A summary of our conversation:

• Marshall argues that traditional evaluation systems (lengthy write-ups, pre/post conferences) often become compliance exercises that don’t improve teaching.

• His core shift as a principal was to frequent, short (10–15 minute), systematic, unannounced visits followed by meaningful face-to-face conversations.

• The post-observation conversation is central; without it, evaluation becomes superficial or demoralizing.

• Marshall rejects the “feedback sandwich” and proposes a four-part structure:

  1. Specific appreciation

  2. Get the teacher talking (context, intentions)

  3. A leverage point for growth

  4. A clear, actionable next step

• Frequent visits lower stakes and reduce anxiety, allowing feedback to focus on growth rather than judgment from a single high-pressure observation.

• Rubric-scoring individual lessons (e.g., Danielson scored lesson-by-lesson) is a structural mistake; comprehensive rubric judgments should occur at the end of the year based on accumulated evidence.

• Student learning matters, but large-scale value-added measures were unstable and flawed; instead, focus on lesson-level and PLC-level evidence (exit tickets, quizzes, formative data).

• Principals should observe with a simple mental framework (curriculum/purpose, pedagogy, learning), not a checklist.

• AI presents risks (e.g., canned, impersonal evaluation write-ups), but Marshall sees three promising uses:

  1. Preparing for difficult feedback conversations

  2. Lesson transcription/analysis tools that surface patterns (e.g., talk ratios)

  3. Immediate AI-generated summaries of feedback conversations (e.g., 150-word summaries reviewed and approved on the spot)

• Teacher autonomy should focus on how content is taught, not on freelancing the curriculum; coherence and shared scope/sequence matter.

• Effective supervision requires judgment (“taste”): knowing what matters, distinguishing red lines from pet peeves, and focusing feedback on what will most improve teaching and learning.

Links:

Bob Newhart “Stop It!” sketch

The Marshall Memo

Kim on Principal Center Radio discussing The Best of The Marshall Memo

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:08):

Welcome everyone to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Kim Marshall. Best known as the author and publisher of the Marshall Memo. Kim is also the author of some excellent books on teacher supervision and evaluation, including Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, which made a big impact on me as a principal. And I’m honored to welcome Kim to the show today. Kim, thanks so much for being here.

Kim Marshall (00:35):

Glad to be here.

Justin Baeder (00:37):

Well, you are a person who I’ve had the real honor and privilege of connecting with over the years to talk about teacher evaluation, talk about teacher supervision and supporting teachers’ growth. And this is a timely conversation because as we’ve noted in some of our correspondence recently, a lot is happening in the profession regarding teacher evaluation, teacher growth, technology, AI. There are some things that are now possible that we have to really make some decisions about and think about what is wise, what is the best way to approach teacher growth and just all the processes that we have in place. So just first, to start things off, what are some of the big issues that are on your mind and that you’re seeing as you work with schools around the country on these issues of supporting teacher growth?

Kim Marshall (01:26):

I think the biggest thing is the cynicism about teacher evaluation, the belief that it really doesn’t make a difference, that it’s just a compliance thing that you have to get out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible, which then raises the issue of artificial intelligence being one tool to make it quick and efficient, but without any real aspiration that it’s going to improve teaching and learning and improve the culture and climate, professional climate in the school.

Justin Baeder (01:51):

Right. And it sounds like your belief there is that it really can have a positive impact. It’s not just measurement. We’re not just taking a snapshot, writing a number down and saying there we did it. You actually believe that it can make a difference in teacher growth.

Kim Marshall (02:04):

Well, that was my epiphany as a Boston principal years ago, having for six years worked with the traditional system of lengthy write-ups and pre and post-conference and all that. And then teachers kind of tapping me on the shoulder and basically saying, “Well, we actually don’t read these things that you’re giving us. We just look at our rating.” And it was really kind of a slap in the face kind of thing. And I shifted to more frequent, short visits with face-to-face conversations. And things really began to move at that point. Teachers, it was a tough union school. They’d looked at it critically at first, but then realized this is much better. If he’s in once a month, watching, randomizing what part of the day he’s there, what subject I’m teaching is in elementary school, that he can really then have a conversation. And that was the critical part was the conversation, the face-to-face conversation, ideally in the teacher’s classroom when the kids aren’t there.

(02:56):

Just talking about what was going on, letting the teacher give the broader context, what happened after I left, what happened before I came in, what was going on with this girl who was so excited, all those details of it, and then keeping it quite informal. And then at the end of the year, doing kind of a wrap up of all the impressions that I’d had, not only from the classroom visits, but other points of contact. So I do believe that it can make a difference. And in our school, we really made great progress. There were other things going on, of course, but that was one of the main things I thought was authentic, frequent, real time, and what was really happening in classrooms and having those conversations. I’ve since done some elaboration on that in the three editions of the book that I’ve written and all the coaching that I’m doing of principals now go around the country, but that is the core idea that it can make a positive difference to teaching and learning.

Justin Baeder (03:46):

Absolutely. And I think that word can there is critical because it does require that we attend to that and not treat it as a compliance process. And if I compare your process that you talk about in rethinking teacher supervision and evaluation to the traditional process, one of the big things that you mentioned that I want to make sure our listeners realize is that these are unannounced visits. They’re not planned, they’re not coordinated in advance with a teacher. You’re not saying, “Okay, on Thursday at 10:00 AM, I’m going to be there.” You’re showing up sort of randomly and definitely unannounced. Is that

Kim Marshall (04:18):

Right? That’s correct. That used to be the first thing on my list as I went through the different parts of the system, but now I’ve made it the fourth thing. So you start with the idea, they got to be frequent because just once a year is obviously ridiculous, especially if it’s a dog and pony show. And then they have to be, if they’re going to be frequent, they need to be short. So now we’re talking 10, 15 minutes. And if they’re going to be frequent and short, they need to be systematic to make sure that you’re not always coming at 10:00 AM. The kids are always on the rug or you’re always in the do now or whatever part of the lesson. And then the fourth thing is, of course, given those three things, frequent, short, systematic. And of course it has to be unannounced.

(04:58):

And if you start with the unannounced, people get a little freaked out. And I always, in workshops with teachers and principals, I always walk through, so what would be you would be nervous about? And people talk about there are like 11 things like, “You don’t know my subject area, it’s a gotcha,” all those other things. So you kind of get past that with the logic of this system, but the frequency is the critical thing, more than the unannounced. People get used to the unannounced. In fact, they actually prefer that. I’m teaching, come in as long as you have the conversation. The worst thing would be you come in unannounced, you catch a bad moment, and then that’s a gotcha rather than, tell me more about that. What was going on? Why were you so testy with that child? Why did you not call on that girl whose hand was raised the whole period?

(05:41):

And there’s a story behind that. She’s been dominating the conversation for the last two weeks. I want other kids to have a chance to talk. Context and respecting teachers, the world that they live in, I think is so critical to this process.

Justin Baeder (05:52):

Yeah. And yet the conversation afterward seems to be something that people are eager to avoid if they can. And I see that most clearly in the desire for a form to fill out. And I did this personally, I’ll be the first to admit, when I was a principal trying to get into classrooms, I made myself various forms. And I thought, if I can just fill out this form, then I don’t really have to talk with the person. They don’t have to talk to me. They don’t have to defend themselves. I’ll just write something and hopefully it won’t be too controversial and I’ll have done it and I can move on. Why do you think we tend in that direction toward a form and toward avoiding the conversation?

Kim Marshall (06:28):

Well, I think one is time. The conversation, both from the principal’s point of view, the supervisor’s point of view and the teachers. The teachers are very, very busy. I mean, both my children are teachers I know perfectly well, how very busy they are. Hardly have time to go to the bathroom, let alone talk to the principal. And then if you have the mindset that it’s going to be a 25, 30 minute psychodrama with the principal, then that’s another reason for avoidance. But then there’s just plain, this might be a difficult conversation from the principal’s point of view. And then the principal’s time. So there’s like four reasons why people avoid this and why you want to ... But again, back to the cynicism, this isn’t going to make any difference anyway. So let’s just get it out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible and then we get to AI or email or other, a note on the teacher’s desk, a little posted, “Great lesson, go tiger, keep up the great work kind of thing without...” So conversations for a lot of reasons are difficult, but they’re so critical.

(07:21):

And I really, in my latest edition of the book, I have now a structure for the way to handle the conversation that I think works well, a four-part structure, which I’m happy to talk about with any encouragement.

Justin Baeder (07:32):

Yeah. Let’s get into that conversation a little bit because I think a lot of people have been taught or have assumed that the way you do that conversation is what I call the feedback sandwich. And in the military, they have a term for the feedback sandwich that we can’t use in this context, but compliment the meat of the sandwich, which is the kind of suggestion for improvement and then another compliment, butter people up, give them the straight talk and then butter them up a little more so they don’t cry as you leave. What’s your take on structure for that conversation?

Kim Marshall (08:02):

Well, it just doesn’t work and people see it coming a mile away. “Oh boy, here we go. “And either they ignore the meat, the criticism, the suggestion, because there’ve been two compliments around it, or they obsess about the meat and ignore the compliments. And either way, they’re walking away without really changing anything. So my four part, my quadrants thing, short circuits that process. I was just in a middle school culinary arts class yesterday in a school in Southern New Hampshire. So the teacher had a planning period right after we were able to bring her in and have that feedback conversation. So the four parts are number one, the appreciation. Okay, this is so well organized. These groups of kids getting the hamburger out of the refrigerator, putting them on the stove, opening the cans of sauce and tomato sauce and so forth. And the way you used your microphone, she had a microphone so the kids could really hear her over the blowers and the thing, just specific compliments.

(08:56):

But the second quadrant, which is away from the feedback sandwich is get the teacher talking. So tell me more about the context of this lesson, what I said to this teacher. How does this fit into the curriculum? Tell me what happened after we left because we were only there for 10 minutes, our group of observers and the teacher then talks and she told a lot of things that we hadn’t seen. For example, they actually prepared the food and ate it by the end of a 45-minute period, very important detail. And so then the third quadrant is the leverage point, something that might be an improvement. It turns out that while we were in there, a girl opening the can of tomato sauce cut her hand, unexpected thing that came up. And so the teacher had to deal with that. She dealt with it very, very well.

(09:40):

But then there was the question of just in time or just in case that whole, Peter Lildal talks about this, about do you try to upload everything upfront or do you try to deal with it more in the context? Obviously she had safety rules, but how did she deal with it? We talked about that. And then there was this sort of the takeaway at the end, what’s the actionable next step? So those are the four quadrants, the genuine compliments, get the teacher talking and really listen, then the possible leverage point and then the wrapping it up in the actionable next step. And that sort of four part thing that gets away from the ... The most critical point, of course, is the second thing, is allow the teacher to talk. And I have a series of suggested questions. The most sophisticated one is, tell me something you hoped I would notice.

(10:20):

But a series of open-ended things, let the teacher talk and really listen, then land the plane, but there doesn’t have to be a criticism. It can be a hundred percent compliments. So anyway, that’s the structure and I think that’s working really well.

Justin Baeder (10:32):

Yeah. Well, I imagine it is because it provides so much insight beyond just what you can see yourself in a few minutes. And I think there’s a little bit of a tension around evidence here where we have to get into classrooms and see for ourselves what’s going on. So this is not just hearsay. We’re not just saying, “Hey, how have you been doing this year?” And then basing everything on that. We’re actually getting into classrooms and seeing, but we’re also recognizing that we don’t see everything, both for practical reasons that we can’t be in the classroom that much, that we’re constrained, but also because some of what matters that we’re trying to get at by listening to the teacher is just inherently invisible. The teacher thinking, you really can only get at that by allowing the teacher that space and time to talk and to elaborate.

Kim Marshall (11:21):

You’ve written really wonderful stuff about this, the different kinds of things, the ways of reacting to things that happen in a classroom. I love your approach to that. But back to this structure, if the structure is we’re only doing a couple of visits a year, then you sort of have to draw global conclusions from this observation. And that’s the trap. And so my big thing is we’ve got to change the system. We got to have more frequent visits. So then you can take one thing at a time rather than trying to do this comprehensive analysis of a teacher bringing in a rubric or whatever based on only one or two observations.

Justin Baeder (11:52):

Yeah. And I think the stakes really go down and people really relax when they know, okay, it’s not, this is it. This is my one shot. Everything has to be perfect. People are just a lot more comfortable when they realize after the fact I can say, “You know what? Something didn’t go right today. Come back another time.” And if they know you’re going to be back another time.

Kim Marshall (12:10):

Right. Well, that’s the thing. I mean, the three hardest parts are, first of all, getting out of your office in the first place and getting through that kind of force field around a classroom where you’re coming in, you’re there to judge, you’re there to make evaluated, and then chasing the teacher down and having that feedback conversation. So in each of those, there’s resistance from the busyness and chain to your email to just getting through that force field, to then actually having a conversation. And all those things that I’m working on really hard with the people I’m working with and trying to get them through. And when they get through that, then things really start to happen. Then you have an ongoing dialogue about teaching and learning, which is what you want to have.

Justin Baeder (12:47):

Absolutely. And one of the things I really appreciate about that is that you have perspective for making other decisions. When you know what’s going on in classrooms, the other decisions that you have to make as a school leader about, what do we prioritize in professional development? What do we budget our resources for? How do we staff? All of those decisions can be informed by those classroom conversations and otherwise we have to make those decisions based on other information or a lack of information.

Kim Marshall (13:15):

But the other thing is what the principal knows or the supervisor knows going in broadens their vision. For example, if you’ve been in a PLC meeting, then you’ve seen this fourth grade team struggling with the issue of comprehension or phonics or whatever it is that they’re struggling with. And as Paul Bamrick Sentoio says, when you go into a classroom, it’s like you have 3D glasses on because you know what the issues are that the teachers have been working with. And of course, knowing the teacher’s goals for the year, knowing the context of the teacher’s personal life, all these things make you a better observer when you go in.

Justin Baeder (13:48):

And I think sometimes we forget that because of some of the more system level practices like ... Certainly as a principal, I visited other schools with my supervisor and other principals, we’d go do this big tour, everybody in a suit walking around with their heels clumping on the floor. And it feels like we’re doing something important, but when you’re in another school where you don’t know the teachers, you don’t know the curriculum, you don’t know the students, it is very different that a lot of that context is missing that informs you about just kind of what you’re seeing. So yeah, I feel like-

Kim Marshall (14:20):

I think those learning walks can be informative. I mean, you can learn a lot about a school and the culture and so forth and see cool things going on like here’s building thinking classrooms or here’s a new approach to phonics or whatever it is. So those are useful. I think they’re not completely useless. But in terms of, of course, the thing that bothers teachers is, “Here are all these dudes in my classroom, these suits, what did they think? “ And of course you couldn’t possibly give any meaningful feedback to the teacher. But I think it’s useful for principals to get into other schools. Yeah.

Justin Baeder (14:49):

Yeah. I think it’s good to see. It’s just not enough information to really judge. And I think that gets at an issue that I’m a little bit obsessed with and kind of concerned about. And that is what I call observability bias. The idea that if I see something, then that’s enough and it matters and I should focus on what I can see because it’s visible to me, not necessarily because it’s all that important. So if I can’t see what happened yesterday because I wasn’t here yesterday and I’ve never been in your school before, then as long as I just go really hard on the parts that I can see, then I’m going to have good feedback for you and it doesn’t matter that I don’t really know that much about your classroom. So I think that that problem drives a lot of what we see and a lot of the teacher anxiety about this when we don’t know much and they know we don’t know much and yet we have this kind of high stakes process.

Kim Marshall (15:39):

And the big thing there is if you shoot from the hip, if based upon this very fragmentary thing, it could be a full lesson, but if it’s a short thing and you draw conclusions, that really annoys teachers. It gets their backup. Even if they have a union maybe and they don’t have a strong ability to push back, still it leads to cynicism and discouragement and maybe even leaving the profession.

Justin Baeder (16:03):

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I’ve always appreciated about your work is the respect for teachers and the respect for the work of teaching that you show through this process of actually talking with someone, not just filling out a form and filling out a rating and saying, “Here you go, have a nice day,” but actually caring what the teacher says, what the teacher’s thinking and their perspective.

Kim Marshall (16:24):

Which doesn’t mean that sometimes you don’t say, “I never want to see that in this school ever again.” I mean, you can be very, very clear and firm based on stuff you see that is just not good for kids and mean or whatever.

Justin Baeder (16:36):

Absolutely. Yeah. I’m a big fan of the Bob Newhart School of Instructional Leadership that sometimes you just have to say, stop it and move on from there.

Kim Marshall (16:44):

Right.

Justin Baeder (16:45):

You know the Bob Newhart sketch, the Stop

Kim Marshall (16:47):

It Skit. I had not associated that with him. Please send me a YouTube clip if you have one.

Justin Baeder (16:51):

I’ll put it in the show notes. I love it. It’s where he plays a therapist and his whole gimmick as a therapist is somebody will tell them their problems, they’ll tell them their behavior patterns that they’re falling into that are ruining their life and he’ll just say, “Stop it. “ And I think sometimes it’s not any more complicated than that. Usually it is, but sometimes it’s not. Well, let’s talk a little bit, if we could, about AI because certainly a lot more is becoming possible now. And similar to the observability bias problem where when we see something, we tend to fixate on things that are available to us. There’s kind of an availability heuristic that can send us in the wrong direction. We face a similar temptation with tools that like now we have all these very powerful tools for writing, for analysis. We can do all of these things that before we had to do manually that were slow, that were time consuming, that were mentally taxing, and often we just didn’t get to or didn’t feel like we always did a very good job of.

(17:43):

What’s your take on the current landscape with AI tools?

Kim Marshall (17:47):

Well, you’re right about the power and a lot of principles kind of sub Rosa sometimes at home using ChatGPT or something, they’re using AI to take their notes and to write up teacher evaluations. And I ran into some people just a couple of weeks ago in a graduate course here in Boston, teachers who were just upset that they were getting this clearly canned AI generated pablum on their lessons. So that’s a really bad use, I think. But I think there are three use cases that are very promising and very interesting. One is preparing a principal for a conversation with a teacher. “Here are my notes, here’s some background information about this teacher, here’s some those I had in a classroom and so forth. Here’s my general sense of this, what’s going on here. Give me a script, give me some talking points, give me a way of approaching this.

