notebook paper, then share and refine the resulting written work in pairs. In social studies or history classes, students might engage in a 5-minute, written reflection about the importance of a towering figure like Frederick Douglass, or quickly respond to a prompt like “Was the U.S. Civil War avoidable?” to commit some initial thinking to paper. 

Edutopia: avoid rushing

 Many good suggestions in this article.  

Suppose a science lesson identifies 15 pages of reading and 10 related questions for students to complete within a 45-minute block. Many students will struggle to meet this expectation, so teachers are faced with two choices: spread the lesson over more than one class, or determine what portions of the text and which questions are most important for achieving that day’s learning goal. I recommend the latter because it will not only prevent the dreaded problem of falling behind but also help teachers learn more about how the curriculum supports important standards.

To avoid rushed grading, it helps to reflect on what feedback actually accomplishes. As Youki Terada and Stephen Merrill note, “The hours you commit to grading and commenting on every assignment and quiz are likely to be met with a shrug by your students.” Instead, they recommend focusing on a few high-impact areas for improvement. One of my favorite strategies for streamlining feedback is the holistic sort, which places formative data into two or three categories (such as “met,” “approaching,” or “not yet”). That way, we get a brief yet accurate picture of how students are doing.

For example, if students write a short constructed response (say, a paragraph) with the goal of identifying a main idea and some students have not done this correctly, the teacher is aware of who exactly is struggling. The next day, this teacher might allow students who met the standard to work independently for 20 minutes while pulling the “not yet” students aside for small group instruction on the skill. To try this out, pick one major assignment per week to receive detailed feedback and mark the rest with a quick holistic sort only. Research also indicates that students respond to feedback better when they see it without a grade—the latter is evaluative but is not considered feedback in and of itself.

Also a link to another article about the holistic sort

When teachers get bogged down in grading a large number of assignments, students do not receive feedback in time to make necessary adjustments to their understanding and are therefore more likely to give up. Providing feedback is not synonymous with giving a grade, and the value in letting students know where they stand informs their future success. Deciding which assignments deserve a grade and which exist solely to give the teacher data requires some discernment, but it’s well worth the effort. As for student pushback about not getting graded on everything, they will not be as vocally opposed to feedback for its own sake once they see the value of correcting their mistakes before their work is evaluated.

Suppose a sixth-grade science teacher wants to assess how accurately students identify mutually beneficial relationships within ecosystems by asking them to make a list of such interactions among organisms. Rather than grade the assignment or spend time making numerous comments, the teacher can divide student understanding into two categories labeled “Met” and “Not Yet.” Then, looking for overall patterns, the teacher makes notes about what mistakes students who are in the “Not Yet” category seem to encounter and uses that information to guide next steps.

This process is short and direct and provides the sort of visibility about student outcomes that makes instruction more relevant. In addition, students receive far more incisive feedback that helps them improve before a higher-stakes opportunity presents itself in terms of grades, and they are therefore less likely to get bogged down in a sense of failure.

Read in and out of comfort zone

 

from NYT learning network - 

read NYT - windows and mirrors

Before you read any further, try a quick experiment:

• Go to the NYTimes.com home page, or to any of the individual sections.

• Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is immediately interesting to you because it is on a topic you know or care about, or are somehow connected to already.

• Now take a second look. Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is outside your usual comfort zone, yet still seems potentially interesting.

• Read — or watch or listen to — them both. What happened?

This is exactly the challenge Kim Butterfield, an English teacher at Central High School in La Crosse, Wis., and a member of this year’s New York Times Teaching Project, gave her students.

What they discovered is that no matter how foreign a topic feels initially, you can nearly always find a way to connect to it and learn something valuable. And, as Ms. Butterfield explains below, when her students shared what they chose, “all of our worlds widened.”

We liked the idea so much we asked other Teaching Project members to try it. We ended up with students in schools from four U.S. regions — the South, the Midwest, the East Coast and the West Coast — all attempting the same exercise, and all discovering the same things Ms. Butterfield’s students did. Below, you can read excerpts from the reflections of a few students in each of these classrooms.

