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.

Temple Grandin on the Role of Neurodivergent People (Like Her)

        In this New York Times article, Temple Grandin (Colorado State University) says she didn’t have language until she was four years old. She was diagnosed as brain damaged, then on the autism spectrum. She gradually blossomed, in different ways – for example, at age 7 or 8 she was experimenting with parachutes made of old scarves, single-mindedly, almost obsessively, trying to figure out how to get them to open more quickly. 

        Over time, Grandin realized that she was a visual thinker, seeing the world in “photo-realistic pictures… with images clicking through my mind a little bit like PowerPoint slides or TikTok videos.” Reading about inventors like Edison and the Wright brothers, Grandin realized that many of them shared her powers of observation, single-mindedness, and persistence and wondered if some were also on the autism spectrum. 

        Most other people, Grandin saw, are “word-centric,” mostly seeing the world and communicating verbally. A term was coined for them – neurotypical – along with a descriptor for people like Grandin – neurodivergent. The popularization of this term, she says, and “society’s growing understanding about the different ways that brains work, are unquestionably positive developments for many individuals like me.”       

        For all the gifts visual thinkers possess, says Grandin, life is still challenging for them. That’s true in schools that “force students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum” and in jobs that rely heavily on verbal skills. “This must change,” she says, “not only because neurodivergent people, and all visual thinkers, deserve better, but also because without a major shift in how we think about how we learn, American innovation will be stifled.” To fix American infrastructure, she believes, we need people with visual skills and hyper-focused attention. 

        Grandin’s number one suggestion for improving K-12 schools: “Put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics, and welding… These classes also expose students – especially neurodivergent students – to skills that could become a career. Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up having never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical.” Grandin says she would have hated school if it hadn’t been for teachers who allowed her to think visually and have direct tactile experiences. 

        Algebra was too abstract, she says, because it’s usually taught with no visual correlations. With today’s curriculum requirements, Grandin believes she would have difficulty graduating from high school. Better to provide alternative routes with courses like statistics incorporating real-world applications, making it possible for students who are “bad at math” to graduate and move into careers that put their skills to work. Grandin did poorly on the math SAT, which prevented her from getting into veterinary school – yet today she is a professor of animal sciences and is asked to speak to academics, corporate executives, and government officials around the world. “The true measure of education,” she says, “isn’t what grades students get today but where they are 10 years later.” 

        She believes about 20 percent of the drafting technicians and skilled welders she’s worked with over the last 25 years designing and constructing equipment to manage livestock are on the spectrum. It’s not just the unique contributions that neurodiverse people make, says Grandin; it’s also the synergy that takes place in diverse teams: “If you’ve ever attended a meeting where nothing gets solved, it may be because there are too many people who think alike.” 

        In her travels, Grandin has noticed a number of high-quality products in the U.S. that are made in other countries – for example, most of the highest-tech silicon chips are made in Taiwan; much of the specialized mechanical equipment for processing meat is made in the Netherlands and Germany; the glass walls of the Steve Jobs Theater in California were made in Italy, the massive carbon fiber roof in Dubai. 

        The reason, says Grandin, might be that these and other countries give 14-year-olds the choice of pursuing a university or a vocational pathway. The latter “is not looked down on or regarded as a lesser form of intelligence,” she says. “And that’s how it should be everywhere, because the skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems.” 

“Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All” by Temple Grandin in The New York Times, January 12, 2023; Grandin’s 2022 book is Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #969 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Disrupting School Rituals

           In this article in Urban Education, Eric DeMeulenaere (Clark University) describes how he and two high-school teachers started their school year in a way that shook up the usual get-acquainted/syllabus-review/rules-and-expectations ritual for a group of 27 seniors: 

• The classroom lights were out and the blinds closed. 
• At the rear of the classroom, a projector displayed the question, Why are we here? 
• On a side wall in bold letters were several signs with life aspirations, including: Write a novel, Hike the Appalachian Trail, Be a Mom, Live off the grid. 
• Chairs were arranged in a circle, and students sauntered in and sat near their friends. 
• The teachers stood in a corner, backs to students, talking among themselves. 
• Three minutes passed, and students’ chit-chat subsided to puzzled whispers. 
• Finally one teacher walked to the middle of the circle and read a story about a painful conversation he had with his father, who had returned after abandoning the family. 
• The teacher said, “I’ve only shared that story with four people before today,” and then, gesturing to the back of the room, added, “This is partly why I am here today.” 