(18:32):

“That can be very helpful. I’ve talked to teachers, especially with difficult conversations. AI can do a brilliant job of sort of walking you through it, put your feet on the floor, take a deep breath. The second use case is that there’s a guy in Switzerland, an American in Switzerland, Tommy Malvoy, who’s developed on his own nickel, a thing called InformEd ED is capitalized. And what it does is listen to a whole lesson, transcribe a whole lesson. The computer does this. And then based upon some very sophisticated stuff that he’s put into it, it creates an analysis of the lesson like who talked more? What was the level of questioning? How much teacher talk to student talk, girl, talk, boy talk, and level of questioning from very simple to more sophisticated discourse. And for a teacher to be able to look at an analysis like that, I mean, an algebra teacher between periods could say,” Oh my gosh, I’m talking too much, “or whatever.

(19:27):

And this product, and there may be others, is very sophisticated and very helpful. It could also be, as a supervisor, I would be very curious to see that too, but not to fall into the trap of using that to evaluate. Having that as the basis for analysis and conversation about teaching and learning. The third use case, which I just used yesterday and also last week is something that when you have the conversation with a teacher, a 10 minute conversation going over as I did with this culinary arts teacher, then immediately right on the spot summarizing it. And we did this yesterday after a 10, 12 minute conversation, quite substantive as we talked through this taco preparing lesson, I then stopped the transcription. I’d gotten the teacher’s permission, of course. And by the way, this has to be private. It has to be within the AI system so it’s not going up to the internet with private information.

(20:14):

So we pushed a button and there was 150 word summary of our conversation. I had the teacher read it out loud and there were several other people in the room who’d been watching this thing and it did a brilliant summary. That is useful. That is really useful because what’s the alternative? A principal goes back to his office or her office and writes it up. The teacher waits for a week for that. The teacher disagrees with part of that. We read it together and we could make edits. So then we literally sign off on it. Okay, this is an accurate summary of the conversation we just had. So that just, I think is a terrific use of AI. And I’m quite excited about this particular product because I think it’s just a boon to the principal, a boon to the teacher and it respects the teacher because right then and there, immediately after we had the conversation, here’s this summary.

(21:01):

Now, of course, the AI had to be trained to do this properly, to constrain it to 150 words, to use a certain structure to the feedback. And these guys have done a good job with that, but that I think is a brilliant use of AI.

Justin Baeder (21:14):

And it sounds like the use of AI there was transparent to the teacher, right? The teacher is fully aware that the summary-

Kim Marshall (21:20):

And there would be teachers who would say, “Nope, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to have AI listening in on our conversation.” And so then the principal has to write it up afterward. And I don’t have any data on how many teachers would choose door A or door B. I just don’t know. We’ll find out.

Justin Baeder (21:38):

But I think part of the trust there is the transparency that both of you participated in the conversation. You presumably have the transcript if you need to look at what you actually did talk about. So when you’re reading that summary, it’s not just a black box that prints out a slip of paper and it’s an oracle that you just have to take at its word. It’s kind of traceable.You can see, does this line up with what we talked about?

Kim Marshall (22:03):

Well, yeah. Now, interestingly, with this product, the transcript is deleted as soon as it generates the summary. So again, from confidentiality purposes, we might have said some things that were awkward and so forth, but the proof of the pudding is the teacher’s right there, I had to read it out loud and she said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s just what we ... “ And people in the room, the principal, by the way, the principal was in the room of this middle school, his eyes lit up. He said, “Oh my gosh, you mean we might have something like this that will save me all the ... “ Because it’s not easy to write up a summary of a 10, 15 minute conversation. That’s not easy. And you want to give compliments, you want to acknowledge if there’s a leverage point, you want to say that in the right way, as we discussed.

(22:47):

So this thing is programmed literally to say, just to do the pivot, compliments as we discussed, this is something you’re going to consider trying, and I look forward to seeing it, that kind of thing. And so this is a really ... AI can do that very well if it’s trained properly. So that’s a good thing.

Justin Baeder (23:04):

Yeah, I think that’s a great use case. And I would agree that the time and the mental effort to write a summary, honestly, this is just a good return on investment. And I think we don’t lose really anything by having to do that as long as we put the thought in, we have the presence, we check it, we make sure that it’s what we want to say. And interesting to hear that from you, the person who has written, I’m sure more summaries than anyone else in the world,

Kim Marshall (23:33):

Marshall- Well, no, okay, that’s summarizing a research article or a David Brooks column or something, but this is, and I’ve tried some of these. And by the way, the idea of constraining it to 150 words, about a thousand characters is an absolutely brilliant idea because you can easily write a page and a half about a conversation with a teacher, even if it’s a short one. So these guys down in Tennessee, Ray Fugate and some guys down in Chattanooga, Tennessee came up with this idea years ago of limiting the principle to a thousand characters. And that is just right there as a time saver. But also, I think it was Blaze Pascal who said, “I’m sorry I didn’t write you a longer letter, a short letter, I didn’t have time.” Because constraining it just forces you to ... And it turns out a thousand characters, 150 words is just right.

(24:22):

It’s substantive, but it’s something that it’s a package that’s more portable. And also for the superintendent’s point of view, or head of school’s point of view, you can more quickly review, so what are my principles talking to teachers about? So that would be obviously another advantage to this.

Justin Baeder (24:39):

Yeah. And that brings me to a topic that people may be surprised to hear me bring up here, but it is taste. And I think one of the main reasons that people subscribe to the Marshall Memo is not just the summaries that you write, which are excellent. You’ve written probably tens of thousands of individual article summaries at this point, but the fact that you decide what to include, you decide what sources to read, and then you choose from everything that you read in a week, what to mention in the Marshall memo. What are some of your thoughts on that role of deciding what matters when it comes to teacher supervision and working with teachers?

Kim Marshall (25:20):

Well, maybe in the back of your mind is the question, could AI do that? And I would think at this point, my answer to that is no, AI could conceivably do the summaries. I’ve tried that and I’m not going there. I can’t trust AI to do a good summary of a complex 40-page research article, but back to the question of taste. So I spend all day Sunday, every week doing the reading. It’s about eight hours and I read or skim like 150 different articles. So what am I choosing is your question. And there’s certain things that I just can’t do like breaking news, like Ed Wheat does that very well, the online platforms, ASCD, SmartBrief and so forth. So I’m not doing breaking news. I’m not doing puff pieces, just a super duper, trickly kind of thing of this wonderful principle in Alabama who’s wonderful, but it’s not a critical analysis of what they did and the stumbles and so forth.

(26:12):

I’m not doing things that don’t go anywhere. There’s a lot of the stuff I read, these research articles that come to basically no conclusion. There’s a null impact of this program. I’m not doing highly political stuff. There’s this magazine, I think you must have known it in Seattle, Rethinking Schools. It’s sort of a lefty magazine, really good, but a lot of their stuff is highly political, Ukraine, Gaza, that kind of stuff. So I’m staying away from that. And so what I’m looking for is stuff that is really about the change process, about how did this sixth grade teacher deal with this situation? How did this school reschedule to get more teacher meeting time? How did this principal deal with this thorny situation? How did this school get these amazing ... I’m a big fan of Karen Cenowith, the latter day, Ron Edmonds, who’s written about the beat the odd schools, the schools that are against the odds are getting great results.

(27:02):

So what are the key factors? I’ve been fascinated about that since Ron Evans wrote in the 1970s. So those are the things. And I think behind your question also is the thought that there’s some personal preferences to this. A different person doing this would choose different articles. I think there’ll be a lot of overlap, but that is really the key thing is my judgment about what matters and what my readers, because I have readers in 65 countries all over the world, people are reading this and pay money for it for the Marshall memo, what is it that they might be interested in? And every issue I’m sure is, you skim through every issue, there’s certain things that you’re not interested in. I’m probably not going to read that one, but here’s something for my librarian. I want to give this to my librarian or here’s something for my history teacher or something, or here’s something for me to ponder because it’s something that I haven’t done well.

(27:49):

So that is every week I’m making those judgements on Sunday. And then on Monday I do the hard work of writing the summaries, which is just plain hard work. I mean, it’s trying to do a good job of an intellectually responsible job of summarizing this so that the very busy people who are reading it don’t have to read the full article.

Justin Baeder (28:07):

Right. And I see some parallels there between knowing your readers and what they’re going to find helpful and knowing your teachers as an instructional leader and figuring out not necessarily just what are the facts of this situation, what are the opportunities for improvement, but like, what does this person need from me right now, which may be different than just kind of an objective brute force analysis. We can get AI to do that. If I ask AI to tell me three things this teacher could do better, I can get those. But the taste issue to me is that may not be what that teacher needs to hear next.

Kim Marshall (28:44):

Yeah. Well, speaking of taste with principals, there’s also the issue of pet peeves. Everybody has pet peeves. For example, one of mine is, I don’t like to see a teacher walking around a room with a cup of coffee, like drink your coffee before the lesson, but that is never the most important thing to talk about. I don’t like teachers addressing kids as you guys when they’re girls and boys in the room, but I just got to let that one go all over in a school district yesterday, all over the school district, everyone was talking about you guys and to teachers too. It drives me crazy, but it’s part of American kind of culture at this point. So the taste issue, not just with small things like that, but I ask audiences or principals, what are your red lines? What is the thing that you absolutely will do that Bob Newhart kind of thing of stop doing that.

(29:33):

I don’t want to see that anymore. And people need to think through that. What are the things that are just absolutely unacceptable in their school? And what are the things that are a matter of taste? I wouldn’t have taught it that way, but it seems to be working. And by the way, the issue, and you’re probably about to ask about this, is what about student learning? Because some of the teacher evaluation stuff in the Obama era was trying to use test scores, student performance as a main way of evaluating teachers. So Do you want to talk about that?

Justin Baeder (30:02):

Yeah, I’d love to talk about that because I felt like we put a lot of effort into that over many years and just don’t have a lot to show for it.

Kim Marshall (30:10):

Well, more than that, it turns out it was really just, I think you summarized this very quickly the other day. It’s simply because of blips in class assignments and other things, it’s extremely unstable. So the whole value added movement and student learning objectives, SLOs for kindergarten and phys ed and stuff like that, methodologically it’s extremely problematic. And thank goodness at the end of his administration, Obama in 2015, the ESSA legislation, they took that away. Nobody needs to use student achievement as a significant part of teacher evaluation anymore. But I think Obama had a point. Whether the kids learn it or not, it’s important. You taught it. They didn’t learn it. Did you really teach it? That was ineffective. And so I’ve been struggling with how can you really get to the issue? Because there was a meeting in the Oval Office in January 29th, 2009, right at the beginning of the Obama administration when a gentleman that I know persuaded Obama to do this.

(31:07):

And the persuasion was we have to hold teachers accountable for student learning. It’s not enough to just watch them teach and give them good grades on their lesson. Did the kids learn it? And so I’ve pivoted on that one. I said Obama had that right. It was just the methodology that was wrong. And so my answer to that is let’s look at student learning, but let’s look at it lesson by lesson. Let’s look at a PLC meeting by PLC meeting. You taught that. Let’s look at the exit tickets. Let’s look at the polling. Let’s look at the test that they gave, the quiz. And if they didn’t learn it, let’s talk about that, not in an accusatory way, but in a way of saying, okay, let’s think about a better way to do that. Or if they did learn it really well, let’s celebrate that.

(31:51):

So all the time talking about student learning, but much more at the granular level because the other way won’t work.

Justin Baeder (31:58):

Yeah. And that gets to something we’ve been talking about recently around grain size and rubrics that often the rubrics that we’re using for teacher evaluation are very, very broad. They cover a K-12, they cover every subject, they cover every teacher and are usually somewhat contractual that this is what you’re evaluated on. But that may be very far removed from what’s actually happening on a Tuesday that we talk about in our PLC on Wednesday. Take us into some of your thoughts on that kind of granularity issue.

Kim Marshall (32:29):

Well, so I do a lot of work in the New York City public schools. For 21 years, I’ve been down there a lot coaching principals, working with groups and so forth. And under the Joel Klein administration a few years ago, they made the fundamental conceptual error of trying to Danielson score each lesson.

(32:47):

And that is just, I mean, these are very smart people who meant well, but they just took this fork in the road. And as soon as you do that, one teacher said at one point, as soon as it becomes part of my rating, it stops being meaningful because now we’re arguing, was that developing? Was that proficient? Was that distinguished and so forth? And so you’re taking your term, the wrong grain size. You’re taking in a comprehensive description of the teacher’s entire work and trying to fit that into one lesson or even one part of one lesson. It’s ridiculous. And New York City and a lot of other districts, Chicago and others have been doing this for a long time contractually. And it seemed to make sense. But again, the structural problem is if you’re only doing one or two lessons a year, then you have to rubric score them.

(33:33):

So you got to restructure the whole thing. You got to get to short frequent unannounced visits, systematic visits. You got to take one thing at a time and then do the rubric at the end of the year because I do believe there should be a comprehensive rubric analysis of the teacher at the end of the year. I think that makes sense. It’s much better than a narrative. The rubrics are good. Danielson is good. I think mine is better. Mine is free, by the way. And I’ve gone through 17 revisions of it. But basically you need to deconstruct teaching and then you need to at the end of the year with teacher input. I mean, the best format is the teacher fills it out, the principal fills it out. You compare and you discuss disagreements and then you talk about evidence, but you don’t make the mistake that Chicago public schools made and are still making, which is for everything in the Danielson rubric, we need evidence.

(34:17):

So that’s like if you’re going to the Supreme Court, if you’re firing the teacher, yeah, you need evidence. But for 98% of the teachers who are either solid or need some improvement, you don’t need that. You need to have the ongoing conversations and coach and prod and poke and motivate and inspire and PLC and all these other things to help improve the actual teaching on a day-by-day basis. So we got to get away from this rubric scoring of individual lessons. If there’s a new chancellor in New York City, I’m really hoping that I might be able to persuade him to change the system. I

Justin Baeder (34:50):

Wonder if we could, if we have enough time left for this, I know we’ve got to wrap up soon, but I wonder if we have time to discuss the idea of instructional purpose and if there is potential for rubrics that are more designed to look at a smaller unit of instruction because I’m currently, I think, kind of undecided on this. I think there’s possibly potential here, but there’s also the issue of, we’re always going to be collecting data in specific ... We’re collecting evidence in specific circumstances, but those specific circumstances don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in the context of the whole school year, the relationships, the curriculum, all the things that teachers are doing that that big rubric describes shape what’s happening in that small slice of time that we’re observing. And I’ve had the idea recently of looking at instructional purpose and saying, okay, rather than take that giant rubric and decide how you did in 22 different criteria based on these 10 minutes I was in your classroom, what if I just look at what you were trying to accomplish during that time and bring a rubric to bear on that?

(35:59):

What’s your initial reaction to that potential? Because I don’t have one. I’m not proposing that everybody should use one, but I’m interested in your thoughts on the idea.

Kim Marshall (36:07):

So I love the idea of what were you trying to accomplish. And so with the culinary arts lesson yesterday, they’re trying to teach kids how to cook safely and produce this taco thing that they were doing. And that comes out either from seeing the lesson plan in advance or from figuring it out in the classroom or from asking the teacher afterward, “What was your intended learning outcome?”That’s a good quadrant two question, right? Open-ended question of the teacher to explain. So that is at the core of everything. And of course, it’s one thing at a time. It’s the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s the division of decimals. It’s medieval Europe, whatever it is that they’re studying. And the purpose should certainly be part of the conversation, whether it’s the micro purpose of this particular lesson or the bigger purpose of this unit, or this unit on European history, or this unit on South America, whatever it is.

(36:55):

And so that’s where certainly unit planning. And I’m a big believer in understanding by design, the Wiggins & McTighe, backwards design thing of knowing what are the essential questions, what are the big purpose. So purpose is everything. And of course that goes to results as well, like did you get your results according to your purpose? But I’m an anti-checklist person coming into classroom. So what I come in with is like this, just a low tech, little pad of paper or even a card. Yesterday, I just had a little note card and jot down that wonderful student thing that the kids said that was so wise and clever or that funny thing the teacher said, or maybe take a picture sometimes of something on the bulletin board, but low tech and capture a few things for the conversation. But to your bigger point, what’s in the back of your head as you do that.

(37:47):

So at one point I developed a five-letter acronym for what to have in your head: SOTEL. So safety, objectives, teaching, engagement, and learning. Learning being the big one, did they learn it? And I thought that was pretty clever. I developed it with a group of graduate students, principals and training, and it seemed safety, psychological, and physical, classroom management, objectives like you’re thinking like, where’s this lesson going? The actual teaching, the pedagogy itself, is it appropriate? The engagement, how engagement are the kids, and then the actual evidence of learning. Thought it was clever. And then I found out that the Springfield public schools in Massachusetts were using it as a checklist. So they were coming in with a checklist doing SOTEL. And I was horrified at that. I don’t know if they’re still doing it. So I tried to simplify it even more. And my current thinking is three things in the back of your head.

(38:39):

First of all, the curriculum, and that’s your thing, the purpose. What’s going on here in this French class? The second thing is the actual teaching, the pedagogy. So is this small group work? Is this standing up at the whiteboards? Is this batteries and bulbs experiment, hands-on? Is this the best way to get to that purpose? And then the third one, of course, is learning. Okay, you did it, but did they learn it? And often you can’t see that in a short observation. You need to ask the teacher, you need to look at the exit tickets, whatever. So I’m for low tech, but focused on that big picture. Back to your thing, what’s the purpose? And then most important, did it work? Did the kids actually learn? Does that make sense?

Justin Baeder (39:21):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I’m thinking of a couple of issues that that raises that present a little bit of a challenge for us. If you as an observer come in after the tacos are made, after the tacos have been eaten, when they’re cleaning up, to some extent, the teacher’s purpose during that time is just the cleanup. There’s no learning objective, maybe how to clean up is part of it.

