Children's Books on Climate Change

            In this School Library Journal feature, Tennessee school librarian Suzanne Costner recommends books on climate change and environmental activism:

• Cactus Queen: Minerva Hoyt Establishes Joshua Tree National Park by Lori Alexander, illustrated by Jenn Ely, grade 1-3
• The Ocean Gardener by Clara Anganuzzi, kindergarten-grade 3
• Loop de Loop: Circular Solutions for a Waste-Free World by Andrea Curtis, illustrated by Roozeboos, preschool-grade 3
• Marjory’s River of Grass: Marjory Stoneman Douglass, Fierce Protector of the Everglades by Josie James, grade 1-4
• My First Earth Day by Karen Katz, preschool-grade 2
• We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom, illustrated by Michaela Goade, kindergarten-grade 3
• Our Planet! There’s No Place Like Earth by Stacy McAnulty, illustrated by David Litchfield, preschool-grade 1
• Angela’s Glacier by Jordan Scott, illustrated by Diana Sudyka, preschool-grade 2
• To Change a Planet by Christina Soontornvat, illustrated by Rahele Jomepour Bell, preschool-grade 2
• Love, the Earth by Frances Stickley, illustrated by Tim Hopgood, preschool-grade 2
• Global: One Fragile World. An Epic Fight for Survival by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano, grade 3-8
• Ducks Overboard! A True Story of Plastic in Our Oceans by Markus Motum, grade 3-5
• Climate Action: What Happened and What We Can Do by Seymour Simon, grade 2-6
• The Global Ocean by Rochelle Strauss, illustrated by Natasha Donovan, grade 3-7
• Team Trash: A Time Traveler’s Guide to Sustainability by Kate Wheeler, illustrated by Trent Huntington, grade 3-6 

 “Great Books: No Planet B” by Suzanne Costner in School Library Journal, February 2025 (Vol. 71, #2, pp. 41-43)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1074 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Peter Liljedahl on Giving Students a "Navigation Instrument"

            In this chapter (13) in Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Peter Liljedahl (Simon Fraser University) says he and his research colleagues frequently ask students this question: 

So, you just finished a unit on ---. Was that unit just one big topic, or was it a collection of a bunch of smaller topics? 

“I have never asked a question that is so predictive of student performance on a unit test,” says Liljedahl. Typically, about 15 percent of students answer that the unit was made up of subtopics and can name and describe those chunks; those students score above 90 percent on the upcoming test. Students who know there are subtopics but can’t fully describe them score between 75 and 90 percent on the unit test. And students who say the unit is one big topic score below 75 percent. 

            Why the big difference? Because students who know the subtopics of the unit have a grasp of the content similar to the teacher’s and can see specific areas where they are doing well and others where they have work to do. This is a key insight about formative assessments, says Liljedahl: “Information communicated from a teacher to a student who sees the topic as one big unit will only inform that student of what it is that they can do; but because they don’t have a clear picture of the whole unit and all its subtopics, they cannot see what is still left to learn.” 

            The missing piece in many classrooms, he believes, is finding a way “to help students see mathematical topics as collections of subtopics, sections, and/or special cases the way teachers do, and use this knowledge to inform themselves about what it is they can and cannot yet do.” The analogy in navigating on land and sea is knowing where you are and where you are going. For students, “where they are is what they understand, know, and/or are able to do. And where they are going, within the scope of a unit of study, is what they have not yet learned, don’t yet understand, and/or are not yet able to do.”

            To accomplish this, Liljedahl says, we need to give students a navigation instrument with the subtopics of a unit, including specific examples of what they are expected to learn in each one. After a lot of trial and error, he and his colleagues came up with a grid that looked like this for a unit on fractions, with examples of fractions problems.

