Recommended Children's Books on Climate Change

             In this School Library Journal feature, Baltimore librarian Liz Bosarge recommends books for tweens and teens on global ecology: 

Elementary: 

• Living Planet: The Story of Survival on Planet Earth from Natural Disasters to Climate Change by Camilla de la Bédoyère, grade 3-6 
• Climate Action: What Happened and What We Can Do by Seymour Simon, grade 3-6 
• Young Water Protectors: A Story About Standing Rock by Asian Tudor and Kelly Tudor, grades 2-5
• Can You Hear the Trees Talking? Discovering the Hidden Life of the Forest by Peter Wohlleben, grade 3-5 

Middle school: 

• The Beekeepers: How Humans Changed the World of Bumble Bees by Dana Church, grade 6-10
• All the Feelings Under the Sun: How to Deal with Climate Change by Leslie Davenport, grade 6-9
• Be the Change: Rob Greenfield’s Call to Kids Making a Difference in a Messed-Up World, by Rob Greenfield, grade 4-7
• Hothouse Earth: The Climate Crisis and the Importance of Carbon Neutrality by Stephanie McPherson, grade 8-10 
• Imaginary Borders by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, grade 7-9 
• Planet Ocean: Why We All Need a Healthy Ocean by Patricia Newman, grade 5-8 
• Girl Warriors: How 25 Young Activists Are Saving the Earth by Rachel Sarah, gr. 7-9 
• Seen: Rachel Carson by Birdie Willis, illustrated by Rii Abrego, grade 6-8 
• Earth Squad: 50 People Who Are Saving the Planet by Alexandra Zissu, grade 4-7 

High school: 

• The Story of More (Adapted for Young Adults): How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren, grade 8 and up 
• How to Change Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and 
• Each Other by Naomi Klein, grade 8 and up 

 “An Eco-Hero’s Bookshelf” by Liz Bosarge in School Library Journal, March 2022 (Vol. 68, #3, pp. 47-50)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #929 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Dealing with Math Anxiety

             “Up to 30 percent of adults report moderate or severe mathematics anxiety, experiencing fear or dread when encountering mathematics,” report Holly Klee, Michelle Buehl, and Angela Miller (George Mason University) in this article in Theory Into Practice. For many people, math anxiety begins in elementary school and increases as they move through the grades, leading them to avoid courses and careers that involve math. Research points to four variables that are at play with math-anxious students:

• They believe that doing well in math is important. 
• They compare their performance to that of other students and external benchmarks. 
• They strive to not mess up and avoid failure versus mastering the material. 
• They believe they have very little control over how they’ll do. 

Studies have shown there’s no correlation between math anxiety and ability and IQ; when students are anxious, they have difficulty with tasks they were able to perform when their anxiety was low. 

            How does math anxiety make people less capable? Klee, Buehl, and Miller believe it’s because the anxiety reduces working memory. “The cognitive worry experienced by students with mathematics anxiety,” they say, “can occupy a large portion of working memory, leaving less available to process the task at hand… Thus, students with mathematics anxiety are performing two tasks when others are performing one: they are working to solve the problem while also coping with their anxiety.” 

            Klee, Buehl, and Miller suggest six ways for teachers to decrease students’ math anxiety and thus improve their self-efficacy and performance: 

• Conceptual teaching – “The ‘drill and kill’ method of practicing procedures, while easy to implement and effective in producing ‘correct’ answers, does not help students gain deep understanding of mathematics concepts,” say the authors. It’s better to frame goals in terms of understanding versus correctness and good grades, praise students for working hard and explaining their reasoning, and wrap up lessons with a short explanation of the conceptual takeaways. 
• Contextualizing mathematics – Studies show that the more personal and real-world connections students see, the less anxious they are, the more agency they feel, and the better they do. 
• Partner and group work – “Encouraging students to work together to discuss potential solutions,” say the authors, “provides students the opportunity to voice their own understandings and potentially recognize there are multiple ways to find the correct solution, which can also support autonomy.” Working together in pairs or small groups is also reassuring when students realize that they’re not the only ones having difficulty. In addition, they can get insights as they wrestle together with problems and come up with novel solutions. Group work increases student autonomy – a valuable psychological factor in success – and allows the teacher to circulate and get ideas about what’s causing difficulty and how to boost the conceptual level of the material. 
• Formative assessment and feedback – Frequent, low-stakes checks for understanding let the teacher know whether to slow the lesson down or increase the conceptual level, and also give students feedback on their level of understanding – perhaps a sense of mastery. Low-stakes assessments convey the importance of mastery, versus students comparing themselves to peers. Short online quizzes during and after class give students an immediate sense of how they are doing and focus on whether they used successful or unsuccessful strategies. Some teachers ask students to self-report on their level of mastery and confidence and follow up with individual check-ins. 
• How summative assessments are framed – Final exams and end-of-semester tests are when student anxiety is highest, and teachers need to address this head on. Having students talk openly about how they’re feeling before a big test is surprisingly helpful, say the authors: students realize they’re not alone and gain a greater sense of self-efficacy and control. It’s important for teachers to verbally emphasize mastery – This is an opportunity to show what you know – versus performance – I’m looking to catch you on what you don’t know and compare you to your classmates. Teachers should point out that the summative assessment has the same material students have been seeing in formative assessments in recent weeks. It’s also good to be open to feedback on the quality of test questions: if all students got a question wrong, that test item needs to be revised – or the teacher needs to change how the concept was taught. 
• Student awareness of strategies to address math anxiety – “One of the most powerful things we can do as educators is to help students be aware of the anxiety they are feeling,” say Klee, Buehl, and Miller. Polling students on their anxiety on the first day of class reveals that students are not alone in the way they are feeling, which is tremendously reassuring. “Hearing anxiety is normal seems to function as a form of social persuasion that increases self-efficacy beliefs and decreases anxiety,” they say. “Checking in throughout the semester, especially around exams, continues this acknowledgement from educators and increases students’ sense of autonomy. Making anxiety a purposeful conversation is an important strategy for reducing it.” One study showed that getting students to write about their worries just before an exam improved performance and speeded up processing time, indicating that working memory had been improved by neutralizing some of those anxious thoughts. Mindfulness interventions have also been shown to improve performance for math-anxious students. 