But sometimes we come in during those kind of management times of a lesson and we think, okay, there’s not really anything super substantive. The teacher does not need three points of feedback from me on how the students are cleaning up necessarily. That’s not where a lot of opportunity is. We don’t need to make a rubric for everything. And then the other side of that is the autonomy. Sometimes if we’re looking at questions of curriculum, sometimes the teacher didn’t come up with a curriculum.

(40:09):

Sometimes the teacher does not have any control over what lesson they’re teaching today and what’s in that lesson. And we expect teachers to follow an established curriculum. So any kind of final thoughts on those questions of just

What you might see in autonomy?

Kim Marshall (40:22):

Yeah. Well, with coming in for the cleanup thing, the principal could make the decision, turn around and come back another time. Or in the conversation with the teacher, tell me what happened before we came in. How did that taco thing go? And then you got the teacher’s account of that.

You haven’t seen it firsthand, but it’s so important to randomize during a lesson. You need to see the launch. Sometimes you need to see the middle part, you need to see the closure, you need to see the group work.

And principals need to be systematic. I don’t know if that’s autonomy or not, but systematic about seeing different parts of lessons and elementary teachers teach math, English, social studies, and science. So we need to see the different subjects. My daughter, as a seventh grade teacher, taught five lessons. We need to see at least three groups of lessons.

(41:07):

But am I answering your question about autonomy? Are you talking about the principal’s autonomy or the teacher’s autonomy?

Justin Baeder (41:12):

Well, the teacher’s autonomy from the perspective of curriculum that if I’m going to give the teacher feedback on something, I need to make sure that it’s actually something that they get to decide.

Kim Marshall (41:21):

Oh, well, that kind of autonomy. So I taught sixth grade in Boston in the 1970s. I was at this middle school for 11 years, and at that point it was the Wild West. I mean, as long as my kids were reasonably well behaved and there were no parent complaints, I taught a lot of cool stuff, the Bermuda Triangle, Eldridge Cleaver. I mean, all this stuff that was cool and entertaining, and I cannot defend that looking back on it.

So that kind of teacher autonomy is just, I don’t think is the right thing. To me, we’ve done a much better job in the US over the last 10 years of deciding, okay, so when do we teach the Holocaust? Okay, that’s going to be eighth grade. When do we teach Egypt? Okay, that’s going to be sixth grade. When do we do division of fractions? That’s fifth grade, whatever it is.

(42:04):

So having a roadmap that makes sense. So you don’t get the situation of this thing that I had in the Marshall Memo a while ago of a teenager listening to some adults talking about Pearl Harbor. And the teenagers said to them, who’s Pearl? There’s certain things that people need to know like Pearl Harbor, Tulsa in 1921, just stuff that they need to know. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job with Common Core and then the adaptations of it and IB and all these other things of kind of mapping out the K to 12 curriculum.

And I don’t think there’s teacher autonomy on that, but I think the teacher autonomy should be how it’s taught. I think Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to talk about bold, persistent experimentation. We’re constantly trying different ways of doing things. And in our PLC, Justin, you taught it this way, I taught it this way, the common objectives, but we try different things.

(42:57):

And then the proof of the pudding is, well, Justin, your kids did better than mine, so what did you do? And we begin to think about what is the best way to approach this. So autonomy with the how to, but I’m pretty clear on for my own grandchildren and we need to be systematic and it isn’t a question of teacher autonomy of what gets taught. Does that make sense?

Although I will tell one story if we have another minute for it. So one of my favorite all- time articles that I summarized in the Marshall Memo was an article in Rethinking Schools by Alana Goldstein, a woman, a third grade teacher up in the Northwest of the US. She might’ve been in Seattle who decided that she was going to teach about wealth distribution in the United States as part of her fractions unit. And she had the kids bring in dried macaroni, lot of dried macaroni.

(43:48):

They put them into baggies with a hundred in each baggie. So then they had 90 baggies with a hundred in each. And on the rug, she displayed and she divided the rug into five quintiles, how the wealth was distributed in the United States. And you might imagine what it looks like. The poorest quintile is nine individual pieces of macaroni out of 9,000 proportionally. The second one is 18. The third is 150. The next one is 900, so nine baggies, and the richest quintile in terms of wealth distribution is 79 baggies. So it’s like this. And those kids will never forget that. So that’s an example of teacher autonomy. She’s teaching fractions. She’s putting in a little bit of a bigger picture. Now is that appropriate to third grade? What would you as a principal think of seeing that in a third grade classroom? I’ll put you on the spot, Justin.

Justin Baeder (44:42):

Well, it’s a topic that is broader than the math lesson and that people may say, is wealth inequality a topic for third graders? And I think that’s a fair question to ask.

Kim Marshall (44:52):

Yeah.

Justin Baeder (44:53):

Definitely.

Kim Marshall (44:54):

But there’s an example of a teacher freelancing, right? If she saw it in San Francisco, I guess the exploratorium, she saw this exhibit and she decided I’m going to do that. But I think it’s pretty cool. But maybe junior high school, maybe high school, but that is a provocative example of teacher autonomy versus the set curriculum. She’s trying to have it both ways, right?

Justin Baeder (45:14):

Kim, if people want to find out about the Marshall Memo, get a subscription to that or find out about your books, your teacher valuation rubrics, where’s the best place for them to go online?

Kim Marshall (45:23):

It’s marshallmemo.com, a Marshall with two Ls. So the Marshall Memo does cost money. It’s cheap, but it does cost money. But there is a free website that we put together with support from a foundation called the bestofmarshallmemo.org. And that has like 26 super curated collections of articles in these specific areas like race inequality and differentiation, time management and so forth. So that’s totally free. So you just go to bestofmarshallmemo.org and you can access those for ... They’re also recordings of each one. So there’s a professional recording. So that was our pandemic project, Jenn David-Lang and I.

Justin Baeder (46:01):

Wonderful. Great resource. Great resource. Well, Kim, as always, I could talk for hours about this stuff and could talk about anything with you for hours, but thank you so much for your time today and I hope we can talk again soon.

Kim Marshall (46:13):

Appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks so much. A real pleasure.

• School-wide instructional systems: Principal Johnson describes comprehensive tier 3 leadership systems implemented since 2014, including standardized lesson components for math (daily entry tasks, problem-solving, fact fluency, conceptual development) and ELA instruction across K-6 grades

• Walk-to programs for differentiation: The school operates both “walk to math” and “walk to read” programs where students receive 60-90 minutes of core instruction plus 45 minutes of differentiated small-group instruction daily, utilizing all teachers, paraprofessionals, and support staff to create 11-12 different ability-based groups

• Balancing autonomy with alignment: Johnson addresses the tension between teacher autonomy and systematic consistency, emphasizing that constraints serve their high-needs population (50% English language learners, 80-85% low-income students) who benefit from predictable structures and consistent instructional language across grade levels

• Collaborative system development: Rather than top-down mandates, systems emerge from teacher input and consensus-building, though Johnson maintains final decision-making authority based on classroom observations and student data; teachers retain individual personality and teaching style while following agreed-upon frameworks

• Vertical curriculum alignment: Grades 3-6 follow identical scope and sequence for ELA skills, teaching the same standards simultaneously using grade-appropriate texts, enabling powerful vertical collaboration and ensuring students don’t have to relearn systems each year

• Continuous improvement culture: The school maintains constant revision cycles, analyzing multi-year data to identify weaknesses (like struggling with vocabulary targets) and collaboratively developing new strategies; pacing guides and systems undergo regular iterations based on evidence

• Implementation strategy and sustainability: The transformation began by studying and adapting successful practices from Gildo Ray Elementary, a demographically similar high-performing school, rather than creating systems from scratch; turnover remains minimal (1-2 teachers annually) with many teachers expressing preference for the collaborative, supportive structure

• Leadership philosophy: Johnson emphasizes that not all teacher voices carry equal weight in decision-making—input is valued based on classroom effectiveness and student outcomes rather than seniority or volume, creating what he calls a “meritocracy of ideas”

Full Transcript:

Justin Baeder (00:08):

Welcome everyone to the Eduleadership show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program principal Justin Johnson. Justin is principal at Wahitis Elementary School in Othello, Washington. Justin, welcome. Thank you for having me. Well, I’m excited to have you as my first ever guest here on the Edgy Leadership Show. We connected last week and you shared with me some of what’s going on in your school that lines up with some things that we’ve been talking about a lot lately here at The Principal Center about tier three systems for learning, and in this tiered systems, not in our RTI model, but I think of tier one leadership as the direct work we do to give feedback on teaching tier two work as the instructional leadership work we do to grow teachers over time and provide coaching. And I think of tier three instructional leadership work as the systems we build. And you had so many great examples of those systems that I thought it would make sense for us to sit down and have you share a little bit if you’re willing to do so. So thanks so much for being

Justin Johnson (01:05):

Here. Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Like I was telling you before, I’m really passionate about this work and excited, excited about it and what we can do for our kids.

Justin Baeder (01:15):

And I should clarify, we didn’t coordinate any of this in advance, so we just connected. You’re not following up on my ideas, we’re just connecting over those ideas. These

Justin Johnson (01:24):

Are things you’ve

Justin Baeder (01:25):

Been doing independently for years.

Justin Johnson (01:27):

Yeah, we started this journey here at W HEDIS probably in 2014 ish, and I’m the third principal in the rotation. At the time when it all started, I was the instructional coach here and our principal that started this whole thing is now our superintendent in our school district. So yeah, it’s evolved quite a bit since the beginning, but it’s been quite the journey for us.

Justin Baeder (01:56):

Yeah, well, lately I’ve been using the acronym CAIRO—curriculum, assessment, instruction, rules, operations. What are some of the key systems that stand out to you as things that make a difference in your school?

Justin Johnson (02:09):

Yeah, I mean, systems is thrown out a lot these days in education creating systems and this that, but to us, when we say that what we mean is we all agree that just at the very foundational level, we’re going to teach ELA in math in a very similar way, and that the components of each lesson are going to be the same, whether it’s kinder all the way up to sixth grade. We are a K six building. And so for example, in math, every day there’s going to be a daily entry task, which is a review piece, and that’s a non-negotiable that everyone will have that. And you’ll see that every day in our lessons, there’s going to be a problem solving piece. We have a system of how do we attack those problems we call, so everybody will have a VEPs problem every day. There will be a fact fluency piece every day in your lesson, and then there’ll be a conceptual development piece, which is obviously the bulk of the lesson, but just at the very foundational level, those components kind of ground us in what that instruction will look like. And then the same thing in ELA, it’s a little bit slightly different ELA, because there’s a much heavier emphasis on foundational reading in the K two bands, but then at the upper three, six more comprehension. And so how we attack each of those pieces is again, our system, what we ground, what we do in, and then we look for ways to get better at each component or each part of those pieces. Everybody we’re talking the same language, we’re using the same things.

Justin Baeder (03:38):

And if I recall correctly, you have a walk to math program where students can go to different math. Talk to us a little bit about the logistics of how that works.

Justin Johnson (03:47):

We have both walk to math and walk to read. And so every student gets core non-negotiable. Our resource room students or if they’re pulled out for speech or at other times if they need to be pulled out for any other, anything else, it’s a non-negotiable that they will not be pulled out during core instruction. So everybody gets third grade, ELA, everybody gets fourth grade, third grade math and so forth. And then walk two time, well, let me back up a second. So in math, the core time is roughly 60 minutes, a little less for our kinders in first. They go a little bit heavier on the walk two portion, but it’s about 60 minutes. And then on the ELA side core is about 90 minutes, give or take a few minutes here and there per grade, and then on top of core instruction than everybody gets what we call walk to.

(04:33):

But it’s really like a tier two instruction for 45 minutes a day, they’ll get walk to math and for 45 minutes a day they’ll get walk to read. And so what we do is we pool all of our paras, our teachers, everybody. So I’m just going to use fourth grade for example, when it’s fourth grade walk to read time, there might be anywhere from four to eight paras depending on the grade level. But in fourth, I think it’s about six, six paras, three teachers, our ELL teacher, we have another position in the building that gets pulled in at that time. And so there’s about 11 or 12 different groups running at that time. And it’s all based on what the individual groups need. So we have a few groups at the top that it’s more extension type activities where they’re really digging into the social studies content, but looking at it from a reading comprehension lens and doing some writing all the way down to, we still have some fourth graders needing more decoding work, and that’s what they’re getting at that time. But that doesn’t come during core. That comes during walk two when it’s really individualized down to what very small groups of kids need. And the same thing goes for math. They get their core and then it’s a walk to math based on what they need or enrichment, how can we really keep pushing the kids that the grade level stuff they’re mastering, how do we continue to push them and not hold them back?

Justin Baeder (05:50):

So anytime there is a coordinated schoolwide effort like that, I think that creates a little bit of an excuse to align on some things that otherwise might be left to the individual teacher’s autonomy. And you have, I would say, a lot of systems in place that some teachers might feel do constrain their autonomy. Take us into your philosophy on that a little bit around autonomy. I feel like in a lot of places, especially Washington State, it is a very strong professional norm that teachers expect to have autonomy. And we’re talking about some real constraints. If we’re going to be aligned on some things, that means I don’t get to just do everything my way.

Justin Johnson (06:26):

Yeah, there’s a couple different things I want to hit on here, but we talk a lot about, again, this system, we’re all agreeing to attack ELA and math in a very similar way. And so with that, having a common scope and sequence, which is the very basis of it, we have to be on the same page. We have to know exactly what we’re teaching when we’re teaching it. And then with walk twos, you have to stick to that pace or your kids are going to go to another room for 45 minutes a day and it’s going to be pretty obvious that you’re two weeks behind or you haven’t taught that yet. And so it holds everybody accountable. So there’s that piece to it. We talk a lot about here that our school is made up of roughly 50% second language learners, second or third, and then about 80, 85% low income from low income backgrounds.

(07:17):

And so the consistency for all kids is extremely important, but for our kids, even more so that we need to be consistent across the board and we need to guarantee that no matter what classroom they go into, they’re getting an incredibly high level of instruction and that they’re getting the standards that they need to be getting at that time. And so we do a lot of that framing of the mindset going into it that it’s not about wanting to make all the teachers robots. It’s not about wanting to just take away autonomy for the sake of taking it away, things like that. But why are we doing it? We’re doing it because it really truly is best for kids. And that gets thrown out a lot too, what’s best for kids? But if we can prove that this is really what they need and why, then it’s hard to argue against it.

(08:01):

And also the teachers do have quite a bit of input into the system itself. There are some things that I’m just from the get go, we have said are non-negotiables. It is a non-negotiable that kids will get daily review every day. In math, you don’t get to pick that, but when we’re designing what that looks like, teachers have input. We’re going to come to a consensus and do it the same way, but it’s constantly, we’re in a constant state of revision. So sometimes that gets a little frustrating for people that it’s never done. It’s never done. So once we’ve learned something and got some information back on it, are we going to continue? Are we going to make it better? Do we need to change something? And so all of the pieces of the system are in that kind of constant flux. But again, it’s the feedback that the teachers are giving as a whole, and then we make decisions.

(08:47):

This is what we’re going to do. And sometimes it comes down to two different groups, think two different things, and it’s as admin, we have to say, well, we’re going to try this one right now, and just like anything, collect information. And if it works, great, let’s keep going. If not, we’re going to fix it. And so I think all that comes together to hopefully answer that question for you that yes, it does take away a little bit of the daily autonomy from teachers, but they do really have a lot of input into the system. It’s just once we agree on something, we agree to do it that way. And then you’ll notice too, and a lot of people say this when they come and visit our building, you’ll see the same lesson being taught across four different sections of a grade, but each teacher has their own flare on that content or their own flare on. We’ve agreed to teach it this way, but everybody has their own personality, and that’s a hundred percent within bounds. We’re not asking you to read a script, stick to it, stand in this corner of the classroom, say, this kid says this. It’s not like that at all. Every teacher has to put their own spin on it, and that’s how we learn from each other. Some people when we go watch, oh, that’s really working, I’m going to try that next too. And so it all kind of comes together to address that.

Justin Baeder (09:57):

Yeah, very well said. I feel like there’s this tendency to characterize anything other than complete autonomy in ways that make whatever it is into some sort of boogeyman that it’s not. And one aspect of that is the idea that the only alternative to autonomy is top down. But when I heard you describing how things go in your school, it didn’t seem really top down. That didn’t seem like the right way to describe it because in a lot of cases, the expectations, the content, the specifics are coming from teachers, and teachers are constantly improving them. It’s not coming from on high, it’s not falling out of the sky tied to a rock. It’s what you have collectively decided as a school. And teachers do have a lot of ownership of it. It’s just that as individuals, nobody is free to say, no, I don’t feel like it. There’s a commitment to everyone else. There’s an obligation to everyone else to be part of that team. Say a little bit more about how teachers see their role in that.

Justin Johnson (10:53):

There’s some people that haven’t liked that process, and that’s okay. Some people have opted out and gone to different buildings. There is a lot of, from the admin perspective, having to massage or get groups of individuals to work together. And that’s a big part of my job actually, is getting all of our grade teams to come together and we’re all human. Some people like each other better. Some people work better together. Some people have different philosophies and whatnot. And so a big portion of this for me is finding ways to massage those relationships and so people feel comfortable to come into a room and say what they think, and we can have tough conversations and then we can walk out and do it. In a perfect world, that’s not part of the equation. You just get ‘em in a room, they all talk, they walk out and they agree, but we don’t live in a perfect world.

(11:43):

And there are some teachers that feel like others have more of a pull than they do and things like that. But on my end, there’s a reason for that. We haven’t talked about it yet, but I’m in classrooms quite a bit and so is our assistant principal. And so if somebody says something and I’ve seen it in their room and it’s really been working, okay, you speak up, let’s go. Let’s go that direction. Whereas others, if I haven’t seen it and you’re saying you’re doing something, but I’ve never seen it happen and whatnot, I’m probably not going to give as much weight to that person. And so it’s, again, I don’t know how to say that nicely, but that’s truly part of the equation to it, that I want to honor everybody in the building. I want to respect that they’re here giving what they have every day.

