ASCD Inservice

Reading Practice Improves Brain Connections

Last week, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University demonstrated that, after six months of intensive remedial reading instructions, children who struggled with reading not only improved their skills, but changed their brains. After intervention, brain scans of the poor readers in the CMU study showed new, stronger White matter connections, which are important for helping the brain perform complex cognitive tasks.

The Carnegie Mellon study is one of the few that has shown that the brain can actually change its connections through learning and adaptation, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports. One of the CMU researchers said studies like this show "we're not at the mercy of our biology."

Do your students know they have the power to change their brains? 

The Turnaround Trap

Post submitted by Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Even when everyone agrees change is essential, it is enormously difficult to change established institutions. I explore this point in depth in my forthcoming ASCD book Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling. It may be most relevant in the context of school "turnarounds"—a  subject that is much in the news.
 
The Obama administration believes in turnarounds. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called for turning around 5,000 low-performing schools in the next four years. The president has gone so far as to suggest that the efficacy of school turnaround is demonstrated by research. And, of course, the administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top initiative places substantial weight on state assurances that they will turn around lots of low-performing schools. Good stuff, no?

Unfortunately, not. This is a case of good intentions gone awry. In two decades of experience with state takeovers of low-performing schools or districts, we've yet to see a clear success. Only a handful of providers, like Academy for Urban School Leadership, can perhaps tally a few dozen successes among them. By throwing a big slug of federal dollars and moral support behind self-promoters promising to turn around lots of schools, the administration is setting up a potentially reasonable idea as one more oversold fad, and making it likely we'll waste a slew of dollars in the process.

Given the good intentions, it's only natural to root for turnarounds. But, while the phrase "turnaround" may be relatively new to those in education, “silver bullet” enthusiasm has a long track record in other sectors. And that record makes the case for steely-eyed realism. Even in the business world, where management enjoys many more degrees of freedom, turnarounds are an iffy proposition. Peter Senge, director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has observed,

"Failure to sustain significant change recurs again and again despite substantial resources committed to the change effort (many are bankrolled by top management), talented and committed people 'driving the change,' and high stakes. . . . There is little to suggest that schools, healthcare institutions, governmental, and nonprofit institutions fare any better."

Turnarounds mostly fail because troubled organizations usually need more than new leaders, practices, and urgency—they need to be rebuilt free from the rules, norms, policies, and contracts that shape them. Today's vague, enthusiastic calls for school turnarounds don't create those conditions. As I explain in Education Unbound, we too often substitute a cheery faith in the transformative power of new leaders or good intentions for the real work of creating conditions where excellent new providers can emerge and thrive. Our education system requires—and deserves—creative new approaches to tackling barriers to entry, talent, spending, and quality control.

Read Rick’s response on school turnarounds at the National Journal’s Education Experts panel blog. Education Unbound is the ASCD February 2010 Premium Member Book; Rick will be a distinguished lecturer at ASCD’s Annual Conference, March 6-8 in San Antonio, Tex. 

Pawn or Origin? Enhancing Motivation in Disaffected Youth (1977)

How can educators motivate students to learn? In the March 1977 issue of Educational Leadership, Richard deCharms, professor of psychology and education at Washington University, explores the psychological underpinnings of motivation and offers some practical solutions to reach disaffected students. 

Read the article: Pawn or Origin? Enhancing Motivation in Disaffected Youth (PDF)

Drawing on a distinction between what he calls "pawns" and "origins," deCharms describes two different types of behavior—the sort that is externally determined and the sort that is internally motivated. He warns against attempting to force students to learn, noting that "when pupils are treated as Pawns, they don’t learn, they misbehave." In contrast, when they find an internal source of motivation and the behavior originates within—that is, when they are "origins"—they learn more readily. 

 

Bookmark This! K-12 Online Conference '09

Free and open to everyone that joins their conference Ning or visits their blog, the K-12 Online Conference officially got underway this week. By the time it "closes" December 17, over 50 presentations will be posted for download and discussion—not to mention the more than 120 archived presentations from past conferences that will also be available.

The conference focuses on the intersection of technology and learning, from practical guides for integrating Web 2.0 and innovation in your classroom to more philosophical state of 21st century learning keynotes.

After peeking at K-12 Online's impressive lineup of presenters and jam-packed session schedule, it's hard to believe this is all free. Anyone interested in innovative teaching should definitely bookmark this.

