Books About Friends for Young Adolescents

          In this School Library Journal article, Gail Cornwall reports on her hunt for books that help tweens unpack the “stormy, frustrating, and sometimes sad aspects of friendship.” Cornwall cites studies showing that only half of friendships survive a middle-school year, one in a hundred seventh-grade friendships are still intact by the senior year of high school, and 80 percent of students experience loneliness at school. Friendships come and go, with kids often asking themselves, Do they like me? What have I done? Am I okay? Am I fitting in? As for cliques, they can be loose, ephemeral, and porous, with an uneven distribution of power. 

          Books can help tweens explore these complexities, see beyond the “ideal best friend” myth, and learn the friendship-enhancing power of admitting fault and making amends. Cornwall’s book recommendations: 

Fiction:

- Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone by Tae Keller

- Invisible by Christina Diaz Gonzalez and Gabriela Epstein

- Eggs by Jerry Spinelli - Troublemaker by John Chou

- When Life Gives You Mangoes by Kereen Getten

- Booked by Kwame Alexander 

- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 

Nonfiction: 

- Like Ability: The Truth About Popularity by Lori Getz and Mitch Prinstein (age 12 and up)

- Growing Friendships: A Kids’ Guide to Making and Keeping Friends by Eileen Kennedy-Moore and Christine McLaughlin (age 6-9) 

 “Between Friends” by Gail Cornwall in School Library Journal, March 2023 (Vol. 69, #3, pp. 48-51); here’s a related article by Cornwall: “How Understanding Middle-School Friendships Can Help Students with Ups and Downs” in KQED, November 30, 2020.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #979 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

The Impact of Homogeneous Grouping on Achievement and Equity

          In this Review of Educational Research article, Eder Terrin and Moris Triventi (University of Toronto) say that almost all students in industrialized nations start school in heterogenous groups and are taught the same curriculum. But at some point, many students are sorted into different groups based on achievement, interests, and attitudes. This has a significant impact on students’ school performance, educational pathways, access to higher education, and the kinds of work they do after school. 

          Terrin and Triventi did a meta-analysis of research on this sorting process (a.k.a. streaming, tracking, ability grouping) in secondary schools to see what studies have found about its effectiveness – does it produce better overall student achievement? – and its impact on equity – does it change the relationship between family background and students’ school and life trajectories? 

          A number of arguments have been made for homogeneous grouping of students, including:

• Teachers can tailor their instructional strategies to students’ abilities and interests. 
• This specialization allows teachers to work more efficiently and effectively. 
• All students can maximize their potential and learn more. 
• The learning process is more effective, producing higher overall levels of student achievement. 
• If the achievement of lower-group students increases more than that of their higher-group peers, inequality will decrease. 
• Grouping students by their achievement, attitudes, and interests encourages students to take an educational and career pathway that suits them best – academic or vocational. 
• This can lead to greater student and adult satisfaction and lower dropout rates.

 Conversely, arguments have been made for heterogeneous grouping of students: 

• Students tend to be sorted according to family background, with more-advantaged children in the higher-achieving groups and less-advantaged children in lower groups. 
• Groups with higher-achieving students have more-rigorous instruction and curriculum than the lower groups. 
• There’s a peer-group effect; learning with higher-achieving students provides mutual advantages – and the opposite is true in lower-achieving groups, where lower self-esteem and negative attitudes toward schooling can create a less-favorable climate for teaching and learning. 
• There’s also teacher sorting, with more-experienced teachers opting to teach the higher-achieving groups and novice teachers working with the lower groups. 
• There’s evidence that per-pupil expenditures, the demands of the curriculum on students, and teachers’ expectations differ by curriculum level, within and between schools. 
• The earlier student sorting occurs, the more likely it is that decisions are influenced by cultural and other biases, consigning some students to less demanding instruction. 
• Homogeneous grouping therefore intensifies the inequalities with which students enter school and unfairly skews educational and life outcomes along social-class lines. 

          In their meta-analysis, Terrin and Triventi examined the trade-offs between efficiency and equity – between the purported benefits of homogeneous grouping on overall student achievement and the possible negative impact on how achievement is distributed. What did this analysis reveal? 

          First, the impact of homogeneous grouping on student achievement “is nul” – in other words, the supposed efficiency of grouping secondary students by achievement, attitudes, and interests does not produce a higher overall level of student achievement, nor does it result in lower overall achievement. There’s no measurable difference. 