(12:27):

But to be honest, every voice doesn’t carry the same weight. And it’s not just because of who I like or personal preferences watching the data. I’m watching how the kids interact. I’m hearing what parents come to the office and say about certain segments of a teacher, they feel like their son or daughter isn’t liked in that classroom. I hear what taking all that information into play. And so when the teachers get into a room, I encourage all of them to speak up. Now’s your time. We have to talk. We have to do this. But then when it comes right down to it in the end, sometimes I just have to make a decision. And sometimes people don’t like it, but there’s not always, I can’t always give a hundred percent all the information of why I’m making that. I try to be as transparent as possible, but some of that just doesn’t need to be shared with everyone. But

Justin Baeder (13:15):

The great investor Ray Dalio has and a phrase that I like the meritocracy of ideas, and I don’t know that I like his specific ideas for how to create that meritocracy of ideas. Some of them I don’t think would translate very well into a school environment, but it goes against the idea that everybody’s ideas are equally good. And I think part of the reason that people fear giving up their autonomy is they know that in some cases, their professional judgment is going to save them from bad ideas. They have been exposed to bad ideas before. They have been forced to implement bad ideas, and they’re proud of their professional, rightly so, proud of their professional judgment that allows them to avoid a lot of the mistakes that they’ve seen. So that autonomy, there’s a real value to that autonomy. And I liked what you said about your responsibility as a leader to make sure that if we are all going to do the same thing, it has to be a good thing. It has to be the best thing. We’re not going to do one person’s idea just for the sake of having a round robin or being nice to everybody. If it’s not the best idea,

Justin Johnson (14:16):

Loudest voice doesn’t always win.

Justin Baeder (14:19):

And that’s the other thing that happens is whoever is the most forceful personality tends to get their way. Yeah,

Justin Johnson (14:26):

And I think with it, it’s really always trying to frame it, get the mindset back to a growth mindset that, okay, we’re going to try this. One of the things you can see on my wall here, we say, go hawks. And so I made a big thing of it, and all the little words in there are the sayings we say to each other all the time, and one of them is Today, we’ll do it. Tomorrow we’ll do it better. Or this year we’ll do it. Next year we’ll do it better. And so always trying to get ‘em in that we’re agreeing to this and we’re going to do it, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve written it in stone now that this is exactly the way it’s always going to be. We’re going to give it our best shot. We’re going to see if it really works.

(15:02):

And then again, we’re going to come back to the table. So maybe it wasn’t your exact idea this time that we’re trying, but when we come back, you’re going to have some really good input about how do we do it better next time? And so getting them in that mindset and then also, again, autonomy is great, but that’s a personal thing for you as an adult. And we’re not here to, honestly, we’re not here right now for us. We’re here for the kids. We’re paid to do what’s best by the kids. And I’m not going to ask you to do anything that you’re not morally or ethically comfortable with. But we have to agree to put that away because we’ve seen the evidence of how if we can as adults be very consistent, grade 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, it’s really beneficial for our kids. They don’t have to figure out the system. They don’t have to figure out the language. They don’t have to figure out something new every year. It can truly be a continuation on what they’ve already learned and continue building. And so when we get into those hard times where we’re not agreeing, we always have to try to come back to that. Why are we actually doing this? Why are we agreeing to work together so closely? And sometimes it takes a couple days, but we come back. We come back.

Justin Baeder (16:11):

Well, let’s talk about one particular type of alignment, one type of constrained autonomy that is something of a third rail for educators, which is pacing guides or a scope and sequence that says basically, this is exactly what you have to teach and this is the schedule that you have to teach it on. Maybe not down to the minute, maybe not down to the word or it’s not scripted in that way, but it does create expectations for what units you’re going to get to, what you’re going to be on this week. Talk to us about how that works in your school.

Justin Johnson (16:42):

Yeah, that’s another thing that’s in constant state of flux, not day to day, but year to year. I mean, we’re probably on, when it comes to scope and sequence, we’re probably on iteration five, six or seven depending on the grade level in the content area. But one thing that we did that really accelerated the vertical planning for us or vertical collaboration and that whole piece of we’re working together is we went to our grades three through six. They all are on the same scope and sequence for ELA. So we had to get in a room with all 16 of our, well actually it’s only 14 because there’s two sixth grades, but 14 of our teachers. And agree, what do we need to teach? What is the priority? And we can go way down that road too, but how are we going to teach it? What are we going to do?

(17:31):

And then we’re going to lay it out. So that third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, they’re all working on the same skill. Each week we’re using different novels, obviously different Lexis, different vocabulary, all of that is different, but the content itself is the same. And what that allows us to do is then our vertical collaboration during PLC, is it just a grade level? It’s a three six. How are we going to teach inference? How are we going to teach? Main idea, okay, third grade, here’s what you really need to do. Fourth grade, here’s what you need to do. Fifth grade, sixth grade, sixth grade. Here’s what they’ve done for the last three years. Now you can take it the next step. This is the language we’re going to use. This is the graphic organizers we’re going to use and so forth. And so that common scope and sequence really grounds us in that and allows us to do really pretty in-depth vertical collaboration.

(18:19):

And again, that’s where the cohesion comes in. We can’t decide that I’m just going to use this random organizer and teach kids this random chant or gesture or whatever, but the rest of you’re going to do something else. It doesn’t work that way. We all got to come to an agreement and say, this is how we’re going to do it. And it’s not lockstep. I mean, if a team, something happens and whatnot, and they get a couple days behind here and there, there’s a tiny bit of flexibility, but they know they got to stay pretty close to that because we’re going to come back together and we’re going to talk about it. And you don’t want to be the team that’s saying, well, we’re two weeks behind. And so it kind of holds everybody accountable to that. And math is a little different just because of the nature of math.

(19:01):

We do put our scope and sequence together side by side, K 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, but it’s not quite as vertically aligned like ELA is, but each team knows what the others are working on. And we’ve done PLC around math as well. So the standards all tightly aligned. So each team’s getting feedback on, Hey, these are the standards from second grade that lead into my third grade standards. How did you teach that concept? Okay, you use this language, you use this place value chart, or this is how you did it, so I’m going to tie that in and now teach third grade standard this way. And so it’s not quite as tight as ELA, but it’s similar and it’s all grounded in it having a really understandable and easily accessible scope and sequence. For the teachers that they got to produce, they had to sit in a room and really hash it out. They had to come up with the reasons for why are we doing what we’re doing. Ultimately, it was up to me and our assistant principal to give the rubber stamp on it, like, okay, we can go that direction. The idea has really come from them.

Justin Baeder (20:02):

And I think that forces decisions about trade-offs and opportunity costs that ultimately we have to make, right? We can’t do everything we want to. We can’t spend an infinite amount of time on everything. We have very real pacing decisions to make, and often teachers resent the imposition of a pacing guide because they know that means I can’t slow down and spend more time on this. If my kids need extra time on it, I have to keep moving forward. But the flip side of that is we get to what we’re supposed to get. There’s an agreement about what we’re going to cover, what we’re going to get to, so that the next year the teacher knows this is what was taught, this is what was not taught, and we can have that kind of alignment. I want to go back to something you said on, well one about math being different, and I think that’s just a great side note that math is different and often we don’t acknowledge how math is different. But you also mentioned in reading that there’s alignment around the skills that are being taught, and that’s kind of built on from year to year, but three through six is teaching the same skill the same week and building on it in different ways. I think one thing you told me in our earlier conversation though is that within a grade level though, there’s alignment on what books are being taught at any given time. Is that right?

Justin Johnson (21:11):

Oh, yes. So for example, on December 1st through the fifth, we were teaching target six. We all agreed on our anchor charts, what they were going to be, how we were going to teach these things. But then each grade level had the autonomy within the grade to choose what text they want to use to teach that at their grade level. So for example, third grade was using chocolate touch and was going to be in chapters nine and 10. Grade four was going to be in James, the giant Peach chapters 26 through 31 Maniac McGee for fifth grade. And then sixth grade was still in Harry Potter. So they were all going to be using grade level text, but teaching that skill through it, so it aligns around that text. And then they can collaborate and they need to be planning what the daily lessons look like within their grade, during their common planning time.

(21:57):

But as a vertical PLC, we were teaching the big ideas around target six and what do the kids need to know and what’s the progression of the instruction going to look like from three to six? And this same thing goes once we hit into informational text. So TCI here means the target for this week is unknown word or phrase, which is target 10. So it’s basically vocabulary. TCI is our science book. So they’ll be on science unit one using that science text to teach unknown word or phrase. Same thing for fourth grade here, fifth grade. And then sixth grade does it ELA slash social studies split. And so in the ELA side, they’re in poetry, but on the social studies side, they’re using their social studies content again to really focus on the unknown word or phrase skill itself. And then what we do too is, I don’t know if you can see it, but just this morning I had to be out of the building.

(22:50):

We had common PLC time, but I asked them, well, let me show you what I’m talking about here. So this was their assignment this morning after committees, I wasn’t here. I was at MMS for a board site visit for some district stuff I have to do. But I told them, are we ready for TCI? And it looks like we were near or below at grade levels last year in Target 10. Is there anything else we can try to think of? Because we’ve been trying lots of different things, but the data shows that it’s really hard to see here, but this is the last four years. In third grade, we were near below, below in fourth grade, below, below, below fifth grade, near, above, below, below. So we haven’t done real well on this target historically. So what are we going to do different? Don’t just tell me this is what we did last year. This is what we’re going to do because it’s not working for our kids. What’s the next thing? So that was their challenge, and they just got done a few minutes ago here, and I got back to the building right before I jumped on with you. So I’m very curious to find out what they’re going to tell me.

Justin Baeder (23:47):

There’s continuous improvement work. There’s looking at data, there’s revising that scope and sequence, and clearly a ton of work goes into that. But it seems like that probably also makes the day-to-day planning easier because a lot of the decisions have already been made. Is that kind of how teachers experience?

Justin Johnson (24:05):

It seems to be how they feel. And then really, so they do that on Monday mornings, kind of the big overarching decisions and whatnot. And then it’s up to them the rest of the week during their common planning with their grade team to take that back and put it into play. What does that mean when we’re teaching TCI this week? What does that mean? What are some things that we could try that next week when we go back and talk that they did seem to work and whatnot, but I was thinking that it might be a good example for you of the, or giving them some autonomy, but it’s as a whole, not as a, each grade level gets to decide on their own. We have to come together and what are some ideas of how we can do this better, but we’re going to come up with them together, not in isolation.

Justin Baeder (24:50):

Just in closing, I want to talk about the impact that this has had on retention, because a lot of people might hear about that constraint on autonomy and think, no, that’s not for me. I want to be left alone to do my own thing. What has been the response in terms of turnover? You said it’s not for a hundred percent of people. How have people voted with their feet in terms of that policy?

Justin Johnson (25:11):

I mean, this past year we didn’t have anybody leave the billing. Each year. It’s maybe one, maybe two. And it’s for various reasons. It’s not always the system itself or the systems themselves that have or people have chosen to leave. Actually, I should rephrase that. We did have one leave this year. We did have one or last year. So I mean, we’re not continually turning over. It’s one or two a year, which seems to be pretty typical for most schools. And so I don’t think it’s a real big issue. What is nice though is that teachers sometimes do kind of feel overwhelmed when they come to us because there’s some expectations with each part of the day exactly how we’re going to teach it. But there’s so much done for them that they don’t have to come up with things on their own. They can really lean on their teams, the other three or four teachers that they’re with to learn from them, and they don’t have to find things and whatnot. And so it’s a double-edged sword. Some people really don’t like it. Others absolutely love it, and they say they would never want to teach anywhere else because they really enjoy this part of it. And so yeah, I guess it’s a give and take.

Justin Baeder (26:17):

Yeah. Well, and it’s certainly about as low as you could expect turnover to be, right? I mean, every school’s going to have turnover just due to life changes. And it’s certainly not. I think what a lot of us fear, which is, Hey, half my staff is going to quit if I hold the line on something. And you certainly have not found that to be the case.

Justin Johnson (26:33):

And I think I would probably fear that too if I was going out and going to tell them, Hey, I don’t know. We’re going to change and we’re not going to do all this stuff we’ve been doing. But it’s got to be really embedded in the inquiry process itself of getting their feedback and really making the staff part of the decision itself and not skirting the responsibilities of making decisions, but making sure you have their input. And when we say we’re doing something, it’s not just me as the principal telling them that they have to do something. It’s the collective saying, this is how we think we’re going to do it. The big thing is they have to buy into the systems itself. The pieces are going to stay the same. And if you don’t agree with those or if you don’t agree with really staying sticking to pacing guide or things like that, that’s where the big difference in philosophy can come in. And I’m not going to lie though. There have been a few times that I go to ‘em and I’m say, Hey, we’re going to try this. Give me some time. But I think I would hope that they trust me at this point that they know that there’s some reason I’m asking ‘em to do it at this point. But I don’t know if I’d start with that strategy from the jump as a brand new principle.

Justin Baeder (27:43):

That’s a really great point. And you said earlier that this work has been developing since 2014, so it’s not like you woke up one morning and imposed this on everyone. It’s really been a building process over more than a decade.

Justin Johnson (27:55):

And the thing that really helped us, I mean, I’m not going to lie, we have to give a ton of credit to the school’s name is Jill Dore Elementary in Auburn. It’s over on the west side by Seattle. And our old principal, who’s, like I said now, our superintendent, he did a bunch of research and found that they have, their demographics of kids was very similar to ours. The languages that they were, it wasn’t Spanish that they were coming to school with, but it was other languages still language learners. Low income was very similar. They had the same amount of paras. I mean, we just went down the list and our schools on paper were very, very similar, but they were just heads and tails above us as far as academic proficiency for their kids. And so we went and learned from them, and this is the system in 2014, when we came back, we just took theirs and said, guys, they’re doing better than us.

(28:45):

We just have to give this a shot. And so we took their stuff and we implemented it, and now our teachers are versed enough in it that we’ve changed it quite a bit to fit us. But what we did at that point was we just laid it out and we said, Hey, what we’re doing isn’t working. These guys have figured out something that does work for our kids. Instead of spending tons of time and energy and this to try to come up with our own system, why don’t we just take that and see if we can give it a go? And so the teachers bought in and we went with it, and like I said, it’s just been in a constant state of revision since then. Love it. Love it. Yeah. I think a big thing for a principal in a seat that wants to try something like this is getting your superintendent or your assistant superintendent of teaching learning or however your district sets it up, getting them on board to give you a little freedom to try.

(29:38):

Because I think we as principals can get really scared too of, well, what if I try something and it doesn’t work? My job’s on the line, I’m going to be out. So if I just tow the line and do what they said, then it’s not my fault if something goes wrong. And so I think really working with the layer above you of here’s why I want to try some different things. Here’s what I want to try. Maybe, like I said, for us it was finding somebody that was doing it and going and visiting and then saying, Hey, this is what it could look like for our kids. Can we, can we give us a year or two to try to figure this out and not feel so much pressure? I think that would be maybe a little bit of my advice to principals that want to try work like this, because there’s going to be times where not everything you try is going to work a hundred percent, and not everybody’s going to be super happy. Some of your teachers might be going to their union saying, Hey, we don’t like this. But if there’s some understanding of why you’re doing it, I think it can take some of that pressure off to at least give it a go.

Justin Baeder (30:37):

Great advice. Great advice. Because anything is hard work before it shows results, and there’s definitely the potential for the pushback to sink a change before you see if it actually had the impact that you wanted it to.

Justin Johnson (30:49):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Justin Baeder (30:51):

Well, Justin Johnson, thank you so much for joining me on the Eduleadership Show. It’s been a privilege.

Justin Johnson (30:56):

Thank you for having me.

Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong? Higher ed’s maximally inclusive approach hurts those it attempts to help, by Alan Levinovitz in Chronicle of Higher Education

What do time accommodations do to the predictive value of LSAT scores for legal education?, by Derek T. Muller, Notre Dame Law School

The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring, by Benjamin Bloom in Educational Researcher (1984).

The late Robert Slavin on Proven Tutoring—one of his last interviews on Principal Center Radio

Joe Liemandt of Alpha School on the Invest Like The Best podcast—listen: Spotify, iTunes

Full Transcript:

(00:00):

Welcome to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and in this episode we’ll talk about academic accommodations at elite colleges. We will talk about Bloom’s two Sigma problem, and I’ll share with you a paper of his from 1984 that’s getting a lot of attention today, and we’ll talk about hype in the AI ed EdTech market. First up, over in the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch argues that America’s colleges have an extra time on tests problem. In an article called Accommodation Nation, she outlines the surge in academic accommodations, especially extra time on tests that’s happening in elite colleges.

And what’s interesting is this is not happening in all colleges, in its especially not happening in community colleges, which is where you would expect students with disabilities to be concentrated. So something is going on here. She says, at the University of Chicago disability, accommodations have tripled in eight years at Berkeley, they’ve quintupled in 15 years at Brown and Harvard.

(01:14):

Fully 20% of undergrads now have some sort of academic accommodations, and at Amherst it’s 34%. So something is going on here and it is concentrated at the colleges in our country that have the best qualified students, the strongest students academically. Why are they getting these accommodations?

Well, it’s undeniable now that there are simply incentives for seeking out accommodations. These are not the kinds of accommodations students got in K 12. These are not students who had IEPs. These are disabilities that students are self-identifying and reporting to the student Office of disabilities so that they can get some sort of accommodation. And I’ve seen some discussion that the accommodation can be literal on some campuses that you do get preferential housing. Perhaps you get to have a pet with you on campus if you have some sort of accommodation for a disability identified. So there are very practical reasons that students are incentivized to seek out these accommodations, and it’s something that they really have to take seriously and grapple with, especially when it comes to competitive things like law school admissions.

(02:22):

One quote from the article that I thought was worth sharing, she says, if the rise in accommodations were purely a result of more disabled students making it to college, the increase should be more pronounced at less selective institutions than at so-called Ivy plus schools. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. According to Weis’s research, only three to 4% of students at public two year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 or 15 years. And you may remember that Alan Levinovitz had a similar article in the Chronicle of Education last year where he argued that the college disability system was somewhat out of control. And he pointed out in that article that there are real advantages to getting extra time, especially on tests like the LSAT and Derek Muller, professor of law, Notre Dame Law School, said in a blog post that LSAT takers who get accommodations on that test score four to five points higher than test takers who do not.