Teaching Students, Not Just Standards, with Visual Literacy

Post submitted by ASCD author Lynell Burmark.

In this climate of standards and standardized testing, of politicians posturing and parading, the pressure is on to make square pegs fit into round holes. Even the Gates Foundation has joined the parade, announcing a $1 million grant to the National Parent Teacher Association last week so that the PTA can engage parents in the push to adopt national K–12 curriculum standards.

Standards and high-stakes tests focusing on language arts and math (to the exclusion of "electives" like art, music, and physical education) reduce the education experience for some students to words and numbers. Yet serious research, inspired publications, and classroom experience (including the irrefutable "teacher's gut") all reveal that these elective methodologies are frequently the best, if not the only way to reach students who are flailing, failing, and dropping out of our increasingly standardized education system.

ASCD's most beloved authors don't mince words on this topic. The queen of differentiated instruction, Carol Ann Tomlinson, advises us to "begin where the students are, not in front of the curriculum guide." Robert Marzano concedes that to cover all the standards, students would have to attend school K–22! And Thomas Armstrong, with his wonderfully accessible prose, applies Howard Gardner's 40 years of research documenting Multiple Intelligences, implicitly encouraging us to change our assessments from "How smart are you?" to "How are you smart?"

Sleep: The E-ZZZ Intervention

Sleep: The E-ZZZ Intervention

Sleep-deprived students tend to be more restless, irritable, and impulsive than other students, and their achievement suffers.

Research shows that even small, temporary increases in sleep (30–40 minutes more a night) have a substantial effect on students' classroom performance—memory, motor speed, attention, and other abilities associated with math and reading test scores improve.

But what can educators do to get kids to sleep more, and preferably not during instruction?

In their recent EL article, Christi and David Bergin recommend

• Regular, supportive communication with parents about promoting healthy sleep habits.
• Capping extracurricular activities at 9:00 p.m. during the school week.
• Limits on homework and ample lead time (and frequent check-ins) for big assignments.
• Lobbying your central office for later start times. (If you need talking points, how about this West Des Moines school district that gained $700,000 annually by starting later?)

Are sleepy students common at your school? How's your school responding?

A Teacher Walks Into the Principal's Office . . .

Transitioning roles from classroom teacher to administrator, Deirdra Grode gets her first taste of classroom management from the principal's perspective.

Read her latest column, "Working Together to Tackle Classroom Management."

Grode learns that communication and a shared vision on discipline determine whether administrators provide meaningful support for classroom management, or whether the principal's office is just a temporary detour for disruptive students.

Grode believes her discipline style as principal will benefit from her experiences with classroom management as a teacher.

How do teachers and administrators work together to tackle classroom management at your school?

What Should H.S. Do?

International accounting and consulting firm Deloitte released a survey this month that reveals a gap between what low income parents and students want from high schools and what high school educators see as their main job. Forty-two percent of parents and 48 percent of students surveyed rank college preparation as the top aim of high school, while only 9 percent of teachers gave primacy to college prep.

High schools would benefit from shifting focus from a preoccupation with immediate assessment gains to preparing students for long-range success in college and careers, Deloitte advises. Deloitte says high schools need to be redefined as a launchpad to college and careers. 

Skeptics say the wording of the Deloitte survey may have created more of a disconnect between parents, students, and teachers than actually exists. In the survey, most teachers said their main job was either to get students to master the subject they teach or to teach basic life skills. For many teachers, content mastery and college preparation go hand-in-hand, critics note (in the Orange County Register).

Do you detect the disconnect Deloitte claims? If so, what's feeding the gap in expectations? How would you define your community's high schools?

Scope vs. Intimacy

Post submitted by ASCD Scholars facilitator Jen Morrison.

I believe that the more students one affects, the less impact on any one person an educator has. Do the actions of a school superintendent bring more about change than those of a building principal? In your school district, is a student more under the influence of the superintendent or secretary of education/ministry of education? Or do all of these roles take a backseat to the leadership of the classroom teachers with whom students work each and every day?

Blog Watch: History Meets Technology in Practice

Teacher Nate Kogan’s blog The History Channel This Is Not… has plenty to recommend it, not only to fellow history teachers, but also to all educators who are grappling with how to intelligently integrate the ever-expanding list of online tools into practice.

