“MLK's lesson is clear: The arc of the moral universe bends not from gravity but from the gravitas of our collective struggle to improve our communities, our society, and our world. The arc of the moral universe does not passively bend; it is actively bent. We bend it.”

            Chika Okafor in “The Arc of the Moral Universe Doesn’t Bend Itself”

in The Boston Sunday Globe, January 14, 2024

“What has tended to happen in American public schooling with poor kids, and particularly with poor kids of color, is that when they haven’t learned, the variables are poverty, the lack of parenting, difficult community circumstances, socioeconomic status, and on and on and on. And interestingly enough it never circled back to the teacher or the school. And therefore it let us off the hook.” 

Anthony Alvarado, former New York City schools chancellor, who died last week at 81; click here for a January 10, 2024 New York Times obituary.

“There is always the question, can the octopus so enmesh you that there will always be an arm around you, tugging you from the direction you want to go. The octopus is the system, the bureaucracy. I’ll walk around with a pair of shears in my back pocket. Whenever I see a tentacle, I’ll take it out.” 

            Anthony Alvarado when he was appointed New York City chancellor in 1983

“To teach children effectively, you must teach teachers effectively – and constantly – about how to teach children effectively.” 

            Anthony Alvarado

“Start off your cabinet meetings with a quick ‘Hope or Humor’ story. Someone from the team shares a quick student story that instills hope or focuses on a humorous event. Although this might seem insignificant, it sets the mood for the meeting and refocuses everyone on why we do what we do as educators.” 

            Howard Carlson, quoted in School Administrator, January 2024 (Vol. 81, #1, p. 7)

“Depression is a treatable medical illness.” 

            Karen Swartz, Johns Hopkins University Mood Disorders Center, in “Universal

Depression Education in High Schools” in School Administrator, January 2024 (Vol. 

81, #1, pp. 20-23); Swartz can be reached at kswartz1@jhmi.edu. 

“If you want to improve reading, improve writing, because when you read, that’s what you do, but when you write, you read and write. If you do only one, you’ll pay the price for not doing both…”

            Allen Berger (Miami University, Ohio), in a New York Times letter, January 11, 2024

“The term ‘balanced literacy’ should be used in today’s teaching to mean love of and exposure to literature, but with the phonics element intact.”

            Daina Schuman (ibid.)

“Learning takes effort and sustained attention. Unfortunately, dopamine hits of social media have trained students to flee effort in search of easy, cheap entertainment.”

            Daniel Buck (see item #2)

“The role of oral, live, public speaking assignments is going to increase.”

            Jeffrey Schnapp on the impact of ChatGPT and other large language models on 

the classroom, quoted in “AI in the Academy” by Jonathan Shaw in Harvard

Magazine, November/December 2023

“One way of looking at this might be that, for 42 years, I’ve been making small regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

            Chesley Sullenberger in an interview with Katie Couric shortly after he landed his 

airliner in the Hudson River, saving everyone on board, in “The Good News About Bad 

Airplane Safety Incidents” by Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times, Jan. 11, 2024

“The goal [of National Transportation Safety Board post-accident investigations] is to identify the problem to make future errors less likely. This encourages people to be frank, in stark contrast with liability-driven cultures that encourage people to hide their errors and the authorities to seek scapegoats rather than solutions… If something has gone wrong, the reason will be identified and fixed.” 

            Zeynep Tufekci (ibid.)

  In this Harvard Business Review article, Jamil Zaki (Stanford University) says today’s employees – especially Millennials and Gen Zers – “don’t merely hope for empathy from their leaders – they demand it.” That puts a lot of pressure on conscientious bosses. “When you adopt empathy in the workplace,” says Zaki, “you expose yourself to the emotional ups and downs of everyone you manage – a welter of joy, anxiety, anger, self-doubt, fear, confusion, exuberance, jealousy, sadness, disappointment, and more.”

 “I feel like I’m never enough,” said one executive. “Anything going wrong with them means I’ve failed.” 