(03:21):

And as a result, scores over-predict the law school success of students who get extra time. In other words, students are giving law schools a false impression of how well they will do in law school because they’re using extra time to get higher scores than they would otherwise get. And the surge here is dramatic just as it is in undergrad. 6,000 students got extra time in 20 18, 20 19 or requested extra time and 15,000 students requested extra time in 20 22, 20 23. So something big is going on here. I think there’s a concern among people who work in college disability offices that we don’t want any kind of witch hunts here. We don’t want people being questioned about their disabilities. We just want to be able to support all of the students who actually need accommodations. And part of that involves not really worrying about which students actually need accommodations.

(04:14):

I don’t know if that approach is going to hold much longer because as the Atlantic article points out on some campuses, it will not be long if you extrapolate just not too far into the future. It’ll not be long before a majority of students are receiving disability accommodations. So let me know what you think about this issue.

Next up in a segment I’m calling Article Alert. I want to share with you a classic from Educational Researcher published in 1984 by none other than Benjamin Bloom. This article is entitled The Two Sigma Problem, the Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring. Now interestingly, this article is getting a lot of attention lately because a lot of companies are trying to develop AI tutors that can produce those elusive two sigma gains. What is interesting about this article though, and if you read the article, you you’ll no doubt recognize an approach that John Hattie has continued of reviewing different studies and trying to find effect sizes that can ideally be stacked up to produce large learning gains, right?

(05:19):

If something has a one standard deviation impact, maybe we can do two of those things and have a two standard deviation impact. So I think the intent here is really good. The goal here is really good to improve learning to figure out how to do school in ways that will improve learning dramatically for large numbers of students. I think the issue in this article is that the original research has not held up. It has never been replicated. So we currently do not have a model that allows us to produce those two sigma gains. That finding has just not held up. So the idea that we would build EdTech in order to match those gains in a cost way I think is also not going to hold up. If anyone is going to promise that an EdTech product can produce those two sigma gains, they’re going to need to realize that that would be unprecedented.

(06:08):

We do not have tutoring models or anything of the sort that can reliably produce those two sigma gains. There were some unique experimental conditions, there was extra time, there were lots of things about those original experiments that resulted in them not really being replicable and scalable as solutions to gaps in learning in K 12 education. So it’s an interesting article. I want to encourage you to read it and I think you will recognize, again, many of Hattie’s ideas about stacking different practices. I think we do need to think seriously about tutoring. We need to continue to pursue tutoring as an effective support for lots of students who are behind. But we have to recognize that it is going to take time and we ultimately run out of time. We may be able to devote some money to tutors, but we still have time in the day that we have to provide for that tutoring to take place.

(06:59):

Now, I mentioned that AI and EdTech companies are picking up on this idea of a Two Sigma problem and trying to develop AI based applications that will help students learn much, much faster. There is no better example of this than Joe Liemandt of Alpha School who was on the Invest Like The Best podcast back in August and talked about what he believes is possible with AI tutoring. And of course we have to recognize that AI tutoring is not the same as one-on-one tutoring with a human. There are some big differences and we have to recognize that even human powered tutoring did not actually achieve those two Sigma impacts. But Joe says in the podcast, you can take in kids who are behind and if they’re learning twice as fast, they’re going to catch up. So you can take a kid at the 50th percentile and get them to the top 10%.

(07:53):

Again, all of this is really unproven and I’ll be happy to eat my words if there is proof that emerges that this is actually possible. I think the challenge about catching up though is if you take a kid who is at the 50th percentile, they are at the 50th percentile because they learn faster than some kids and they learn slower than some kids, and the top 10% is in the top 10% because they learn faster. So if you give the same opportunity to all of the kids, if all of the kids have the opportunity to learn more quickly with whatever AI or other ed tech technologies we come up with, well the kids who are in the top 10% currently are going to stay there because they are going to learn faster as well. The only way we can get a distribution, like the very tall squished graph on the right in Benjamin Bloom’s chart is if we devote so much time to a topic that everyone masters it completely.

(08:48):

And again, the challenge here is time we run out of time, we want to move on to other things. There is more to get to, so I don’t for even a moment believe Joe’s contention that you can take a kid at the 50th percentile, run them through an AI platform and get them to the top 10%. I think there is some real potential here. I think Alpha is developing some tools that really can help students who are very motivated and who are at the top already learn even faster, which is not a bad thing, but I think we have to be very careful about buying into the hype. Let me know what you think.

(09:20):

That’s it for this episode of the Edueadership Show. I also want to encourage you to check out my podcast Principal Center Radio, where I interview authors about their books. You can check that out at Principal Center dot com slash radio.

Twitter: Alpha School students score in the 98th percentile

UCSD Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions Final Report (PDF)

A ‘Steep Decline’ in Students’ Academic Preparation at UC-San Diego Struck a Nerve

Sweden Went All in on Screens in Childhood. Now It’s Pulling the Plug—How Sweden is rolling back the phone-based childhood, by Linda McGurk

Full Transcript:

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and in this episode we’ll talk about the challenges of researching micro schools. We’ll talk about math preparedness among incoming students at the University of California at San Diego, and we’ll talk about how Sweden is rolling back the high tech childhood. Let’s get to it. First up, a new article in the 74 million argues that researchers are finding it nearly impossible to gauge the impact of micro schools. Micro schools are popping up all over the place. A lot of states have new laws and new access to funding that is causing micro schools to proliferate phenomenon that really took off during the pandemic, but has stuck around. And as Linda Jacobson explains, in the 74 million, it is actually very difficult to study the impact that those micro schools are having. She says that researchers at the RAND Corporation actually had to give up their original plan to study the data from those schools because the data mostly did not exist, and they instead had to shift their focus to why it’s difficult to study micro schools.

(01:25):

Apparently the primary reason for the lack of data said one researcher is that a large number of micro schools are not opting in to do these assessments in the first place. So in order to be able to show growth, a school has to have its students take say the NWEA MAP exam twice, once in the fall and once in the spring. And they found that out of 271 schools that they set out to study, only 10 had the necessary data. And a lot of this, I think, comes down to the fact that parents who put their kids in micro schools often are opposed to testing. The article quotes one spokesperson as saying, others argue that parents are the best judge of whether their children are learning. The number one measure that we have to demonstrate that these programs are working is that the parents are happy according to Lindsay Burke, who’s quoted in the article.

(02:16):

And obviously if these are private schools that parents are paying for, well, their opinions are valid, that’s worth paying attention to. But if these are schools that are receiving public funds, that makes it incredibly likely that there is going to be more scrutiny, that there is going to be more demand for accountability. And so far, researchers are not really able to assess the quality or impact of micro schools because that data is not available. So watch this space. I said we’d be talking about this last week when I talked about Alpha School and Alpha School seems to still be at it. They seem to have their developers and other team members touting the benefits of Alpha School on social media by saying things like Alpha School students score and the 98th percentile on standardized tests. I’ve heard things like that from numerous people at Alpha School.

(03:06):

I think maybe the school is putting them up to saying these things. And yet, as we talked about last week here on this show, alpha School has declined to provide Wired Magazine with proof of its claims with internal evidence that it is doing what it is claiming to do as far as accelerating students and getting them to learn much faster. I think what is much more likely to be going on with that 98th percentile claim if it’s true, which I don’t have any reason to believe it’s not true. I think what’s probably going on there is that this is a selection effect. Alpha School is $40,000 a year. They have one campus in Brownsville, Texas that’s $10,000 a year. And whenever you’re charging that much tuition, you are strongly skewing your student population toward kids who are already at the 98 percentile. So we’re not really able to assess the impact of the school itself or the impact of the model that’s heavily driven by AI that’s used in alpha and similar schools.

(04:01):

Next up, faculty at the University of California at San Diego have sounded the alarm that students are coming in with very inadequate preparation in mathematics. And this began going back to 2016. The faculty has pretty good procedures in place for screening and placing students in math classes. And they have had for a long time some remedial classes to catch kids up if they’re admitted, but then they need some foundational work to get them ready for college math. Well, according to the new senate administration work group on admissions, which released their report just earlier this month, they said in the fall of 2022, the number of students placed into the remedial course Math two rose from about 100 to nearly 400 and by the following year to about 500 students. And that was just far more than they were prepared to teach. They really had to scramble.

(04:56):

And one thing that’s going on here is that in 2021, the University of California system made the decision to stop considering SAT and a CT scores at all. So that put the University of California campuses in a position of relying on high school grades much more heavily to make admissions decisions. And that means that we’re getting kids with bigger and bigger gaps. The report says alarmingly the instructors running the 2023 and 2024 math two courses, the remedial course that was intended to cover high school concepts observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. Now, most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further to middle and even elementary school, elementary school gaps among students who are admitted to a highly selective flagship state university. I think there is really no escaping the need to go back to the SAT and A CT in order to identify kids who are adequately prepared for the rigors of a particular college program.

(05:57):

And of course, there are lots of University of California systems. There’s a robust state university system, community college system, as well as the flagship uc system. But I don’t see any way to distinguish between the many, many high school students who have very strong GPAs due to grade inflation without using a standardized test like the SAT or the A CT. But let me know what you think. Lastly in after Babel, the Substack publication by Jonathan Het of the anxious generation author, Linda McGirk argues that Sweden is going back on the digital childhood. She explains how she moved her family to Sweden in roughly 2018 and was just really surprised at how tech friendly everything was and how students had just adopted technology at an incredible and harmful rate to an excessive degree with middle school kids on Snapchat and kids on their devices all day in school and just far too much screen time.

(06:57):

Well, Sweden is a small country and not one to shy away from bold social experimentation. And she reports now on how Sweden is pulling the plug on technology in childhood and going back to their roots as being a very nature centric and free play based society. And she says that the idea that students should play a lot in nature was kind of applied unthinkingly to the internet and to devices and that students were just kind of let free to do their own thing on technology. And that did not go the way people expected it to go. Letting kids play outside is one thing, letting them roam freely online is quite another. And she says that screens were challenging one of the most quintessentially Scandinavian things, the nature-based childhood. So their society has made quite a few changes in recent years, including implementing phone bans all the way up to away for the day policies coming soon nationwide in Sweden, they are returning to physical textbooks and getting away from laptops and things like that that put students on devices during the day and going back to pencil and paper materials.

(08:07):

And they are increasingly educating parents about how much kids should be on technology at different ages. So I think these are all really encouraging signs for our society in the US where we can make many of the same choices. We have many of the same issues going on where we’ve gone too far, where technology for kids, including at school, including at home, including for very, very young children. And we can roll this back. I’m thinking about how we dealt with the crisis around the hole in the ozone layer many, many years ago. Something that you may have even forgotten about. But there was a hole in the ozone layer caused by chloral fluorocarbons, which we banned and it worked, right? We rolled the problem back and it worked. And I think we’re seeing the same thing starting to happen with kids and screen time. But let me know what you, lastly, make sure you subscribe to all of our other shows here at The Principal Center.

(08:59):

We’ve got the teaching show at teachingshow.com and have been having a great time interviewing classroom teachers about their practices that they use in their particular subject. I’ve been having a great time as well with Principal Center Radio now with over 500 episodes in the archives, featuring interviews with authors and leading experts in their fields. And lemme know if you have guest recommendations or if you’d like to hear me talk about a book on Principal Center Radio, we’ll try to get the author on for an interview. And lastly, we have a couple of members only shows called the Instructional Leadership Show, which is all about classroom walkthroughs and making time for instructional leadership and dealing with that core work of teacher supervision and evaluation and professional growth. And we are bringing back one of our members only shows called Ascend Live. And if you watch for the links carefully, sometimes you can attend that live for free.

(09:51):

And then we have the recordings in our members only archive. And Ascend Live is all about the admin job search, and I’m particularly excited to expand our focus a little bit to talk about having a job created for you if you’re looking to stay within your organization, but move into a slightly different type of work or take on some additional leadership responsibilities. So keep an eye out for Ascend Live and our related job search trainings and shows. That’s it for this episode of the Eduleadership Show. I’m Justin Baeder and I’ll see you next time.

Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out—Wired Magazine

No, kids aren’t learning 10x faster with A.I.—learning is hard work, and only human teachers can motivate kids to sustain effort for hours and hours a day to learn everything they need to learn. (Justin Baeder on TikTok)

In Defence of Striving: What we can all learn from Texas high school mariachis, by Quico Toro in Persuasion

Netflix: Going Varsity in Mariachi

How One District Made Pickleball an Inclusive Varsity Sport, By Jaclyn Borowski & Yi-Jo Shen in Education Week

Montgomery County Schools Corollary Sports

The Teaching Show

Principal Center Radio

The Instructional Leadership Show—exclusively for members of the Instructional Leadership Association

Full Transcript:

(00:00):

Welcome to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and in this episode we will talk about Alpha School and perhaps unrealistic claims that are being made about how fast students learn under its AI driven, teacher free model. We’ll talk about earnest striving and varsity mariachi, and we’ll talk about varsity pickleball and corollary sports in one Maryland school district. Let’s get to it.

First up, wired magazine released something of a bombshell investigative report on Alpha School, the Texas private school chain that is getting a lot of headlines that is being pushed pretty hard on Twitter these days. And the headline of their article is Parents Fell in Love with Alpha School’s Promise then they Wanted out. And I have to give some kudos to wired for some in-depth reporting on Alpha School because I’m hearing about this all the time. I’m seeing incredible claims made about how fast students learn under Alpha’s model and Wired’s reporters just did their homework to a really remarkable extent.

(01:18):

Now, if you’re not familiar with Alpha, this is a school network that has been founded in Texas by some very, very wealthy people, billionaires, people who are behind tech companies, and a lot of what they do in their businesses is create the software that is powering the Alpha School model. And Alpha is unambiguous and unapologetic about the fact that they do not have teachers. This is entirely AI driven instruction for two hours a day. And the idea is you come in in the morning, spend about two hours doing various apps and get all of your academics that way, and then you spend the rest of the day working on fun projects, different workshops, group activities, things like that to get the social interaction. And as a model, I am not ready to throw this out. I don’t think it is a terrible thing to try.

(02:07):

This actually came up on my Dr. Phil episode. We talked a little bit about models like this, and I think there’s some promise here. There are some things that we can learn from models like this. I don’t like that it’s teacher free. I don’t like that. Students have to basically open a support ticket to talk with someone who has some expertise in their subject area because the guides on campus are not supposed to help with academics. So I think there are some very strange things about Alpha and some very basic mistakes that the people running Alpha are making. But what I wanted to concentrate on and what the Wired article does, I think great reporting on is the claims about academics. And to put these claims in context, you got to understand that Alpha is $40,000 a year. It’s a private school, and the tuition is $40,000 a year at their Austin campus and I think other locations.

(02:53):

And then they have a campus in Brownsville, Texas where there is a SpaceX Star base. And on the Brownsville campus tuition is $10,000 a year. And the Brownsville campus is what the Wired article focuses on. And what’s interesting about the claims that are being made about Alpha is that initially Alpha was making some claims about how fast students were learning under their model. You have two hours a day to sit down on a computer with their AI apps and get all of your learning done. And I believe to a certain extent that students can learn fairly efficiently in that way. Now, whether we want them to, whether we think that’s a good thing, is a different question, but I think students probably can learn, okay, on a computer for two hours a day. But when given the chance to prove their claims and to demonstrate how much their students were learning and how fast their students were learning, alpha repeatedly declined to provide Wired Magazine with any evidence for those claims.

(03:47):

And I’m seeing those claims and more outlandish claims being made on Twitter. I saw a tweet and did a video about it in which someone affiliated with a different school that’s using office technology said that kids are learning 10 times faster. Again, I’ll grant that with good technology, kids could learn a little bit faster. I don’t think they’re going to learn 10 times faster though. One of the main reasons I don’t think that is that motivation is going to play a huge role after a while. And I would encourage you to read the Wired magazine story to hear a little bit more about how Alpha School attempts to motivate kids without teachers. And I think this is a little bit grim and a little bit indicative of what you’re left with after you take teachers out of the equation. They have points, they have a store, they have apps that they’re required to earn a certain number of points on, and there’s a lot of reliance on extrinsic motivation and a lot of just grinding through computer-based activities that frankly does not seem super pleasant to me.

(04:44):

And I think, again, there’s promise here because we’re not talking about a whole ton of the school day. We’re talking about very efficient learning, but this does not sound great to me, and it certainly doesn’t sound worth $40,000 a year, and it certainly doesn’t sound like it could result in students learning 10 times faster. I think if anything, it’ll end up producing kind of similar results to traditional schools. It’s just a different way to approach things, but it’s certainly not going to get students to learn 10 times faster. Now, we’ll talk about this on an upcoming episode of the Edge of Leadership Show, but I want to point out that it is very, very difficult to assess how effective private school models are for one simple and impossible to ignore reason. And that is tuition. When you are charging $40,000 a year, you’re going to attract a very different student population that is going to respond very differently to instruction, and that’s going to make it difficult to compare your particular model to any other model of school, right?

(05:38):

There are not a lot of public schools with traditional enrollment doing Alpha’s model, and it’s very, very difficult to study it. And when you have students who can afford $40,000 a year tuition, you’re probably working with students who aren’t going to be super dependent on your instructional model. Those students are probably going to do fine. They’re probably going to get into elite colleges because of their family wealth. So I think it’s very difficult to study this kind of thing, but I’ll share with you some research next week on how researchers are attempting to do that and what we can learn from their efforts so far.

Next up, I wanted to highlight a very interesting story in the publication Persuasion, which normally focuses on political science, but has a very interesting article this week called In Defense of Striving, which was written by Quico Toro, who I believe is a Canadian citizen living in Japan.

(06:31):

And bear with me on the line of thought here. He talks in this article about what we can learn from Texas high school Mariachis, and he came to some of these conclusions after watching a Netflix documentary that I’ll tell you about in just a little bit. But he connects it in what I think is just a fascinating essay to a Japanese concept called Majime. And he, as I mentioned, is Canadian, but lives in Japan and has kids that go to school in Japan. And he says, one of the hardest things to explain about what it’s like to live in Japan has to do with a single word mame. It means something like earnest striving or wholesome seriousness. That’s easy enough to understand. What’s harder to wrap your head around is the role it plays in Japanese society where majime attitude is the default setting for social interaction.