          Second, the meta-analysis found that homogeneous grouping has a negative impact on equity. The research evidence, say Terrin and Triventi, “provides no support for the existence of an ‘equality-efficiency trade-off’ – that is, the need to sacrifice equality to improve the overall performance of the educational system. Instead, this finding suggests that the stream of literature that emphasizes the role of tracking in enhancing both student achievement dispersion and inequality of opportunity relies on more solid empirical evidence than the theoretical arguments suggesting that tracking increases efficiency.” 

          The authors acknowledge that teaching students in heterogeneous groups at the secondary level is pedagogically challenging and educators need to be nimble and innovative to help all students learn at high levels. [See Memo 924 for an article addressing this issue.]

“The Effect of School Tracking on Student Achievement and Inequality: A Meta-Analysis” by Eder Terrin and Moris Triventi in Review of Educational Research, April 2023 (Vol. 93, #2, pp. 236-274); the authors can be reached at eder.terrin@unitn.it and moris.triventi@unitn.it.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #979 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Dear Vermont Learning Readers

          For the past nine and a half years I've been editing and publishing Vermont Learning using the Paper.li platform, based in Switzerland.  I learned very recently that Paper.li will end its business as of April 20.  Please know that I'm currently seeking a solution that will enable me to continue to bring new, free, issues of Vermont Learning to VT educators twice a month.  I hope to let you know what that solution will be.  As things look right now, it's likely that Vermont Learning will move either to Substack or Facebook, or both.  In any case, I will keep you posted. 

Nancy Cornell

What Does It Take for a Superintendent to Earn Principals' Trust?

          In this article in AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice, Justin Benna (North Dakota State University) examines how five elementary principals in New England perceived and experienced their superintendents’ trustworthiness. From in-depth interviews and a review of the research, Benna found that principals gauged their bosses’ trustworthiness in four overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) areas: 

• Support – This included the ways in which principals saw their superintendent enhancing and reinforcing their own school leadership, specifically: 

- Providing guidance – Offering suggestions, answering questions, and helping to generate options as principals dealt with problems, opportunities, and projects. Guidance could be helpful, but sometimes the superintendent became directive in ways the principal saw as impinging on their autonomy. A key variable was the principal’s sense of the superintendent’s competence. 

-Taking action – Superintendents scored trustworthiness points when they reinforced a principal’s decisions (especially helpful when extra clout was needed in personnel decisions) and protected them from potential negative consequences. 

- Building a supportive district team – Principals appreciated the superintendent orchestrating staff support on legal issues, state requirements, and curriculum questions.

• Autonomy – The key was superintendents supporting principals and at the same time respecting them as leaders of their own schools. “A superintendent who strikes this balance,” says Benna, “sends a powerful message to a principal: that the principal is trusted.” He found three key areas:

- Volition – Principals were deeply appreciative when their boss granted them time to get to know their school, experiment and figure out their own strategies, and be free from micromanagement.

- Role boundaries – Building leaders appreciated clarity on when, how, and why it was appropriate for the superintendent to step in and what the bigger picture of authority was in the district. In the words of one principal: “Yes, the superintendent is the boss, but I also feel like it should be more of an open partnership. You’re both directing different parts of the district, but for the same goal. There shouldn’t necessarily be a ton of friction.” 

- Knowing the context – “Participants expressed appreciation when they noticed how superintendents approached and validated the unique context of the principals’ schools,” says Benna. “Superintendents who sought to understand and demonstrated an understanding of a school’s context were also perceived to be better positioned to provide principals with support.” 

• Presence – This was a willingness to “be there” at key moments when the superintendent’s physical presence was meaningful and supportive. The opposite of this was the boss being intrusive. In the words of one principal: “When her car would pull in the driveway, I would start to be like, ‘Oh gosh, now what?’” Principals appreciated it when superintendents were available (when needed) and visible: 

- Availability – Could the principal reach the superintendent when needed (while recognizing that they are always busy), and were district leaders attentive, invested, and responsive? Being reachable was especially important in emergency situations; at those times, a quick response really built trust. The opposite, said one principal, was the feeling of being “dangled out there with no support.”

 - Visibility – Seeking out face-to-face interactions and being in tune with the daily heartbeat of schools and the larger district scene demonstrated concern, interest, and commitment and built trust. The opposite of this was infrequent visits to schools and showing no interest in getting into classrooms, watching student performances, or talking about instruction. 