***

Fractions                        Basic            Intermediate        Advanced

    

Add and subtract            1/5 + 3/5        1/4 + 3/8            3/5 + 1/7       

proper fractions

Add and subtract 

mixed fractions

Multiply and divide

proper fractions

Multiply and divide

mixed fractions

Solve order of

operation tasks with

proper and mixed

fractions

Solve contextual 

problems involving 

fractions

Estimate solutions for

problems involving

fractions

***

Linking specific questions to the outcomes of each row “turned out to be vital,” says Liljedahl. “Although the language in the left-hand column is clear to us, students needed to see specific questions to fully understand what many of the outcomes meant.” This was especially important in the primary grades, where students’ reading proficiency was still developing, but was important right through high school. 

            The real power of navigation instruments comes when students have taken an end-of-unit review assessment prior to the final test. Students compare their answers to correct answers and mark each one on the navigation grid with these symbols: 

    - A check if it was correct;

    - S if it was mostly correct but there was a silly mistake;

    - H if it was answered correctly with help from the teacher or a classmate;

    - G if it was answered correctly with a collaborative group; 

    - X if it was attempted and answered incorrectly;

    - N if it was not attempted. 

Having students do this after an interim assessment and then use the results to study for the final test, Liljedahl and his colleagues saw “astonishing results:” 50 to 70 percent of students saw immediate improvement of 10-15 percent; knowing where they were and where they were going was all they needed to improve. “I mean, now I know exactly what I need to work on,” said one student. “I finally get what we are doing,” said another. A third: “Are you kidding me? This is great. I know what we are doing now.” This was especially helpful for low-achieving students; they made significant progress by focusing on the basic-level questions. 

            Why didn’t all students improve? Some of them (about 15 percent) already knew what the subtopics were, so the navigation grid was redundant information and produced no improvement. Another subgroup really didn’t care about their learning or their grade. They already knew where they were (in the lower achievement range) and didn’t have any ambition to improve. “That is not to say they couldn’t be helped,” says Liljedahl. “Just not in this way.” 

            There was a third group of students who didn’t benefit from getting specific information on their practice test: students who were achieving at a B level, and thought that was good enough. “Hey, I got a B,” said one student, “without doing anything. Why would I want to put in a bunch of work to try to get an A?” Another: “A B is good enough for my mom.” A third: “I’m not one to go the extra mile.”

            Isn’t it enough for teachers to give students written feedback on their quizzes and tests? For students who understand the details of curriculum units, yes, but for the 85 percent of students who don’t, says Liljedahl, this is not enough; they need to know where they are and where they are going, in detail.

            Why the categories Basic, Intermediate, Advanced? Liljedahl and his colleagues started with Easy, Medium, Hard, and students found those were clearest. But teachers preferred Basic/Intermediate/Advanced, and students had no difficulty with it, so that’s what was chosen. Another option considered was Novice, Emergent, Expert, but the researchers realized that those labels describe the abilities of the students rather than the complexity of the tasks.

            What about students who see the three levels and are happy to do just the Basic level? This is a problem, says Liljedahl, “but the problem is with the students, not with the navigation instrument. And for this reason, the solution lies not in the instrument, but within the students.” The teacher’s challenge is working on students’ basic motivation so they care about learning.

            Does splitting up each curriculum unit into subtopics and levels of complexity keep students from seeing the bigger picture of mathematics? “This is a very good question,” says Liljedahl. “We were concerned about this as well.” But it turns out that for students to see math as a connected whole, they must first see the subcomponents. This was especially important for students who answered the initial question saying that the unit was one big topic: “They needed to see the distinctions to see the connections.”

            Doesn’t stating the learning goal at the beginning of a lesson (as many teachers are required to do) take care of students understanding what they’re doing? “In theory, yes,” says Liljedahl. “In reality, however, it doesn’t.” Students need to see the detail and dive into assessing their own work and taking responsibility for improving it.

            Isn’t this the same as self-assessments that students are sometimes asked to do? The difference, says Liljedahl, is that most assessments ask students for their opinion of their abilities. Here, students are looking at their actual achievement. He and his colleagues found that students took the data seriously – and most of them rolled up their sleeves and went about improving their learning.