          This was the kick-off for an innovative “Roots and Routes” class in this low-performing urban high school in central Massachusetts, designed to change the usual pattern of very few students going on to post-secondary education. The group was drawn from every achievement level in the school – potential valedictorians and gang members, gamers and teen moms – and all, says DeMeulenaere, were “woefully underprepared for college.” The principal’s charge to the teachers and DeMeulenaere was to help students prepare for and apply to colleges – and teachers had free rein to try different methods.

          “While this project focuses on the internal and micro-level interactions of students and teachers in a single urban school classroom,” says DeMeulenaere, “it recognizes that the classroom culture is deeply influenced by the larger school and community context.” This included a depressed economy, poverty, and segregation, along with inadequate funding for the school, poor administrative decisions, less-than-effective teaching in some classrooms, and insufficient counseling and psychological services. Still, DeMeulenaere and his colleagues hoped to change the distrustful relationships between students and their middle-class teachers by shifting school rituals associated with factories and the military to trust-building rituals drawn from the theater and places of worship. 

          DeMeulenaere describes three other experiences from the first week of the Roots and Routes project (which took place during the 2008-09 school year), all designed to “shake the students free from going through the motions of schooling…” 

• The altar – At the end of the first day, students were given a handmade artist book created by one of the teachers and given several days to create their bucket list and a symbol that represented themselves on their life journey. When they were finished several days later, students placed their books on a table at the back of the classroom decked out with a black tablecloth and candles to resemble an altar. DeMeulenaere shared his aspirational list and symbol, and invited students to follow suit. After an awkward silence and some giggling, one student stepped forward, and others followed, clearly investing in the ritual that couldn’t have been more different from standard school protocols. “The fact that no one could even assess these projects,” says DeMeulenaere, “that teachers completed this task alongside students, and that everyone shared their books in the class disrupted the status hierarchies in this classroom and began to forge new relationships between teachers and students. And through a collective and ritualized sharing, each member of the classroom community was recognized for their individual humanity rather than their status role in the classroom.” 
• The mountain climb – On a hot day shortly after this, students were driven to the base of the tallest mountain in the region, divided into three teams, and dropped off at different locations. With no maps, compasses, or assistance from the teacher accompanying them, students were asked to figure out how to get to the top of the mountain. In addition, each group had an egg, a helium balloon, a bag of ice, and an opened 50-pound bottle of water; the challenge was to get to the mountaintop without breaking the egg, popping the balloon, spilling any of the water – and before the ice melted. Each group got lost at least once, says DeMeulenaere. Students expressed frustration that the teachers wouldn’t help them and struggled with the four items, especially the water container. But all the groups came up with creative solutions, including using hair ties and plastic bags to seal the top of the water bottle and using sticks and belts to harness the heavy jug. All students reached the summit before their ice melted, and there was great celebration and euphoria, with the first arrivals cheering on the others. One high-achieving student who initially wanted nothing to do with one member of her group who she believed was headed for prison was deeply moved by the leadership he took and, in her college essay, said she “began to see myself and the people I grew up with in a new light.” 
• The permanent marker incident – At the top of the mountain, one of the teachers noticed that several students had used a permanent marker to write their names on one of the stone lookouts. Before they returned to school, the teachers gathered students in a circle and asked them to reflect on the incident without saying anything. Back at school, there was a lengthy discussion in which some students said it wasn’t a big deal (like carving initials in a tree, a way of capturing the moment), others saying they should tell the principal and accept the consequences. But the discussion wound up in a different place: several of the perpetrators paid for cleaning supplies and those students, accompanied by others who weren’t complicit, returned to the mountain with their teachers and scrubbed the stone markers clean. 

          DeMeulenaere and his colleagues continued in this vein for the rest of the year, including taking students through a high ropes course, visiting their families, and returning several times to the “altar” to discuss students’ and teachers’ aspirations. The result was a higher level of trust within the group, students seeing their classmates in new and more-accepting ways, and improved academic achievement. 

          “Teachers want students to do more than just go through the motions of schooling,” DeMeulenaere concludes. “But teachers too often fail to recognize that their deployment of scripted school rituals fosters routinized relationships marked by hierarchy, control, distrust, and disengagement. This is even more pronounced in urban schools where differences in the socioeconomic and racial backgrounds between teachers and students foster even greater distrust… Teachers committed to social change need to think beyond curriculum redesign and pedagogical innovation and begin to re-envision the micro-level interactions of classroom rituals.” 

 “Disrupting School Rituals” by Eric DeMeulenaere in Urban Education, January 2023 (Vol. 58, #1, pp. 59-86); DeMeulenaere can be reached at edemeulenaere@clarku.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #966 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.