ASCD Inservice

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?

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.

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.

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?

New Teacher's Guide to Better Assessment

In "The New Teacher's Guide to Better Assessment," Mary Jo Grdina sets up two scenarios that hamper deft use of assessments for new and longtime teachers:

Newbies often leave teacher education programs with idealistic visions of the range of assessments they'll use to evaluate students;

And even seasoned teachers, who put serious time and effort into lesson design, resort to more efficient, rather than more effective, assessment instruments.

"How can we preserve the ideals of new teachers when they enter the hectic real world of teaching? And how can we convince veteran teachers that the aim of assessment is to educate and improve, not merely to audit student performance (Wiggins, 1998)?," Grdina asks.

Three important priorities guide Grdina's resolution to these assessment challenges. How do you answer these challenges at your school?

How Did Test Scores Become King?

Post submitted by guest blogger Gerald Bracey. A longtime champion of accurate analysis of education research and vocal advocate for public education, Bracey died October 20, 2009.

In my article in the November Educational Leadership ("The Big Tests: What Ends Do They Serve?"), I mentioned a 50-year trend toward seeing test scores not just as a necessary tool, but as a sufficient measure to evaluate students, teachers, schools, districts, states, and nations. It's worth considering how we got to this point. 

Criticism of U.S. public schools grew greatly at the start of the Cold War. Two influential critiques were Arthur Bestor's Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Public Schools in 1953 and Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read in 1955. In the midst of this hostility, the Soviet Union dropped a bomb, so to speak: Sputnik, the first manmade satellite to orbit the earth. Public shock at being bested by the Russians sparked even more attacks on the U.S. education system. 

These earlier criticisms did not invoke test scores as evidence of the schools' inadequacy, but later critics would. Bobby Kennedy insisted that the effects of 1965's Elementary and Secondary Education Act be evaluated, and the only available instruments were various norm-referenced, standardized tests. Tests took center stage.

In 1977, a College Board panel examined recent declines in SAT scores and blamed the changing population of students taking the test. The media and the public blamed the schools. The 13 indicators of national mediocrity in 1983's A Nation at Risk all referred to test scores. The message was clear: Information coming from teachers and administrators could not be trusted. We needed scientific, precise, objective measures of school outcomes. Tests, it was said, met these criteria. 

Well, if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. With only tests as tools for accountability, we've overlooked many other outcomes we should work for in schools. 

What important school outcomes do you think we're ignoring with our laser-like focus on test scores?

What Makes or Breaks a Principal?

Principals often face a paradox, note the October EL authors of "What Makes or Breaks a Principal":

"The bold action needed to improve the school's performance often puts staff relationships at risk."

Complicating matters, typical principal certification programs and professional development often don't educate on professional relationship building. The authors explain how leaders develop three clusters of relational skills and qualities crucial to school leadership:

• Acting as consultants to translate pedagogical knowledge into practice
• Mediating conflict and reaching consensus
• Valuing relationships

Relationship skills can make or break a school leader. How do you stay sharp on these so-called soft skills? How have the relationship skills of school leaders had a positive or negative effect on your school?

The Power of Two

Post submitted by Principals William Sterrett and Matthew Haas.

Because of our frantic schedules, principals often have no meaningful dialogue, in any consistent manner, with a peer. As we describe in our October EL article ("The Power of Two"), the two of us have found a way to make peer-to-peer dialogue happen.

As two young principals from the same school division, we formed a working partnership and meet monthly to discuss issues that confront us and the mechanisms behind our successes. While it took some work and planning to get this tete-a-tete consistently on our calendars, once it was set up, we honored it with care. One of us leads a small elementary school, the other a comprehensive high school, but we've found good instruction in each setting is similar: It involves building positive classroom community, engaging students, tight collaboration, and a sincere desire to see all students succeed. 

Emphasizing cooperation over competition also helps our professional relationship. Charles Warner, a consultant/trainer and active blogger at www.MediaCurmudgeon.com, notes that "if in fact competition brings out the 'beast' in us, then . . . cooperation surely brings out the 'best' in us (see Warner's article on this topic).

We'd like to hear from you: Have you found creative ways to regularly meet with a peer to bolster your leadership?

The Outside-Inside Connection

The Outside-Inside Connection

Challenges you face inside the school are connected and compounded by things happening outside the school. So, says Thomas Hatch ("The Outside-Inside Connection"),

It's not enough for principals to be good administrators of staff and school operations and good instructional leaders--they've also got to be the liaison to those outside the school, acting as "spokesperson, negotiator, and champion of the school's interests."

Leave all these responsibilities up to the principal alone, and you're bound to encounter one of these problems down the road:

• Principal burnout
• Over-attention to external issues alienating the principal from what's going on in the school
• Leaders who leave a school take the power of their networks with them

Hatch says principals must constantly scan the school community for concerns and opportunities for partnerships, and seed school advocacy among community members, all while keeping the big picture of school needs in mind.

Principals, how do you leverage the outside-inside connection at your school?

Why Can't Any High-Poverty School Become High-Performing?

Submitted by guest bloggers Kathleen Budge and William Parrett ("Tough Questions for Tough Times," October 2009 EL) 

If one school can overcome the powerful and pervasive effects of poverty on student achievement, shouldn't any school be able to do the same? 

