Staff Weekly Newsletters

August 23, 2021: Rebound, Grades K-12 (Fisher, Frey, Smith, Hattie, 2021)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

It is estimated that between 17 percent and 33 percent of instruction minutes are not used for learning (Fisher, 2009; Rathore, 2019).

The predictions of some scholarly organizations predict 32 percent to 37 percent in reading and 50 to 63 percent in mathematics with the “COVID slide.”

The likelihood that a student will take a credit recovery course increases by 15 percent each time the student is suspended (Heinrich, 2019).

There are three major teaching practices that matter the most: 1. Maintaining high expectations and holding students accountable for meeting those expectations; 2. Utilizing a variety of tasks that were well-matched to the intended learning outcomes and moving beyond low-level tasks and “busy work” to engage students in meaningful learning; 3. Establishing some form of routine or daily structure provided a greater likelihood that students would stay up to date with work and maintain engagement.

A reasonable goal is that, on average, 50 percent of the instructional minutes are spent in student-to-student interactions- this would mean ensuring that there was sufficient time and focus to the content-level instruction and appropriate time for the deeper relational instruction that leads to greater effective student talk. The other 50 percent is time that teachers are building or surfacing knowledge, or when students are engaged in independent practice.

Students need systematic and purposeful experiences that move them from surface to deep, to transfer of learning. These moves include the following: modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration.

Here are some time-saving routines to incorporate and rotate in your instruction: collaborative posters, reciprocal teaching, jigsaw, discussion roundtable, text rendering, and five-word summary.

Student grouping should be intentional, assessment driven, and flexible. One method for constructing sound heterogenous small groups is to use an alternate ranking system. Use a recent assessment formatively to rank students in order from highest achieving to lowest achieving and then split the list in two halves. In a class of 32, sublist A will be students 1-16 and sublist B will be students 17-32. Group 1 will be students 1, 2, 17, and 18. Group 2 will be 3, 4, 19 and 20. This maintains heterogeneity across groups while bracketing for cognitive, social, and language resources.

Let’s begin the new school year with a positive attitude and a reflection on what “engagement” really means. How can you and your students be more engaged in learning this school year?

August 30, 2021: Grasp (Sarma, 2020)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

In most psychological studies of the spacing effect, cramming the night before an assessment is just as effective as spacing, and sometimes it can be even more effective on test day. But take that same test again after a week or a month, and the spaced-out strategy wins out virtually every time.

...These findings fly in the face of the all-too-common idea that learning should be a struggle: an ordeal to be surmounted by force of will. In fact, whether a student is struggling mightily to read despite dyslexia, or struggling to keep her eyes open in a boring lecture, effort alone is often not enough to win her the day. For even highly motivated learners to reach their potential, we have to find ways to tally the practice of education with the demands of the systems-level brain. In many cases, the most important thing to do is to find ways to promote curiosity. ”

According to cognitive load theory, the cognitive demands of thinking through how to solve problems occupied critical slots of working memory that can be put to better use. Harvard’s George Miller had suggested that human working memory could maintain as many as nine chunks of data, but a series of follow-up studies have reduced that number to four.

In a world where Andrew Bell (1787) graced school entrances, students would “graduate” from coursework based on mastery of it. There was no ranking, no movement too fast or slow in the classroom. In our world, the vast majority of students, in all their varied, individual glory, are expected to move along the same rate in every class.

Space out your assessments of students’ learning. Employ less large unit or topic exams with significant weight, and more small formative assessments of students’ learning.

Curiosity can be actively promoted in the classroom not by demanding attention, but rather by framing knowledge in terms of digestible information gaps.

Learning via worked examples, instead of solving problems yourself, is one potential way past working memory roadblocks.

Utilize universal design for learning to limit roadblocks for students and provide optimal opportunities for pace for students in your content.

In what ways can you spark curiosity in your students with you learning content this week?

September 30, 2021: What School Could Be (Dintersmith, 2018)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Each year, about four million young adults leave our K-12 school system, half from families in poverty. Almost all of our three thousand colleges face financial challenges. Collectively, our universities can’t offer enough scholarships to make college the vehicle for broad and equitable opportunity across America. If we continue to insist on a college degree to get to life’s starting line, affluent kids will be fine, but only a smattering of low-income kids will make it through.

We see schools with “PEAK” principles in the classroom: Purpose, Essentials (skill-sets and mind-sets), Agency, and Knowledge.

If our goal is to close a gap measured by standardized tests, we should give up. These tests reflect the parent’s motivation, not the child’s. When scores fall short, our solution is to pile on even more worksheets and test prep.

When you standardize education, you rob students of any opportunity to go deep on what they care about, to build distinctive competencies, and to create differentiated paths forward.

Students work on problems that are important to them and their community. They complete projects with real-world impact that can be displayed publicly. Over time, students gain conviction that they can make a difference in their world. Purposeful work builds purposeful students.

In today’s world, everyone needs to be entrepreneurial. Not entrepreneurial in the sense of starting a for-profit business, but in the sense of fighting tirelessly to improve your world through your skills, passions, perseverance, audacity, and community support. It’s the essence of our humanity- to create, to invent, to make our world better. Giving students and teachers the support and permission to be creative and entrepreneurial isn’t optional in the twenty-first century- it’s indispensable.

Consider a more meaningful achievement gap: how students perform on messy real-world problems that require resourcefulness, out-of-the-box thinking, doggedness, and staring down failure. Authentic challenges get at a child’s competencies, character, and intrinsic motivation-more than a parent’s commitment.

Let’s move our instruction to a new vision of the U.S. Education: innovative, decentralized, purpose-driven, trusted, organic, creative, and life-ready.

Do I push children on the conventional path of learning because that is how I experienced it and was successful?