In a post that brings together these two strands, Kogan writes about using Wikipedia in a U.S. history survey course. Students, he discovered, had been instructed repeatedly not to use Wikipedia, "because anyone could edit it, and therefore the site (undoubtedly edited by nefarious internet goblins) might lie to them." However, he found them invariably drawn to the site anyway.

In a way that shows—rather than tells—teachers how to use new online tools, he embeds the assignment document into his blog, using the versatile publishing tools of Scribd. The assignment asks students to review and edit history-related Wikipedia pages—and it's easy to see how teachers in other content areas could adapt the assignment for their students.

More recently, Kogan shared his experience using online tools such as TinyChat and Drop.io to connect with absent students, which could be especially useful during flu season; described using Google Forms to conduct a quiz; and even posted a video of a student exercise that involved using active learning to describe early civilizations.

Read Kogan's blog at http://nkogan.wordpress.com.

Finding Our Way Back to Healthy Eating

Finding Our Way Back to Healthy Eating:  A Conversation with David A. Kessler

Today, kids are more likely to eat for reward than fuel, says former FDA commissioner David Kessler in an interview in this month's EL.

"Kids are growing up, not just with food that's been highly developed to be stimulating—layered and loaded with fat, sugar, and salt, which stimulates intake—but they're also constantly bombarded with food cues," he says. With fat, sugar, and salt available 24/7 and on every corner, what can schools do to help kids develop healthy eating habits?

One way is to make sure the lessons taught in the lunchroom don't contradict those taught in science or health classes. Teach kids how to make nutritious choices, and provide in-school healthy options and opportunities for students to exercise good food judgment. 

In the same issue of EL, "What the Research Says About . . . School Meals and Learning" points to some of the barriers to more nutritious school meals (higher cost, less appeal to students). Several articles ("Good Food in the City," "Saving Marvin Sweettooth," "Coordinated School Health: Getting It All Together") show schools that have steered their communities back to healthy eating.

How has your school supported healthy eating? How have you handled barriers to healthy eating?

Public Comment Period Now Open for Healthy People 2020

Healthy People, a national initiative that provides health promotion and disease prevention objectives to improve the health of all Americans, has opened its proposed 2020 objectives for public comment. The national health objectives, updated every 10 years to reflect new research and trends, are intended to address a broad range of health needs, encourage collaboration across sectors, help individuals make informed health decisions, and measure prevention efforts.

The Healthy People 2020 objectives are open for public comment through December 31, 2009. ASCD plans to specifically comment on objectives that align with our mission to provide children with healthy learning environments that support their academic, physical, and emotional well being. Our comments will be available to the public by December 18. We encourage other interested individuals and organizations to also comment on the objectives. Together, we can help ensure the Healthy People 2020 objectives are relevant to public health needs and help prepare our young people for healthy and fulfilling lives.

How Can Schools Prevent Self-Injuring Epidemics?

Guest post submitted by Matthew D. Selekman, MSW, LCSW, codirector, Partners for Collaborative Solutions, and author of the December/January EL article "Helping Self-Harming Students."

If you think that a self-injuring epidemic could never happen in your school, you might want to think again. According to recent research, between 5 and 8 percent of adolescents actively engage in self-injurious behaviors. Such activities are also becoming increasingly prevalent among 5th and 6th graders. All it takes to start an epidemic is a few powerful and popular students who endorse the benefits of self-harm.

One of the most effective ways to stop a budding epidemic in your school is by creating a support group for self-harming students. An intervention like this not only helps students reduce and eventually eliminate their self-harming behaviors, but also empowers them to help other at-risk students in the school,thereby reducing the risk of contagion.

Reading to Learn

ASCD Express is looking for short, 600–1,000-word essays on the theme "Reading to Learn." The theme description is below, and guidelines for submissions are here. Send us your submissions by January 6, 2010. 

Good readers can use their skills to gain knowledge of any subject. How can teachers help students learn to extract information and construct meaning from what they read, no matter what the subject? What new or expanded reading comprehension skills are necessary in the 21st century? What can educators do to enable all students to learn from any kind of text they encounter, whether it's poetry or prose, fiction or nonfiction, on paper or online? We welcome submissions on teaching English language learners to read as well as strategies for older students who read below grade level.

"Play Is Problem Solving"

Early learning programs enrolling children as young as 3 years old are considered critical to closing achievement gaps, evident as early as kindergarten, and an important first step in a student's cradle-to-career trajectory.

