Questions that Help PLCs Close the Learning Gap

From Marshall Memo 808 - October 21, 2019

Questions That Help PLCs Close Achievement Gaps

            In this article in The Learning Professional, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (San Diego State University and Health Sciences High) and John Almarode (James Madison University) say professional learning communities are not always fulfilling their potential. The authors suggest five questions to focus same-grade/same-subject teams on improving teaching and learning and achieving equitable outcomes:

            • Where are we going? Learning goals that are well-framed and clear can also contain low expectations – for example, a fifth-grade team planning lessons based on third-grade expectations. When this happens, say Fisher, Frey, and Almarode, students don’t work up to their potential and achievement gaps aren’t closed. Teacher teams need to put grade-level expectations on the table, analyze the gaps and barriers to better performance, and orchestrate the support that students need.

            • Where are we now? “When teams discuss the current performance levels of their students,” say the authors, “they are often confronted with the reality that some students have not had equitable opportunities to learn to grade-level standards, and they are called on to accept responsibility to close the gap.” This is the heart of PLC work.

            • How do we move learning forward? When teams don’t get specific on this question, say Fisher, Frey, and Almarode, “some well-meaning teachers end up using ineffective approaches, like assigning worksheets or doing all the work for students.” The culture of a teacher team has to be such that team members are candid with each other and share teaching practices that produce results – including materials and pedagogy that are culturally relevant.

            • What did we learn today? This includes students’ academic progress based on frequent checks for understanding, and also teachers’ lesson-by-lesson insights on what’s working, what reteaching and extension tasks are necessary, and how pedagogy can be improved.

            • Who benefited and who did not? The authors believe it’s important for PLCs to break down assessment data by student subgroups. The Progress versus Achievement Tool is helpful www.visiblelearningplus.com/groups/progress-vs-achievement-tool (registration required). So is plotting students’ achievement on this quadrant:

Students who achieved well but did not make a lot of progress	Students who achieved well and made strong progress
Students who did not make progress and did not achieve at the average of the class	Students who made progress but still need to achieve more

One teacher team that used this approach noticed that the lower left-hand quadrant was filled with English learners. “Without visualizing the data this way,” said a teacher, “I would have focused on the individual students in my class who needed more support. But it’s clear that we need to do something different for our English learners if we have any hopes that they will succeed.”

“5 Questions PLCs Should Ask to Promote Equity” by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Almarode in The Learning Professional, October 2019 (Vol. 40, #5, pp. 44-47),

https://bit.ly/2pDNI6W and scroll down; the authors can be reached at dfisher@sdsu.edu, nfrey@sdsu.edu, and almarojt@jmu.edu. 

Teachers as "Amateur Counselors"

From Marshall Memo 808

Can Teachers Be Amateur Counselors with Their Middle Schoolers?

            “Tweens may think bad feelings stick around forever, struggle to interpret feedback, or have no idea how to make themselves feel better,” says Washington, DC school counselor and author Phyllis Fagell in this article in AMLE Magazine. Here’s what an angry 14-year-old at Fagell’s school experienced one day: she took offense when a classmate made an innocuous comment about her weekend plans; she felt rejected when there wasn’t room to sit with her friends at lunch; and when she was scolded by a teacher for being chatty that afternoon, she yelled that she always got blamed for everything and stomped out of the classroom. Sitting with this angry girl a few hours later, it took a while for Fagell to get her to identify why she was so on edge: she’d had a fight with her mother on the way to school.

            Eruptions like this happen all the time with young teens, who are seldom in touch with the underlying reason that an argument, a slight, an or an ambiguous comment can sour their mood. Fagell suggests some counseling techniques that any educator can use:

            • Artfully reframing – “Getting disinvited from a sleepover, bombing a test, or getting excluded from a gift exchange all can feel like catastrophes,” she says. One trick is helping kids think about the situation as if they were looking down on it from a hot-air balloon. Another approach is walking through it step by step to the logical conclusion: Will it really turn out so badly? And if it does, what will you need to cope?