We have labeled the students’ choices “windows” and “mirrors,” because all of these teachers explained the assignment in terms of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s often-cited metaphor of “windows and mirrors,” which she described this way in a 1990 essay:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.

When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

What mirrors and windows can your students find in The New York Times? If you’d like them to try the exercise described above, we have a related Student Opinion question, “How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone?” that challenges them to take the same steps, then post their answers to our comments section.

If they enjoy that, they might also be interested in our annual Summer Reading Contest, which invites teenagers to tell us what got their attention in The Times each week and why. This year it begins on June 11 and runs through Aug. 19.

Choose 3 and tell me what you think

 From NYT learning network:  summer reading

Every summer for 16 years now, we’ve invited students to read (or watch or listen to) anything they like in The New York Times and tell us about the experience. We’ll be doing that again this year, and, as always, we’ll be offering students dozens of free pieces a week to choose from if they aren’t already Times subscribers.

But if you would like to help your students practice this kind of independent reading before turning them loose, our spring challenge can help.

All your students have to do is choose three articles (or videos, podcasts or photo essays) from three different Times sections; read, listen to or watch them; and then tell us what they thought — in writing or via a short video.

Clarify Priorities Constalty

Clarify Priorities Constantly from Leadership Freak

Fuzzy priorities waste energy. What is your priority today? This week? This month?

If you can’t list your priorities, you don’t have any.

If you have more than five priorities, you don’t have any. 

Is AI making us stupid?

 ​Just sharing:  You probably know Cal Newport ("Deep Work").  Here's a short excerpt of an interview where he's talking about AI and students (he teaches at Georgetown).  Seems wise.  I really like the "10,000 steps" metaphor.  

 Is Artificial Intelligence Eroding Our Ability to Think?

In this Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Evan Goldstein, Cal Newport (Georgetown University) talks about his worry that artificial intelligence is making us stupid. Some excerpts:

“When AI automates tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming,” says Newport, “or that you would be willing to hand off to a research assistant, I’m not so concerned. If a political scientist can use an AI coding agent to do a more comprehensive and faster data analysis to help them form an argument, that’s good.”

But he sees many students using AI to automate thought. “Think about having to write something and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want to avoid that cognitive strain. You can get a good enough draft from AI and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It’s at the core of empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights, and religion and philosophy… Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.” 

The combination of distracting social media and artificial intelligence “is a powerful one-two punch,” says Newport. “This is a problem that’s 15 years in the making. The smartphone revolution and social media kicked this off. Now here comes AI at the worst time from the perspective of human thinking.”

“We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness,” he continues. “There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that e-mail from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee the strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.” 

How about the student experience? “We are going to look much more like classic Oxford than we do today,” says Newport. “More in-person testing, more blue books. Also, more Oxford-style tutorials where you sit with a proctor and walk through an argument and they assess how well you understand the material.” 

“Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried” by Evan Goldstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2026 (Vol. 72, #15, pp. 24-29)

NPR on the value of homework

 NPR on the value of homework:

This NPR discussion features two education writers who both support homework but from different angles, creating some interesting tensions:

The Core Agreement: Both Holly Korbey and Elizabeth Matthew support homework, particularly for older students. They compare it to practice in sports or music—you need repetition to build skills.

Key Tensions:

Why homework disappeared: Elizabeth blames higher education's "equity" approach—eliminating achievement to close achievement gaps. Holly focuses more on public perception that learning should always be "fun and creative," unlike how we view athletic practice.

What homework actually does: Elizabeth emphasizes executive function—having deliverables, meeting responsibilities to non-parents, building independence and routine. Holly stresses cognitive benefits—storing knowledge in long-term memory rather than relying on Google, practicing foundational skills like multiplication tables.

The class contradiction: Elizabeth points out that upper-middle-class parents complain most about homework burdens, yet lower-income families (who may actually struggle more with time) could benefit most since their kids have fewer structured activities and homework provides screen-free constructive time.

The research: Clear benefits for middle/high school students, but elementary school evidence is mixed. Both acknowledge there was too much bad homework in the mid-2000s, leading to overcorrection.

The alarm: Both worry about declining national reading and math scores over the past decade, suggesting the no-homework trend may be contributing to academic decline.