But along with more formal integration of early learning into K–12 education comes a narrow focus on tested content and skills. Time for play-based activities is increasingly taken up with math and reading instruction. The Alliance for Childhood found that full-day kindergartners in New York and Los Angeles spend less than 30 minutes playing and four to six times more time on literacy, math, and test-taking. 

Several studies show the benefits of play: it allows students to develop social skills like empathy, reduces tendencies toward delinquency and emotional disturbances, and helps students practice impulse control.

As more states put funding toward early learning, play advocates worry that politicians will trade long-term social development gains for bumps in test scores, the Washington Post reports in this week's most-clicked SmartBrief story.

Arlington, Va., public preschools offer a model for developing programs—full-day preschool anchored to a play-based curriculum that integrates vocabulary and numeracy learning. Through 5th grade, students in these programs show test score gains more than those without.

What's the state of play in your school?

Better Leading Through Technology?

Post submitted by ASCD Scholars facilitator Tom Hoerr.

More and more, it feels like technology is an essential part of our lives. At times it feels like I live on e-mail; at times it feels like it suffocates me. I'm tethered to my computer and I just bought an iPhone. My weekly parent e-letter and staff e-bulletin are clever and relevant (if I say so myself), and I find myself having virtual meetings that take place on a computer screen. And wait until you see my PowerPoint presentation on multiple intelligences! But . . . is technology being marketed as a cure-all? Do we seek technological solutions where none is necessary?
 
How important is technology to leadership? Is it possible to be a good leader and not be technologically savvy? Can too much technological expertise hinder leadership? How does the pervasiveness of technology change leadership? Or does it?

Feed Up, Back, Forward

Feed Up, Back, Forward

Feedback, a complex and powerful resource for teachers, is characterized by three distinct components, say authors Fisher and Frey:

• Feed Up, or establishing clear purpose and learning goals
• Feedback, or ongoing response to student work
• Feed Forward, or using feedback to plan and modify future instruction

Checking for understanding, using common assessments, identifying and assessing specific course competencies, and meaningful practice toward state exams sets the stage for aligned multiple measures that allow for feeding up, back, and forward.

Not knowing what to do with assessment data can make this resource seem out of reach. How does your school make student data both meaningful and useful? 

Why Every Student Needs Critical Friends

Why Every Student Needs Critical Friends

Every student needs critical friends--peer critiques transform the classroom into an authentic audience, students tailor their work in consideration of wider array of feedback, and student engagement goes up because they realize their perspectives are essential to classroom progress.

But, author Amy Reynolds notes in her November EL article, using peer critiques means establishing a safe and trusting environment for students to practice being constructive critiques. It also takes patience and helping students overcome initial fear and resistance.

Have you seen students display the fear and difficulty in giving and accepting criticism that pervaded Reynolds's early attempts? If so, how did you deal with these issues?

The Quest for Quality Assessments

The Quest for Quality

Assessment quality and balance determine how reliable and useful the data collected will be, say authors Chappuis, Chappuis, and Stiggins in "The Quest for Quality." 

Using misinformation defeats the purpose of bringing in more results to inform our decisions, they write. The authors outline five keys to assessment quality:

• clear purpose
• clear learning targets
• sound assessment design
• effective communication of results
• student involvement

Guiding assessment balance means considering formative and summative applications, as well as whether assessments are meeting student, teacher, or district information needs.

To achieve balance and high quality in assessment practices, the authors conclude that all assessors and users of assessment results must be assessment literate, that is, "to know what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate uses of assessment results."

What does your school or district do to improve assessment literacy?

The Problem with Performance Pay

Special Topic: The Problem with Performance Pay

Performance pay requires districts to develop a new definition of performance based on our true goals for students and teachers, argues Donald Gratz in "The Problem with Performance Pay."

Teacher performance pay based primarily on student standardized test scores sets a low ceiling on what we expect from students and teachers, says Gratz, who headed research during the first phase of Denver's performance pay pilot (ProComp).

Denver successfully expanded its definition of teacher performance in part by looking at student academic achievement in terms of teacher-set objectives, not just standardized scores. Engaging teachers in the process and valuing their contributions, as well as considering multiple components beyond academics, led Denver to a system that benefits both teachers and students.

If the problem with performance pay is an overreliance on standardized test scores to determine teacher merit, what measures would you include in a true definition of teacher performance?