September 13, 2021: The Knowledge Gap (Wexler, 2019)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Students who aren’t reading on grade level by third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school. If the child is poor, the odds are even worse.

During their first several years of schooling, children add eight words a day to their vocabularies, on average; the only way to expand vocabulary that quickly is to expand knowledge.

Fifty sessions of strategy instruction yield no more benefit than ten.

Enrollment in AP and other college-level courses rarely doubled in the decade after 2006, and the percentage of students who earned a passing score on AP exams increased from about 14 percent to 22 percent.

Children’s development does not proceed in a series of fixed, discrete stages, but depends on the child, the task, and even the day. Any subject can be taught effectively to any child at any stage of development.

If teachers organize their read-aloud by topic instead of the skill-of-the-week, children have the chance to hear the same concepts and vocabulary repeatedly.

Asking open-ended questions about content- like, “How does all this connect with what we read earlier?”- had a more positive effect on comprehension and recall and led to richer discussions. “In doing strategy instruction, kids aren’t going directly for the meaning of the text. They’re going through, okay, how do I do a summary? Or how do I predict? They have to go through a kind of routine. And we think that sometimes there could be, or many kids, more focus on what that routine is than what the content of the text itself is.”

Open AP and College in the High School courses to all students, regardless of grades or teacher recommendation.

How do I better focus on the connections, over strategies, in class for students?

September 20, 2021: What happened to you? (Perry & Winfrey, 2021)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

“Not only is ‘What happened to you?’ the key question if you want to understand someone, it is the key question if you want to understand the brain. In other words, your personal history- the people and places in your life- influence your brain’s development. The result is that each of our brains is unique. Our life experiences shape the way key systems in our brain organize and function. So each of us sees and understands the world in a unique way.”

There are three types of “developmental adversity” that will predictably alter the CRNs and cause widespread problems. The first is disruptions that happen before birth. The second is some form of disruption of the early interactions between infant and caregiver if these are chaotic, inconsistent, rough, aggressive, or absent. The third is any sensitizing pattern of stress. This can result from any unpredictable, uncontrollable, or extreme and prolonged activation of the stress response.

Moderate, predictable, and controllable activation of our stress-response systems leads to a more flexible, stronger stress-response capability.

A recent study by the National Survey of Children’s Health found that almost 50 percent of the children in the United States have had at least one significant traumatic experience. A student from 2019 by the CDC found that 60 percent of American adults report having had at least one adverse childhood experience.

For one child, eye contact means, “I care for you; I’m interested in you.” For another it may mean, “I’m about to yell at you.” Understand that your actions will not warrant universal reaction based on your past experiences.

If the parent (or teacher) is consistent, predictable, and nurturing, the stress-response systems become resilient. If the stress-response systems are activated in prolonged ways or chaotic ways, as in cases of abuse or neglect, they become sensitized and dysfunctional. Act with consistent, predictable, and nurturing behavior.

Many of us have opportunities for healthy rewards: lots of positive human interactions through work, worship, or volunteering that are consistent with our values and beliefs. A healthy combination of rewards can help decrease the pull towards any single unhealthy form of reward such as substance use or overeating. Find ways to provide non-tangible healthy rewards to your students on a daily basis.

It is the continual small moments, when we feel the other person fully present, fully engaged, connected, and accepting, that we make the most powerful, enduring bonds.

How can my actions influence the children in my classroom and how can I be more deliberate to reduce an unnecessary stress-response?

September 27, 2021: Achieving Equity and Excellence (Reeves, 2019)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

“Excellence and equity schools do the following seven things: Organize their school as a professional learning community, display a laser-like focus on student achievement, conduct collaborative scoring, emphasize nonfiction writing, utilize frequent formative assessment with multiple opportunities for success, perform constructive data analysis, and engage in cross-disciplinary units of instruction.”

One of the most frequently misunderstood terms is "significance", which, in the context of research, almost always means statistical significance. It is significantly significant if an analysis of those differences shows they are unlikely (less than a 5 percent chance) to be different due to random variation.

When teachers scored the rubrics alone, there was barely a 20 percent level of agreement. When they collaborated with colleagues, however, the level of agreement rose dramatically, to a consistency rate of more than 90 percent.

"Collaborative scoring conferences reduce the time required to grade an assignment by more than 70 percent".

Strategy is also the art of deciding what not to do. Be sure to be deliberate in your assessment and do not overdo it.

Assessments are only of value if they are clearly linked to the question of what we want students to know and be able to do. Otherwise, these assessments are not formative, rather uninformative.

Using the three-column rubric engages students because they take on the powerful role of assessor. Teachers no longer have to write comments or provide rubric scores for every part of an assessment; they save time by focusing exclusively on student misunderstandings.

Fairness is a function of consistency.

How can you ensure your feedback to students is FAST (fair, accurate, specific, and timely)?

October 4, 2021: Make Just One Change (Rothstein & Santana, 2018)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is a step-by-step process designed to facilitate the asking of many questions. It takes students through a rigorous process in which they think more deeply about their questions, refine them, and prioritize their use.

QFT is both an art- an open process that is continuously shaped by the actions and thoughts of teachers and students- and a science- a rigorous, laboratory-tested, scaffolded procedure; a protocol for consistently producing similar, replicable results each time it is deployed.

The ability to ask questions may be taken for granted by highly educated people who have lived their entire lives in societies where they have the freedom to ask questions.

If students can Google the answer, you are probably asking the wrong question.

The RQI Question Formulation Technique: Produce your own questions, improve your questions, and prioritize your questions. Students produce a list of questions. They then categorize them between open and closed questions. Finally, they choose the three most relevant questions.

Divide the class into groups of three to five students. Use those small groups to develop the questions.

Use question starters to help students develop their own questions.