            How can teachers know if they’re doing a good job helping students know where they are and where they’re going? At the end of a unit, suggests Liljedahl, have students make a review test on which they will get 100 percent. If they can do this, they know what they know. Then ask them to make a review test on which they will get only 50 percent. If they can do that, they know what they know and what they don’t know. 

 “How We Use Formative Assessment in a Thinking Classroom” – Chapter 13 of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by Peter Liljedahl (Corwin, 2021); Liljedahl can be reached at liljedahl@sfu.ca; see Memo 992 for a summary of chapters 1-3 of the book, Memo 1013 for a summary of chapter 5.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1070 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

David Brooks on Young People Becoming the Best Versions of Themselves

            In this New York Times column, David Brooks says he believes that for individuals, character is destiny, and for a healthy society, moral formation is essential. At a recent meeting hosted by the Making Caring Common project at Harvard, Brooks took note of some key ideas for teachers, parents, and “anyone who wants to build a society in which it is easier to be good”: 

• A communitarian ethos – A common belief today, says Richard Weissbourd, faculty director of Making Caring Common, is that young people’s ultimate goal is individual achievement and happiness, versus the common good and caring for others. “Schools that focus on moral education,” says Brooks, “stand athwart that tide. They have a sense of moral mission, that who you become is more important than what career track you pursue… They have rituals to mark transitions. They have retreats and group travel so that people can see one another before the makeup goes on.”
• Moral skill-building – “Treating people well involves practicing certain skills, which can be taught just as the skills of carpentry and tennis can be taught,” says Brooks. They include:
• The skills of understanding – listening well, eliciting people’s life stories so we accurately see them and they feel seen; 
• The skills of consideration and treating people well – offering criticism with care, asking for and offering forgiveness, breaking up with someone without crushing their hearts. 

Brooks fears that many young people aren’t learning these skills. 

• Exemplars – “Admiration is one of the most powerful moral emotions,” he says. Nelson Mandela revered Mahatma Gandhi; Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Standon admired each other. Kids need to study examples of true greatness. In the words of Warren Buffett, “Tell me who your heroes are, and I’ll tell you how you’re going to turn out.” 
• Moral traditions – “We are the lucky inheritors of many rich and varied moral traditions,” says Brooks. “Schools can teach these traditions and students can decide which seem true to them. People become their best selves as they begin to embody the values of a specific moral tradition.”
• Self-confrontation – Everyone has core faults they must confront and conquer, says Brooks. Dwight Eisenhower had a terrible temper; some people are egotistical, judgmental, or people pleasers. Parents and schools can help young people to acknowledge and try to fix their shortcomings. 
• Public service – “Community service, whether it’s feeding the poor, sitting with the homeless, or championing a cause, is not just to make society better,” says Brooks; “it is done to usher a transformation in the person doing the service.” This kind of service fosters emotional understanding – “the ability to be made indignant by injustice, outraged by cruelty, to know how to gracefully do things with people, not for people. That kind of knowledge comes through direct contact with the problems.” 

 “The Character-Building Tool Kit” by David Brooks in The New York Times, January 10, 2025; Brooks can be reached at dabrooks@nytimes.com.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1070 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Recommended Comic Graphic Novels for the Elementary Grades

            In this School Library Journal feature, Brigid Alverson suggests these children’s books with witty dialogue and silly plots: 

• Detective Beans and the Case of the Missing Hat by Li Chen, grade 1-4
• Rocket and Groot: Tales of Terror by Amanda Deibert, illustrated by Leo Trinidad, grade 2
• Schnozzer and Tatertoes: Take a Hike! and Schnozzer and Tatertoes: Shoot the Moon! by Rick Stromoski, grade 2-5
• Sophie: Jurassic Bark and Sophie: Frankenstein’s Hound by Brian Anderson, grade 3-6
• Barkham Asylum by Yehudi Mercado, grade 3-7 
• Bunny vs. Monkey by Jamie Smart, grade 3-7 
• The Unpetables and The Unpetables Book Two: Unpetable in the City by Dennis Messner, grade 4-7
• It’s Jeff! by Kelly Thompson, illustrated by Gurihiru, grade 4-7 