In the caring professions – doctors, nurses, teachers, and their managers – compassion fatigue is an occupational hazard. Zaki suggests three strategies for sustainable empathy: 

• Physician, heal thyself. He once shadowed a doctor for six hours and realized that she hadn’t eaten, had a drink of water, sat down, or used the bathroom all day. This kind of behavior has been called “martyr mentality,” and some empathetic managers wear it like a badge of honor, absorbing the stress that others are suffering. “If I have any little piece of energy left at the end of the day,” one executive told Zaki, “then I didn’t do all I could.” 

This mentality “harms your ability to truly be there for your people,” he says. “Stress numbs you to others’ concerns, makes it harder to see the world through their eyes, and may even make you more aggressive… When you let yourself burn out, you deny everyone else the best version of yourself.” 

The antidote is “self-compassion” – taking care of yourself so you can care for others. Key steps:

-   Acknowledge the distress that comes from caring about the pain of others.

-   Treat yourself with the same grace you offer others.

-   Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

“These practices are powerful,” says Zaki. “Research finds that people high in self-compassion tend to be mentally healthier than others, more able to control their emotions, and quicker to recover from setbacks.” 

            • Learn to tune your caring. Emotional empathy involves taking on someone else’s distress – I feel your pain. Empathic concern or compassion is wanting to improve someone else’s well-being. “When it comes to burnout,” says Zaki, “these two types of empathy are not created equal.” The second – concern and compassion – is much more likely to lead to helpful action. “You can help yourself and the people you work with,” he says, “by tuning yourself toward concern and away from distress.” 

            • Empathy is more like a skill than a trait. “When you understand that empathy can be developed,” says Zaki, “you also understand that caring well doesn’t always mean caring more.” We can learn how to adjust our empathy to factor in self-compassion and our concern for others. One helpful practice is “compassion meditation” – focusing attention first on ourselves and then on others, silently repeating expressions of goodwill toward them: May you be peaceful and May you be safe from harm. 

“That may sound wacky,” says Zaki, “but compassion meditation can enhance your ability to connect with others and even change your brain in the process. It can be a powerful tool for people whose jobs require caring.” Before going into a tough conversation, he suggests, “pre-regulate” yourself with a few minutes of mindfulness. “Instead of getting sucked in by another’s feelings, focus on what you want for your colleague in the long term and how you can help achieve that.” 

“How to Sustain Your Empathy in Difficult Times” by Jamil Zaki in Harvard Business Review, January-February 2024 (Vol. 102, #1, pp. 62-69); Zaki can be reached at jzaki@stanford.edu. 

In this Education Gadfly article, Daniel Buck says that in schools that are permissive about cellphone use, “children develop habits of inattention. They’re talking to friends while watching videos; they’re watching teachers while they have music in their ears; they’re completing math problems with a few rounds of Candy Crush between sets, or reading a book with their phone on their desk. Learning takes effort and sustained attention. Unfortunately, dopamine hits of social media have trained students to flee effort in search of easy, cheap entertainment.”

Buck cites recent studies showing that banning cellphones in class boosts standardized test scores and end-of-course grades – adding the equivalent of an extra hour of instruction a week. Researchers have also found that keeping kids away from their phones during recess leads to a big increase in exercise and better attention back in class. When Buck visits school cafeterias that do and don’t ban cellphone use, he sees a dramatic difference. In the latter, students sit “shoulder to shoulder with their necks craned down, their faces faintly lit, occasionally leaning over to show their friend a funny meme or TikTok video but never glancing up.” In the former, students’ lunchrooms have a “healthy, boisterous energy.” 

            The research about improved learning makes sense, says Buck: “At the cognitive level, all new information enters our brains through our working memory, the doorway to long-term memory. If that doorway clogs up with Temple Run sneakily played between textbook pages or with emotional anticipation and consideration of that fateful buzz, telling a student that their crush just texted back, students cannot focus on class content, in which case they won’t learn much of it.” 