Students Reading Challenging Texts

 From Marshall Memo 1115

 Timothy Shanahan on Students Reading Challenging Texts

In this online article, Timothy Shanahan (University of Illinois/Chicago) responds to a teacher worried that students will be frustrated and discouraged if they’re required to read material above their current level. “I don’t want to undermine anybody’s motivation or love of reading,” says Shanahan, and he acknowledges that reading difficult texts can be frustrating and sometimes leads to off-task behavior and discipline problems, especially if students are trying to do so without support. But easy, boring texts can also lead students to act out, especially if they sense that their teacher has a negative mindset about “low readers.” 

“Let’s face it, motivation is complicated,” says Shanahan. “Difficulty can lead both to withdrawal and intensification of effort.” Students can feel incompetent struggling with a difficult text or get a sense of efficacy mastering it. They can feel inept or be driven by a desire to please a teacher, learn new information, and connect with peers. Simply adjusting the instructional level of a text to a child’s “just right” level doesn’t solve the problem of motivation – and risks the stigma of being assigned to a low reading group. Most important, leveling won’t accelerate students’ reading level and give them the feeling that they’re catching up.

“Instead of avoiding challenge,” says Shanahan, “I think it better to introduce it intentionally, placing students in books that they cannot already read well” – and then provide scaffolding and emotional support that encourage persistence and build skill, fluency, and background knowledge. Three important elements:

• Choose texts that connect with students’ interests and are worth reading.

• Give students a sense of the progress they’re making, emphasizing a growth mindset.

• Don’t overdo it; not every text has to be above level, especially independent reading.

“Won’t Challenging Texts Discourage Young Readers?” by Timothy Shanahan in Shanahan on Literacy, November 29, 2025; Shanahan can be reached at shanahan@uic.edu. 

Excerpts or whole novels - Tim Shanahan

 link to his article

How to Get High-School Students Reading More Closely

 How to Get High-School Students Reading More Closely

from Marshall Memo 1111 (Nov 3, 2025)

In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez says that with so much text reading
in schools, “sometimes, in some classes, with some students, it can get pretty boring. Pretty
dry.” She interviewed high-school English teachers Brian Sztabnik and Susan Barber, who
have an online presence (Much Ado About Teaching) and recently published a book of
strategies for getting students more engaged with texts. Here are three of their ideas:

• Reconstructing poems – A poem is cut up (into lines, phrases, or individual words)
and students put the poem back together, annotate their version, and compare it with the
original. “It’s forcing students to do a close reading of the poem,” says Barber. “If I would
have passed out this poem and said, I want you to do a close reading, their eyes would be
glazed over.” Putting the pieces together gets them slowing down and thinking about lines,
phrases, words, punctuation, and meaning.

• Inferential timeline – Each student is assigned a few pages from a section of the novel
being read by the class and writes on an index card or sticky note the most important thing that
happened on those pages, with a quote that illustrates it. “This is all about decision-making and
cutting out the extraneous details and just focusing on what’s really important,” says Sztabnik.
“Often it’s either character development or increasing conflict or maybe a symbol finally
emerges.” Students post their cards on a timeline on a wall.
Students then stand up, choose another student’s card, and add a new card under it with
an explanation of why they believe that moment was significant in the grand scheme of the
novel. Finally, students do a gallery walk of the whole timeline, taking notes on the inferences
their classmates made.

• Text rendering – The class reads a passage and each student chooses the sentence or
line they think is most important, then the most important phrase within that sentence, then the
most important word in that phrase. Students defend their choices to the full class, then small
groups work together to draw general conclusions about the passage. Barber says she came up
with this idea because students were often vague about where they got an idea from a text (It’s
just there, they’d say). Text rendering gets them reading much more closely and zeroing in on
specific language and meaning.

“3 Fresh Strategies That Get Students Engaged with Texts” by Jennifer Gonzalez, Brian
Sztabnik, and Susan Barber in Cult of Pedagogy, October 26, 2025; Gonazlez can be reached
at gonzjenn@cultofpedagogy.com . Sztabnik and Barber’s book is 100% Engagement.