 “Strategies for Alleviating Students’ Math Anxiety: Control-Value Theory in Practice” by Holly Klee, Michelle Buehl, and Angela Miller in Theory Into Practice, Winter 2022 (Vol. 61, #1, pp.49-61); the authors can be reached at hklee@gmu.edu, mbuehl@gmu.edu, and amille35@gmu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #929 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Karin Chenoweth on the Secret Sauce of Gap-Closing Districts

            In the concluding chapter in her book on six beat-the-odds school districts, Karin Chenoweth (The Education Trust) ponders how to summarize the key ingredients. She noticed a number of seemingly important elements: passionate, hard-working teachers; a coherent reading program; an effective assessment system; a good student management program; well-targeted grants. “As nice as it would be to boil the success of these districts down to a couple of those things,” says Chenoweth, “I don’t think the answer lies in that direction. After all, there are plenty of passionate, hard-working teachers in ineffective districts, and the same can be said about good reading programs, assessments, data systems, and grant programs.” 

            She believes that what explains these districts’ remarkable achievements is their “ethos,” which was powerfully summed up by Ronald Edmonds in a 1979 article: a culture in which “it is incumbent on all personnel to be instructionally effective for all pupils.” Chenoweth unpacks Edmonds’s statement: 

• Incumbent – Educators have internalized the responsibility to ensure that kids get smarter, and they (the educators) are willing to be accountable for that. 
• All personnel – Getting results is not the sole responsibility of individual teachers but of every adult in the building, including cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and custodians. 
• Instructionally effective – This is broadly defined, encompassing curriculum, schedules, materials, pedagogy, interventions, engagement, and encouragement. 
• All pupils – This includes children living in poverty, African-American children, and others who are left out of school success in far too many U.S. schools. 

The districts Chenoweth describes – and the schools she’s written about in her other books – “are filled with adults who feel it incumbent on themselves to be instructionally effective for all kids.” Here’s what that looks like in concrete terms: 

• Leadership – “None of the leaders in this book is a fluffy, utopian idealist,” says Chenoweth. “All are hard-headed career educators who have seen the power schools have to change lives… They aren’t waiting for the cavalry to teach the kids; they are the cavalry.” As one of the superintendents put it, educators “can change the path of poverty.” Leaders communicated a clear, ambitious vision and set measurable goals (in one case, that no fourth grader would fail the state reading test and have to repeat the grade). Notably, none of the district leaders blamed educators for student failure; rather, says Chenoweth, they expected principals, teachers, and other staff members “to be curious and willing to learn, improve, and lead efforts to find solutions to problems.” 
• Scientific method – A common theme in the districts was the systematic application of these steps:
• Identify an important problem. 
• Propose a solution based on local data and existing research. 
• Implement it. 
• Gather and analyze data to see if the problem was solved. 
• If it was, identify the reasons and extend and expand the solution. 
• If it wasn’t solved, identify the reasons and either adjust or start over. 

“When you do that week after week, month after month, year after year, you start seeing results,”   said an Oklahoma superintendent. This is not easy work, says Chenoweth, and many educators aren’t good at the last three steps. But when the scientific method is applied, “This way of working by its very nature builds leadership capacity throughout schools and districts, because ideas and solutions come from everywhere. A paraeducator’s insight into why a student may be having trouble with a particular concept or skill is just as valuable as those of a teacher, principal, or superintendent. A bus driver or school secretary may have information about a student that no other professional in the building knows. A brand-new teacher might have better training in reading or math instruction than a veteran one.” With common metrics of success and continual examination of data, schools can be creative, try new things, and find the best solutions for kids. 