• Openness – The final trust-building aspect of superintendents’ leadership was their style of communication in two key areas: 

- Asking questions, showing vulnerability, and listening – In Benna’s interviews, principals repeatedly spoke of the importance of these traits, which he says demonstrated superintendents’ “genuine interest in knowing about individual schools, educators, students, and families.” Questioning and listening also showed that the boss saw the principal-superintendent team as interdependent, and “that superintendents relied upon knowing and learning from others to inform the course of their own leadership.” In the words of one principal, “That exudes that lifelong learner type mentality. I would trust them going forward.”

 - Being honest, clear, and transparent – These three were closely linked in principals’ minds as they assessed their bosses’ trustworthiness. As soon as a superintendent’s honesty came into question, principals were wary in their interactions, and if they had the option to leave the district, they did.

          In short, says Benna, a trusting bond with the superintendent was an important factor in principals’ success. One principal said it allowed her “to be able to fully participate and not be afraid. You have to be able to do that in order to grow and push yourself. You have to be able to take risks… And I think that I’ve been a better leader because of it.” Another principal said that with a trusting relationship with her superintendent, “People become more light-hearted, and they go about their day because an assumption is there that you’ve built that relationship and so there’s much more energy for other things.” 

          But Benna found that many of the principals had worked with superintendents they didn’t trust, and one said flatly that he’d rarely had a superintendent who was trustworthy. “The trust factor,” said this principal, “while very important, is not something that I’ve experienced a whole lot. So, while we would all want a superintendent we can trust, that’s not the end all and be all. Sometimes you don’t have that person and you just have to make sure that you surround yourself with supportive staff, supportive parents, a supportive school board, and keep on going, doing the right thing.” 

          Benna sums up: “Superintendent trustworthiness is desired and perceived to enhance the principals’ work and professional lives, but it is not something that they depend on. In other words, a principal’s perception of superintendent trustworthiness is complementary to but not required for a principal’s own sense of efficacy, commitment and resolve as a school leader.”

 “Superintendents’ Trustworthiness: Elementary School Principals’ Experience and Perceptions” by Justin Benna in AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice, Winter 2023 (Vol.19, #4, pp. 9-25); Benna can be reached at justin.benna@ndsu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #977 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Key Steps in Being an Effective Principal

          In this article in Serendipity in Education, Allyson Apsey says that principals can’t possibly be “masters of best practices and pedagogy in every content area and every subject area.” That’s what makes it so challenging to give helpful feedback on standard teacher observation forms. Apsey wonders if that’s why research consistently finds “that teacher evaluation systems have zero or very little positive impact on student achievement.” 

          But other aspects of principals’ work do make a difference, she says, which is why school leadership is second only to classroom teaching in improving student learning. Apsey lists what she believes are school leaders’ most valuable activities: 

• Visiting classrooms regularly and giving specific, positive feedback – Apsey recommends following up with cause-and-effect statements, for example: “When you had students stand and use gestures to represent the vocabulary words, all of them became engaged again and excitedly participated.” Frequent, informal visits and statements like this build trust – so teachers don’t cringe when the principal walks in, fearing a negative judgment. 
• Talking face to face with teachers about instruction – These conversations are more about guidance and coaching than evaluation, with administrators frequently learning about pedagogy and curriculum from teachers and always discussing what’s working – and what’s not. 
• Shadowing students – Following a student through all or part of the school day is one of the best ways to get insights on teaching and learning, says Apsey. She recommends doing this frequently in all parts of the school, seeing all classrooms through students’ eyes. 
• Sitting in on professional development – “This is not to become the expert in the room,” says Apsey; “this is to show teachers how important investing in professional learning is to you. It is to have a knowledge base that will allow you to have deep conversations with them about the impact of the instruction on student learning.” 
• Orchestrating effective PLCs – Teacher teams looking at student work and evidence of learning are key to improved teaching and learning, says Apsey: “We move from trying to Tier Two our way out of a Tier One problem to genuinely collaborating around the impact of instructional practices.” 
• Always talking about student learning – Teachers are often good at planning together, discussing student behavior, and organizing events, says Apsey. “However, they are not always quick to pull out student work and sort through it together to look for strengths and next instructional steps. They need constant guidance and modeling from leaders to always bring the conversation back to evidence of student learning, and not just quarterly to look at percentages on standardized tests.”
• Having fun every day – “If you are a secondary principal and like to make a fool of yourself trying to shoot hoops for a few minutes with the varsity basketball team, go do that,” says Apsey. “If you are an elementary principal and you love pushing kindergarteners on the swings, go do that. Play fun music and dance with students. Whatever you need to do to remind yourself about the things you love the most about your job each day, be sure to schedule in time to do it.” 