With banning cellphones, says Buck, the devil is in the details. He suggests three guiding principles:

            • The ban must be universal – It needs to apply to all classrooms. Teachers shouldn’t be put in the position of being the tough cop while others are cool and nice (“But Mr. Jones lets us use our phones!”)

            • It must be enforced – If the policy is violated, the same consequence must occur everywhere in the school. Buck took a student’s phone away last year, only to watch the principal return it to the student a few hours later, violating the school’s policy that a parent must come pick it up. Some schools add a lunch detention to that consequence.

            • PR – When a cellphone ban is launched, says Buck, it needs to be accompanied by an information campaign on the negative consequences of overdosing on screens. Students will resent not being able to use their phones, and parents will be annoyed at not being able to contact their kids during school hours and having to come to school to retrieve a confiscated phone – but kids and families are more likely to understand and support a ban if they’re fully informed.

“How to Ban Phones Effectively” by Daniel Buck in Education Gadfly, January 11, 2024

 In this Teachers College Record article, David Nurenberg (Milton Academy) and Liana Tuller (Charlestown High School, Boston) report on a 1,409-student suburban Massachusetts high school shifting from seven achievement-grouped courses in English, history, science, and math to heterogeneously grouped courses in which students could choose to take the class for honors credit while still working side-by-side with a diverse group of peers. This was during the 2020-21 school year, with Covid-19 remote instruction. 

Nurenberg and Tuller were interested in whether the honors-option in this high school would solve what researchers have found to be perennial problems with tracking: less rigor and lower achievement for the lower tracks and mixed results for the upper tracks. Looking at achievement data, surveys, and interviews in the Massachusetts school, here’s what they found:

-   The embedded honors option was correlated with increased participation in honors classes in most courses, especially for traditionally marginalized students.

-   There was a significant increase in honors enrollment across all student groups, including white students, but especially among African Americans, Hispanics, and ELLs (even though previously, enrollment in honors classes was available to any student who opted in).

-   In addition, whereas previously very few students switched from non-honors to honors, this was much more likely with the honors-embedded approach. 

-   Academic performance improved significantly among students who took the honors option, including those who were previously enrolled in non-honors courses (although it’s difficult to separate the impact of remote learning from embedded-honors classes).

-   There was a significant improvement in students’ final course grades compared with the two previous academic years (teachers said they had not decreased the level of rigor). 

-   There was a perception of greater academic challenge among students in the non-honors option.

-   There was a perception of diminished rigor among those who took the honors option.

-   Heterogeneous classes were especially appreciated in the humanities, where the more-diverse range of viewpoints improved the quality of discussions.

-   Students said they appreciated interacting with and making friends with a wider group of peers. As one student said, “It felt nice that we were all in this together.” 

-   There was less stigma for those who chose the non-honors option.

-   Teachers’ pedagogy varied widely, with some teachers differentiating effectively, others “teaching to the middle,” some just giving extra worksheets or assignments to the honors students. Not enough emphasis was put on PD for differentiation, say Nurenberg and Tuller.

-   Some teachers noted that there wasn’t much difference between honors and regular curriculum, indicating that the school hadn’t thought through the distinction.

Nurenberg and Tuller’s overall conclusion: “Changing the modality of ‘honors’ or accelerated courses from separate classes to separate options within a heterogeneously grouped class correlated with greater and more-inclusive participation in those honors opportunities, whatever it is those opportunities actually entailed in practice.” Attempting this ambitious change during the pandemic, they say, makes its overall success even more impressive.

When the school opened for in-person instruction the following year (2021-22), it returned to achievement grouping by course. Planning for the 2022-23 year, the principal proposed re-starting the honors-optional heterogeneous courses. There was a heated debate on the school board, with some parents of high-achieving students arguing that their kids would be held back by lower-achieving students in the same courses. The principal ended up limiting the honors-optional initiative to ninth-grade English classes. 