(07:20):

And he contrasts this with the typical American attitude of the detached teenager, the Gen X cynicism, that some of us grew up with the idea of being too cool for school. And at a societal level. I think it’s quite possible to think that that holds us back, that our lack of earnest striving holds us back as a society. And that’s something that probably is a cultural asset of Japan. But on a flight, he found a documentary, the author Qui Toro found a documentary that highlighted an example of earnest striving in American culture, specifically in Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. And there was a documentary that talked about the culture of high school competitive varsity mariachi bands. You may not have known that those existed. I didn’t know that there was competitive varsity mariachi in Texas, but there is a documentary about it going varsity in Mariachi.

(08:15):

And he says, if you follow the stories of some of these students, you see that earnestness. You see that desire to really work hard and achieve a great thing. And I think we can often find that in some of our student activities that you may see students not really caring that much in their academic subjects, but you can see some real striving when students work together in a subject like band and in a particular subject like competitive varsity mariachi. So check that out over at Persuasion, and let me know what you think. Lastly, a school district in Maryland is adding varsity pickleball as one of three corollary sports. And I found this very interesting and very encouraging Education Week reports that the Montgomery County School District in Maryland has added pickleball, bocce ball, and softball as competitive interscholastic sports that combine basically general education and special education students, students with disabilities and students without disabilities working together in corollary sports.

(09:20):

And what I love about this is that it is still competitive. You are still playing against other schools in the district, but the competition does not take the front seat, right? You’re playing against other people. It’s a real thing, but it’s not only for those who can compete at the most elite level. And I think if I had, one thing that I could complain about with sports in the United States is that we push the competition so far that we lose a lot of what’s good about it, and we lose the opportunity for a lot of kids to participate at all. I think when sports becomes merely a vehicle for elite status reproduction, right? Like when you are a leading family in town and you can put your kids in all the elite sports and you can pay for the travel teams and the camps, well, that doesn’t really create the kind of opportunity that supposedly we have athletics in schools to create, right?

(10:11):

I think a lot of the rationale for having sports be school-based programs is that they create opportunity for students. They can get college scholarships and lots of good things can happen that create mobility and opportunity for students. Well, if those opportunities are closed off to many, many, many students, then I think a lot of that rationale disappears. But I think an alternate rationale is, Hey, it is a good thing to be part of a team. It is a good thing to be a part of a physical activity. It is a good thing to develop a lifelong fitness habit and passion that you can take with you after school. So I don’t think they’re going to win state. I don’t think there’s going to be a state tournament in pickleball. Maybe there will be, but I think this is probably a good thing. Their head coach says, this is what it’s all about, getting them to feel like they belong and they’re part of something.

(11:00):

And I feel like if we can get more kids to feel like they belong and are part of something, we will have more learning. We will have fewer kids dropping out, and we will have better outcomes at the societal level. Lemme know what you think. Lastly, I want to highlight some of our other shows that we produce here at The Principal Center. One that just launched is called The Teaching Show, and I’ve had the opportunity to publish at this time, three great interviews with educators about different aspects of teaching and different pedagogies that come up in different content areas. So we’re not shying away from specific content areas in the teaching show. And I would love to have your feedback on the episodes we’ve dropped so far, as well as your input on who I should talk to and what we should cover in upcoming episodes of the teaching show.

(11:45):

You can subscribe completely for free at teachingshow.com. I also want to make sure you know about my long running podcast Principal Center Radio. We’ve done about 500 episodes of that over the past decade, and you can subscribe in your favorite podcast app or at Principal Center dot com slash Radio. Principal Center Radio is a book focused long form podcast. So we typically record for 20 to 25 minutes and go in depth on a single book with the author or authors. And I’ve had the privilege of speaking with just some incredible people, some of the luminaries of our profession, people who are household names, and you can hear from them firsthand on Principal Center Radio. Now I have one more show. We do a total of four shows a week currently, and the last show is the Instructional Leadership Show, and this is our members only show that is specifically on instructional leadership strategies for school administrators. So we talk about how to get into classrooms, how to have feedback, conversations with teachers that change their practice, how to integrate your classroom walkthroughs into your school improvement work and much more. And you can learn more about the Instructional Leadership Show and our Instructional Leadership Association membership at Principal Center dot com slash join. That’s it for this episode of The Eduleadership Show. I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you next time.

My kingdom for a reliable curriculum review, by

The “Just Tell Them” Trap, by

Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching, with on Principal Center Radio

When the staff decides to bring their own chairs to PD without telling admin, by @AbbySchnieders on TikTok

Full Transcript:

(00:01):

Welcome to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and in this episode we’ll talk about curriculum reviews and what we need from them. We will talk about the, just tell them trap and some considerations about teacher talk and student talk when we’re using explicit instruction. And we’ll talk about what happened when teachers brought their own chairs to professional development. Let’s get to it.

First up, let’s talk about curriculum reviews and the organizations that provide them. Journalist Holly Korbey has a new article that I want to share some insights from that echoes something that you may have heard in a recent update to the Sold A Story podcast by Emily Hanford. If you heard Emily’s recent updates on the Steubenville School District, you might’ve heard her talk about how the curriculum that they’re using from Success for All is not on the list or was not on the list of Ed Reports, a major nonprofit that provides curriculum reviews.

(01:11):

And that episode got some of the national conversation going on curriculum review organizations. But Holly Korbey has done an in-depth article on curriculum review called My Kingdom for a Reliable Review, where she explains what the different types of curriculum reviews do and what we need them to do. And one occasion for her looking into this and talking about it is that the CEO of Ed reports one of the major organizations and the one that declined to initially put Success for All on its list, their CEO is departing in 2026. And Holly wonders if perhaps there is a sea change coming, a new opportunity to improve curriculum reviews. But take a look at some of what Holly says in her article over at the Bell Ringer. She says, reviews are only produced by groups of educators and no researchers or experts are consulted. And reading and math programs that use techniques unsupported by research have received the coveted green light, while others that have been proven successful often through randomized controlled trials have not creating confusion.

(02:15):

And what she’s talking about here is, of course, success for all, which has been proven to be highly effective through randomized controlled trials, as well as other approaches. And the reason that those approaches have not made it onto the list of ED reports is that Ed Reports is looking at one particular thing. Holly says, ed Reports is mainly looking at Common Core alignment. And of course, that’s not the only thing that we may be concerned with. But there are other reviewing organizations such as the Federal What Works Clearinghouse, which she says they do efficacy reviews of curricula. And the What Works Clearinghouse database is interesting because what they also look at is the quality of the evidence itself, not just the quality of the programs that are studied. They look at the quality of the studies. The Knowledge Matters campaign is also looking at knowledge building.

(03:04):

And the Reading League tool evaluates evidence-based reading materials. And some of their concerns include whether students have the opportunity to read whole books. And I’ve been engaging with this issue lately and looking into what the different components of a good curriculum need to be. And I think there is some legitimacy to the idea that students do need to be reading whole books. They do need to be building knowledge systematically. And right now we don’t have one organization that can provide all of the types of information we need when reviewing curriculum. And if we make a list of all those different issues, they are standards alignment again, which is what Ed Reports does with the Common Core standards. They look at does this curriculum cover what it needs to cover? Second, is there evidence that the curriculum works? And this is outside of the scope of ED reports.

(03:49):

You can have an entirely new and unproven curriculum that gets the green light from Ed Reports, even if it doesn’t have any evidence of efficacy. And I can see the point there that people should be able to come up with new standards aligned curriculum and get it to be tried in schools. We shouldn’t have to prove that something works before anybody is allowed to use it. But at the same time, we do have mounting evidence about specific programs and we should make decisions based on that evidence. And the third criterion is the quality of evidence. Now, there’s a little bit of potential for confusion here because sometimes the evidence itself can be very high in quality. A study done by researchers on a curriculum can itself be of high quality, but the curriculum that it’s studying may not actually work very well. This high quality study may demonstrate that a curriculum is in fact mediocre and has almost no impact.

(04:40):

Fourth, we can look at whole Books and fifth, Knowledge Building. And I have to say personally, my kids have really benefited from a knowledge building curriculum wit and Wisdom in elementary school. And I think anytime we’re not taking advantage of the opportunities that we naturally have in school to systematically build students’ knowledge, they’re not going to be as effective. Students are just not going to have the opportunities they have to learn and to develop the schema and the background knowledge that they need to read at high levels and go on to advanced study. So let me know what you are looking for in curriculum reviews.

(05:12):

I think one final point that Holly makes that’s worth mentioning is that we do need organizations that are dedicated to this. We simply do not have time. Policy makers don’t have time. District decision makers don’t have time to review every single curriculum and every piece of evidence about it. There needs to be a coordinated kind of FDA style clearinghouse for this type of research about curriculum and evidence about curriculum. But let me know what you think.

(05:35):

Next up, in a new article called the Just Tell Them Trap British educator, David Didau takes a little bit of an issue with the title of Zach Groshell’s book. Just tell them to make what I think are some very good points. He has in the subtitle of his article, how Direct Instruction Gets Mistranslated as Teacher Talk lecturing and all sorts of other dull bobbins. And he’s referring here to Zach Rochelle’s excellent book. Just tell them the power of explanations and explicit teaching, which you can learn about on Principal Center Radio. We’ll put a link to my interview with Zach Rochelle in the show notes. But this is a great book on explicit instruction. But David’s argument in his article is that the fact that explicit instruction is a good thing does not mean that teachers should simply talk all the time.

(06:25):

And that may be obvious to us, but in reality, people hear things like just tell them and get in the habit of just telling kids stuff and not getting them to do anything. And I think there are two critical distinctions here in David’s article, and then I’ll share a couple of quotes from David. The first distinction that Zach Rochelle points out in his book is that explicit instruction is far more effective than what we might think of as constructivist or discovery learning, right? If we want students to know something, to understand something, to be able to do something, it is far more effective to explicitly teach them how to do that and to get clear on what we want them to learn and figure out the best way to teach it, to explain it, to model it, to help them practice. Explicit instruction is not even close, far more powerful than any kind of discovery learning.

(07:14):

However, that doesn’t mean that the proper role of the student in explicit instruction is passive. Students need to be active. And this is much of what David talks about in his article, that students need to constantly be doing something other than just listening. So explicit instruction cannot just be the teacher talking and the students listening. David says, fully guided instruction is not monologue, but dialogue. It’s structured interaction. Teachers explain model, question, check, and adapt in response to what students show. They understand. Effective teachers design a high ratio of participation constantly assessing attention and comprehension and holding students to account for the quality of their thought. So yes, tell them. Tell them clearly. Tell them well tell them again, but don’t just tell them. Make them think, speak, write, and argue. If the purpose of explanation isn’t to expand students’ thoughts so they can think the unthinkable and the not yet thought, then it results in an impoverished classroom experience. So check out that article over on David’s website and let me know what you think.

(08:19):

Lastly, I wanted to share a video from TikTok user, Abby Schnieders, who caption this video when the staff decides to bring their own chairs to PD without telling admin, take a look, return to the Mac up.

(08:34):

What it’s looking for, a better way to get up, getting on the internet and checking new of somewhere between y’all walking here is a party been, and we did it. Music I my skin, and put my bones into everything I record to that stage, light on down. Got that game, my style money sucks. Stay on my and stick around for those. Do trust me. And so 14.

(09:12):

So a lot of fun can be had when teachers bring their creativity to things like this. And I’ve seen PD sessions where teachers brought their own camping chairs and a campfire and grass carpet, lots of fun that could be had here. But there are also some serious points made in the comments over on Abby’s TikTok. One teacher said, I was 34 weeks pregnant with twins, and we had a full day of PD sitting in the cafeteria tables. I dragged a comfy chair in from the student lounge, so I wouldn’t die of pain. And another teacher says, because why are we expected to sit on bleachers for hours with no back support? Sorry, but we are not children. And I can also attest to the challenge of sitting in chairs that are made for children, especially if they’re made for kindergartners or first graders. Look, the reality is adults need adult seating.

(10:00):

They need chairs that are a little bit padded that have back rests, not the cafeteria tables or benches or bleachers that just don’t have any back support. And honestly, metal folding chairs are not good enough either. I think we need to make people comfortable enough that they can actually pay attention and not have the seating be a distraction. And a sofa may be the way to go. A beanbag may be the way to go. I’m not sure about that. I personally need to kind of sit up at a table to not get too sleepy. But let me know what you think about, bring your own chair. That’s it for this episode of The Eduleadership Show. I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you next time.

Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices by Douglas Carnine (2000) (PDF)

Schools Are Accommodating Student Anxiety — and Making It Worse, by Ben Lovett and Alex Jordan (originally published behind a paywall in the Boston Globe)

Accommodations for anxiety are often counterproductive. Justin Baeder @eduleadership on TikTok

Corn in the Horn—Bryan Akers on Facebook (read the comments for more stories of odd objects found inside band instruments)

Full Transcript:

(00:01):

Welcome to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and in this episode we’ll talk about stopping the pendulum swings and making the education profession one that’s based on evidence. We will talk about why some accommodations for anxiety may be counterproductive and ultimately not helpful for students. And we’ll talk about the band director who found corn in the horn. Let’s get to it.

(00:40):

First up, Douglas Carnine, the Professor emeritus of the University of Oregon and founder of the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators, has a new article out published by Robert Pondiscio over at The Next 30 years. And in this article, he argues strongly that we do not have a research based profession, that education is not a profession that takes research seriously. And he outlines a plan for turning it into one and making this a profession where we make decisions based on evidence and we don’t revert to discredited practices.

(01:16):

Now, you may recognize Douglas Carnine’s name from a paper he wrote about 25 years ago called Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices and What It Would Take to Make Education More Like Medicine. And in his new article, he picks up on that argument, which has a lot of updates. We’ve had a lot happen in the last 25 years, and he argues that we’ve essentially kept doing the same thing. We have allowed the profession to swing back and forth between different priorities that are not driven by research. He says, professions grounded in evidence don’t revert to disproven practices, but education does—it lurches on a pendulum swinging back and forth between approaches already tested and found wanting.

(01:57):

And he says, if we want to be an evidence-based profession, we need five basic things. And those five things are a shared knowledge base, research aligned educator preparation for teachers and administrators, licensure that is rooted in competence.

(02:12):

In other words, we should actually have to demonstrate that we are able to teach or able to lead before getting licensed accreditation with teeth. In other words, certification programs should be held accountable through the accreditation process if they’re not teaching what they need to teach and preparing graduates the way they need to. And then fifth, accountability for quality of practice.

(02:31):

And he says other fields have all of those characteristics. They meet all of those criteria. Medicine, aviation, there are lots of industries, lots of professions that meet those criteria and yet we don’t. So what should we do about it? Carnine suggests putting in place three particular guardrails. First, a shared knowledge base where we can agree this is what the research says, this is what the research says we should do and what we shouldn’t do. And that has been a challenge in our profession.

(02:58):

We are continuing to battle discredited disproven practices that we know are not a good idea. They live on far longer than they should. Second, he says, we need implementation tools to support educators with effective practices. And then finally he says, we need a consortium of states and districts. So check out that article over at the next 30 years. We’ll put a link in the show notes as always, and lemme know what you think of this argument and this approach. I think curriculum is kind of the missing ingredient here. I think it’s great when we can agree on what the research says. We have not shown that as a profession, we do a great job of agreeing on what the research says and then acting on it. But I think curriculum is a promising way around that limitation in our profession if we have a vulnerability around how well we do with research, well curriculum can be designed based on quality research and then that curriculum can be implemented even if not everybody who’s implementing the curriculum is aware of the research.

(03:54):

So I think there’s an overlooked vehicle here in curriculum, but let me know what you think. Next up, are schools making student anxiety worse by providing unnecessary accommodations? Let’s take a look. Schools are accommodating student anxiety and making it worse. According to a new article by Alex Jordan and Ben Levitt who are psychologists writing for Teachers College at Columbia University. And this is not an outlet that I would expect to say something like this, but I’m glad that they’re saying it because if we at school help kids with anxiety, avoid the things they’re anxious about, what’s that going to do to their anxiety? Well, they explained quite clearly that is going to increase their anxiety. It is going to reinforce the false idea that the thing they’re anxious about is actually dangerous. Like if you have anxiety about public speaking, well, public speaking is not actually harmful.

(04:46):

It’s not actually dangerous. And you are accommodated in that anxiety by getting out of public speaking, getting out of reading in front of the class. If you’re anxious about timed tests and you’re given an accommodation that says, well, you don’t have to take timed tests, you have as much time as you need, that is going to harm you as a student and reinforce the idea that you can’t do it, that you don’t have what it takes, that the situation is just unmanageable. And I think what we’ve got to remind students and reinforce for students whether they have anxiety or not, and what we’ve got to remind ourselves of is that students are capable. Students do rise to challenges and students need to be challenged in order to get an education. So check this article out. I’ll put the link in the comments. Schools are accommodating student anxiety and making it worse.

(05:30):

And they point out that the average student with anxiety gets 20 accommodations in school, many of which are avoidance based. You don’t have to do it. You don’t have a time limit. You can do it privately. You have an alternate format. If the thing that we’re asking kids to do is good for them, we should not let them out of it. In the name of kindness, let me know what you think. I think a good framework for thinking about accommodations is to think about a physical accommodation, right? If you have a student who has a broken leg or perhaps a degenerative disease and is not able to use stairs, well of course you’re going to allow that student to use the elevator. No question. They’re entitled to that accommodation. But think about a student who does not have a broken leg, does not have any kind of medical condition that makes it impossible for them to walk upstairs.