• Systems of support – Chenoweth quotes Paul Zavitkovsky of the University of Illinois/Chicago: “The key to a high-performing school is that it becomes a community where adult learning is as important as kid learning is. And because of the infrastructure of American schools… you’re fighting an uphill battle to create the time and the space to do systematic adult learning where adults can really learn their way through chronic problems together.” The districts Chenoweth profiled won this battle by: 
• Effective teamwork – Teacher teams pored over assessment data, behavioral data, attendance data, and student work and thought deeply about the effects of their work, what they should do more of, and what they should do less of; 
• Common assessments – “Teachers need to be looking at how students did on the same assessment given at roughly the same time,” says Chenoweth… “Without common data there is no real way to expose and learn from expertise.” This means that teacher teams agree on what their students should be learning, and then experiment with how to teach it.
• A culture of trust – The question often heard in highly productive meetings: Your kids are doing better than mine; what are you doing? “It is long past time to acknowledge that it is impossible for individual educators to know all there is to know about making kids smarter,” says Chenoweth. “There is simply too much to know. It is only by pooling their knowledge and learning from expertise that educators can possibly expect to help all kids.”
• Using the research on how people learn – The districts Chenoweth chose mostly figured this out for themselves. It would be more efficient, she says, for districts to draw on the rich insights on human learning from neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology. -
• Understanding that the work is never done – “There is always another problem to solve,” she says, “more opportunities to provide for children, better ways of doing things, higher standards to reach.” 

 “So, to sum up,” says Chenoweth, “the common elements of these districts are leadership that defines a vision of high expectations for all students and builds a culture where all adults in the system feel it incumbent to make kids smarter; a process to guide the adults in the district to making better decisions while growing their ability to do so using the scientific method; and systems to undergird that improvement process.” 

            Why aren’t more districts implementing these ideas? Why do economic and racial achievement gaps continue to be so wide across the nation? Chenoweth points to these factors: 

• It’s hard to translate research into practice. 
• Many educators resist the idea that others have something to teach them. 
• Most school and district leaders don’t understand how to lead improvement. 
• We as a nation have not fully committed to making all kids smarter. 
• Not everyone agrees that all kids can get smarter. 
• Local newspaper reporters aren’t effectively describing what’s happening in schools. 
• Some Americans “have become discouraged about whether public schools can do much to help kids become smart,” says Chenoweth. “Others have become convinced that schools can but won’t.” 

“I wrote this book hoping to counter such pessimism,” she concludes. “The districts I have profiled… provide clear arguments against the idea that public schools are incapable of improvement and excellence. They demonstrate that our future fellow citizens – children from all backgrounds – are capable of getting smarter and that the efforts of ordinary educators, when marshaled together, can help them do so. Kids can get smarter. We can all get smarter. We just have to muster the will to do so.” 

“We Can All Get Smarter” by Karin Chenoweth in her book, Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021, pp. 129-152); Chenoweth can be reached at kchenoweth@edtrust.org.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #929 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Intervening Early to Improve Students' Math Self-Efficacy

            In this article in Theory Into Practice, Jeesoo Lee, Hyun Ji Lee, and Mimi Bong (Korea University) say that self-efficacy “is arguably the most powerful motivational resource that drives individuals to engage, persevere, and accomplish goals in various domains.” In classrooms, self-efficacy is “the strongest predictor of students’ academic achievement.” 

            But self-efficacy in math – students’ belief that their efforts will produce success – declines during the elementary grades. Lee, Lee, and Bong suggest the following causes: 

• There’s a shift from a mastery orientation toward math in the lower elementary grades to a performance orientation in the upper grades, with increasing emphasis on demonstrating one’s ability, outperforming peers, and getting high test scores. 
• As they encounter frustration in math, many students adopt a fixed mindset about math ability – that it’s innate, you either have it or you don’t – versus a growth mindset – that ability can be developed. 
• Young children initially believe that peers who work hard at math have high ability, but they gradually shift to believing that having to put in a lot of effort for the same result is a sign of less ability. 
• Students are exposed to the belief that boys are naturally better at math than girls, triggering stereotype threat – this despite the fact that in the elementary grades, girls do as well as, or better than, boys. 