Choose priority questions that students are most interested in or need to answer first.

How many of my questions are closed questions and how can I encourage more student-generated open questions in next week’s lessons?

October 11, 2021: Raising Worry-Free Girls (Goff, 2019)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

By nature, girls want to please. Girls define themselves against a backdrop of relationships. Feeling known and loved is crucial. So to say something that might sound crazy or weird, or might make others reject them, can feel like a terrible risk.

The rate of hospitalization for children and teens with sucidal ideation or who have attempted suicide has almost tripled in the past ten years. The rates among girls has shown the greatest increase.

Girls with anxiety overestimate the threat and underestimate themselves and their ability to cope. The worst-case scenario becomes a normal life perspective.

Today’s teens and young adults are five to eight times more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety disorders than people were in history, including during events such as the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

Escape and avoidance are the two strategies most often used by girls and their parents to control anxiety. Neither strategy helps the problem.

Children with anxiety want certainty, comfort, and reassurance. The more reassurance we give, the more reassurance they believe they need.

Worry has several tactics in the mind: exaggerated likelihood, catastrophic thinking, underestimated ability, faulty memory and perpetual questions. Help girls see the inverse of those tactics.

An important weapon in the fight against worry is flexibility. Flexibility quiets down an overactive amygdala.

What coping strategies do you use and how can you demonstrate them to your class?

October 18, 2021: Lifelong Kindergarten (Resnick, 2017)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

The four P’s of creative learning include: Projects: creating projects develops a deeper learning of the creative process. Passion: when people work on projects they care about, they’re willing to work longer and harder. Peers: creativity is a social process, with people collaborating, sharing, and building on one another’s work. Play: Playful experimentation is a pathway to creativity.

Piaget found that children actively construct knowledge through their everyday interactions with people and objects in the world. Children are constantly creating, revising, and testing their own theories about the world as they play with their toys and friends.

Seymour Papert used the term hard fun to describe learning. Too often, teachers try to make lessons easier, believing children want things to be easy. But that’s not the case. Most children are willing to work hard- eager to work hard- so long as they’re excited about the things they’re working on.

The key challenge is not how to “teach creativity” to children, but rather how to create a fertile environment in which their creativity will take root, grow, and flourish.

When developing activities for learning, it is critical that they have “high ceilings, low floors and wide walls.” This means that the low floor allows for beginners to easily get started. The high ceilings allow ways for children to work on increasingly sophisticated projects. Wide walls allow children to take multiple pathways toward the goal.

“When children think they are being taught, they are much more likely to simply reproduce what the adult does, instead of creating something new,” Gopnik wrote. “The children seem to work out, quite rationally, that if a teacher shows them one particular way to do something, that must be the right technique, and there;s no point in trying something new.”

What types of play are most likely to help young people develop as creative thinkers and are you incorporating opportunities for play in your learning experiences?

It’s important to provide learners with sufficient time, because some paths and styles take longer than others.

How can your learning activities, or assessments, incorporate “low floors, high ceilings, and wide walls”?

October 25, 2021: UDL Now! (Novak, 2014)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

UDL is not something you can just “do.” UDL is what your practice becomes when you shift the way you think about teaching and learning.

“Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement” (Pink, 2009).

The UDL implementation will not happen overnight. Think of it as a lifestyle change as opposed to a diet.

UDL is about designing lessons that will challenge all students and push them to achieve grade-level standards. When you teach UDL, you have to believe that all your students will succeed and keep that belief at the forefront when designing your curriculum. If you eliminate barriers in your learning environment, you take away many of the reasons and excuses for failure. Then, and only then, you can teach every student.

UDL is not a checklist. A UDL teacher doesn’t just play a video and hand out a rubric. He or she eliminates barriers to learning by proactively and deliberately planning curriculum that all students can access.

If we want our students to be motivated learners, we have to support their journey so they become autonomous and can personalize their learning. To do this we have to focus on engagement and start with why. Empowering our students with options and the opportunity to personalize their own learning is one of the core concepts of UDL and what sets it apart from differentiated instruction.

In order to build executive functioning skills, students need the opportunity to set their own goals and create their own strategy. An important part of creating a strategy is determining what information and resources you need to be successful and also how you’re going to monitor your progress.

For writing, have students complete a RAFT prompt (Role-Audience-Form-Topic). Within RAFT, students make choices about who they are as a writer, who their audience is, which format they want to use, and what topic they want to write about.

What strategies can you use in your classroom this week to help better universally design for all students in your classroom? Try at least one.

November 1, 2021: Hacking Assessment (Sackstein, 2015)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

The more we want our children to be (1) lifelong learners, genuinely excited about words and numbers and ideas, (2) avoid sticking with what’s easy and safe, and (3) become sophisticated thinkers, the more we should do everything possible to help them forget about grades (Alfie Kohn).

Grades misrepresent what students know and can do because they oversimplify student achievement and categorize children into narrow boxes that stifle growth.

Averaged scores say very little about actual learning: any number of students can earn a B for many different combinations of reasons.

The language associated with grading often has a negative connotation that shuts the learning process down.

It isn’t the grade but the conversation that communicates learning. Discuss the learning with your students and their parents/guardians. We value the learning that occurs over the grades.

Using grades as a motivator doesn’t encourage learning on a larger scale; it merely motivates in the short term. Try a project or unit where you go gradeless with students. (p.s. your administration supports it!)

Teach students to be peer reviewers. Provide class time for students to work together to norm feedback.

Students are notoriously left out of the assessment process. Teach students to reflect on the process of learning.

Identify a project, unit, or lesson where you can go gradeless. What is the learning result of the students based on that experience?