From Test Takers to Test Makers

From Test Takers to Test Makers

Norwegian educator Kari Smith ("From Test Takers to Test Makers") found that her students who were good at retaining factual knowledge and answering what and when questions often did well on tests but did not necessarily understand the material.

In contrast, students who did understand the material and the relationships between facts (they were good at answering "why" questions) had trouble demonstrating that knowledge at test time.

Frustrated with the quality of tests, and the data they were producing, Smith sought a way to better data.

The Next Generation of Testing

The Next Generation of Testing

The history of wide-scale, school-based assessment practices has been pretty circular:

1938 to late 1980s: Multiple-choice tests that measure only part of the skills and knowledge outlined by standards and tell us little about helping students do better.

Late 1980s to early 1990s: Performance-based tests that give a more comprehensive view of student learning, but they are expensive and hard to norm.

Early 1990s to today: Back to the bubble test.

"YouTube Meets Wikipedia"

Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger's recent launch of an online education video library got a lot of attention last week. WatchKnow.org houses thousands of educational videos for youth ages 3-18, as well as hundreds of videos for teachers and parents.

Site users can add their own videos or edit how videos are tagged or organized on the site. Videos for students can be filtered by age and are categorized by content area and then broken down into subtopics or skills. WatchKnow.org aims to not only capitalize on the Internet as a learning environment but also provide some much-needed order to the vast clutter of free educational videos online.

Does WatchKnow.org make you more likely to use educational videos with your faculty, students, or own children? And how likely are you to create and add your own educational videos?

Assessment: A Forward Look (1966)

As we consider how best to use multiple measures of assessment to determine the success of our schools, it's instructive to look back at the dawn of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which in its infancy used a far greater diversity of measures than it has in recent years.

In the November 1966 issue of Educational Leadership, J. Raymond Gerberich, an education professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, describes the thinking behind the development of NAEP, which wouldn't be administered until 1969.

Read the article: Assessment: A Forward Look (PDF)

According to Gerberich, It was designed to "obtain evidence about the progress of American education that will parallel the information presently supplied by an economic index, the Gross National Product." He recommends that in addition to basic skills and content areas, "interests, habits and practices" and "societal outcomes" should be assessed to give a fuller picture of U.S. schools.

Better Support for and from Middle School Parents

Ed Week's Debra Viadero has a great new piece profiling the work of Harvard University researcher Nancy E. Hill. Hill writes about how schools can better guide parents in supporting the scholarship of their adolescent or middle school-age children.

Hill's findings show the blanket K–12 recommendations school districts provide for parent involvement often underserve middle schoolers. Instead of helping with homework and chaperoning a field trip, Hill's research suggests parents beef up at-home support for academics by

• Communicating their expectations for their children’s achievement.
• Discussing learning strategies.
• Fostering career aspirations.
• Linking what children were learning in school, or were interested in learning, to outside activities.
• Making plans for the future.

Further, Viadero reports on Hill's discovery that it is incredibly important for parents, middle, and high school educators to be on the same page about academic pathways from middle school to college—in other words, the courses and academic supports a child needs to get into the high school classes that will prepare them for college.

Certainly the guidance counselor would be a big player in facilitating Hill's recommendations for parent involvement and making sure that parents and schools are clearly communicating academic pathways, particularly to those students whose parents may be less savy about navigating the system. Yet a recent survey shows a majority of high schools are freezing or cutting back on counseling staff due to budget shortfalls. We imagine middle school counselors are facing the same shortages.  

Hill's research shows how schools can better work with parents and guardians of adolescents, but schools need community support to be able to build this capacity. Help schools better serve families by getting involved as an Educator Advocate or whole child supporter.

The Many Meanings of "Multiple Measures"

The Many Meanings of "Multiple Measures"

Is anything that measures higher-order thinking a "multiple measure"? What about more than one opportunity to take the same exit exam? Is that a "multiple measure"?

From how state and federal policy define and apply multiple measures to classroom practice, Sue Brookhart looks at The Many Meanings of "Multiple Measures" in the November EL.

Multiple measures are designed to accomplish construct validity and decision validity, but as Brookhart points out, different definitions and different ways of combining multiple measures may not give an accurate picture of achievement or school effectiveness.

As an example, five states with graduation tied to a single exit exam narrowly define achievement and show the same or declining graduation rates over a three-year period. Whereas four states using a multiple measures graduation policy showed steady or rising graduation rates over the same period.

