Fostering Psychological Safety in School Teams

            In this article in Communiqué, school psychologists Brittany Lewno-Dumdie, Lina Kitson, and Andrew Shanock say that psychological safety is the “engine for successful teams.” They define it as a collective belief that people “can raise concerns, test ideas, ask for help, and acknowledge mistakes without fear of embarrassment or punishment.” It should not be confused with “comfort, niceness, or low expectations,” they say. “Instead, it creates the interpersonal conditions that make honest discussion and learning possible while maintaining clear expectations and accountability.” 

            Lewno-Dumdie, Kitson, and Shanock describe eight ways that school leaders and psychologists can foster psychological safety:

• Make it an explicit priority. Quickly reviewing its importance at team meetings keeps it front of mind. “Even small leadership moves, such as thanking someone for raising a difficult concern or revisiting a conversation after tension arises, help communicate that participation is both safe and valued,” say the authors. “Over time, these repeated interactions help establish team norms that promote honest participation.”
• Encourage everyone to speak up. Meetings should not be dominated by the most-experienced and highest-ranking people in the room. Prompts like, What perspectives have we not heard yet? Is there anything someone is hesitant to say that we should consider before moving forward? open the door to wider participation, say the authors, and “communicate that thoughtful disagreement and additional perspectives are welcomed.”
• Establish norms for handling failure. Psychological safety is not about “eliminating accountability or pretending mistakes do not occur,” say Lewno-Dumdie, Kitson, and Shanock. Teams need to anticipate unsuccessful interventions and setbacks and think through how they will be handled, including open discussion and reflection (What worked? What didn’t work? What can we learn from this?) versus blame and punitive responses.
• Create space for new ideas. Problem-solving meetings should include brainstorming and be open to unfinished, unconventional ideas. “When leaders respond with curiosity, acknowledgment, and appreciation,” say the authors, “teams become more willing to share ideas, identify problems early, and collaboratively work toward solutions.”
• Embrace positive conflict. Educators will disagree about discipline practices, special education referrals, and interventions, and leaders need to accept and normalize differences of opinion and keep their colleagues from seeing them as evidence of disrespect, personal conflict, or disunity. Calmly rephrasing opinions and matter-of-fact summarizing of arguments helps focus on the issue rather than personal conflict.
• Recognize patterns of silence. There are many possible reasons an individual might not be participating in a meeting, and checking in with them can surface what’s going on: I notice you were quieter during part of the discussion. Was there anything you wanted to add or anything that felt difficult to bring up? “These small leadership moves,” say the authors, “communicate that participation is valued and that disagreement and uncertainty are acceptable parts of collaborative problem-solving.”
• Promote dialogue and feedback. Psychological safety is not about avoiding difficult conversations or structural barriers that are getting in the way of supporting teachers and students. Leaders need to acknowledge concerns, ask clarifying questions, and be willing to revisit decisions that aren’t working out.
• Celebrate wins. “Psychological safety is strengthened when teams intentionally recognize progress, collaboration, and shared success rather than focusing exclusively on problems or deficits,” say Lewno-Dumdie, Kitson, and Shanock. “Educators often work within high-pressure environments and rapidly move from one challenge to the next… Recognizing individual and team contributions may reinforce trust, strengthen morale, and increase willingness to continue engaging collaboratively.” 

“Psychological Safety as the Foundation of Strong Teams” by Brittany Lewno-Dumdie, Lina Kitson, and Andrew Shanock in Communiqué, November 2026 (Vol. 55, #3, pp. 21-24)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1158 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Recommended Picture Books About Advocacy and Activism

            In this article in Social Studies and the Young Learner, Chris Hass (James Madison University) and Katie Kelly (Furman University) say inquiry-based instruction is a way to integrate civic education into daily social studies teaching. “When we invite students to investigate questions that matter to them, their communities, and the broader world,” say Hass and Kelly, “we shift the purpose of their work as budding social scientists from merely consuming facts to exploring what it means to strengthen our democracy.”

            In the article, they suggest seven picture books as catalysts for a unit on activism and advocacy, focusing on these questions: Who are people who take action? Why do these people choose to act? What does this look like? What are the outcomes?

• Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike of 1909 by Michelle Markel, illustrated by Melissa Sweet
• Drum Girl Dream: How One Girl’s Courage Changed Music by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Rafael López
• Emmanuel’s Dream: The True Story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah by Laurie Ann Thompson, illustrated by Sean Qualls
• Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books by Karen Leggett Abouraya, illustrated by Susan Roth
• Sit In: How Four Friends Stood Up for Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Brian Pinkney
• Sophia Valdez Future Prez by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts
• What Do You Do with a Voice Like That? The Story of Extraordinary Congresswoman Barbara Jordan by Chris Barton, illustrated by Ekua Holmes 

“Teaching Young Learners with the C3 Framework Curiosity for the Common Good: Inquiry as a Catalyst for Civic Responsibility” by Chris Hass and Katie Kelly in Social Studies for the Young Learner, September/October 2026 (Vol. 39, #1, pp. 27-32); the authors can be reached at hasscl@jmu.edu and katie.kelly@furman.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1157 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

A New Website on Technology and Society

Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt (author of The Anxious Generation) just launched this website with comprehensive, free research and publications on smartphones and social media, educational technology, AI and emerging technologies, technology across the lifespan, online gaming, gambling, and pornography, global adolescent health, technology policy evaluation, and sociology and history of technology 

 “After Babel: Tech and Society Lab at NYU Stern” October 2026

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1156 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Intentionally Designing Instruction to Maximize EL's Learning

            In this article in Language Magazine, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (San Diego State University and Health Sciences High and Middle College) say students’ behavior may suggest they’re engaged – hands raised, looking at the teacher, doing the work. But that “does not necessarily reveal how deeply students are thinking,” say Fisher and Frey, “how connected they feel to the classroom community, or whether they see themselves as capable learners.”

            This is especially important for English learners, who may be cognitively engaged but holding back for fear of saying something incorrectly. “Silence, therefore, should not automatically be interpreted as disengagement,” say Fisher and Frey. They urge teachers to be proactive, designing the classroom environment to maximize engagement for all students.

• Begin with invitation. Two questions on ELs’ minds: Is my thinking wanted here? Does it have to be expressed in grammatically correct English? Teachers can address these uncertainties by making a point of welcoming contributions from all students, encouraging them to share their thinking, and giving students the chance to rehearse ideas with partners before speaking in front of the class. It’s also helpful to use visuals to support communication and connect curriculum content to students’ prior experiences.
• Make belonging visible. “Students continually notice who gets heard, who receives support, whose ideas are taken seriously, and who seems to matter,” say Fisher and Frey. ELs need to get the message that they belong and their participation is genuinely welcomed. This means pronouncing their names correctly, including community and cultural references in lessons, calling on all students (including the quiet ones), expanding on their responses, and not allowing students to be interrupted by classmates.
• Make learning clear without making it easy. “Clarity does not mean simplifying the intellectual work,” say Fisher and Frey. Teachers need to communicate robust learning goals “in accessible language, unpacking important vocabulary, modeling processes, providing examples and nonexamples, using visuals and demonstrations, checking understanding frequently, and making success criteria visible.”
• Protect the challenge while providing the support. ELs “need access to the same rich thinking, complex texts, interesting problems, academic conversations, and intellectually demanding experiences as their peers,” say the authors. “The teacher’s task, then, is not to remove struggle but to distinguish between productive struggle and unnecessary barriers… The principle is simple: scaffold access, not thinking… Students might examine a diagram before reading, discuss observations with a partner, annotate a text, use sentence frames when helpful, sketch their thinking, or rehearse an explanation before sharing it publicly.”
• Expand what counts as participation. Fisher and Frey urge teachers to look beyond conventional notions of engagement and ask, “Are students making meaning? Are they interacting with ideas? Are they explaining their thinking to someone? Are they asking questions? Are they revising their thinking? Are they using feedback? Are they connecting new learning to what they already know?”
• Building voice and agency. Intentionally shift from students responding to the teacher’s questions and receiving support (which are important) to students themselves asking questions, requesting clarification, seeking feedback, expressing preferences, monitoring their progress, adjusting the strategies they’re using, and contributing ideas as learning unfolds. This is especially important, say the authors, in moving ELs from uncertainty to confidence. 