November 8, 2021: Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know (Grant, 2021)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

If false scientific beliefs are not addressed in elementary school, they become harder to change later. “A task that becomes increasingly difficult the longer it is delayed, and one that is almost never achieved with only piecemeal instruction and infrequent practice” (Kelemen, D.)...That’s what kids really need: frequent practice at unlearning.

A meta-analysis compared the effects of lecturing and active learning on students’ mastery of the material, cumulating 225 studies with over 46,000 undergraduates in STEM. On average, students scored half a letter grade worse under traditional lecturing than through active learning- and students were 1.55 times more likely to fail in classes with traditional lecturing. The researchers estimate that if the student who failed in lecture courses had participated in active learning, more than $3.5 million in tuition could have been saved.

Philosopher Robert Nozick insisted on teaching a new class every year. He stated, “Presenting a completely polished and worked-out view doesn’t give students a feel for what it’s like to do original work and to see it happen, to catch on to doing it.”

“I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking” (Grant, 2021).

In a curriculum developed at Stanford, high school students are encouraged to critically examine what really caused the Spanish-American War, whether the New Deal was a success, and why the Montgomery bus boycott was a watershed moment. The focus is less on being right, and more on building the skills to consider different views and argue productively about them. This is part of a broader movement to teach kids to think like fact-checkers: (1) interrogate information instead of simply consuming it, (2) reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability, (3) understand that the sender of information is often not the source.

Engaged students in active learning over lecturing. It will be more difficult for students and they may not initially “like” the idea of active learning, but that is because it is harder cognitively than sitting and listening to a lecture. It is more effective when remembering content is critical. If you spend all your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.

Aim to throw out 20-25% of your course material each school year and replace it with new material.

Education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning.

Identify a project, unit, or lesson where you can go gradeless. What is the learning result of the students based on that experience?

November 15, 2021: The Art of Gathering (Parker, 2018)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

"I wrote this book because I think gathering is a form of leadership — it’s not a form of logistics. And part of this is changing the culture in our companies and in our workplaces that move our assumptions from our gatherings being centered around things to remembering that gathering is actually a form of group leadership around people. I think that gathering is a leadership capability and one that needs to be developed in people.""

Have you ever stopped to think what makes for a good gathering? We spend a large part of our lives gathering, from Monday morning team catch-ups to Friday night drinks, book groups and board meetings. But few of us really take the time to consider the ingredients that go into a successful, meaningful or exciting gathering. And when we do try to plan, we tend to be focused on the practicalities. We look to Pinterest for decorative suggestions, or we spend time focused on the logistics of a business event. Rarely do we stop to think about the deeper purpose that lies behind our gathering, get under the skin of how people connect with one another and consider how to design gatherings in a way that encourages better human connections.

Anyone hosting a gathering of any kind today has to deal with the fact that being distracted by technology is a reality of modern life. A Deloitte study has shown that people check their phones an average of 150 times a day.

The author once had a teacher, Sugata Roychowdhury, who on the first day of class, recorded attendance in an incredible way. Instead of reading through and checking off the list of 70 students’ names, he paced the room. One by one, he held eye contact with the students, pointed at them and stated their full name. Roychowdhury and his students had never met before. He’d taken the entire class attendance from memory, presumably having studied photos and names for hours. The students were mesmerized and immediately felt both honored and excited to be in his class.

One of the first things Parker writes about is that before you gather, you should be crystal clear about why you’re meeting. You may think you know why you’re meeting, but Parker says: “A category is not a purpose.” In other words, a purpose is not: “I’m getting married” or “I’m hosting a meeting about our new product release.” Parker urges readers to get really specific about what they want to accomplish and achieve through a gathering. She says: “drill baby drill” — ask “why?” until you find an articulation of what you truly need to accomplish. By doing this, you will move from a “basic, boring purpose” to one that is “specific, unique, and disputable.”

Typically we think that events begin when they begin. Parker reminds us that events actually start long before: they are initiated in how guests are prepared for the gathering. According to Parker: “90% of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.” For example, you may take time to individually meet with stakeholders before a big meeting or maybe you send an inspiring article to the attendees of an upcoming dinner party.

It’s not that I’m anti-food. It’s not that I’m anti-décor — I like a beautiful place as much as the next person. But everything that you create in an environment should serve the purpose of the gathering. And the parts of a room setup that I am interested in are: How do you physically set up space so that the room is working for your goals? Last week, I ran a 400-person gathering experience for an organization. I had asked for the whole room to be in a circle — a giant 400-person circle — and the hotel where the company was hosting the gathering couldn’t do it. They sat people at 40 round tables — 10 people at 40 tables. I got up and started the experience, and said, “Now, usually I do this in a big circle but we weren’t able to do it this way. Can you please — let’s stand up and see how it goes.” And, on their own, everyone got up from their tables, moved out and created a 400-person circle with the tables in between them. And it was awesome.

So part of the idea of embodiment and physical format is first, to not accept the default structure that you’re given, but instead to design for connection. And to create a physical environment that nudges people in the direction that you want them to go.

Everyday school is a gathering. How can you design your environment and student experience to create the results you want educationally?

November 22, 2021: Career Pathways for All Youth (Hamilton, 2020)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Just as Americans fret today about the economic ascendancy of China, they worried three decades ago about Japan and Germany, most visibly their rising share of the auto industry. Half or more of young people who did not graduate from a four-year college were neglected by policy and the education system, to the detriment of those people and the nation as a whole.

White men now account for less than half of the workforce, outnumbered by the combination of women, men of color, and immigrant men. A college diploma has proved to be the best defense against declining real earnings, but a chasm has opened between the incomes of those with and without a diploma, threatening living standards as well as social and political stability.

The 2012 NRC report characterizes what students need to become college and career ready as, “deeper learning.” The defining characteristic of deeper learning is that it is transferable, meaning that the learner is able to make use of knowledge acquired in one place and time in a different context at a later time.