 “Critter Comfort” by Brigid Alverson in School Library Journal, January 2025 (Vol. 71, #1, pp. 32-35)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1069 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Using Student Interviews to Probe Kids' Mathematical Thinking

            In this article in Mathematics Teacher, Nicora Placa (Hunter College) remembers, as a new teacher, looking over a student’s shoulder and spotting this problem: 1/3 + 1/4 = 2/7 Here was the ensuing conversation: 

    - Teacher: I see you added the numerators and denominators. Are those the same size pieces?   

    - Student: Yes? 

    - Teacher: Are you sure those pieces are the same size? 

    - Student: Um. No? 

    - Teacher: Good! So, what do we do if they aren’t the same size? 

    - Student: Um… 

    - Teacher: I’ll give you a hint. We worked on it yesterday. We need to find… 

    - Student: The same size? 

    - Teacher: Yes. We need to find common… 

    - Student: Ummmmmm… denominators? 

    - Teacher: Yes. Very good! We need to find common denominators. Why don’t you review the notes from yesterday on how to find the common denominator and then redo this? 

“I did this with the best of intentions,” says Placa, “thinking I was helping the student. I truly believed that with some prompting or a hint, they would remember what to do. I did not understand that I was dragging them through a solution path that made sense to me instead of trying to understand how they were thinking about the task… I was not hearing all the interesting ways students thought about the problem, and I misunderstood their ideas.” 

            A little later in her career, Placa learned the value of student interviews and began to approach conversations with students in a different way – even when their answers were correct. “When conducting these interviews, I began listening to students with the goal of making sense of what they were doing,” she says. “It was eye-opening. I was able to learn about the different strategies that students brought to the problem and, in turn, change my responses in the classroom… I became fascinated by all the ways students thought about problems and started to build on these conceptions to design instruction.” 

            Using this approach, here’s how Placa would handle the conversation with a student who had written this incorrect solution: 1/3 + 1/4 = 2/7 

    - Teacher: Can you tell me how you got your answer? 

    - Student: Is it wrong? 

    - Teacher: I don’t know. Why don’t you explain it to me, and we will try to figure it out together? 

    - Student: Well, here you have one of three things, and here you are adding one out of four things, so basically you now have two of seven things. 

     - Teacher: Interesting. Can you try using these manipulatives or a drawing to show me another way to solve it? 

“With this change in questioning,” says Placa, “I could see how this solution made sense to students if they thought of a fraction as two distinct whole numbers and not as a quantity itself. Listening to students’ thinking made me rethink the ‘out of’ fractions language I was using when introducing fractions and whether I was sufficiently allowing students to explore a variety of models. I revisited activities that explored the concept of fractions as a quantity before I tried to address the addition of fractions.”

            When she became a math coach, Placa became an advocate of student interviews, and Let’s ask a kid! became her mantra. She encourages teachers to anticipate different ways students might solve challenging problems, interview individual students outside of regular class time, and choose effective questions to probe kids about their solutions. She counsels teachers to avoid responses like: 

    - That’s right!

    - You know that if you just…

    - Remember what we did in class last week…

    - And --- is just another way to say ---.

    - Do you mean…? 

Instead, she helps teachers use interview questions like these:

• General probing questions: 
• What did you notice? 
• Why did you write (or draw) that?
• You wrote ---. Why? How did that help you?
• I noticed that you stopped what you were doing just now (or erased or crossed something out). What were you thinking?
• I don’t know what you mean by that. Can you explain? 
• Questions about alternative solution paths:
• Can you solve it in a different way? Tell me about it.
• Can you use a picture (or tool) to represent your thinking? Show me.
• Another student said the solution was ---. Do you agree or disagree? Why?
• Questions about explaining and justifying solutions:
• How do you know?
• How did you figure that out?
• How sure are you of your answer? Why?
• Can you justify your work with these manipulatives?
• Is there another way to justify your work? What is it? 