These factors undermine elementary students’ self-efficacy in math – especially girls’. The authors say it’s urgent to counteract this negative trend before students reach adolescence, and suggest communicating these core messages to all students: 

• Anyone can get smart and do well at math. Students need to hear loud and clear that math ability improves with effort and practice. A growth mindset message should be conveyed without referring to the opposite mindset, say the authors, because that “could inadvertently strengthen the fixed mindset of children who already hold this undesirable belief.” 
• My brain is like a muscle, and I can train my math muscles. Giving students vivid examples of neural plasticity – for example, how aspiring London cabbies’ brains change as they study for The Knowledge (the extraordinarily difficult test to get a London taxi license) – and making an explicit link to math ability. 
• I can do math better by working hard, using good strategies, and getting help. Studies have shown the efficacy of students embracing this three-part belief. 
• Overcoming difficulty is part of doing well in math. It’s helpful to tell analogous stories of athletes and musicians who overcame handicaps and challenges to master their skills. 
• Girls can perform just as well at math as boys. The authors suggest classroom activities such as Draw a Mathematician and tabulating responses, or guessing the occupation of a series of photos of people who turn out to have counter-stereotypical jobs (e.g., a male nurse, female mathematician), and then following up by eliciting from students the negative consequences of holding gender stereotypes. Again, the authors say that “it is essential not to explicitly inform children of the stereotype because direct messaging can trigger the stereotype threat effect.” 

            Conveying these messages well can change students’ fixed mindsets and gender stereotypical beliefs. The messages are most effective if they are presented in engaging classroom activities that make good use of the following processes: 

• Internalization – Students might be asked to write a letter to a friend or a struggling student, explaining what they’ve learned about brain plasticity or gender stereotypes. 
• Modeling – “Involving successful figures or influential role models in the intervention makes the delivery of messages more effective,” say the authors – another student, a cartoon character, or a story to which students can relate. 
• Attributional feedback and strategy – Students might be presented with the story of two people who tried hard: one succeeded, the other didn’t – the difference was strategies. 
• Goal-setting – If targets are specific, short-term, and seem attainable, they can increase self-efficacy and allow students to measure progress on the road to mastery. 
• Interest – The concept of neural plasticity is not easy for young children to grasp, say the authors, so it needs to be embedded in a variety of fun activities – for example, after learning about the parts of the brain, coloring in areas used by a pianist or someone solving a math puzzle. 
• Surprise – A good example is students guessing wrong about the professions of people working outside stereotypical occupations. 

The authors say it’s better to conduct these activities with a classroom of students rather than individually, because some of the beliefs being counteracted are social in nature. It’s also important that teachers and parents be included in the interventions, since these adults have a major impact on the way children think about their math ability. 

            If this intervention is handled well, conclude the authors, children’s math self-efficacy will improve markedly and they “can face math with stronger convictions in their abilities to succeed and greater tenacity to overcome challenges and setbacks.” 

 “Boosting Children’s Math Self-Efficacy by Enriching Their Growth Mindsets and Gender-Fair Beliefs” by Jeesoo Lee, Hyun Ji Lee, and Mimi Bong in Theory Into Practice, Winter 2022 (Vol. 61, #1, pp. 35-48); Bong can be reached at mimibong@korea.ac.kr.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #928 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

The Story Behind Chicago Schools' Improvement from 1987 to 2015

             In this chapter from her book describing five school districts that have broken the all-too-common correlation of race, poverty, and achievement, Karin Chenoweth (The Education Trust) tells how the Chicago Public Schools, over nearly three decades, brought about significant improvements in student performance. Citing Sean Reardon’s massive analysis of U.S. test scores from 2009 to 2015, Chenoweth says that Chicago “grew” students six academic years in five calendar years. In other words, third graders who had been more than a grade level behind were pretty much at the national average as eighth graders. Other results: 

• On the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA), Chicago improved steadily from 2002 to 2015.
• Once far below other TUDA districts, in recent years Chicago has matched or exceeded many others and is near the national average. 
• In 2011, 48 percent of Chicago fourth graders met basic standards for reading; four years later, 67 percent of the same cohort met basic reading standards in eighth grade. 
• In 2015, only 2 percent of fourth graders read at an advanced level; in 2019, 7 percent of eighth graders were advanced (compared to 4 percent nationally). 
• From 2006 to 2018, the high-school graduation rate moved from 57 to 76 percent (counting the alternative schools, it’s 81 percent). 
• Almost half of Chicago high-school graduates enroll immediately in a four-year college and another 22 percent in a two-year college – rates higher than the rest of the nation. 
• On state assessments in 2017, Chicago’s students did better than the Illinois average. 
• In 2015, white and black students outperformed same-race students across the state. 
• An official in the Chicago Teachers Union told Chenoweth that when he arrived in the city in the late 1990s, he didn’t know a single teacher whose children attended city schools; by 2017, he didn’t know any teachers his age or younger whose children didn’t attend CPS. 

Many people are incredulous when told about Chicago’s success, but the data speak for themselves, says Chenoweth, adding, “There is an important conversation to have about why people were surprised and why, even years after [Reardon’s] analysis, you probably still haven’t heard about Chicago’s improvement.” 