Yet the vast majority of high-poverty schools in the United States continue long traditions of underperformance. Calling for dramatic turnarounds, Secretary of Education Duncan has recently targeted some 5,000 schools for immediate attention.

Still, hundreds of other schools offer a compelling testament to success—high-poverty, high-performing schools such as Dayton's Bluff Elementary in St. Paul, Minnesota; Lapwai Elementary on the Nez Perce reservation in Northern Idaho; Port Chester Middle on Long Island, New York; Granger High in eastern rural Washington; Taft Elementary in Boise, Idaho; and PS 124, a K-8 school in Queens, New York—each with 60-95 percent of their students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. Check them out.

These schools build and maintain their successes by creating positive relationships among staff and students and focusing their work in three primary domains: building leadership capacity; focusing on student and professional learning; and fostering safe, healthy and supportive learning environments. They have also eliminated the all-too-common practices of setting low expectations for low-income children and blaming students or their families for low performance.

More than 30 years ago, EL published an article by Ron Edmonds ("Effective Schools for the Urban Poor," October 1979), the Harvard professor who inspired the effective schools movement. Edmonds wrote,

Why Creativity Now?

Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson

In "Why Creativity Now?" creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson dispels the myth that giving precedence to creativity in education will result in unstructured curriculum or initiatives targeted to a select content or students.

Creativity is a disciplined process that produces results: You can't be creative if you don't do something, says Robinson. And along the way, you need to evaluate how well your ideas are working—it's not just about coming up with new ideas, he adds.

A policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, just as education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it, he says.

The pace of change in our world and economy coupled with the threat of the shrinking scope of curriculum and methods to accommodate standardization make now a perfect time to champion creativity in education.

Robinson says you can assess creativity—it just takes some extra thought. How have you checked progress of students' development of creativity skills?

(This interview also available in audio.)

Accountability vs. 21st Century Skills

Guest post by Terrence Clark, Superintendent, Bethpage Union Free School District, Bethpage, N.Y.

Many educators are eager to move into the post-NCLB world where tests are not the sole measure of a school or a student. The framework developed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills offers a picture of what such schooling can look like. But particularly in states that haven't yet embraced this framework, we face a challenge: how do we implement the Partnership's goals and ideals while assuring our constituents that we will continue to do well on NCLB assessments?

In Bethpage, N.Y., we have the luxury of good assessment scores, but we felt our students needed and deserved more. We instituted an optional program of voluntary after-school, evening, weekend, and vacation activities (described in my article, "21st Century Scholars," in this month's EL). Our students and teachers were hungry for something relevant and meaningful, and we've seen a burst of creativity from both students and teachers in response to the new programming.

Have you wrestled with the challenge of giving students 21st century opportunities while meeting state accountability standards? Would our approach work in your district?

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

"The skills students need in the 21st century are not new," authors Andrew J. Rotherham and Daniel Willingham establish at the outset of their article, "21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead."

What's new is how central these skills have become to individual or collective success, and that's why, they say, schools must be deliberately designed for 21st century learning.

Students need to be able to practice using skills like critical thinking and information literacy in the context of content knowledge central to a particular subject. Teachers need better training and support to facilitate student-centered approaches to pedagogy. And assessments need to be fine-tuned to evaluate the development of thinking skills (the good news is this can be done, the bad news is it might not be scaleable.)

It's not about skills that are novel, it's about teaching these skills more intentionally and effectively. But without better curriculum, better teaching, and better assessments, these authors warn the 21st Century skills movement will do little to make these critical skills universally well-taught.

How is your school, district, or state approaching these challenges?

Bonus: Rotherham and other experts comment on the P21 movement at the National Journal Online.

The ABC's of the XYZ's

Guest post submitted by Marilee Sprenger, professional development consultant and adjunct professor at Aurora University, Aurora, Ill.

The students who were born into this era of technology have been dubbed "digital natives," and those of us who are trying to catch up and keep up are "digital immigrants." It goes beyond just a name. Baby Boomers (you know who you are!) and Generation Xer's are teaching Generation Y's and Z's. It sounds complicated, but it goes something like this:

Generations Y and Z survive and thrive by being digitally connected. They communicate globally, and most schools don’t provide the stimuli they want. On the other hand, their people skills are questionable as face-to-face communication is not a priority. Some show signs of Internet addiction, ADHD, and depression, possibly as a result of spending up to eight hours per day using some form of technology.

In my article in this month's Educational Leadership ("Focusing the Digital Brain"), I list some ways adults in digital natives' lives can honor their need to be digital and at the same time create engaging activities in which students interact face-to-face with others.

How do you connect with your digital enthusiasts?

What Would Socrates Say?

What Would Socrates Say?

Is Socratic inquiry the life jacket that could save students from drowning in a sea of trivia?

Peter W. Cookson, Jr. ("What Would Socrates Say?") may not think you can Twitter your way to enlightenment, but he does think teachers can blend the best of traditional, intellectual, linear culture with the current digital culture to meet the cognitive and expressive demands of the 21st century.

Specifically, he lays out "four elements of the 21st century mind" as the basis for a Socratic-anchored sea change in education: critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition.

Students need the tools to understand the world before they can change it. Cookson's hybrid of Socratic inquiry shaped by immersive technologies dismantles the false dichotomy of learning environments and the "real world."

How do you support 21st century minds in your classroom?