There are four design principles for project-based learning; driving questions motivate learning, target significant learning goals, use projects to promote learning, and dedicate sufficient time.

Successful schools organize education, training, and other services to meet the particular needs of an individual in a manner that accelerates the educational and career advancement of the individual to the extent practicable.

Provide instruction concurrent with and in the same context as workforce preparation, identifying for students occupational clusters.

Talk with students about their career goals and explain to them what steps need to be achieved to reach those goals.

Strive to ensure what you teach is “deeper learning.” Students need the skills and knowledge to transfer among multiple contexts in their lives.

How can you use one of the four design principles for project-based learning in your lessons upon return from the holiday break?

November 30, 2021: The End of Average (Rose, 2016)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

“....it made it easier to measure each student’s deviation from the average- and thus made it easier to determine who was superior and who was inferior...For Thorndike, the purpose of schools was not to educate all students at the same level, but to sort them, according to their innate level of talent.”

If you are comparing two different groups of people, like comparing the performance of Chilean pilots with French pilots- as opposed to comparing two individuals from each of those groups- then the average can be useful. But the moment you need a pilot, or a plumber, or a student- the moment you need to make a decision about any individual- the average is useless.

To transform the averagarian architecture of our existing system into a system that values the individual student requires that we adopt these three key concepts; 1. Grant credentials, not diplomas; 2. Replace grades with competency; 3. Let students determine their educational pathway.

“If someone proposed combining measures of height, weight, diet, and exercise into a single number or mark to represent a person’s physical condition, we would consider it laughable….Yet every day, teachers combine aspects of students’ achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort, and behavior into a single grade that’s recorded on a report card and no one questions it” (Guskey).

Rethink your grading procedures. Why are you averaging? Are you focusing on compliance or content mastery?

Utilize Universal Design for Learning components to begin reaching all students in your lesson planning.

Let students tell you their preferred way to learn a new topic.

Show students strategies to have text read aloud to them; visualize patterns, and help them type. Simple online tools can help reduce the cognitive load and lead to more learning in your class.

If there truly is no “average student”, what can you change in your classroom to meet the individual needs of your students?

December 6, 2021: Limitless Mind (Boaler, 2019)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Every time we learn, our brains form, strengthen, or connect neural pathways. We need to replace the idea that learning ability is fixed, with the recognition that we are all on a growth journey.

The times we are struggling and making mistakes are the best times for brain growth.

When we change our beliefs, our bodies and our brains physically change as well.

Neural pathways and learning are optimized when considering ideas with a multidimensional approach.

Since learning is not fixed, be sure to directly teach your students that their brains are physically changing as they learn new ideas and concepts.

Struggle and mistakes should be encouraged in your class. Celebrate the “struggle bus” and welcome mistakes.

It is difficult to change beliefs, but just changing your perspective on failure and teaching children that you want them to fail forward will physically change your, and your students’ bodies and brain.

Universally design your content presentation so that you can optimize the learning. Utilize the five senses and movement to help kids learn.

Do I create a classroom environment where students feel safe to make mistakes and struggle? Are all students experiencing struggle in my classroom?

December 13, 2021: Teaching Boys Who Struggle in School (Cleveland, 2011)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

If we, as educators, view our underachieving boys’ behaviors, attitudes, and choices through the narrow lens of our own style, we can aggravate the teacher-student style conflict by attributing negativity where none is intended or interpreting behaviors to be the result of attitudes that don’t exist.

The issue of fear of failure is particularly pertinent to boys and their construction of gender. For boys, fear of failure operates across a number of domains. Many of the problems boys experience during education can be traced to their frustration and feelings of inadequacy in attempting to live up to what they believe their peers and society generally expect of them as males.

Although boys are expected to “act tough”, they are more emotionally fragile than girls.

Sometimes boys push on boundaries as a means of getting attention. The more attention we give in response to an infraction, the more likely the boundary will be pushed on for just that purpose. The smartest response on our part is to speak calmly and avoid shouting.

Replace his negative attitudes about learning with productive perspectives about the role of risk as a necessary and valued part of the learning process.

Reconnect him with school, with learning, and with a belief in himself as a competent learner who is capable, valued, and respected.

Rebuild life skills and learning skills that lead to academic success and also lay the groundwork for success in life.

Reduce his need to use unproductive and distracting behaviors as a means of self-protection.

Are there any aspects of the subject you teach that seem to be obstacles to academic success for a large number of boys? How can you change that?

December 19, 2021: Caste (Wilkerson, 2020)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than that of Russia and China, with a rate of 655 per 100,000. The United States imprisons more people, 2.2 million, than any other nation. If the US prison population were a city, it would be the fifth largest in America.

“Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire….Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind.” Dalit Bhimrao Ambedkar.

The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized in his research after the end of the Civil War: “The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.”

The United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world.

Without the intervention of humanitarian interventions, a reconstituted caste system could divide those at the bottom and those in the middle, and lock those on the bottom rung.

People of personal courage and conviction, secure within themselves, willing to break convention, not reliant on the approval of others for their sense of self, deep in empathy and compassion, are who can change what is currently happening to what could happen.

Our educational system tends to pit students against one another in competition. Provide learning opportunities that are collaborative, instead of competitive.

As a member of the dominant caste, develop opportunities to reduce stereotypes and provide equitable opportunities for all children.

How am I perpetuating a dominant caste system and what can I do to change “the system”?

January 2, 2022: Quiet (Cain, 2012)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Introverts are what’s called “highly sensitive”, meaning they take in the information given to them, for example via stimuli from their environment, a lot more thoroughly than their extrovert peers.