            • Challenging distorted thinking – Students “think in black and white, overgeneralize, and discount the positive,” says Fagell. A boy might ignore numerous positive comments on a presentation and obsess about one snarky remark about his voice cracking. Adults need to point out faulty perceptions and ask kids to come up with alternative possibilities.

            • Validating – There’s a tendency to refute comments like, “You never call on me” or “No one ever wants to be my lab partner,” but a better approach is to acknowledge the feeling and sympathize with it: “If I thought no one wanted to be my lab partner, I’d be pretty upset too.” Feeling heard makes it more likely that a student will be open to taking the next step and solving the problem.

            • Listening actively and reflectively – Repeating students’ concerns back to them, says Fagell, “requires concentrating, matching a student’s body language, turning toward them, eliminating distractions, making eye contact, and ensuring your tone, gestures, and words are in alignment.” And no shuffling papers or glancing at your computer!

            • Providing psychoeducation – Counselors can help other educators in their school understand the difference between depression and normal teenage mood fluctuations, and know when to talk to a student themselves or make a referral to a specialist.

            • Scaffolding risk-taking – For example, if a student has been taking tests in a separate room as part of an IEP, see if she can take a test in her regular classroom with her back turned to classmates. If a student is afraid of making a presentation to his class, have him present to a few trusted friends or read from a script.

            • Asking open-ended questions – For example, How do you learn best? What excites you? What progress do you hope to make in your class? “Solicit their opinions,” says Fagell, “treat them as the expert in their lives, and speak above their maturity level to convey respect.”

            • Linking thoughts to feelings and behaviors – “Tweens experience intense lows and are wired to remember the negative, and that makes middle school the perfect time to reinforce positivity and optimism,” says Fagell. Teachers might have students fill in charts on their mood or hang their names on a clothesline that shows their emotions, then discuss ways to turn around a sour frame of mind – and also savor and extend moments of joy.

“Eight Counseling Techniques Every Middle-School Educator Can Use” by Phyllis Fagell in AMLE Magazine, October 2019 (Vol. 7, #4, pp. 39-41), https://bit.ly/2MAQ8wd

Preventing School Shootings

from Marshall Memo 807

Preventing School Shootings

            In this article in Education Week, Jillian Peterson (Hamline University/St. Paul) and James Densley (Metropolitan State University/St. Paul), both leaders of The Violence Project, say there is a $3 billion industry focused on protecting students and educators from mass shootings: reconfiguring school architecture, classroom locks, security cameras with facial recognition, safe rooms, bulletproof windows, Kevlar backpack inserts, and lockdown drills. “There is no evidence that any of this stuff works,” say Peterson and Densley. “All we do know is that the search for school safety solutions is sending districts into more debt and hurting school climate.” More than half of U.S. teens worry about a shooting in their school, even though the chance of that happening is roughly one in 614 million.

            Peterson and Densley spent two years looking for a better approach. Under a grant from the National Institute of Justice, they studied the life histories of mass shooters back to 1966 and all school shootings starting with Columbine. They also interviewed incarcerated school shooters, their families, students who planned violence but changed their minds, survivors, teachers, administrators, and first responders. They combed through media and social media, suicide notes and manifestos written by perpetrators, trial transcripts, and medical records. The researchers found that although there isn’t a single profile or predictor of violence, school shooters shared these characteristics:          

-    98 percent were male.

-    They were almost always a student in the school.

-    They were angry or despondent over a recent event, resulting in suicidal feelings.

-    They expected to die in the act, so their plans were suicidal.

-    They suffered early-childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age.

-    They studied other school shootings, often online, and found “inspiration.”

-    They had access to weapons to carry out an attack; in 80 percent of cases, guns belonged to family members, most often parents and grandparents.