“When teachers carefully listen to and make sense of students’ thinking,” says Placa, “they can design instruction that is tailored to students’ current understanding. Through student interviews, coaches can help teachers to develop these skills in one-on-one situations and then transfer them to their work in the classroom.” Some good questions for teacher team meetings:

- What did you notice about the student’s thinking?

- In what ways do the student’s explanations make sense?

- What different conceptions do you notice the student has?

- What types of questions help uncover the student’s thinking?

- What questions are less helpful?

- What instructional moves might be helpful if we notice these ideas in our classrooms?

- What implications does this have as we plan instruction going forward? 

 “Let’s Ask a Kid! Conducting Student Interviews” by Nicora Placa in Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, December 2024 (Vol. 117, #12, pp. 900-906); Placa can be reached at np798@hunter.cuny.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1067 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Centering Hope in the Social Studies Curriculum

            In this article in Social Education, Li-Ching Ho (University of Wisconsin/Madison) and Keith Barton (Indiana University) worry that the world’s problems – political division, mistrust of leaders, racism, poverty, hunger, disease, war, refugees, climate change – may lead K-12 students to be pessimistic, even despairing, about the future. “To counter this,” say Ho and Barton, social studies educators “must provide students a sense of hope – a belief that a better world is possible, and that human action makes a difference.” 

            Implicit in history, geography, and civics classes, they believe, is a focus on hope: “Embedded within the curriculum is an assumption that by providing young people with the necessary skills, knowledge, and dispositions, they will be positioned to help their communities address societal issues and imagine a different and better future.” But Ho and Barton wonder if this emphasis has been explicit enough: “Even when dealing with potentially hopeful content – such as successful social movements – we may fail to highlight its relevance for today.” They believe social studies should embed hopeful content about possibilities, goals, and pathways at a pragmatic and visionary level.

• Pragmatic hope – This curriculum strand would embody the belief that a better future can be attained through strategies that are currently available, with a focus on making a positive difference in people’s lives today. Students might study:
• Possibilities – Successful social movements such as women’s suffrage, civil rights, farmworkers, industrial safety, LGBTQ rights; 
• Goals – Ways to target specific areas of progress in a reasonable timeframe – for example, reducing childhood hunger; 
• Pathways – Understanding strategies that bring about social change – for example, a coalition that made helped restore the Louisiana coastline.
• Visionary hope – “At the core of visionary hope,” say Ho and Barton, “is a belief that the world can be very different than it is.” Looking far beyond present-day realities, students might engage in big-picture thinking about an ideal future, moving beyond conditions that are taken as givens today:
• Possibilities – Students might study how the Harlem Renaissance affected art and culture in the U.S. 
• Goals – Students might consider grand ideals that people have held throughout history – for example, less-exploitative economic arrangements, more-equitable gender relations, greater harmony between people and nature.
• Pathways – “Utopian has gotten a bad reputation as synonymous with ‘impossible,’” say the authors. “Visionary hope must engage students in thinking about how to achieve a different society. Helping students think through how to get from here to there is a corrective to feelings of inevitability.” Women’s suffrage is a good example. 

“Without a deeper and more-complete understanding of visionary goals,” say Ho and Barton, “students may fail to see what it would mean to apply them. And without exploring the rationales behind such goals, students may abandon their beliefs in the face of public opinion or self-interest.” 

            The authors add three cautionary notes. First, they say, “Centering hope does not mean simplifying or romanticizing social change, whether past or present. Social movements are complicated, and their intricacies cannot be ignored in a misguided attempt to make them more inspirational.” The U.S. civil rights movement wasn’t linear or straightforward, nor has it been completely successful. A hope-oriented curriculum needs to delve into such complexities lest we leave students with “false hope.”