“Designing Engagement for Multilingual Learners” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in Language Magazine, September 2026 (Vol. 26, #1, pp. 23-25); the authors can be reached at dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu and nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1156 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Keys to Effective Teaching of Algebra

             In this article in Mathematics Teacher, Jill Newton (Purdue University) says that when she returned to a classroom during a sabbatical, she encountered many of the same challenges she’d experienced in her years as a high-school math teacher – plus some new ones: enforcing the school’s cellphone policy, a high rate of student absenteeism, and the pressure of standardized testing.

            As she re-immersed herself in teaching algebra, Newton compiled a list of what she wished she’d known as a new teacher. “I loved my students,” she says, “supported them, and did what I was taught to do, but as they say, When you know better, you can do better.” Here are her suggestions to her younger self – and other teachers of algebra: 

• Help students see the bigger picture of algebra – conceptual understanding and connections across algebraic procedures and topics. This is more helpful, says Newton, than breaking down algebraic procedures to the smallest steps.
• Discuss the uses of variables with students – for example, unknown, constant, argument, parameter, label, and varying quantity. Discussing conceptions of variables, Newton has found, really enhances students’ understanding of algebra.
• Give students opportunities to investigate strategies and make decisions about selecting methods for solving. “Learning when and why to use an algebraic procedure is just as important as learning how to use it,” she says.
• Facilitate students’ thinking about taking algebraic objects apart, putting them back together, and transforming them. Thinking about “doing” and “undoing” in algebra helps develop students’ procedural fluency and conceptual understanding.
• Begin with the idea of function families, and work with students to summarize their properties and compare and contrast different function families. This helps students make sense of algebra.
• Introduce the many ways to represent algebraic ideas, make connections among them, and make decisions about their uses. Focusing on multiple representations and building representational fluency builds students’ understanding of algebra.
• Engage students in exploring the power of algebra to investigate real-world issues and develop possible solutions.
• Model correct algebraic language, connecting ideas through words, and avoid imprecise terms. This helps students participate in mathematical discourse.
• Discuss the history of algebraic ideas, stories about important mathematicians, and the contributions of female and non-European practitioners. This sparks students’ interest in and understanding of algebra.
• Be frank about algebra’s historical role stratifying students in schools and its gatekeeper role for post-secondary opportunities. “I wish I had viewed algebra teaching and learning through a more-critical lens,” says Newton, “and asked more questions about who benefited and who was disadvantaged by school policies related to algebra.” 

“10 Things I Wish I Had Known About Teaching Algebra” by Jill Newton in Mathematics Teacher, September 2026 (Vol. 119, #9, pp. 742-747); Newton is at janewton@purdue.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1155 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Co-Constructing "Thinking Notes" in Building Thinking Classrooms

            In this article in Mathematics Teacher, Texas math educators Priya Pierre-Louis, Laura Godard, and Margaret Pearce describe Thinking Notes as an adaptation to Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms process. Here’s what led to the idea.

            In the middle of a BTC class, with students working standing up in groups of three solving a challenging calculus problem at erasable whiteboards, the teacher noticed an error being made by all the groups. Getting the attention of the class, the teacher provided an explanation that got students back on track.

            But the teacher (and colleagues in similar situations) noticed that some students “felt uneasy moving on without a detailed, teacher-guided, written synthesis,” say Pierre-Louis, Godard, and Pearce. “They valued collaborative discovery but wanted reassurance from the teacher about the precision of their understanding.”

            That’s what sparked the idea of Thinking Notes. “Instead of providing prewritten notes,” say the authors, “we co-create summaries with the class after problem-solving sessions. These notes are not ‘examples and answers’ but rather artifacts of our collective reasoning” – including graphs and diagrams, insights, generalizations, and examples and non-examples that surfaced during the all-class discussion.

            The Thinking Notes are captured in the class’s digital notebook, say the authors, forming “a bridge between the spontaneity of thinking tasks and the students’ desire for precise records for future reference.” At each of these “pause points” in a lesson, “students independently decide whether to record notes in their notebooks, often adding to the student-created notes they have already written during group work.”

            The Thinking Notes provide “a shared, vetted synthesis that students can draw on as their understanding continues to develop,” say Pierre-Louis, Godard, and Pearce. “While still grounded in student language and reasoning, Thinking Notes benefit from teacher facilitation and tend to be more conceptually coherent, mathematically precise, and reusable as reference for future tasks, assessments, and revision.”