(06:18):

They just don’t feel like it. Well, if we suddenly start accommodating that and treating it as if it’s a much more severe condition than it is, well, what we’re going to see over time is that students become less and less able to walk up and down the stairs and more dependent on the elevator when they don’t need to be right. We risk making students get into worse shape, whether it’s academically or physically when we provide accommodations that they don’t need. And I think we can take the real situation seriously. We can treat it seriously as a medical condition and certainly anxiety can be a very serious condition that deserves professional treatment. But that doesn’t mean that we treat all discomfort or all requests from students and families as if they are serious medical issues. And there was one particular comment, student who’s an adult now and is commenting but had severe anxiety as a kid and got treated at a children’s hospital, would shut down during tests.

(07:15):

And I thought this was the kind of situation that was worth accommodating, right? Where it’s actually serious and it is necessary for the student to benefit from their education. What I think the authors of the article that I just shared are calling for is for as to not provide unnecessary accommodations for students who don’t really need them and to not reinforce anxiety over little things that kids can get used to and do absolutely fine with taking tests or speaking in classes. But we’ve had over half a million views on social media for that video so far, and thousands of comments. So let me know what you think.

(07:53):

Lastly, I came across this post from Bryan Akers, who is band and choir director at Hanover-Horton High School, who was working with some of his middle school students. And he said, I don’t have many firsts anymore, but this was a first.

(08:06):

He had a student whose horn didn’t sound right, it was not working, so he looked inside of it. And what did he find? Corn? He found corn in the horn and some of it was even sprouting. And Bryan concludes. So that’s middle school on a Wednesday for you. If you have a fun story to share from your experience or that you found on social media, please send it my way and we might feature it in an upcoming episode of the Eduleadership Show.

(08:33):

Lastly, I also wanted to let you know that I’m launching a new show called The Teaching Show. You can subscribe right here on substack or go to TeachingShow.com. And what’s different about the teaching show is that I’m focusing on very specific practices. Each episode will be a deep dive on one particular practice with one particular person. And so far I have one episode published with Marcie Samayoa focusing on FASE reading and tiered vocabulary instruction in science.

(09:03):

So check that out and let me know if you would like to be a guest or if you have a guest recommendation for an upcoming episode. But our goal is to focus on practice, to get specific, to talk about those areas of practice that often get overlooked.

(09:15):

So if like Bryan, you are a band director, if you are a choir director, if you are teaching art or an elective class, if you are engaged in pedagogy, that often gets overlooked. I want to talk with you about how you teach. So reach out anytime and go to teaching show.com to subscribe. That’s it for this episode of The Eduleadership Show. I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you next time.

“Makeup work” doesn’t really make up for missing school—Justin Baeder @eduleadership on TikTok

How many nights per week should you be reading? 6-7, by Riverview Elementary School & Dodge Middle School in Farmington, MN

Full Transcript:

Welcome to the Eduleadership Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and in this episode we’ll be talking about scaffolding grade level text with repeated reading, and we’ll look at a protocol for doing just that. We’ll talk about learning on vacation and what we can realistically expect students to get done when they are on vacation. And we’ll talk about how many nights a week students should read. Let’s get to it.

First up, in a new article in the Reading teacher published by the International Literacy Association authors, Jake Downs, chase Young and Alycia Cole report on a study. They did a pilot study with third and fourth grade students and they especially report the results for fourth graders, taking them through a protocol for repeated reading as an attempt to scaffold grade level or above grade level texts. And this is a great paper to read. It’s fairly readable, it is technical, but I think it’s very digestible and introduces a lot of background about reading that may be helpful to you.

The article is titled Promoting Fluency Through Challenge, repeated Reading with texts of varying complexity. And the texts were not part of a single focused topic. They were on a variety of topics, but what the study had them do was work with a paraprofessional head students in say groups of five, work with a paraprofessional over about 50 sessions to read through a text five times, five different ways.

The first way in this protocol, which they’re titling read Like us, was to do a model read. So the paraprofessional, the adult would read through the text fluently to model for students how to read it. And remember, this is a text that’s going to be challenging for students. It may have unfamiliar vocabulary, it may have content that students don’t have a lot of background knowledge on, and that is the point it is to introduce that vocabulary and background knowledge and build students fluency and their ability to pronounce and read fluently and all the elements of proficient oral reading.

So the first read is a model read. Then the second read is an echo read, and the echo read is essentially repeat after me. So I’ll read a sentence and then the class will or the group will repeat the sentence after me. The third read is a choral read and they’re not necessarily doing these all back to back. They may be doing these in subsequent sessions, mixing it up a little bit. But on the choral read, students are all reading aloud together.

Then in the fourth read they’re reading with a partner and then in the fifth read, a student is reading by themselves to everyone else. And I love how this strategy builds in the scaffolding without a whole lot of extra prep work for the teacher or for the paraprofessional. It is simply reading the text multiple times. And I really appreciate the way the authors dug into a lot of the background research on what this builds, why this works, and they actually measured the impact as well.

So I look forward to hearing more on repeated reading and on the read like Us Protocol. And I’m actually looking to interview some teachers who have used this strategy or a strategy like it. So if you have used this approach or you’re interested in trying it, please reach out and I’d love to interview you for a new show that I’m doing more on that soon.

Next up, let’s talk about when students go on vacation during the school year. Now, certainly there are once in a lifetime opportunities, family reunions, special trips, weddings and funerals, all kinds of family events that students will be out of school for. And I think we understand when those things occur, but we don’t want them to occur too often, right? We want students to be on track with their learning and to do that they really need to be in school.

In this video I talk a little bit about why that is, why we can’t really send the whole experience of being in class and learning home with students so they can take it on vacation in some sort of packet form. Take a look and let know what you think.

What parents often don’t realize when they ask for makeup work so they can go on vacation during the school year is that the whole experience of a class in school can’t be reduced to a packet that we can send home, right? At least that was never true for my classes. Maybe if you’re reading a novel, you could send a novel, maybe if you’re working through a textbook like in math, the book itself can be sent home and taken on the trip. But the whole experience of learning as we do in school can’t really be taken with you on vacation.

And I think we’ve got to be honest with people and let them know, Hey, if you need to pull your kid out of school so that you can do a once in a lifetime vacation, or if there’s a wedding or a funeral or some other important family event, do what you’ve got to do for your family and for your life. But understand, we can’t replicate the experience of getting an education in packet form. We cannot truly send home makeup work that is in any way equivalent to what the kid is missing by not being in school. Let me know what you think about this and how that works in your subject. But I was a science teacher and if you miss all of the labs, if you miss all of the discussions, if you miss all of the planning, yes, there are some papers that I could send home.

I’m not going to have them weeks in advance. I don’t think that’s reasonable, but even if I did, you wouldn’t be able to do them on your own because we do them in class. A lot of it’s collaborative, A lot of it requires being there for the teaching. A lot of it requires actually doing the lab and I can’t just send that home when I hear that a lot of families now are booking vacations during the school year on purpose because it’s cheaper. Everybody would like to save money. I understand that going at lower demand times can save you money on vacations. School is important. Don’t pull your kid out of school just to go on vacation just to save a little bit of money. They need to be there for their education. Lemme know what you think. So I think there’s no real substitute for being in class.

And if a student is going to take an international trip, a big national parks vacation, some sort of trip where it’s obvious that they will be enriched by it, I don’t think we need to worry too much about sending work with the student to do on their trip. They’re going to learn some things on that trip, but they’re not really going to learn what they’re missing in class because to do that learning, they kind of need to be in class.

So one thing that I think we need to encourage families to be mindful of is not booking those vacations that fall right before a school break. And often it is cheaper. If you book your vacation a week earlier and miss the last week of school before say Christmas break, you probably will save money and you’ll get a longer break as a result. But when a lot of people do that, it really erodes our ability to use all 180 days of the school year and plan a unit that we can actually teach all the way up until the last day before the break.

If we know half of our students are going to be gone, then we’re not really going to be able to do that. But lemme know what you are seeing in regards to this issue.

Lastly, in our continuing coverage of the critical issue that is six seven, I wanted to share a photo that you may have seen making the rounds from Riverview Elementary and Dodge Middle School in Farmington, Minnesota, where they ask rhetorically, how many nights per week should you be reading? And of course the answer is six seven. As I’ve said before on this show, I think the best way to respond to students overusing the phrase six seven is to just roll with it and not make a big deal about it and use it and perhaps make it a bit cringe. And I think we’ll see this wave crest soon.

That’s it for this episode of the Eduleadership Show. I’m Justin Baeder and I’ll see you next time.

TFA’s Ignite tutoring program

What’s Really Behind the “Southern Surge”? by Natalie Wexler on Substack

Natalie Wexler’s interviews on Principal Center Radio:

• The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How To Fix It

• Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning

Knowledge Matters Campaign

• Knowledge Matters Podcast

• History Matters Podcast

Ms. Gontjes on The Today Show

Ms. Gontjes @thatweirdchoirteacher on TikTok—student-written warm-up

There Are No Miracles in Education, by Freddie DeBoer

Is Mississippi Cooking The Books? by Karen Vaites & Kelsey Piper in The Argument

Emily Hanford’s Sold A Story podcast

Small-Group Reading Instruction Is Not as Effective as You Think, by Mike Schmoker & Timothy Shanahan in Education Week

6 out of 10 Kids Use Their Smartphones Between Midnight & 5am—TikTok @eduleadership based on Jean Twenge’s book 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World—coming soon to Principal Center Radio

Full transcript:

Welcome to the Edueadership Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and in this episode we’ll talk about the “Southern Surge” and specifically the “Mississippi Miracle.” We’ll talk about some smart ways to use small groups, and why overusing small groups can actually reduce learning during the literacy block.

And we’ll talk about what happens when kids plug their phones in in their rooms overnight. Let’s get to it.

First up, in a new publication called The Argument, journalist Kelsey Piper argues that illiteracy is a policy choice, and she in particular takes to task her home state of California for falling behind, and especially falling behind the state of Mississippi.

She says, in a lot of cases, you would actually be better moving from California to Mississippi to attend the excellent public schools there. And what she’s talking about is a set of policy choices that Mississippi has been making for more than a dozen years now that have caused their reading performance, specifically on fourth grade NAEP, the nation’s report card, to just go up and up and up.

And you can see on this graph that Mississippi has passed the national average. It has passed California. California has gone down. The national average has gone down. Massachusetts has gone down. And Mississippi may soon eclipse the reading scores in Massachusetts as well.

And what she points out here is that Mississippi is spending a lot less than states like California and Massachusetts and getting durably superior results. This is not a fluke. This is not something that just happened one time.

And this is not a test that can be easily gained. There is something real here that Mississippi is doing. And we’ll talk about what that is. And unsurprisingly, part of the story is phonics.

You have no doubt heard the Sold a Story podcast from Emily Hanford, where she goes into the importance of phonics and explains why phonics is often overlooked and under emphasized.

And there’s a huge opportunity there, certainly around phonics, but Kelsey Piper’s article in the argument identifies three factors that go beyond phonics. The first of which is state level mandated or strongly suggested and very well-supported curriculum for teaching literacy that is based on the science of reading.

And in the states that are being the most successful, which especially are the southern states, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the emphasis on curriculum can’t be overstated. The states are getting involved. They’re not leaving it up to individual teachers or individual districts.

And they’re saying in sometimes fairly heavy-handed ways, this is what you need to be doing to ensure that all students learn how to read. And those guidelines tend to be fairly well aligned with the science of reading.

The second thing that they’re doing at the state level is providing in-depth teacher training on the specific curriculum that teachers are being provided. So there’s a lot of opportunity for teachers to learn how to teach this curriculum effectively.

And then the third piece is accountability. And this one, you know, people would like to believe that that’s not necessary, that it’s not helpful, but it seems to be that there needs to be some accountability, especially for adults to make sure that students get the support they need.

And one interesting policy that’s been getting a lot of attention this year is third grade retention. The idea that you can’t promote a student to third grade if they cannot read, if they cannot pass a particular reading assessment. And the explanations that I’ve seen for why that works have to do with adult behavior, that when adults are not allowed to pass a student on to the next grade, they realize the consequences of retention are pretty dramatic. So they do whatever it takes. They pull out all the stops in order to get those students up to where they need to be in reading.

Now, despite the ample evidence, despite the long-term trajectory of Mississippi in terms of reading scores, there are skeptics. And one of my favorite skeptics to read is Freddie DeBoer, who has been a testing expert, who has been a critic of education. And he has argued for a while that education essentially doesn’t work, which I don’t agree with.

But I do agree with some of his specific points. He says, you know, we’re not really going to close achievement gaps and we need to be very suspicious whenever we see big gains in a short period of time. And he really dismissed Kelsey Piper’s piece about the Mississippi miracle in terms of just his general observations about how often these things don’t pan out, right? There were various turnarounds that on closer examination seemed to disappear or that seemed to not scale.

And yet in this piece, he doesn’t really look at what is different about the Mississippi situation and about the southern surge, specifically that we’re looking at NAEP data and that we’re looking at it over a 12 or 13 year period. We have very long term data now that Mississippi is actually doing much better.

And when we look at what Mississippi is doing differently, it makes sense. So I think there are no miracles. You know, that may be true on its face value, right? There are no miracles here. There’s only hard work, but there are things that work in education and we need to do more of them.

He says in his skepticism in this article, the odds are very, very strong that eventually it’ll turn out that students in Mississippi and other miraculous systems are being improperly offloaded from the books or out of the system altogether. And this will prove to be the source of this supposed turnaround. That’s how educational miracles are manufactured, through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education.

And I think he is right that selection bias is a very powerful force in education. But you don’t have to take my word that that’s not what’s going on here, because Kelsey Piper teamed up with literacy advocate Karen Vaites to write a follow-up piece rebutting the idea that Mississippi is somehow cheating on NAEP, that they are getting students off of the testing rolls to artificially inflate scores.

So they go into quite a bit of detail in this follow-up article, and specifically talking about retention, there was some concern that maybe students were being retained so they wouldn’t be tested in fourth grade. If you retain a third grader, then they don’t get tested the next year. But there were a lot of ways to check that and ways to see if there’s any funny business going on in Mississippi.

And the authors say, before a student is retained, he or she will be screened 12 times across four grades using a quality screening tool approved by the state. Well-trained teachers will have quality lesson materials and they will know which students need extra support. It’s a system set up to work so that very few students need to be retained in third grade, which is exactly what happens.

So I think this holds up pretty well. I think we will continue to hear a lot more about the Mississippi Miracle and the Southern Surge more broadly. And other states are using different approaches that shed additional light on what is working, especially around building knowledge. So stay tuned here on the Eduleadership show for more on that story.

Next up, in a powerful op-ed in Education Week, Mike Schmoker and Timothy Shanahan argue that small group reading instruction is not effective as you think. And they’re specifically taking aim at the idea that core instruction, that Tier 1 instruction that ordinarily would be provided to the whole class, should not be provided in small groups.

And their fundamental argument here is that when you deliver your main instruction in small groups, you’re cutting your time by, you know, however many groups there are. If you have four groups, well, then you’re eliminating three fourths of the instructional time that each student receives because when they’re not working with the teacher in a small group, they’re doing something that is probably less productive. They’re not learning as much. Maybe they’re doing something that is easier and not really challenging them and giving them the intensive support they need.

And they don’t at all argue against small groups for intervention. They don’t at all argue against small groups working with a tutor or a specialist.

What they’re arguing against is spending the entire literacy block in small groups, which I have found to be quite widespread based on the comments I’ve seen on TikTok. They say, given the stakes, we must ask, is the small group model truly superior to whole class teaching for either reading or foundational literacy skills?

Alas, no, despite recent claims that the science of reading requires small groups. Though small groups can be effective in certain circumstances, any advantage is wiped out by the model’s drastic reduction in the amount of instructional dosage. And Mike Schmoker in particular has been talking about dosage for a very long time.

And he argues that we have a lot of opportunity to improve in this profession by simply teaching more, by fitting more in and not allowing ourselves to waste time with things like small groups when we could be using whole class instruction just as effectively.

They also talk about some of the downsides of attempting to differentiate, especially when it comes to core tier one instruction. Differentiation has not been such a good idea for guided reading, they say. As John Hattie has demonstrated in his meta-analyses, differentiated instruction is less effective than providing the same treatment for all students. It denies struggling students the opportunity to engage with challenging material and texts as they fall further and further behind. In this way, small group differentiated instruction is especially hurtful to the poor and underachieving students who most need effective teaching.

And again, I think the opportunity here with small groups is to use them for intervention, to have students work with an interventionist, with a reading specialist, with a tutor, with someone who can provide more, not replacement instruction that is taking them away from that core instruction.

Lastly, I wanted to share with you some insights from my recent interview with Jean Twenge, who will be featuring in an upcoming episode of Principal Center Radio. I sat down with Jean to talk about her book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World, and I wanted to share just one thing that I took away from that book. Let me know what you think about this. a shocking six out of ten kids use their phones between midnight and 6 a.m when kids go to bed with their phones they don’t really go to bed and even if they do go to bed they wake up in the middle of the night and get on their phones either to text their friends or because their friends are texting them or they’re calling them

Lots of kids are apparently up in the middle of the night doing who knows what. And the best case scenario is that they’re just talking to their friends. It gets worse from there. But as Jean Twenge says in her new book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World—I just talked to her for Principal Center Radio and we’ll get that interview published soon—as she says... One of the biggest risks, even if nothing bad happens, is that kids will simply not get good sleep and sleep is linked to lots of things like you’re much more likely to be depressed and anxious if you are not getting enough sleep.

And if kids are going to bed with their phones in their rooms, they are not going to get enough sleep. And the average age now of getting a cell phone is 10 or 11, not 14, not 15, not 16. 10 to 11 years old. So even in elementary school, we have kids who are on their phones between midnight and 5 AM when nobody should be on their phones. Everybody should be asleep. Kids are texting each other. Kids are calling each other.

And we as adults have to be the ones who say, this is one of our rules. This book is called 10 rules to give your kid, not suggestions, not things to talk about with your, yes, talk about them. but they need to be rules that come from adults because we need to make sure that our kids are not only safe, but that they’re also getting a good night’s sleep. Let me know what you think. So watch for my interview with Jean Twenge coming soon to Principal Center Radio.

And if you’re not already subscribed to Principal Center Radio, you can find it on Spotify, YouTube, or iTunes, or whatever your favorite podcast app is. That’s it for this episode of The Eduleadership Show. I’m Justin Baeder, and I’ll see you next time.