            What accounts for this track record? Chenoweth says it all started in 1987 when the newly elected mayor, Harold Washington, convened a community-wide meeting and heard a torrent of complaints about the schools. Shortly after that, William Bennett, the U.S. Secretary of Education, visited Chicago and said its schools were the “worst” in the nation. The energy generated by these two events set in motion a series of reforms in governance, policy, data collection, and training. Here’s a brief summary: 

• Radical decentralization – In 1988, the Illinois legislature passed the Chicago School Reform Act, which created local school councils in every one of the city’s 542 schools. Each council’s elected members (six parents, two community members, two teachers, and a student member in high schools) had the power to hire and fire the principal, approve the school improvement plan, and allocate the school’s Title I budget and any grant money. This move to hyperlocal control of schools was an attempt to break the grip of the central office, stop patronage appointment of principals, and focus funds on each school’s needs. 
• Journalistic accountability – Two local foundations were persuaded to fund Catalyst Chicago, a new publication devoted entirely to covering the schools, and it published for 25 years, at which point it was folded into the Chicago Reporter, published by a faith-based organization. “Catalyst was brutal,” says Chenoweth. “It documented dirty buildings and professional malfeasance, drooping test scores and staff turnover, teacher shortages, exclusionary discipline, and overcrowding.” The fact that it covered bad news so honestly gave it real credibility when it reported good news. Catalyst became required reading for many parents, community members, principals, teachers, and district leaders. 
• University brainpower – The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, led by Anthony Bryk, began a long-term study of the impact of the 1988 Reform Act. Funded by a major grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and subsequently by other benefactors and the Annenberg Foundation, Bryk and his colleagues (“a set of education research superstars,” says Chenoweth) were able to dig deeply into the details of the schools and document efforts to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. Catalyst Chicago covered the researchers’ reports on an ongoing basis, bringing key insights to educators and the broader community. “None of this was quick or easy,” says Chenoweth. “There were fits and starts and difficult conversations with district officials who weren’t always happy with the Consortium’s findings. They rarely made for good press releases.”
• Strong and consistent central leadership – In 1995, Chicago mayor Richard Daley Jr., impatient with the slow improvement in test scores, convinced the state to enact a second reform bill that gave him more control over the school board and superintendent. The district now had a governance structure that was at once radically decentralized and highly centralized. Daley appointed Paul Vallas as CEO – a man with no school experience but great management skills – and he proceeded to straighten out the finances, begin a massive building and renovation project, and reform the bureaucracy. In 2001, Vallas was succeeded by Arne Duncan, who served until 2009, so Chicago had energetic, steady central leadership for eleven years – rare in an urban district. 
• New schools – Duncan partnered with the business community (including several hedge fund managers) to foster the creation of 100 new schools, both charter and non-charter. Their performance was similar to that of other Chicago public schools. 
• Improved instruction – A respected chief education officer, former CPS principal Barbara Eason-Watkins, led a major effort to improve classroom teaching, including the Chicago Reading Initiative led by literacy expert Timothy Shanahan. He revamped the literacy curriculum and sent reading specialists to 114 schools. Chicago’s K-8 structure necessitated another major staff development effort – training and certifying middle-school teachers who didn’t meet No Child Left Behind “highly qualified” standard. This ten-year investment in pedagogy was funded by the Chicago Community Trust, one of the city’s biggest philanthropies. 
• Research insights – In 1998, Bryk’s team published a study of how decentralization was working. It raised big concerns about equity – the poorest schools weren’t making as much progress as those in more-affluent neighborhoods – and dug deeper into the data to identify the characteristics of successful schools in all parts of the city. The two most notable findings were: (a) “relational trust” among educators, parents, and the community was a key success factor; and (b) identifying several key indicators of ninth graders not on track for graduation and urging early intervention. These and other research findings gave Chicago principals a clear path forward, focusing their leadership on factors that actually improved student success. One result was educators fretting less about test scores and addressing the antecedents in classrooms that ultimately drive better scores. The Consortium continues to track multiple streams of data and report to the community on progress and problems. 
• Tuning in on key school effectiveness factors – In 2010, the Consortium published another study comparing 100 schools that improved and 100 that didn’t. The two sets of schools had similar demographics and other characteristics, including principals who worked hard and cared deeply about improvement. What made some schools more effective than was a set of organizational characteristics that greatly amplified impact of teachers’ daily work with students. Those elements, updating the effective schools research of Ronald Edmonds and Michael Rutter et al., were:
• Principals focused on results and school improvement; 
• A safe and supportive school culture with high expectations; 
• Engaging teaching pointed toward challenging, worthwhile objectives; 
• Teachers collaborating and striving for excellence; 
• Partnering with families and the community. 

“When schools had all five essentials firmly in place,” says Chenoweth, “they were ten times as likely to improve than if they didn’t.” These, along with test scores, became the elements of the district’s accountability efforts, and still are today. 