Know the signs of AI writing

 

Know the signs of AI writing

from this website

There are telltale signs of AI writing. If you’re new to teaching or unfamiliar with AI, just knowing these can help grow your AI Spidey Sense. Here are some to look for:

• The Em Dash – AI, ChatGPT especially, loves to use the em dash (—). And it usually uses it incorrectly, substituting it for a comma. Students, however, almost never use an em dash, especially below 11th grade. (For lovers of the em dash, like myself, this royally sucks.)
• Parallel Structure – AI frequently leans on triplets or balanced phrasing (e.g., “She was strong, she was brave, she was determined”). Students usually don’t polish structure that deliberately.
• Empty language – AI was designed to fill a word count. It’s very good at using vague, meaningless, or unnecessary words, often culminating in a bland and empty essay.
• Overly tidy paragraphs: Each one often follows the same rhythm (topic sentence + evidence + conclusion) with no natural tangents, quirks, or false starts.
• Smooth but generic transitions: AI loves words like moreover, furthermore, consequently, in conclusion. Real students are more likely to mix “so,” “but,” or skip transitions entirely.
• Vague sophistication: AI favors slightly elevated but non-specific words (significant, crucial, deeply, inherently, resonates, underscores). Students tend to swing between too casual or too forced.
• Clichéd analogies: AI might drop clichés like “a double-edged sword,” “a beacon of hope,” “paints a vivid picture.”
• Balanced but bland tone: One nice thing about grading AI-generated work in upper level ELA classes is that it isn’t that good or interesting.
• Symmetrical answers (usually in 3s): If the writing prompt a 3-part question, the response will almost always have three neat sections, each similarly sized. AI loves 3s: three main ideas, three body paragraphs, or even just the number three.
• Perfect grammar: This may be dependent on your students’ grade level, but if a sixth grader writes a 4-page essay without a single error, I might be impressed…or suspicious.
• Impersonal responses: AI writing usually removes 1st person POV from student writing. If you required a personal response, AI writing might come off as a level or two removed from this.

How well does "Jigsaw Learning" work?

From Marshall Memo 1099

 Jigsaw Learning – How Well Does It Work?

In this Review of Educational Research article, Eva Vives (Ghent University) and six

co-authors report on their meta-analysis of jigsaw, a cooperative learning strategy developed in

the 1970s by Elliot Aronson and colleagues at the University of Texas (details at the Jigsaw

Classroom website ). Here is the most common jigsaw sequence:

- The class is divided into groups.

- Curriculum content is split into the same number of segments as students per group.

- For example, with a lesson on Eleanor Roosevelt and 5-student groups: her childhood,

family life, life after FDR’s polio, as First Lady, and her career after FDR’s death.

- In each group, students are assigned different segments and silently study material on it.

- The class reshuffles into “expert groups” for the segments, and each discusses its

portion and rehearses how it will be presented back in their home groups.

- The original groups reconvene and each “expert” presents their segment in sequence.

- The teacher circulates to monitor and intervene as needed.

- If all students do their job, each group puts together the jigsaw of the whole lesson.

- All students are assessed on their knowledge of the lesson’s content.

Advocates of jigsaw learning believe it has these key attributes: students are more

actively involved than in a standard teacher-centered class; every student takes responsibility

for curriculum content; students teach each other; students work together to reach the learning

goal; and students get practice on collaboration and social-emotional skills.

How effective is jigsaw learning? Vives and her colleagues did a comprehensive review

of 40 years of research and found mixed results depending on the curriculum area and how

well it was implemented. Their conclusions:

• “The introduction of social interdependence in the classroom,” say the researchers, “can

have positive effects on both academic and psychological outcomes.” Students from

elementary grades through college liked jigsaw as a classroom process.

• The most positive academic results were in language arts and social sciences classes,

somewhat less positive in STEM and vocational classes. Academic gains from jigsaw lessons

were more long-lasting than from standard instruction. A key factor in stickiness seemed to be

the “desirable difficulty” involved in the expert phase – the challenge for students being

responsible for studying their content, understanding it, and presenting to peers.