These common factors, say Peterson and Densley, suggest strategies to prevent school shootings from happening in the first place:

            • Mitigate childhood trauma through school-based mental health services provided by counselors and social workers.

            • Implement curriculum units on positive coping skills, resilience, and social-emotional learning, especially for young boys.

            • Be alert to signals of trouble: “In 80 percent of cases,” say the researchers, “school shooters communicated to others that they were in crisis, whether through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.” All school staff need training on picking up signs, and everyone should have access to a system for anonymously reporting a student in crisis.

            • When a student makes a threat or shares a plan, that’s a de facto suicide note and should be treated as a cry for help. “By unduly punishing or criminalizing students making threats,” say Peterson and Densley, “schools pile on stress and exacerbate any grievance… Schools need care teams dynamic enough to see opportunities to connect students with needed resources and safeguard them in a wraparound process.” In interviews with students who planned an attack and changed their mind, the reason was always that an adult reached out and provided hope.

            • Schools need media literacy curriculum units to help students more critically assess what’s on the Internet and see through extremist propaganda.

            • Lockdown/active shooter drills “send the message that violence is normal, when it’s not,” say Peterson and Densley. What’s more, drills may teach potential shooters (who may be taking part as students) what security measures are planned, providing guidance for working around them. “All adults in the school should be trained in active-shooter response, but schools can stop spreading the script of mass violence by protecting their students from these drills.”

            • Schools need to send a strong message to families on the importance of securing all firearms in the home.

“Why School Shootings Happen” by Jillian Peterson and James Densley in Education Week, October 9, 2019 (Vol. 39, #8, p. 20), https://bit.ly/2IOD6sG; the authors can be reached at jpeterson68@hamline.edu and james.densley@metrostate.edu. 

Teaching Talk - The Power of Classroom Meetings

From Marshall Memo 807

The Power of Classroom Meetings

            In this article in Middle School Journal, Jamie Silverman and Molly Mee (Towson University) describe middle-school students with serious concerns:

-    An eighth grader wears his cleanest shirt to school for fear that a bully will call him out and post a photo on Snapchat ridiculing his meagre wardrobe.

-    A sixth grader eats lunch in the bathroom because three girls who were her friends in elementary school turn away and whisper when they see her and won’t let her sit with them at lunch.

-    A seventh grade girl who believes she should have been born a boy tapes her developing breasts and is called “slut” by a bully and shoved against a locker.

Skillful implementation of classroom community circle meetings, say Silverman and Mee, might bring about happier outcomes:

-    In a meeting, when students are asked, If you had one wish, what would it be? the first student gathers up his courage and says he wishes he had a few more tops to wear this winter. The next day, he finds a shirt in his locker with this note: “Hey Man, I’ve outgrown this anyway and thought you may like it.”

-    In a circle meeting, the question of the day is, What is the hardest thing about middle school so far? When it’s her turn, the sixth grader says that she’s having a hard time meeting new friends. A girl sitting next to her asks if she’d like to sit with her at lunch, and later she notices that her former friends smile at her.

-    In the seventh grader’s circle meeting, the question is, What is the one thing you wish you could change about yourself? When it’s her turn, the girl says, “I wish my parents didn’t expect me to play every sport. I kind of like singing, but I don’t want to tell them.” As she says this, she notices a classmate who seems to be resonating with her situation and is resisting conforming to others’ expectations, and feels kinship and support.

What are the norms and procedures that can make community circle meetings helpful to struggling students? Some key routines:

-    The teacher begins each community circle with an open-ended question.

-    The teacher says all responses are to be respected and remain in the classroom.

-    Students must be holding a “talking piece” to speak in meetings.

-    The teacher says that when students have the talking piece, they can comment on what a classmate said, or defer their comment, or simply say, “I agree with what --- said.”

-    The teacher encourages students to snap (or choose a different signal) to acknowledge and agree with peers contributing thoughts or experiences.