We often perceive whoever’s the most confident to be the most competent as well. That couldn’t be further from the truth, since just being a charming speaker and captivating figure does not make one a good leader. Being more sociable often leads people to think you’re also more interesting and willing to cooperate.

Multitasking: Scientists now know that the brain is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduces productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.

A reward-sensitive person is highly motivated to seek rewards—from a promotion to a lottery jackpot to an enjoyable evening out with friends. Reward sensitivity motivates us to pursue goals like sex and money, social status and influence. It prompts us to climb ladders and reach for faraway branches in order to gather life’s choicest fruits. But sometimes we’re too sensitive to rewards. Reward sensitivity on overdrive gets people into all kinds of trouble. We can get so excited by the prospect of juicy prizes, like winning big in the stock market, that we take outsized risks and ignore obvious warning signals. Extroverted clients are more likely to be highly reward-sensitive, while the introverts are more likely to pay attention to warning signals. They’re more successful at regulating their feelings of desire or excitement. They protect themselves better from the downside.

Even the best schools, like Harvard, try to groom their graduates into extroverts, by forcing them through group work, seminars, presentations and even going out with fellow students at night as part of their program. Value each of your students for the uniqueness they provide, be they introverts or extroverts.

Introverts are good leaders: Introverts are uniquely good at leading initiative-takers. Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Introverts are less likely to take leadership roles, so your position as the educator is to give students those experiences.

Introverts are more sensitive: there’s a host of evidence that introverts are more sensitive than extroverts to various kinds of stimulation, from coffee to a loud bang to the dull roar of a networking event—and that introverts and extroverts often need very different levels of stimulation to function at their best. How can you redesign your classroom experience to appeal to both introverts and extroverts?

Extroverts are more likely to take a quick-and-dirty approach to problem solving, trading accuracy for speed, making increasing numbers of mistakes as they go, and abandoning ship altogether when the problem seems too difficult or frustrating. Introverts think before they act, digest information thoroughly, stay on task longer, give up less easily, and work more accurately. Develop learning activities that focus less on time and “completeness” and more on accuracy.

How can your classroom experiences be designed to appeal to both introverts and extraverts? Do you call on more introverts than extraverts? In what ways can your class activities value both traits?

January 10, 2022: Absent from School (Gottfried, 2019)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Students with more school absences have lower test scores and grades, greater risk of dropping out of high school, and higher odds of future unemployment. Absent students are also more likely to use tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs, and they exhibit greater behavioral issues, including social disengagement and alienation.

Balfanz and Byrnes show that chronic absence rates in kindergarten are equivalent to those at the end of middle school and beginning of high school.

A student who is absent 15, 18, or 20 times per year will score about 10-15 percent of a standard deviation lower than an otherwise similar student who misses only a handful of days per year.

There are equity issues with assigning OSS or ISS to students for student misbehavior and truancy.

Of the predictors, prior chronic absenteeism accounts for nearly half of total variability for first and second graders. Efforts at reducing absenteeism in the earliest grades will be critical to prevent chronic absenteeism in future grades.

Show students that you noticed when they were absent from school. Tell them you missed them and how important it is to come to school.

Identify the absences early. It is easier to reduce overall absences at the start of the school year, than to wait until mid-year to start to address the problem.

Come to school. You are the adult that children admire and you need to show through your attendance that school is important and you will attend regularly.

What procedure can I put in place at the start of the school year to identify my students who miss school often and how can I notify the office or SAP team?

January 18, 2022: Atomic Habits (Clear, 2018)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

Anyone can convince themselves to practice yoga or meditation once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it becomes hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. The goal is not to get straight A’s, the goal is to become a person who studies every day. The goal is not to finish a painting, the goal is to become an artist. The goal is not to win the game or competition, the goal is to become a person who practices every day.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.

Various research studies have found that it is easier to change your behavior when your environment changes. For example, students change their television watching habits when they transfer schools. Wendy Wood and David T. Neal, “Healthy through Habit: Interventions for Initiating and Maintaining Health Behavior Change,” Behavioral Science and Policy 2, no. 1 (2016), doi:10.1353/bsp.2016.0008; W. Wood, L. Tam, and M. G. Witt, “Changing Circumstances, Disrupting Habits,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88, 918–933, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022–3514.88.6.918

Are you willing to be uncomfortable for 5 minutes? Exercising is easier once you've started the workout. Conversation is easier once you're already talking. Writing is easier once you're in the middle of it. But many rewards in life will elude you if you're not willing to be a little uncomfortable at first.

Sometimes in life, you will make mistakes. And when you think back on those mistakes, you may feel embarrassed. That's a normal feeling. Nobody is perfect and we all make our fair share of mistakes in life. However, if you do not take responsibility for the mistake and do your best to correct it, then you are committing a second mistake. Do the right thing, even though you may feel embarrassed by your previous actions. Don't compound the error.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, you need to make the cue a big part of your environment. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. In the long-run (and often in the short-run), your willpower will not beat your environment. You can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues. Making a better decision is easy, natural even, when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.

Your habits reshape your identity in a gradual way. It's slow and nearly impossible to see. You can rarely tell a difference between who you were yesterday and who you are today. But with each rep, with each vote cast, your internal story begins to shift. Start by focusing on who you want to become, not what you want to achieve.

Which habits do you need to double down on this year? Which habits are no longer serving you and need to be replaced this year?

January 24, 2022: When You Wonder, You're Learning (Behr & Rydzewski, 2021)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Rogers himself was once asked why his educational television program didn’t focus on facts- on letters and numbers, fractions and spelling. “I would rather give [children] the tools for learning,” he responded. “If we give them the tools, they’ll want to learn the facts. More importantly, they’ll use the facts to build and not destroy.”

It has been estimated that today’s young people will change jobs as many as fifteen times over the course of their lifetimes and that many of their jobs will require work that hasn’t been invented.