            Second, teachers need to make good decisions on the case studies they use to teach about hope – and in the current political climate, some choices will be controversial. “Teaching for hope does not make potential controversies go away,” say Ho and Barton; “dedicated teachers still have to be ready to defend their choices.”

            Finally, the authors believe hope must be central to the curriculum, not an occasional add-on. “Occasional hopeful examples will have limited impact on students’ imagination,” they say. “Centering hope requires consistently and systematically studying hopeful prospects for addressing many different social issues, at a variety of scales and in different settings.” 

            “Despair is central to the thoughts and feelings of many people these days, whether young people or adults,” conclude Ho and Barton. “Schools must counter this sense of despair – not romantically, not simplistically, but forcefully. This means focusing our efforts to provide a foundation for both pragmatic and visionary hope: realistic and successful struggles to improve the world, and the idealistic visions that guide and motivate effective action.” 

 “Centering Hope in Social Studies Education” by Li-Ching Ho and Keith Barton in Social Education, November/December 2024 (Vol. 88, #6, pp. 334-340); the authors can be reached at liching.ho@wisc.edu and kcbarton@iu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1067 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

A High School Student Schools His Father

            In this Kappan article, teacher/instructional coach/writer Steven Goldman says that for four years, he commuted to his school in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his teenage son Theo, who attended the school. Since the drive took 60-90 minutes, they had plenty of time to talk (and listen to his son’s music selections). Goldman says Theo’s observations about the school have been the best professional development of his career. A few examples: 

• Teachers slow to return students’ work – Theo says teachers shouldn’t ask students to take on new tasks until they’ve given feedback on the previous assignment. 
• Student bravado – Theo told his history teacher that he’d blown off studying for a test when in fact he had put in the time. The alternative to lying, he told his father, was “to admit that I’m [expletive] stupid.” 
• Lesson plan “menus” with fun “dessert” options – “All this means,” said Theo, is that I will never get to do anything interesting because I work slowly.”
• The “dyslexia tax” – Theo has a mild learning disability and some executive function challenges, and says he is often unfairly marked down on tests. “School is a minefield for kids who do not fit our stereotypes of the ‘good student,’” says Goldman. 
• Seen as lazy – “I can’t begin to count the number of times that teachers have assumed that he wasn’t trying or didn’t really care based on small mistakes that are a real challenge for him to avoid,” says Goldman. “Believing that you know a student well enough to judge them for inadequate ‘effort’ is arrogance. Unfortunately, it is something I know I did often as a teacher. Theo helped me see that.” 
• Unhelpful teacher judgments – One wrote “Good grief” in the margin for a spelling error, another took points off for an assignment left at home. “Feedback should be about how someone can improve,” says Goldman, “not about making them feel like they aren’t measuring up.”
• Student support – Four years ago when he moved from middle school to high school, Theo commented on a difference he noticed in the educators: “The real difference is that some teachers are on your side and some really aren’t.” 

            “I don’t know of a better definition of what makes someone a good teacher,” says Goldman. “If someone is on your side, both of you are working toward the same goal. Being on a student’s side is not simply giving help or being sensitive to who they are. It is less about whether they measure up to your standards and more about conveying your belief in their capability of achieving their own. It is a mindset that allows the vulnerability necessary for learning to happen.” 

            Theo went off to college this year and Goldman is making the commute alone. “I feel pretty certain that he will never choose education as a career,” he says, “which is fine. But he’s been a teacher, nonetheless. We all learn so much from our children. I feel lucky that one of the things I learned from mine was how to be a better teacher.” 

“The Person Who Taught Me the Most About Teaching Just Graduated from High School” by Steven Goldman in Kappan, December 2024/January 2025 (Vol. 106, #4, p. 48); Goldman can be reached at arthurstevengoldman@gmail.com.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1067 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.