-    The teacher says that if students feel unsafe or in potential danger, they must tell an administrator or guidance counselor.

In addition to the three prompts mentioned above, here are suggested questions to kick off circle discussions:

-    What do you like about yourself?

- What is your favorite activity outside of school?

- Whom do you admire and why?

-    How has someone been kind to you this week?

-    If you could say sorry to someone this week, who would it be and why?

-    What is the most challenging thing about being a middle schooler?

-    What do you enjoy most about attending this school?

-    What would you change about this school if you could?

-    How would it make you feel to know people were talking about you or a friend?

-    What would you do if you knew someone was saying untrue things about you or a friend?

-    How do you handle confrontation?

-    What would you like to learn about handling difficult situations with peers?

-    What is one positive thing you have learned about a peer in this class who isn’t a close friend?

-    What do you like about participating in community circles?

“Community Circles: Mitigating the Impact of Trauma on the Middle-School Student” by Jamie Silverman and Molly Mee in Middle School Journal, September 2019 (Vol. 50, #4, pp. 35-41), https://bit.ly/2pkLysV; the authors can be reached at jsilverman@towson.edu and mmee@towson.edu. 

Inspirting Quotes

 “All that you touch you change.  All that you change changes you.” – Octavia Butler.  

What to Say: Keep Yourself out of Statements of Gratitude

From HBR article "Stop Making Gratitude About You" 

"There is nothing quite like ingratitude to sour an otherwise happy relationship. It’s not difficult for most of us to recall a time when we were shocked at how unappreciative and thoughtless someone was in response to our generosity. (If you are a parent, chances are you only have to think back to this morning’s breakfast.) Without some sort of acknowledgement, people very quickly stop wanting to help you. In fact, in a set of studies by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino, when someone wasn’t thanked for their help, their future rates of helping people were immediately cut in half.Gratitude is a glue that binds you and your benefactor together, allowing you to hit the same well over and over again, knowing that support won’t run dry.

At least, gratitude can be that glue if you do it right. Recent research suggests that people often make a critical mistake when expressing gratitude: They focus on how they feel — how happy they are, how they have benefited from the help — rather than focusing on the benefactor.

Researchers Sara Algoe, Laura Kurtz, and Nicole Hilaire at the University of North Carolina distinguished between two types of gratitude expressions: other-praising, which acknowledges and validates the actions of the giver, and self-benefit, which describes how the receiver is better off for having been helped. In one of their studies, couples were observed expressing gratitude to each other for something their partner had recently done for them. Their expressions were then coded for the extent to which they were other-praising or focused on self-benefit. Examples of their expressions include:

Other-praising
It shows how responsible you are…You go out of your way…I feel like you’re really good at…

Self-benefitIt let me relax…It gave me bragging rights at work…It makes me happy…

Finally, benefactors rated how happy they felt, how loving they felt toward their partner, and how responsive they felt the gratitude-giver had been. The researchers found that other-praising gratitude was strongly related to perceptions of responsiveness, positive emotion, and loving — but self-benefit gratitude was not.

"Yuck Work" and Work/Life Balance for Teachers

Here’s a Marshall Memo article that is about “work/life balance.”  Some of the hints are exactly the same things that we came up with as a department when we did the work/life balance focus.  I learned a couple new things from it.  And, I happily learned the term “Yuck Work”!

 

Is It Possible to Be Happy 80 Percent of the Workday?