• Transforming school leadership – University and district leaders realized that principals were the key to individual teachers’ success with students, and ramped up efforts to train and recruit effective school leaders. Training programs at the University of Illinois/ Chicago and New Leaders for New Schools used selective enrollment, a cohort model, paid internships, and ongoing coaching to launch more than 350 principals. Subsequent research confirmed that the new principals were more successful at building the five key correlates of good schools, with test scores, a lagging indicator, following along. An important part of this effort was convincing local school councils to hire the new wave of school leaders who didn’t follow the traditional route of serving for many years as assistant principals. District leaders also had to persuade principals not to leave for greener pastures. 
• High standards and a guaranteed and viable curriculum – At one point a few years ago, a reporter pushed Chicago superintendent Janice Jackson on the ambitious goals being set for students. Was she trying to “impose middle-class values” on Chicago kids, the reporter wanted to know. “At the core of what I heard,” said Jackson, “is why are you expecting low-income, predominantly black and Latino kids in Chicago to do what everybody else is doing throughout the United States? That’s what I heard. I believe everybody wants to learn, everybody wants a good education and access to the American Dream, however you define that.” 

            Chicago’s steady progress has plateaued in the last few years, with instability in district leadership, teacher strikes, and the impact of the pandemic. But what the city’s schools accomplished over thirty years provides key insights for other districts, says Chenoweth: “a community-wide commitment to improving the lives of children by improving schools; a willingness to seek out facts in order to make better decisions; and an agreement that the job of school districts is to help principals organize their schools in ways that help kids get smarter.”  

“The Work of a Generation” by Karin Chenoweth, a chapter in her book, Districts That Succeed (Harvard Education Press, 2021, pp. 27-59); Chenoweth can be reached at kchenoweth@edtrust.org.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #928 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

The Importance of Weeding a School (or Classroom) Library

        In this Knowledge Quest article, Maryland librarians Casey Grenier and Lauren Lynn say that in light of the number of challenges these days, it’s important to heed the American Library Association’s 2014 Library Bill of Rights: 

        “Resources in school library collections are an integral component of the curriculum and represent diverse points of view on both current and historical issues. These resources include materials that support the intellectual growth, personal development, individual interests, and recreational needs of students.” 

The needs of all students, say Grenier and Lynn, “not just the needs of a few or a vocal majority.” And that involves continuously adding to the collection, evaluating what’s on library shelves, and tossing out what doesn’t belong. It’s an excellent idea, they say, to get student input on specific books, and types of books, they’d like to see in the library. 

        Students can also be involved in culling books that need to be taken out for a variety of reasons. Grenier and Lynn have used two acronyms for making decisions. The first is MUSTIE, which was developed by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (building on the work of Joseph Segal and Belinda Boon): 

• Misleading or factually inaccurate; 
• Ugly – worn beyond mending or rebinding; 
• Superseded by a new edition or a much better book on the subject; 
• Trivial – of no discernible literary or scientific value; 
• Irrelevant to the needs and interests of students and educators; 
• Elsewhere – the material is easily available in another library or database. 

There’s also the FRESH acronym coined by Jennifer LaGarde: 

• Fosters a love of reading; 
• Reflects a diverse population; 
• Equitable global view; 
• Supports the curriculum; 
• High quality. 

On the key issue of a diverse collection, Grenier and Lynn believe these questions should shape purchases and a systematic look at what’s in the collection (quoted directly): 

• How can I expect students to feel welcome and appreciated in my school library and school if they don’t see anyone who looks like them in our books? 
• How can I expect my students to feel that they are part of a community when they don’t see a family like theirs or anyone dealing with their struggles? 
• How can I say that my mission is to inspire my students to grow and embrace diversity when they don’t have access to books that tell the stories of people who come from different backgrounds? 
• How will my students develop empathy when I’ve never challenged them to step outside of their comfort zones? 

There’s one more reason to be continuously weeding the collection, say Grenier and Lynn: a principal who sees all the shelves full of books might conclude that the library doesn’t need a budget for new books! 

 “Reflecting Our Students and Our World in Our School Library Collections” by Casey Grenier and Lauren Lynn in Knowledge Quest, March/April 2022 (Vol. 50, #4, pp. 14-21); the authors can be reached at grenierc@calvertnet.k12.md.us and LynnL@calvertnet.K12.md.us.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #927 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Recruiting and Training Kids to Spot and Get Help for Troubled Peers

        In this Education Week article, Catherine Gewertz reports on initiatives to train secondary-school students to watch for mental health struggles among their classmates and guide them to professional help. In one Ohio high school, a student who is one of dozens in the school’s “Hope Squad” said, “Some students won’t get help because they’re just afraid to ask for it. But if a peer knows, and if their struggle is seen and heard, then they’re able to say, OK, yes, I do need the help. And we can get them to an adult themselves.” Members of this squad are trained to watch for signs of social isolation or feelings of hopelessness and in how to persuade students to get help. Working with a team of adults, they’re also encouraged to monitor their own emotions and take care of themselves, seeking support when they need it. 