• Some studies found that jigsaw resulted in a high cognitive load on students as they

studied their portion and presented it to peers. Interestingly, the cognitive load was higher in

jigsaw lessons than in a conventionally taught classroom, even though each student was

responsible for only a fraction of the lesson content. Learning depended on groupmates’ skill at

learning and presenting the material.

• Jigsaw lessons had positive psychosocial effects, including students’ motivation and

feeling of competence. Jigsaw’s impact was mixed on boosting student self-esteem and

reducing prejudice. Oddly, there has been little research on how well jigsaw lessons developed

cooperation skills.

“The jigsaw method,” say Vives et al., “confronts students with both a cultural and a

cognitive challenge that requires students to learn how to function in such a pedagogical

environment, in addition to learning their course materials. Such learning may take time.”

That’s why jigsaw is challenging for teachers. Many schools don’t have a culture of

cooperation, and students may not have the social skills to work cooperatively, aren’t used to

being dependent on one another, and may lack the cognitive skills to take responsibility for a

piece of the curriculum and teach it to classmates. Jigsaw lessons were most effective, the

researchers found, when teachers took the time to explicitly teach the cooperative and

cognitive skills involved in the process.

Vives and colleagues believe jigsaw learning may be especially important as digital tools

become more prominent. “Digital technologies,” they say, “offer unprecedented opportunities

for collaborative learning and real-time support for class management (e.g., forming student

groups, monitoring the engagement of learning, deciding when and how to intervene in their

learning activities…). However, as sophisticated as they can be, the digital tools in support of

collaborative learning methods can only be effective if the methods themselves are well

understood and guided by a detailed knowledge of the cognitive and socio-cognitive processes

they activate… We have never needed this knowledge so much.”

“Learning with Jigsaw: A Systematic Review Gathering All the Pieces of the Puzzle More

Than 40 Years Later” by Eva Vives, Céline Poletti, Anaïs Robert, Fabrizio Butera, Pascal

Huguet, ProFAN Consortium, and Isabelle Régner in Review of Educational Research, June

2025 (Vol. 95, #3, pp. 339-384); Vives can be reached at eva.vives13@gmail.com .

Harry Wong - First Days of School

 According to Harry Wong, the first days of school are crucial for setting the tone for the entire year and establishing a successful learning environment. 

1. Teach and Rehearse Procedures

Goal: Build routines through modeling and repetition.

• Activity 1: Procedure Stations

  • Set up “stations” around the room (e.g., turning in work, asking for help, group work norms). Students rotate in small groups, reading a posted scenario and practicing the expected procedure.

• Activity 2: “What Would You Do?” Scenarios

  • Project or hand out short “what if” scenarios (e.g., “You forgot your homework. Now what?”). In pairs, students decide the best response based on your procedures, then share with the class.

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2. Establish Expectations and Consistency

Goal: Clarify classroom norms and make them stick.

• Activity 1: Co-Creating Norms

  • Ask students to brainstorm what a respectful, productive classroom looks like. Then share your own non-negotiables. Combine them into a class agreement you revisit often.

• Activity 2: “The Why Behind the Rule” Discussion

  • Instead of just listing rules, present each one with a short explanation or real-world example (e.g., “Why no phones during discussion?”). Invite student input and reasoning.

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3. Build Relationships

Goal: Create trust and emotional safety.

• Activity 1: “One-Pager” Student Profiles

  • Students create a simple page with their name, interests, goals, and a fun fact. Display them (with permission) or refer to them as you learn names and build rapport.

• Activity 2: “2-Minute Connections”

  • Spend 2 minutes with each student (over a few days) asking informal questions or following up on something they shared. This builds personal connection without requiring a whole class period.

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4. Create a Positive Classroom Environment

Goal: Establish a space that signals purpose and belonging.

• Activity 1: Student Voice Wall

  • Reserve part of your wall or whiteboard for rotating student quotes, jokes, recommendations, or goals. It gives them ownership and keeps the space dynamic.

• Activity 2: Classroom Tour with Purpose

  • Walk students through the room as if it's a living system: where things are stored, how group work is set up, how to access resources, etc. Ask questions to engage them in the layout’s logic.