            In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Trisalyn Nelson and Jessica Early, mid-career instructors at Arizona State University, noticed how much of the time they and their colleagues were griping about being overworked, overwhelmed, and stressed out. Nelson and Early decided to set a goal: having fun and being happy 80 percent of the average workday. They realized this wouldn’t happen just by wishing it and made a concerted effort to approach their jobs with a new perspective, carving out time for renewal, creativity, and risk, and figuring out a way to get the “yuck work” done without undermining well-being and productivity. They decided on four strategies:

            • Learn to say No to discretionary tasks. This is difficult, they acknowledge, because it might mean missing opportunities and being seen as lazy, negative, not a team player. “You are a pleaser and do not want to let anyone down,” say Nelson and Early. “You fear you won’t be asked again. You are tired, and saying yes seems like the path of least resistance.” But saying No is the key to being less overwhelmed – as long as there’s a thoughtful strategy behind it. Some questions for deciding without guilt:

-    Will this task help me understand my colleagues and how the organization works?

-    Does it allow me to make a meaningful contribution?

-    Does it energize me?

-    Will it help me grow professionally?

-    If it’s on the borderline, should I stall for time, hoping the job will be given to someone else in the meantime?

The downside of saying No is that your colleagues (or boss) may be unhappy with you. “The likability factor is particularly problematic for women,” say Nelson and Early, “as many of us have been acculturated to be pleasant.” But if you’re asked to do something that doesn’t meet the first four criteria above, being assertive is important. “Practice saying no,” they advise. “It gets easier.” And if you’re asked to do a clearly inappropriate task, you might go to a higher-up and make the case for being excused from it.

            • Schedule the stuff you hate to do. To reach 80-percent fun, it’s necessary to carve out time for the inevitable paperwork, complex problems, difficult people, and anxiety-producing decisions. “We close our office doors and go into robot mode,” say Nelson and Early, “crossing one small, annoying job after another off our lists. This feels amazing. With the yuck work clustered, our schedules become more available for creative work. It’s like cleaning the house to clear your mind.” Some of the tricks they use:

-    Use hand-written lists and get the tactile satisfaction of crossing things off.

-    Take a moment to notice how much you’ve accomplished.

-    Reward yourself for progress – a short walk, a cup of tea.

-    Do the unpleasant work in a pleasing setting, or use fun technology to do it.

Acceptance is also important. “Tedious or dreaded tasks might not seem like ‘real’ work,” they say. “But they are. Every job involves some degree of dull, irritating, yet necessary work.”

            • Get good at juggling. Educators’ days brim over with classroom instruction, necessary conversations with students, meetings, and service, all of which crowd out creative work, informal collegiality, exercise, and time to yourself. “Throw a family into this,” say Nelson and Early, “and all of these balls you’ve got in the air just get harder and harder to juggle.” Balance seems unattainable, but some insights can help:

-    Multitasking is ineffective and “hurts the brain,” they say. “Multitaskers make more mistakes and retain less information, and multitasking all the time is exhausting.”

-    It’s important to focus fully on a task and then put it aside and transition to another, if possible with a break in between (physical movement, time outdoors, human interaction). “Try to avoid social media and other distractions,” they advise. “What never works is checking Facebook.”

-    Chunk work so it can be done in pieces in the time available. “If you have only 15 minutes, do a 15-minute job,” they say. “Learn to be efficient in short bursts of time.”

Nelson and Early confess that doing all this is a daily challenge, but they’ve seen real improvement since embracing the 80-percent challenge.

            • Rest. “Some semesters just aren’t fun,” say Nelson and Early. “Some projects, people, and committees are just plain hard to deal with. You get worn out.” At that point, taking a break is vital: “Binge-watch something on Netflix. Plant a garden and talk to your tomatoes. Ride your bike. Hang a bird feeder. Bake cookies. Plan a trip. Read a book for enjoyment rather than for work. Sit on the floor and play with your kids or your pet…. Let your brain recharge. Careers are long. It all gets done.”

“4 Ways to Have More Fun as a Faculty Member” by Trisalyn Nelson and Jessica Early

in The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 6, 2019 (Vol. LXVI, #14, pp. A36-37),

https://www.chronicle.com/article/4-Ways-to-Have-More-Fun-as-a/247387; Nelson can be reached at Trisalyn.Nelson@asu.edu, Early at Jessica.Early@asu.edu.