 “Principals: You Don’t Need to Be an Instructional Leader” by Allyson Apsey in Serendipity in Education, February 25, 2023; Apsey is at allyson.apsey@creativeleadership.net

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #975 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Teacher-Led, Soup-to-Nuts ELA Curriculum Revision

 (Originally titled “Revamping the Curriculum as Teachers, for Teachers”) 

        In this article in Educational Leadership, Pennsylvania high-school teacher Marilyn Pryle describes how her English department decided to revamp their curriculum. While their school was getting good test scores, there were problems, including: “None of us knew what the other grades were doing,” 25-year-old anthologies, and a parent social media page critiquing book choices and singling out teachers by name. In short, says Pryle, “We needed order, transparency, and support.” 

        Budget cuts had eliminated the central office ELA director, but Pryle convinced the superintendent to make her a teacher-on-assignment for 2021-22 and have her lead this process: 

• Teacher survey – A poll of the 12-person department confirmed the grade-to-grade coordination problem, along with a lack of diversity among book authors and insufficient focus on global skills, authentic speaking and writing, media literacy, self-awareness, and cultural competence.
• Mission – Pryle had teachers write the top three goals of the department on index cards and used those to draft a statement of purpose and a chart of the steps they would follow. 
• Curriculum mapping – Pryle substitute-taught for each teacher for half a day, freeing them up to write month-by-month descriptions of the texts they were teaching, activities, essential questions, and assessments. By December, she had curriculum charts for all classes. 
• Standards – Pryle then spent two months looking at whether each teacher’s curriculum choices covered Pennsylvania’s ELA standards. “As the sole analyst,” she says, “I could immerse myself in the meaning of each standard and look for trends both in our strengths and our weaknesses as a department.” By spring, teachers met and looked at Pryle’s individual notes on standards covered and missed. The biggest gaps were public speaking, which pointed to the need to develop Socratic seminars and fishbowl discussions; and using technology, which got teachers thinking about publishing students’ work using apps like Blooket, Google Sites, and Goodreads. 
• Representation – Pryle presented spreadsheets of authors color-coded by race and gender, showing graphically a canon that was overwhelmingly white, male, and straight. “Our teachers found this analysis eye-opening,” she says, and there were lively discussions about keeping and letting go of “the classics.” Pryle didn’t issue a mandate, but there were some immediate changes: Passing was added as a counterpoint to The Great Gatsby, Things Fall Apart complemented Heart of Darkness, and To Kill a Mockingbird was replaced by The Nickel Boys. 
• Revisions – For the remainder of the school year, teachers worked on adding activities and assessments to address standards gaps, especially oral presentation, technology, and diversity. “Some changes were big and most were smaller,” says Pryle, “but all of them were in the right direction.” 
• Approval – The superintendent convened a committee composed of Pryle, the assistant superintendent, an elementary principal, three school board members, and himself. The overall reaction to the proposed changes was positive, but some board members pushed back on the age-appropriateness of some texts, including a few that had been taught for years. “I found this a bit frustrating,” says Pryle. “We know what we’re doing! How dare we be questioned!” But she bit her tongue, seeing that teachers couldn’t defend working in silos. She answered every question and the committee approved all the curriculum changes, followed by the full school board a week later, giving “an incredible morale boost” to Pryle and her colleagues. 
• Onward – Pryle is now back in her classroom, teaching world literature to sophomores six periods a day. “I am not the same teacher as when I left,” she says. “I now fully know what my colleagues teach, what they emphasize, and how my class fits with theirs. I know how our classes and departmental mission shape our students. And what I don’t know, I can look up.” The ELA curriculum continues to evolve, with fresh thinking and texts every year. 

        A postscript: district leaders were so impressed with the work of the ELA department that they decided to replicate it for math, releasing a lead teacher for a year to conduct a similar effort. 

“Revamping the Curriculum as Teachers, for Teachers” by Marilyn Pryle in Educational Leadership, February 2023 (Vol. 80, #5, online); Pryle can be reached at marilynpryle@gmail.com.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #973 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.