In his 2004 book, The Wisdom of the Crowds, journalist James Surowiecki explores the power of working together. Under the right conditions, he argues, groups of people tend to make better decisions than even the brightest individual experts. Today, nearly nine out of ten workers spend at least a third of their time in teams.

It is important to value the process and the outcome of struggle and show to kids that they’re inextricably linked. Learning from mistakes takes persistence, and one of the best ways to encourage that is to comment on how children are working on something, not just what they’re making.

Children “catch” curiosity. It is important for you to show them your interests and what makes you wonder. Verbalize your questions and your thoughts.

Ask open-ended questions about “the mad they feel” about disappointments. Sometimes the best thing to say is, “Can you tell me about it?”

Speak honestly with children about times when you struggled with friends. What did you do to repair that relationship? How was the relationship stronger in the end?

Take interest in what interests your children. Approach it with enthusiasm and without judgement.

Wonder aloud: Ask “Why” or What if” with your children. How often do you give them the time and space to wonder? (We have copies of the book for any staff member interested.)

January 31, 2022: Whistling Vivaldi (Steele, 2011)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art.

Stereotype Threat: we know that anything we do that fits the stereotype could be taken as confirming it. And we know that , for that reason, we could be judged and treated accordingly.

During a difficult math test, many women worry about confirming, or being seen as confirming, the societal view that women have a poor math ability. This, in turn, interferes with their performance and they then perform poorly on a math test.

Identity Threat- the subset of identity contingencies that actually threaten the person in some way- is a primary way by which an identity takes hold of us, in the sense of shaping how we function and even in telling us that we have a particular identity.

There exists no group on earth that is not negatively stereotyped in some way. And when people with these identities are doing something, or are in a situation for which a negative stereotype about their group is relevant, they can feel stereotype threat; they can feel under pressure not to confirm the stereotype for fear that they will be judged or treated in terms of it. Identity threats like this- contingencies of identity- are part of everyone’s life.

Confirm students’ achievement ability before they take a test. Students, especially those in historically underperforming subgroups, are likely to achieve higher on the exam.

All students need is a relief from the pressure of a stereotype.

If you want to change the behavior and outcomes associated with social identity- say, too few women in computer science- don’t focus on changing the internal manifestations of the identity, such as values, and attitudes. Focus instead on changing the contingencies to which all of that internal stuff is an adaptation.

Find identities that counter the relevant stereotype to show children they can overcome stereotype threat.

In what ways can my instruction reduce stereotype threat in my classroom? What stereotypes are associated in my content area?

February 7, 2022: Chatter (Kross, 2021)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art. All books featured in this newsletter are available upon request.

Previous research had indicated that a high usage of first-person-singular pronouns, a phenomenon called I-talk, is a reliable marker of negative emotion.

Simply asking people to write about their most upsetting negative experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes- to create a narrative about what happened- leads them to feel better, visit the doctor less, and have healthier immune function.

Showing how to lead ninth graders to focus on the big-picture reasons for doing schoolwork- for instance, emphasizing how doing well in school would help them land their desired jobs and contribute to society as adults- led them to earn higher GPSs and stay more focused on boring, but important tasks.

Paying attention to our self-talk is vitally important for our mental health.

Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when you’re experiencing chatter involves language. When you are trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person “you” to refer to yourself. Doing so is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.

Broaden your perspective. Chatter involves narrowly focusing on the problems we’re experiencing. A natural antidote to this involves broadening our perspective. To do this, think about how the experience you’re worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation.

Write expressively. Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding your negative experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for one to three consecutive days. Really let yourself go as you jot down your stream of through to; don't worry about grammar or spelling. Focusing on your experience from the perspective of a narrator provides you with distance from the experience, which helps you make sense of what you felt in ways that improve how you feel over time.

Clutch a lucky charm or embrace a superstition. Simply believing that an object or superstitious behavior will help relieve your chatter often has precisely that effect by harnessing the brain’s power of expectation.

How is your inner voice both an asset and a liability?

February 14, 2022: Lead From Where You Are (Sanfelippo, 2022)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art. All books featured in this newsletter are available upon request.

The job of a great leader is to help everyone envision a collective goal and eliminate barriers that stand in the way of reaching it.

Lean into your strengths. Everyone is good at something and use your strengths to contribute to the organization.

Schools don’t often change just for change’s sake. However, the perception of change almost exclusively aligns where people find themselves on the continuum.

You don’t need to have all the answers during a time of change. You also don’t need to know where all the answers are. If an environment is created where answers are crowd-sourced, we find ourselves in a place where voices matter.

Avoid using the words “just” when discussing your role. When we downplay ourselves and our roles, others will too. We have to break the cycle of negative perception, and it starts with the way we talk about our work.

First five, Last Five: What are we doing in the last five minutes to make sure kids feel loved, supported, and safe, and what are we doing in the last five minutes to make sure they (the children) have the right story to tell the adults when they get home?

Start and end your day with joy. As the leader in the classroom, school, or district, how you show up for the people you care for has a tremendous impact on their ability to do the best work they can.

Create opportunities for momentum: Instead of letting a student know they did a great job on a project, calling the parent to not only let them know but suggesting a question for the parent to ask their child that you know the student will get right develops trust and purpose for both individuals.

How can I be a leader from my position in the California Area School District? What are the strengths I have to offer the organization?

February 22, 2022: Manage Your Time or Time Will Manage You (Caposey, 2018)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art. All books featured in this newsletter are available upon request.

Lois Frankel (2004) has noted that people with low self-esteem often try to remain under the radar because they don’t want to be noticed, but this is the wrong thing to do. To excel in education means we need to do everything possible to help ourselves grow and add value to the organizations we serve.