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5. Start Teaching Right Away

Goal: Establish that learning begins on Day One.

• Activity 1: “Mystery Text” Engagement

  • Begin with a short, intriguing text (poem, paragraph, image, or artifact). Ask students to annotate or respond. This signals that your class is about thinking and curiosity.

• Activity 2: Low-Stakes Writing

  • Prompt: “What makes a great classroom?” or “What’s something you’re proud of learning?” Collect and read for tone and voice—not grammar—so you can begin to learn their skills.

---

6. Communicate That You Are Organized and Prepared

Goal: Show students that this is a high-functioning space.

• Activity 1: Syllabus Walkthrough with Purpose

  • Rather than reading your syllabus aloud, frame it as “Here’s how this class works best for you.” Emphasize supports, grading clarity, and why you designed it this way.

• Activity 2: Bell-Ringer Routine Launch

• Start a consistent beginning-of-class routine (e.g., “Do Now” or “Lit Lifter”). Train students how it works and why it matters. Use the same format daily from the start.\

 

Should We Use ChatGPT to Make Literature Accessible to Students?

            In this Boston Globe article, MG Prezioso (Harvard University) tees off on teachers who are using AI tools like ChatGPT to simplify texts for students. “As an education researcher, I understand the appeal of AI-adapted texts,” she says. “Classrooms play host to students with a range of language and literacy skills, and AI-adapted materials, which can be translated and tailored to each individual’s reading level, allow students to access the same content – along with supplementary resources, like discussion questions and vocabulary words – at their own pace. This is especially valuable in social studies and the sciences, where information is a prerequisite for conceptual understanding.” But Prezioso has several concerns:

            • Watered-down language – AI-generated text tends to be syntactically repetitive and stylistically flat, she says. Students need to read complex and varied sentences to develop reading comprehension skills. “Why not use authentic texts with additional instructional support, like drawing on background knowledge or helping students break down meaning-filled, ‘juicy’ sentences instead?”

            • Artistic integrity – AI-modified works of fiction, essays, and memoirs can do violence to the original authors’ integrity.

            • Bias – “Can we really trust AI,” asks Prezioso, “with its racial and gender biases, to adapt a novel like Beloved– one that embodies not only Toni Morrison’s lyrical, enchanting style but also the complexities of the black experience?”

            • Love of reading – AI-processed texts simply don’t have the same ability to develop students’ appreciation of authors’ word choice, imagery, and character dialogue. Reading will be a chore, not a joy. “Divorcing a story from its style is like separating humans from atoms,” says Prezioso. “You can try, but if you were to succeed, you would create something entirely different.” There’s already a trend of fewer young people reading for fun, and AI is likely to make things worse.

            As an example, Prezioso takes a passage from the end of The Great Gatsby, a novel often used in high-school English classes:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Now here’s a ChatGPT rendition:

Gatsby believed in the green light, a symbol of the bright future he dreamed of. Each year, that future seemed to slip further away. It was out of reach then, but that didn’t stop him – tomorrow he would try harder, stretch further… and maybe one day, he would achieve it. So we keep moving forward, like boats trying to move against the current, always being pulled back into the past.

“The original is elegant, complex,” says Prezioso. “Its arrangement of words and syntax, from the expanded clauses to the ellipsis and dashes, embodies Gatsby’s yearning for the past, as well as our own faith in, and pursuit of, illusory dreams. The message is tragic, but its tone is  hopeful, leaving us to wonder: are we foolish for beating on, or is the honor in the attempt?” The AI-generated text, on the other hand, is rigid, mechanical, lacks complexity and tone, and distorts Fitzgerald’s message. 

            What makes the original meaningful is that it is “crafted by a person, a breathing, feeling person,” says Prezioso. “There is wisdom in human-crafted words, and it is hard-earned. We mustn’t overlook this wisdom. It’s why we read. It’s what we’ll lose. And it’s something AI will never provide.” 

 

“Teachers Are Using AI to Make Literature Easier for Students to Read. This Is a Terrible Idea” by MG Prezioso in The Boston Globe, April 13, 2025; Prezioso can be reached at mgprezioso@fas.harvard.edu.