            The authors report that this adaptation of Building Thinking Classrooms has resulted in students being more confident with subsequent tasks: “For some students, the obstacle was not a lack of ideas but uncertainty about whether their thinking was ‘correct’ enough to share publicly. The Thinking Notes phase reduced this risk by positioning ideas as provisional and open to refinement. As a result, several students who were hesitant to speak during group work began volunteering contributions during notes creation, knowing their ideas would be examined and revised collectively, rather than evaluated individually.” Quieter students contributed more at the whiteboards and in all-class discussions.

            Thinking Notes, conclude Pierre-Louis, Godard, and Pearce, “have had a profound impact on our classroom culture. Students report feeling empowered because they are the authors of the mathematical ideas recorded: their language, reasoning, and representations shape the notes. At the same time, students experience a sense of security through teacher facilitation as their collective thinking is affirmed, refined, and validated for mathematical accuracy. This combination allows students to take intellectual risks during exploration while trusting that misconceptions will be surfaced and addressed during synthesis. This process has helped us, as teachers, slow down and honor moments of deep reasoning before moving to the next task.” 

“Thinking Notes: Co-Constructed Reflection” by Priya Pierre-Louis, Laura Godard, and Margaret Pearce in Mathematics Teacher, September 2026 (Vol. 119, #9, pp. 748-751); Pierre-Louis can be reached at pierrelouis@gmail.com.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1155 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

What Do Students Want in History and Civics Classroom Discussions?

            Running a good classroom discussion is “challenging work,” say Andrew Schiera (University of Colorado/Boulder) and Andrew del Calvo (Rutgers University) in this article in Social Education, especially on controversial topics. They share suggestions from a diverse group of high-school students on how social studies teachers can make discussions lively, engaging, and safe: 

• A big question – The focus of discussion needs to be open-ended, students said, not pointed toward a single correct answer or a binary agree/disagree choice. Students liked being asked to formulate an initial opinion and then modify it in light of evidence and contrary opinions. In short, say Schiera and del Calvo, students appreciated “an authentic, shared problem space so that they could inquire deeply, individually, and collectively.”
• Facilitation – Students wanted teachers to provoke discussion with questions and follow-up comments that sparked deeper thinking. They also appreciated teachers clarifying when things got confusing and refocusing when students were straying from the topic or “going back and forth on the same stuff.”
• Multiple perspectives – Students said they wanted to hear all sides of historical and civics debates, perhaps engaging in small-group discussions to elicit and understand different points of view. But students cautioned against “both-sides-ism” and hoped that clear moral choices could emerge from discussions.
• Participation – Students had seen too many discussions involving “mostly just like three people,” and asked teachers to ensure broad and equitable participation, including: having students sit in a circle; establishing and monitoring air-time norms; inviting new voices; cold-calling; using thumb polls; and assigning participation grades. At the same time, students recognized that there were times when an intense dialogue should be allowed to continue, not cutting it off and letting others take the discussion off track. 
• The teacher’s role – Students suggested that teachers go beyond mere facilitation, encouraging them to chime in as co-inquirers – without dominating the discussion or conveying that their opinion was correct. Students were aware that a teacher being too opinionated or seeming to push a political agenda could spark parental outrage. 
• Psychological safety – Students mentioned several ways to ensure that discussions felt emotionally comfortable while being intellectually open: setting norms about respectful engagement; thoughtfully introducing difficult topics; reassuring students about fear of saying something “wrong;” allowing students time to think; not trying to orchestrate a single conclusion; not interrupting and shutting students down; and using small-group turn-and-talk when appropriate.
• Connecting past, present, and lived experience – Students appreciated delving into primary-source material but wanted historical events to be connected to the present day and their own lived experience. “Overall,” say Schiera and del Calvo, “students wanted discussions that connected historical inquiry to contemporary life while providing enough structure to help them navigate those connections in meaningful ways.” 

“‘Setting the Conversation on Fire’: What Youth Want from Social Studies Conversations” by Andrew Schiera and Andrew del Calvo in Social Education, September 2026 (Vol. 90, #4, pp. 216-220); the authors are at AJ.Schiera@colorado.edu and andrew.delcalvo@gse.rutgers.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1151 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.