“Sometimes teachers can be persuaded by experience and data to explore more-progressive and equitable practices,” conclude Nurenberg and Tuller, “only to be blocked by parents and community members who view attempts to expand access to challenging learning opportunities as zero-sum prospects that might threaten more-privileged children’s success. Public schools are ultimately beholden to democratically elected school boards, which means the role that research and expertise play in setting school policies can be forced to take a back seat to political processes. As educational issues become increasingly politicized, this element will only become more salient and pressing.” 

“‘All In This Together’: Improving Access to Accelerated Learning Through Embedding Honors in Heterogeneously Grouped Classes” by David Nurenberg and Liana Tuller in Teachers College Record, September 2023 (Vol. 125, #9, pp. 3-50); the authors can be reached at david_nurenberg@milton.edu and ltuller@bostonpublicschools.org.

(Originally titled “Make Classrooms, Not Hallways, the Heart of Belonging”)

            In this ASCD online article, New York City principal Ronald James Jr. describes visiting a school where many students were socializing and fooling around in the halls during class time and there was “an overall feeling of malaise.” Asked about the school’s priorities for the year, the newly-appointed principal said, “I’m focused on discipline and the hallways.” The leadership team was spending a lot of time trying to push students into classrooms. 

            This was the wrong approach, thought James. The principal needed to focus on why students would rather be in the hallways. “If instruction in the classroom does not provide opportunities for students to express themselves and engage in vigorous learning,” says James, “school staff will inevitably find themselves dealing with the consequences.” Here are his suggestions for school leaders who find themselves in this situation:

            • Reach consensus on what effective instruction looks like. “There is power in explicitly naming social, behavioral, and intellectual expectations and best practices and informing all stakeholders what they should be delivering and/or experiencing,” he says. 

            • Create a concise checklist of those practices. In his own experience as a turnaround principal, James worked with his faculty to create a list of six look-fors in classrooms – including student collaboration and high-order thinking – and used the list for classroom visits. 

            • Zero in on struggling teachers. Identify the instructional practices that are associated with students skipping out on certain classrooms. “This analysis is crucial,” says James, “because our primary focus should be on understanding the circumstances that lead to disruptive behavior in the hallways.” 

            • Work with those teachers. PD, job-embedded coaching, improvement plans, and constant feedback will help them create more rigorous and inviting classrooms. 

            • Follow the data. This might be student attendance, less hallway traffic, a reduction of office referrals, and improvement in students’ writing skills.

“Make Classrooms, Not Hallways, the Heart of Belonging” by Ronald James Jr. in ASCD online, January 9, 2024

In this Thinking Is Power article, Melanie Trecek-King (Massasoit Community College) bemoans the way science is taught in many classrooms: a fat textbook full of facts, memorizing them for exams, the “scientific method” involving experiments with a “right” answer, and many students wondering why they’re learning all this when they don’t plan on becoming scientists. The result: low levels of science literacy. “Too many science classes focus on whatscience knows instead of how it knows,” says Trecek-King, “leaving too many unable to spot claims that seem scientific but aren’t.” 

            This does students and society an injustice, she says. “Science is much more than a collection of facts – it’s a way of thinking. There’s no single ‘scientific method.’ There are many ways to do science. And most importantly, science isn’t just for scientists. In a world built by science, scientific literacy is essential for making wise decisions about everything from our health to how to vote.” 

            So what is science? Trecek-King lists five key facts and insights about science and why it matters so much:

• From time immemorial, humans have tried to explain the world around them, often citing supernatural forces. Science is a way of explaining natural phenomena without resorting to such forces. But science can’t answer all questions, including those involving personal preferences, moral judgments, and where the evidence isn’t observable and testable.

• The human brain is prone to errors, jumping to conclusions based on emotions, biases, expectations, and desires. Personal experiences and anecdotes can easily fool us, and science is the best way to prevent that because it’s designed to correct for our limited perceptions and flawed thinking.