        This district started the Hope Squad four years ago when leaders noticed an increase in depression, anxiety, and suicides. Student trainees’ contributions have been especially helpful during the pandemic, which amplified mental health struggles and challenged schools’ counselors and psychologists. This district’s schools are referring more students to nearby children’s hospitals for psychiatric support than other nearby districts of comparable size. 

        Mental Health First Aid USA is the best-known program at a national level. It has trained hundreds of thousands of teens, teaching them to use the ALGEE protocol: 

• Assess the risk of suicide or harm. 
• Listen nonjudgmentally. 
• Give reassurance and information. 
• Encourage professional help. 
• Encourage self-help and other support strategies. 

Research on the program has mainly focused on its effects on trainees, and the results are encouraging in terms of self-awareness, stress management, and improved self-care. Less is known about its impact on other students. 

        Some K-12 educators are wary of loading these additional responsibilities on stressed-out teens. Suzanna Davis, a vice president at Grant Us Hope, which works with schools in Ohio and Indiana, was hesitant at first. “I asked students, is this too much to take on?” she said. “But I realized that they’re having these conversations with their peers on a daily basis. In the absence of formal training, they very much carry the weight on their shoulders that they have to fix their friends’ problems. If we’re not engaging them and giving them the right tools and training to engage in those conversations, we’re missing the boat.” 

        One Florida district trains elementary students to be “friendship ambassadors” to specially painted “buddy benches” on the playground for kids who look like they need a friend. Another program trains middle-school students to watch for students eating alone in the cafeteria. 

        Schools that have taught students to spot problems and work with their peers emphasize the need for good training and support, specifically: 

• Well-conceived training for all students involved; 
• Enough well-prepared adults to provide a skilled, supportive team for students to lean on;
• Partnering with a mental health provider in their community; 
• Schools adhering to the recommended ratio of one psychologist for every 500 students and one counselor for every 250 students; 
• Establishing an after-hours notification system for students to contact if troubling signs appear in conversations and social media when students aren’t in school. 

“Students Train to Spot Peers with Mental Health Struggles and Guide Them to Help” by Catherine Gewertz in Education Week, March 2, 2022 (Vol. 41, #24, pp. 8-10)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #926 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Nimble Leadership for Effective Schools

 (Originally titled “Linking Continuous Improvement and Adaptive Leadership”) 

        In this Educational Leadership article, Jal Mehta (Harvard University), Max Yurkofsky (Radford University), and Kim Frumin (Deeper Learning Dozen) say the continuous improvement process, widely implemented in business, health care, and education, usually calls for (a) defining a problem, (b) developing a strategy, (c) trying it out, (d) assessing how it’s working, (e) making adjustments, and (f) repeating the process. 

        But in a study of continuous improvement in four school districts in the U.S. and Canada, Mehta, Yurkofsky, and Frumin found that it’s not “the linear process that it is often understood to be; instead, there is a lot more leadership skill, relationship building, political savvy, judgment, and personal touch involved.” Here’s what was happening in the most successful schools: 

        • Forging a collective purpose – Leaders developed “a shared desire to move toward a common destination,” say the authors. This is challenging in K-12 schools because of the lack of agreement on goals and measures, a norm of privacy in classrooms, and disagreement on what good teaching looks like. “But when people do come together to work in a disciplined way on an identified problem,” they say, “remarkable things can happen.” 

        An example: in the late 1990s, the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that when ninth graders were “off track” on several key indicators, they were much more likely to drop out. By focusing on getting freshmen on track, Chicago boosted its graduation rate from 60 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in 2020. The key to success was that principals and teachers deeply believed that their work would produce an important result – important for their kids, their colleagues, and their communities. 

        • Implementing with integrity versus fidelity – The authors critique the rigid implementation of a program in one school, resulting in delayed problem identification, lost momentum, and disappointing results. In another school, teachers looked for new strategies to address problems they’d previously identified. “Many of the teachers were inspired by their colleagues’ different approaches to instruction,” say the authors, “and made significant changes to their own practice as a result.” The leaders in this school listened, “trying to understand clearly where their team members were (in mood, energy, and commitment) – and then adapting based on what they were learning.” 

        • Developing dispositions – The most successful schools kept their eye on key processes versus step-by-step implementation of continuous improvement. “Perhaps the most important disposition,” say the authors, “is a commitment to disciplined, reflective inquiry, drawing on multiple sources of data and evidence. After a long focus on accountability, during which many teachers have felt controlled by data, in these cases, the teachers begin to feel the data are working for them.” The authors suggest using a variety of data – the voices of students and community members as well as test scores – and “holding data lightly” as problems are analyzed and solved. 

        • Building a culture of trust – In the most successful schools, this is what made the difference, motivating teachers’ sustained effort and energy for the mission. Trust also made it possible to have difficult conversations. “As people became more invested in one another,” say the authors, “they felt freer to share what was happening in their classrooms and share what was really on their minds.” 