In “The Purpose-Driven Life”, Richard Warren (2002) emphasizes that the most precious gift any of us has is time.

Dr. Martin Seligman identified an acronym-PERMA-that stands for the five key elements that comprise well-being: Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments/achievements.

Iyengar and Lepper (2000) have shown that the human brain maxes out at seven options before we’re overwhelmed.

Eat the big frog first: If you are faced with an undesirable decision or task, start your day by completing that task so the rest of your day feels easier. You should be able to tell yourself, “Today, I did my best to tackle the most complex task facing me first thing in the morning.”

Make sure your calendar matches your priorities: List your priorities, such as family, friends, faith, profession, and heath in rank order. Look at the big picture and determine whether your schedule matches those priorities. Make adjustments to your calendar accordingly.

Identify negative language and work to reframe the problem: In “Above the Link: Lessons in Leadership and Life from a Championship Season” (Meyer & Coffey, 2015), the authors identify a language pattern commonly used when substandard performance is prevalent. This pattern is referred to as BCD behavior. People first “blame” others, then “complain” about the circumstances, and then “defend” their position. A tool to move forward is to implement the TCO language. TCO language asks for the objective “truth”, the “conditions” or the situation, and the “ownership” of the situation.

It is easier for us to make decisions-and we tend to make better decisions- when there are fewer choices from which to choose.

What is one time management technique I can implement in my routine for the month of March to reduce my stress and what is one technique I can teach my students?

February 28, 2022: Poor Students, Rich Teaching (Jensen, 2019)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art. All books featured in this newsletter are available upon request.

Poverty in the United States is getting worse, not better. The new normal is this: we now have a majority of students in public schools who qualify as poor based on school data (Suitts, 2015).

Chronic exposure to poverty affects the areas of the brain responsible for memory, impulse regulation, visuospatial actions, language, cognitive capacity, and conflict (Noble, Norman, & Farah, 2005).

Teachers who do not know what these behaviors really are may inappropriately judge a student as lazy, unwilling to follow directions, a poor listener, low achieving, and anto-social. When students feel a connection with their teachers and feel respect and trust, they behave and learn better.

Often, teachers feel helpless to help students if there is a lack of support at home, but the truth is the classroom teacher is still the single most significant contributer to student achievement; the effect is greater than that of parents, peers, entire schools, or poverty (Hanushek, 2005; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005; Rockoff, 2004).

All students, especially those from poverty, love the idea of goals. Setting personal goals and sharing them with your students is an effective way to foster the relational mindset.

The effect size of cooperative versus individual learning is 0.59 (Hattie, 2009). This gain is solid; over a year's worth of difference. Additionally, cooperative learning supports the critical feeling of belonging.

Use the Two and Ten Strategy: Identify two students who need the most connection. These students may be extra shy or noisy, or they have trouble sitting still, display a lack of self-regulation, or hang around after class seeking a connection with you. For ten consecutive days, invest two minutes a day connecting time to talk about anything with these two.

Give feedback according to SEA (Strategy, Effort, and Attitude). Instead of saying, "well done" or "good job," give specific feedback in regard to strategy, effort, adn attitude: "I love how you kept trying so many strategies on that problem until you got it"; "I like that you refused to give up. That extra effort will help you succeed again and reach your goal" and "Before you began, you thought you could succeed. Your positive attitude helped you come through."

What one strategy above can I try in my classroom this week to help all students in my class?

March 7, 2022: Grading for Equity (Feldman, 2019)

In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an object of antiquity on which the safety of Troy was said to depend. Over time, a palladium has been used to mean anything to provide protection or safety. The path of lifelong learning provides protection and safety for success. This newsletter seeks to inspire reflective professional practice through educational research, strategy, and art. All books featured in this newsletter are available upon request.

While grading had previously existed as a teacher's narrative of student progress, twentieth century schools adopted single letter grading (A, B, C, D, F) and the use of the "curve" to more efficiently describe and communicate student performance, and to sort students easily.

In traditional grading, teachers judge nearly every action of a student throughout the learning process, weakening trust in the student-teacher relationships and inhibiting students from disclosing weaknesses or incentivizing dishonest means to conceal weaknesses. Teachers use "points" in grading based on the traditional belief that points motivate students to learn, even though "one of the sturdiest findings in social science" is that extrinsic motivation for learning is ineffective and even harmful.

Faced with the constraints of using a single letter to report student performance, teachers are forced to make creative adjustments and adaptations, making grades idiosyncratic and, therefore, unreliable.

Assigning a zero nevery accurately represent a student's achievement. The zero also disproportionately punishes students when used within a 0-100 point scale. The 0-100 percentage scale emphasizes failure over success and offers so many fine gradiations that are not only unnecessary but that make it susceptible to error and variance.

Practices that are accurate and mathematically sound: Using algorithms that allow and support student growth rather than consigning students to failure: Using a 0-4 instead of a 0-100 point scale; not giving zeros.

Practices that value knowledge, not environment or behavior: Evaluating students only on their level of content mastery. Examples: not grading subjectively interpreted behaviors such as a student's effort or growth, or on completion of homework; grading students' knowledge based on multiple sources of information.

Practices that support hope and a growth mindset: Encouraging mistakes as part of the learning process. Examples: allowing test or project retakes; replacing previous scores with current scores (rather than averaging).

Practices that lift the veil on how to succeed: Making grades simpler and more transparent. Examples: creating rubrics; using simplified grade calculations.

Practices that build "soft skills" and motivate students without grading them: Supporting intrinsic motivation and self-regulation rather than relying on an extrinsic point system. Examples: Using peer or self-evaluation and reflection; employing a more expansive menu of feedback strategies.

What is one strategy I can use in the next week to transform grading in my classroom?