• Science is a community of experts using varied methods to gather evidence and scrutinize claims. The “secret sauce” of science is that claims are evaluated by many experts, all trying to find flaws in each other’s assumptions, methods, and reasoning. There are powerful incentives for scientists to be accurate, because fraud is a career-killer.

• Science is a way of getting closer to the truth by testing our explanations against reality and critically scrutinizing the evidence. An essential foundation of science is skepticism, insisting on seeing the evidence before accepting a claim. 

• Scientific knowledge is tentative, with scientists testing expectations against reality, never completely certain, always open to change, gradually reducing uncertainty. The built-in checks mean that science self-corrects and progresses, with bad ideas weeded out and good ideas flourishing. 

“Taken together, these assumptions and limitations help us learn about and solve problems,” says Trecek-King. “Is the pattern we observed real? Is a correlation due to causation? Is our understanding robust enough to make reliable predictions?” 

            She goes on to address the confusion that results when everyday usage of scientific terms differs from their technical definitions:

-   A hypothesis is a testable explanation for a fairly narrow set of phenomena based on current scientific knowledge and observation – not speculation or a wild guess. 

-   A scientific theory is a broad explanation for a wide range of phenomena based on accumulated evidence from multiple related hypotheses – for example, relativity, germs, evolution.

-   A scientific law is a description of natural phenomena that is well supported by evidence – for example, gravity, electromagnetism.

-   Laws describe what will happen (the apple falls straight down); theories explain why.

-   A scientific model is a representation of an idea, object, process, or system to make it easier to understand – for example, the solar system, Earth’s climate.

-   A fact is an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and is generally accepted as true.

-   A scientific consensus is a collective position of experts based on evidence, which can take a long time. It’s not groupthink, and the process is not democratic. 

-   Scientific knowledge progresses and accumulates over time as we dig deeper into established knowledge and expand into new territory. “Confidence in our conclusions grows as findings are replicated and lines of evidence converge,” says Trecek-King.

She then distinguishes between three ways scientists gather facts and present their findings:

-   Controlled experiments – Variables are controlled, which reduces the impact of researchers’ biases and other factors and may establish causational evidence. 

-   Observational studies – When controlled experiments aren’t possible or ethical, data are collected in the “real world” with no manipulation of variables.

-   Syntheses and summaries of the body of evidence – Controlled and observational studies are narrow in scope; over time, research syntheses and meta-analyses put together the bigger picture, with summaries, consensus reports, and position statements being the apex – for example, the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Scientific literature is written and published for experts, says Trecek-King, often in peer-reviewed journals in which experts communicate with other experts. These are the best sources of information but they are often inaccessible to non-experts. Even using Google Scholar can produce misleading information: “If you don’t know what you don’t know,” she says, “it’s easy to fool yourself, including in the scientific literature.” 

            The popular press and the Internet are where most people get information about science after completing their formal education – and some do their own online research. Here’s what can go wrong:

-   The news focuses on new findings; established science isn’t dramatic enough to be “news.” 

-   The popular press overstates or sensationalizes single studies – This changes everything! – which is often not the case.

-   This kind of reporting leaves the impression that scientists are always changing their minds. Actually, says Trecek-King, that’s a good thing – if the evidence warrants it.

-   Due to confirmation bias, we cherry-pick news that supports what we already believe, misleading ourselves and others in the process. 

The best approach? Use neutral search terms, seek out the most reliable sources, and look for scientific consensus where it has emerged. 

In short, concludes Trecek-King, be scientifically literate! As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” 

“Science: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters” by Melanie Trecek-King in Thinking Is Power, August 25, 2022; Trecek-King can be reached at melanie@thinkingispower.com.

  In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez, Brandie Wright, Kim Darche, Marnie Diem, and Lucia Hassell recommend eight technology tools for educators:

            • MagicSchool offers more than 50 different artificial intelligence-assisted tools to speed up teaching tasks like lesson planning, developing assessments, feedback, communication with parents, and generating IEPs. 