        • Finding the right frequency for meetings – Given the demands on teachers’ time and the tendency for districts to load teachers with one new initiative after another, the authors found it was crucial to find the Goldilocks zone for collaboration. One district had success with every-other-week “huddle-calls” in which teacher teams gathered online for a half hour after school to recount struggles and share suggestions. Teachers liked this structure, say Mehta, Yurkofsky, and Frumin, because it was “small and personal, focused directly on what they were teaching, and gave them new ideas of things they could try” – without overmanaging them or requiring identical strategies. This approach “can lead to incremental improvement without radically revamping how schools normally work.” 

    • Buffering teachers from incoherence – A final role for leaders, say the authors, is making sure teachers aren’t discombobulated by conflicting demands on their time and attention. In one district they studied, an innovative constructivist biology initiative could have been jeopardized by rigid implementation of the teacher-evaluation process. A savvy university partner showed school administrators how teachers’ new pedagogy dovetailed with the district’s evaluation rubric. 

 “Linking Continuous Improvement and Adaptive Leadership” by Jal Mehta, Max Yurkofsky, and Kim Frumin in Educational Leadership, March 2022 (Vol. 79, #6, pp. 36-41); the authors can be reached at jal_mehta@gse.harvard.edu, myurkofsky@radford.edu, and kim_frumin@gse.harvard.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #926 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Formative Assessment: What Evidence Do Teachers Find Most Useful?

         In this AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice article, Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) and Laura Link (University of North Dakota) say the big idea of mastery learning is usually seen as using low-stakes interim assessments to give students feedback on what they’ve learned well (at an 80% level) and help them focus on errors and misconceptions. Teachers follow up with “corrective” activities aimed at improving students’ performance on a second, parallel assessment with slightly different problems or questions. These follow-up assessments give students a second chance to show mastery (which motivates their efforts) and provide teachers with feedback on how well their supplementary instruction worked. 

         “The ‘just-in-time’ correction,” say Guskey and Link, “prevents minor learning difficulties from accumulating and becoming major learning problems. It also gives teachers a practical means to vary and differentiate their instruction in order to better meet students’ individual learning needs.” (Students who show mastery on the initial assessment take on enrichment or extension activities such as projects, reports, digital academic games, or engaging problem-solving.) 

         “An equally important but often neglected use of formative assessments,” say Guskey and Link, “is the feedback they offer teachers.” The mistakes students make reflect directly on the instruction teachers just conducted. This article reports on a study of K-12 teachers in a suburban midwestern district who were implementing mastery learning. Teachers were asked which of three kinds of assessment reports was most helpful in improving their own teaching (click the article link below and go to pages 14 and 15 for graphics of each type): 

• An item-by-item error analysis of a formative assessment, with special attention to items that 1/3 or more of the class got wrong; 
• Mastery charts of class progress on initial and follow-up formative assessments across multiple units; 
• Summative assessments comparing current students with previous years’ classes taught the same content without mastery learning. 

With the first data report, teachers could zero in on items that more than 1/3 of students got wrong, asking whether it was a poorly-worded test item or instructional practices that failed to reach a significant number of students. With the second data report (mastery charts), teachers could look for a jump in student mastery from the first to the second formative assessment, with students’ scores on initial assessments steadily improving. With the third data report (comparing summative scores), assessments allowed teachers to see if the mastery learning approach was getting better results than the way they had taught the previous year. 

         Guskey and Link solicited teachers’ opinions on the three types of data presentation in a survey asking: 

• Were the results surprising or pretty much what you expected? 
• How informative were the data in providing insights on your teaching? 
• How useful were the results in planning how to teach more effectively? 

There were also open-ended questions asking teachers for their suggestions on adaptations they would recommend and what other types of information would be helpful for improving instruction. 

        What did teachers say? Across grade levels, teachers said they found the item analysis of formative assessments the most useful for improving instruction. “With these data,” comment Guskey and Link, “teachers could determine precisely which concepts and skills had been taught and learned well, and which required a different approach.” The second and third data reports looked at students’ performance at a more general level, which was interesting feedback on how the mastery learning process was working but not as important to improving teaching in real time. Elementary teachers seemed to be better at predicting how well their students would do on formative assessments – probably because teachers in self-contained classes knew their students better than departmentalized middle- and high-school teachers. 

        In the open-response questions, teachers shared two additional insights that are important to schools implementing mastery learning: 

         • Teachers said they needed more time for team meetings to develop common assessments with grade-level colleagues – both to improve the quality of assessment questions and to tap their colleagues’ ideas on crafting better corrective activities.  

        • Teachers said their principals needed to play a more active role in getting teachers to routinely establish mastery-level criteria for formative assessments and more consistently implement mastery learning across the school. 

 “Feedback for Teachers: What Evidence Do Teachers Find Most Useful?” by Thomas Guskey and Laura Link in AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice, Winter 2022 (Vol. 18, #4, pp. 9-20); the authors can be reached at guskey@uky.edu and laura.link@UND.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #925 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.