What meanings of "multiple measures" are at play in your school or district, and how does that affect teaching and learning?

A Novel Approach: Political Debate That Illuminates vs. Obscures

Given the uncivil discourse that's dominated most of the health care reform debate, should those of us who place children at the center of our decision making approach the coming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) with anticipation or dread?

ASCD Executive Director Gene R. Carter, in his November "Is It Good for the Kids?" column, reminds us of three key points: each child's success must be the key criterion for any education reform; any education policies that we create must translate into sound practices; and debate must illuminate issues, rather than obscure them.

Think reauthorization of ESEA can—or should—wait? Consider just a few sobering statistics:

• 27 percent of America's young people drop out of high school.

• Recent international tests in math and science show our students trail their peers in other countries.

• Just 40 percent of young people earn a two-year or four-year college degree.

• The United States now ranks 10th in the world in the rate of college completion for 25- to 34-year-olds.

ASCD members are unified in our call for reform of our nation's education law and stand ready to do our part. We advocate for the federal government to play a leadership role in equity and access for disadvantaged and special-needs student populations, support the development and training of highly effective educators, encourage effective education policies and services for every stage of a student's development, and promote innovative strategies and programs for 21st century students to be successful.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently urged us all to "roll up our sleeves and work together and get beyond differences of party, politics, and philosophy." Isn't it time that we demand each of our elected officials answer the following question: where do you stand on education?

(Post submitted by Barbara Michelman, ASCD Communications Director)

Notes from the School Psychologist

Some of the same qualities that make a great school counselor—humor, insight, and empathy—also make a great blogger. In Notes from the School Psychologist, clinical psychiatrist Rebecca Branstetter writes about everything from student motivation to parenting with verve, intelligence, and lots of good-natured sarcasm.

Some of our favorite posts include one on mentoring new counselors—Branstetter affectionately calls these newbies "manatees," a nickname her husband inadvertently coined—and another one titled "Psychologist vs. Puppy" that explores the links among dogs, spouses, children, and positive reinforcement. Branstetter also tackles heavier issues, such as a recent school shooting, with compassion and depth.

ASCD Testimony on Child Nutrition and Wellness

A report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released yesterday shows that in 2008 almost 15 percent of U.S. households were food insecure, meaning they had difficulty putting enough food on the table at times during the year. This figure represents the highest rate of food insecurity since the report was launched in 1995. Moreover, children experienced instances of very low food security in 506,000 households in 2008, up from 323,000 households the year before.

These troubling statistics show that the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Reauthorization Act, which provides school meals to millions of low-income students, can’t come soon enough. In his remarks about the USDA report, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the Child Nutrition Act reauthorization presents an opportunity to make it easier for the food service program to cover all eligible children and to eliminate gap periods when children aren’t getting the nutrition assistance they need--at breakfast, after school, and during the summer.

Meep Learning Curve on Discipline

Zero-tolerance policies are often a last resort born out of frustration—the sort of scenario you can imagine resulted in the Danvers High principal recently deciding to ban the word "meep" from utterance on school grounds.

The problem is that zero-tolerance policies are a shoddy tool for changing student behavior. The meep kerfuffle in Massachusetts is going to live past its 15 seconds of fame in part due to reactions to the schoolwide ban.

But we're not here to bloggertunistically poke fun at the Danvers administration's headache—we're here to help. There's a moral to this meeping story, courtesy of authors Curwin, Curwin, & Mendler. From the 3rd edition of their best-selling ASCD book, Discipline with Dignity:

What to Do When More Than One Student Is Acting Out

Sometimes you may be faced with a group of students who are acting out at the same time or feeding off one another. The better you know the dynamics of your class, the more effective you will be in handling this type of situation.

The first step is to pick the one student in the acting-out group who is the one the other students respect the most, fear the most, or are amused by the most. Stopping the misbehavior of this student must come first. We call this strategy "The Leader of the Pack." At a separate time in a one-on-one moment, approach the leader of the pack to help you calm or quiet his crew. Appeal to the student's need for control. Often these students like the role of leader and fit naturally into it. You might say, "Rashid, there is too much talking going on while I am teaching. I need your help solving this problem because I notice that most other students look up to you. What do you think would work?" After suggestions are given, conclude with "I am counting on you to quiet your crew when I give you the signal. Thanks."