            • Diffit can take a few words on a topic (or a PDF or URL) and create a reading passage, change it to different levels of readability, generate vocabulary lists, discussion questions, and multiple-choice tests, and translate it into multiple languages. 

            • Eduaide can create guided notes, Jeopardy-style game questions, classroom icebreakers, e-mails for parents, a rubric, and more.

            • Wix Tomorrow Classroom is a suite of resources that teaches secondary school students how to create their own websites. It includes lesson plans, activities, templates, and ways for teachers to monitor student work and give real-time feedback.

            • Sembl includes high-interest math activities for elementary students, with tools for teachers to filter tasks and create personalized playlists. This is an excellent tool for teachers using Peter Liljedahl’s “Thinking Classrooms” approach [see Memos 976, 992, and 1013].

            • Upschool offers free courses and learning materials to equip students with skills, inspiration, and support to solve real-world problems in their communities and globally. Many are aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

            • Flaticon has free downloadable icons and stickers in various formats that can add visual support to learning materials, help students find what they’re looking for in the classroom and online, enhance their own digital products, and brand classroom resources. 

            • Dollar Street shows families around the world on a virtual street based on their income, with photos of their homes, possessions, and daily lives. “It’s like a global neighborhood,” say Gonzalez and colleagues, “helping us see similarities and differences across cultures and income levels. Use this resource to debunk stereotypes, build empathy, and develop global awareness.”

“8 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2024” by Jennifer Gonzalez, Brandie Wright, Kim Darche, Marnie Diem, and Lucia Hassell in Cult of Pedagogy, January 10, 2024

In this Language Arts feature, Sanjuana Rodriguez (Kennesaw State University) and six colleagues share the winner, honor titles, and recommended titles for the Orbis Pictus awards for outstanding nonfiction (click the article link below for cover images and short summaries):

Winner:

-   Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, illustrated by Daniel Minter

Honors:

-   Choosing Brave: How Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till Sparked the Civil Rights Movement by Angela Joy, illustrated by Janelle Washington

-   Fighting for Yes: The Story of Disability Rights Activist Judith Heumann by Maryann Cocca-Feffler, illustrated by Vivien Mildenberger

-   Hardcourt: Stories from 75 Years of the National Basketball Association by Fred Bowen, illustrated by James Ransome

-   Seen and Unseen by Elizabeth Partridge, illustrated by Lauren Tamaki

-   The Science of Light: Things That Shine, Flash, and Glow by Margaret Peot

Recommended:

-   A River’s Gifts: The Mighty Elwha River Reborn by Patricia Newman, illustrated by Natasha Donovan

-   Adventures of Dr. Sloth: Rebecca Cliffe and Her Quest to Protect Sloths by Suzi Eszterhas

-   Caves by Nell Cross Beckerman, illustrated by Kalen Chock

-   Crash from Outer Space: Unraveling the Mystery of Flying Saucers, Alien Beings, and Roswell by Candace Fleming

-   One Wish: Fatima al Fihri and the World’s Largest University by M.O. Yuksel, illustrated by Mariam Quraishi

-   The Mother of a Movement: Jeanne Manford – Ally, Activist, and the Co-Founder of PFLAG by Rob Sanders, illustrated by Sam Kalda

-   Mystery of the Monarchs: How Kids, Teachers, and Butterfly Fans Helped Fred and Norah Urquhart Track the Great Monarch Migration by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Erika Meza

-   The Waiting Place: When Home Is Lost and a New One Not Yet Found by Dina Nayeri, photographs by Anna Bosch Miralpeix 

“2023 Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction” by Sanjuana Rodriguez, Eliza Braden, Sophie Ladd, Julia López-Robertson, Rebecca Maldonado, Noelle Mapes, and Jeanne Swafford in Language Arts, November 2023 (Vol. 101, #2, pp. 137-142)