Kelsey Pomeroy—an analogy for how AI undermines learning

Grade-Level Content When Kids Are Below Grade-Level—Justin Baeder on TikTok

Is 3rd Grade Retention the Secret to Better Reading Outcomes—Or Something Else? By Sarah Schwartz in Education Week

All Things Being Equal: Why Math is the Key to a Better World—John Mighton on Principal Center Radio

John Mighton’s JumpMath curriculum

Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival—30-minute video

Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival—free book

Follow mister_firth on Instagram, TikTok, or X/Twitter

Edutopia: Why Students Should Read Whole Books, by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, & Erica Woolway

Beyond the Science of Reading, by Natalie Wexler

Animal Care partners with Bloomington High School’s vet tech program to help shelter pets prepare for adoption

Overview from National Center for Youth Law

The High Costs of Classroom Disorder, by Neetu Arnold

Sharon Kramer & Sarah Schuhl—Acceleration for All: A How-To Guide for Overcoming Learning Gaps

Mr. Lamb on Instagram & TikTok

AR Bell To Bell No Cell Act

Urban Institute: Changes to SNAP Could Reduce Student Access to Free School Meals

Robert Talbert: Alternative Grading and Deliberate Practice (Substack)

Download: Classroom Visit Notecards

(00:00):

Eduleadership show for August 12th, 2025. I'm your host, Justin Bader, and in this episode we'll talk about some eggs that hatched on campus and they were not chicken eggs. We'll talk about what teachers should be evaluated on versus what they typically are evaluated on. And we'll talk about a high school principal who gave a campus tour with a script that was written by Gen Z and Gen Alpha students using their slang, and that was a lot of fun. So let's get to it. First up, I've been asking for your animals on campus stories and so far you have not disappointed. Cheryl writes, I taught at a rural K 12 school and a student brought the science teacher some eggs. He had found the teacher who was a stereotypical absent professor type, put the eggs under the chemical hood and forgot all about them. That is until they hatched, not into chickens, but into several bulls, snakes, which slithered down the hall, creating chaos.

(00:53):

So if you have had an experience like that, let me know if you have photos or video even better. But we're going to continue featuring animals on campus. Just for fun here on the Edgy Leadership Show. Next up, let's talk about teacher evaluation. I mentioned Charlotte Danielson recently, and anytime I mentioned Charlotte Danielson or teacher evaluation on social media, I get a variety of responses from teachers, some of which seem to believe that teachers should not be evaluated at all, that there should just not really be any system of teacher evaluation. And I get that response because I get that lots of people have been treated in ways that they perceive as unfair. It's never fun to be evaluated, and evaluations, frankly, are not always done well, and that is not a secret or a mystery to Charlotte Danielson. And I've worked with her, I've had her as a professional developer in my school district and have learned from her and seen her speak many times, and I think she has one of the best systems out there.

(01:46):

But she is very aware that her system is not always used in the most constructive ways. And really, she even designed it originally for reflection and professional growth, not for teacher evaluation, but then it ended up being kind of the best framework, the best rubric for teacher evaluation. And now it is the most popular framework out there, but I think it's worth asking what really should teachers be evaluated on? Because a lot of people feel like the Danielson framework is unfair, especially if they're working with less privileged students. And I personally used the Danielson framework in my professional certification portfolio fairly early in my career, and one of the things that I found was a little bit unfair was the description of level four, right? If you wanted to be at the very top of the rubric, not just satisfactory but exemplary or whatever your organization calls it, beyond satisfactory, there are some things that feel like they're a little bit outside of your control.

(02:37):

As a teacher, you can control what you do, but level four requires students to take ownership, requires students to do things, and I think a lot of people feel like those are not always possible no matter what they do. I think they're a good vision to strive for. I think that level four practice is a good vision to aim for, but I think if you feel like sometimes you're really going to have a realistic shot at being able to reach level four, just because of where your students are coming in from, how far you can get them is not going to get to level four practice. So I think we need to think about this question of what should teachers be evaluated on? And there have been different takes on that over the years. There have been the four domains and more recently the Danielson clusters, and there are lots of other systems.

(03:22):

Marzano has a system, Kim Marshall has a system, strong has a system, and your organization may have its own system of criteria for teacher evaluation. And I think on one level we can look at the domains, we can look at the criteria and say that's what we're evaluating people on. But I think at the heart of what we're doing in teacher evaluation, what we're examining, it's not so much the song and dance. Like yes, there may be things like do you explain things clearly? Do you manage the classroom? Well, there are some outcomes, but ultimately what I think we need to be getting at in teacher evaluation is professional judgment. Is this teacher making decisions that were the right decisions for the moment? Because the moment is not always ideal, right? It is not always the perfect lesson where everything is going well and you can just teach it without interruption.

(04:08):

And students learn it, they understand it, they have the background knowledge they're expected to have, and everything just goes smoothly. Teaching often requires making the best of the circumstances. Maybe you had a really great lesson yesterday and half the class missed it so they didn't get what they were supposed to in order to be ready for today's lesson. That's the type of situation that teachers are in every day and that they have to make the best of. So I think we need to look for ways to evaluate teachers based on professional judgment and what they did given the circumstances, not just the outcome, not just the test score, not just the did students take leadership of everything, but did the teacher make the best possible decision under the circumstances? Lemme know what you think. Lastly, today on the Edgy Leadership Show, you may have seen that a high school principal, Mr. Martin at East Forsyth High School did just a fabulous campus tour video using a script that was written by students. This was featured on the Today Show, and he said, I don't know what most of this stuff means. I hope I'm not saying anything too bad. I want to share this with you because I think it is just terrific, and I just really appreciate Mr. Martin being such a great sport here.

(05:22):

Hey, besties. Welcome to Eastery where we serve looks. And lunch. I'm your principal, Mr. Martin, and today I'm taking you on a tour that's busted respectfully. Let's wrap. Flex on all the haters in the weight room. Our students don't skip leg day or class period. The barn is where it's at. Stack up on East Drip in that bold, blue and orange. Plus all the spirit wear. You need to stay repping hard with your fit on point.

(05:51):

Go touch grass out in the courtyard. Don't be sleeping on this chance to soak up the sun during lunch. Low key, obsessed with the food capture table. Be a real one and drop off your UNE food here. How many letters are end of our, you won't drip on a budget, say less. Come to the thrift store to pick up a fit that will give you plus 1000 oral points. Food's down. The Bronco market is my Roman empire. The grub is delicious and affordable. Hashtag free theater has been straight fire lately, drama band and chorus are all slaying every performance. This is the eSports room where our gaming team full of sweats, collaborate. Strategize and bring home the dumps. Jess. Here we have the Google rooms where you and your fam can escape the brain, right, and work together peacefully, no cap. So you about to cook or get cooked on your next test.

(06:53):

Cooking.

(06:54):

I'm in my self-care era. The wellness space is super demure, super mindful. Come on in. For support groups, breathing and straight vibes want to lock in on your future college and career room is getting academic chance. Whether you're clocking tea or sipping on it, the Bronco place is the perfect area to hang with. Homies, catch me spending my whole paycheck on coffee. When you're feeling pressed or even shook, these chat rooms are the perfect place to get in your fields.

(07:23):

If you know

(07:26):

I'm a full-time Bronco's care stand, catch me clocking volunteer hours like it's my nine to five I high key. Love when we help out a school like this. Okay, sigmas, we're nearing the end of our tour. Mad props to you for following me along all of your Bronco loves got me shook. Stay rizzy, Mr. Martin out. Stay repping hard with your feet. Fit on wellness space is super demure. Super. How do you say that word makes no sense. Okay,

(08:05):

I do that again, we got to do that again. Alright, so kudos to Mr. Barton of East Forsyth High School for being just a great sport and playing along with students who wrote him. I'll say a very challenging script and hopefully everybody had a great time. If you have other stories like this, send them my way and I'll feature them on an upcoming episode of the Edgy Leadership Show. If you'd like to learn more about teacher evaluation, I want to encourage you to join me for the Evidence-Driven Teacher Evaluation Certification program. This is a program that you'll find is compatible with any teacher evaluation system and process, but that focuses on evidence and focuses on professional growth through conversation. So if you're interested in having a greater impact through the teacher evaluation work that you do without having to redesign your process, check that out at Principal Center dot com slash evaluation. That's it for this episode of The Edge of Leadership Show. I'm Justin Bader and I'll see you next time. You can subscribe for full episodes@eduleadership.org.

Nason Lollar: The Peter Principle Is A Dangerous Myth

Meghan O’Rourke: I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students

MIT Media Lab: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

Get a free subscription to The Marshall Memo when you join the Instructional Leadership Association

Principal Center Radio: Marc-Oliver Gewaltig—Thesify.ai: Scholarly Writing in the Age of A.I.

Full Transcript:

(00:00):

Eduleadership show for August 11th, 2025. I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and in this episode, we'll talk about a Yale poetry professor who tried chat GPT and shared some of her reflections in the New York Times. We'll talk about "Ride your Horse to School Day and we'll talk about promoting people to their level of incompetence. Let's get to it. First up, you may have seen photos like this making the rounds on the internet. There's an old urban legend in Montana that a state law that is still on the books requires school principles to care for any horses that students may ride to school. And there's been some investigation. I don't think there actually is a state law that says that, but it becomes a fun senior prank every year in a number of Montana schools and perhaps other places. And I just think that's a ton of fun.

(00:47):

The principals are always good sports about it when students ride their horses to school, but we're going to have a recurring segment on this show called Animals on Campus, and I would love to know what your experiences with animals on campus have been, whether those are animals that students bring, like horses or perhaps a smuggled in kitten or puppy. I have some personal stories that I'll be sharing and I would love to hear some of your stories. I've got one lined up for tomorrow and can't wait to share some of those with you, but send me your photos and videos of animals on campus. And if you don't have photos and videos, that's okay to send me your stories and I'll share them here on the Eduleadership show. Next up, I wanted to share a new blog post by my friend Nason Loller, who is the author of 5 Principles of Educator Professionalism: Rebuilding Trust in Schools.

(01:33):

Now, Nason joined me a few months ago to talk about the book on Principal Center Radio, and we'll put a link in the show notes to that interview. Nathan's a very thoughtful middle school principal and he has a new blog post called The Peter Principle is a dangerous myth, and it's all about growing people, especially when they're in new leadership roles. Now, if you're not familiar with the Peter Principle, this goes back to I think the 1960s. There's a book called the Peter Principle, and the idea is that people rise to their level of incompetence. People rise to the level of their incompetence. And what you have to know about the Peter principle is that it's satire. It is a management satire book. As Nason points out, I'm not sure how many books you've read in the management satire genre, I've read maybe one or two, but it is kind of a different animal.

(02:20):

And what you have to understand here is that they're not recommending any particular course of action in this phrase. They're just making an observation that often what happens in organizations is that people are good at their jobs, and those people are naturally the very people we consider for promotion. So that when we have a vacancy, we have a leadership role that we need to fill. We think of people who are on the rise, who have demonstrated competence in what they're doing and are ready for more responsibility. The observation here though, I think is often correct, that when people get put into a new role that requires new skills, they don't come in with those skills. Many of those skills are developed on the job, and we can't always hire for those skills. We can't screen in advance and say, okay, who has these skills? We're only going to consider people who have all of the skills that it will take to do this job successfully.

(03:06):

So often people do end up in jobs that are challenging for them that they have to learn, that they have to develop new skills and they make mistakes. But I think what Nason points out so well in his critique of our popular thinking about the Peter principle is that learning is always necessary. And he says, this is one of my favorite quotes from his blog post, competent people struggle because they're learning. We should not see an instance of the Peter principle as proof that we hired an incompetent person. If we're giving someone more responsibility, that should be challenging to them, that should require them to grow, and that growth and that learning are good things. So read the article. We'll put the link in the show notes over on Nason’s blog. I think it's very thoughtful and I think it really reinforces for me the importance of believing in people's ability to grow, believing in our own ability to grow.

(03:57):

It also for me is a good reminder that there is value in growing your own talent and promoting people, and not just hiring from the outside anytime you have a senior vacancy, but growing people and believing in people and being patient with people while they learn what they need to succeed in a job. And I think this idea that we're always going to be able to hire people who already have everything they need just doesn't hold up very well because those people aren't very common and we can't usually afford them. They're hard to come by in terms of experienced leaders. So often we are growing our own people, and that's a good thing. And you should read Nason’s article if you are interested in that topic. Now, a question I wanted to ask you is have you seen people get promoted too fast? Because what NA is not doing in his article here is suggesting that we should just promote people fresh out of college, give 'em a promotion, give 'em a promotion, one after another, and soon our superintendents are 22 years old.

(04:48):

Obviously, that is going to be a problem if we are promoting people too quickly and there is a learning curve to any job, but there's also danger in promoting people too quickly. There should be some developmental processes. We should have maybe some minimum years of experience. We should have some indicators that someone is ready for more responsibility, and I would love to have your thoughts on what those indicators are and maybe what has happened when you've seen people get promoted too quickly.

(05:15):

Next up, I wanted to share a New York Times essay, a guest opinion essay that I thought was one of the best takes I've ever seen on artificial intelligence. And it's by Megan O'Rourke, who is the executive editor of the Yale Review and a professor of creative writing at Yale University. So someone who knows a bit about writing. And the headline is, I teach creative writing, and this is what AI is doing to students.

(05:39):

And it's a really interesting article because she shares how she ended up using chat GPT very successfully to kind of take on some of the mental load of life, like help me plan meals with these ingredients and that my kids will like, and all the little things that we have to think about so that she could focus more on her professional as a poet, as a creative writer, as a teacher of creative writing, there are things that we can offload to chat GPT, and we're happy to have them carry that load, right? I still use a shopping cart at the grocery store and I lift weights. I don't have to carry my own groceries all of the time. And I think we can all look for opportunities like that to allow AI to carry some of the load, but we have to be very careful.

(06:19):

And this is a very, very insightful essay on the dangers of allowing our students to rely too much on ai. And she cites a study by the MIT media lab called Your Brain on Chat, GPT accumulation of what they call cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing tasks. And you can click through to read the study itself from the New York Times article. But basically in this study, what they did was they had students write essays on three different occasions. So the same students got to experience all three conditions using AI, using only a search engine and using neither one and just relying on their own brain. Now, I want to ask you to stop and think for a second. What do you think happened? What do you think were some of the findings among these different conditions of having students write an essay with and without search engine and ai?

(07:08):

Well, not very surprisingly, they found that using AI and then to a lesser extent using a search engine reduced brain activity, they actually hooked people up to machines and measured their brain activity. It reduced recall their knowledge of what they had written, and it reduced their ownership of their work. And I think when it comes to the work that students are doing in the classroom, we want students to be engaged. We want that brain activity. We want them to remember it because often we're having students do writing not for the sake of the writing itself, but to learn the content and to engage with the content in a deeper way so that it sticks and they understand it. And we want students to take ownership of their ideas, especially with something like creative writing. So all of these to me, seem bad, and I think we need to be very, very careful about using ai.

(07:58):

So here's a quote from the article. Students often turn to AI only for researching, outlining and proofreading. The problem is the moment you use it, the boundary between tool and collaborator, even author, begins to blur. First, students might ask it to summarize A PDF. They didn't read then tentatively to help them outline, say an essay on Nietzsche, the bot does this and asks if you'd like, I can help you fill this in with specific passages, transitions, or even draft the opening paragraphs. So as she points out, AI can be helpful with what you ask it to do, but it will also offer to go beyond what you ask it to do. And there's a constant temptation there for students. They're perpetually going to be tempted to offload their work that is supposed to result in them becoming educated to ai. So what can we as educators do about this?

(08:50):

This is going to be an ongoing conversation for years, I'm sure as the technology continues to mature and become a of our society. But one very simple thing that I've heard a number of people recommend is to simply make students show their work. And you could do that with a pencil and paper in the classroom. If you're having students work with no technology at all, that's totally fine. Have them use note cards, have them use a pencil and paper and watch them do their work so that they didn't have AI do it. If you do want to use more modern tools, a very simple one is revision history. If you have students write in Google Docs, let them know, Hey, I want you to have all of your work done in Google Docs. Don't copy and paste from anywhere else. Actually type it out in Google Docs.

(09:29):

You will be able to see if they did that by checking the version history. So if you go to file version history, you'll see an option that says, see version history. And you can watch them type word by word their entire essay. So it'll be obvious if they copy and pasted from ai. And of course, there are lots of other tricks, and I think the article does a good job of running down some of the drag that it is to try to catch students cheating with ai. I don't think this is mostly about cheating. I think it is primarily about learning and making sure that we're not undermining the goals of the learning by using tools that are supposedly there to help. And I'm reminded of a conversation that I had on Principal Center Radio a while back with Mark Oliver Alig, who is a scientist and researcher, and one of the founders of Sify, a scholarly writing platform for the age of ai.

(10:21):

And he said, essentially, you wouldn't go to the gym and use a forklift to lift the weights. There would be no point to that. And similarly, you wouldn't want students to write an essay for their own development to help them learn, to help them grow as writers, and then use AI to do it and not benefit from that work because they didn't do the work themselves. So we've got to really be thoughtful about the assignments that we give, about the tasks that we give and keep the focus on learning. So this was a great article in the New York Times, again, it was called I Teach Creative Writing, and this is what AI is doing to students. And I would encourage you to check it out because she really does share some great ways that she used AI productively, but also some things that were kind of a unnerving and about teaching it to write in her voice and kind of the dissatisfaction that came from seeing that writing come from her.

(11:10):

So there's a lot there. There's a lot of good stuff. And I want to give credit to my source for finding that article. I did not come across this in the New York Times. I came across it in the Marshall Memo, which is Kim Marshall's weekly roundup of important ideas and research in K 12 education. So what Kim does every week is he reads a stack of newspapers and magazines and journals, and he picks out the best articles and he summarizes them. And I think these summaries are so good that I not only read them every week, he's been doing this for like 20 years now. I not only read them every week, but I buy a subscription for all of our Instructional Leadership Association members. So I highly encourage you to go to marshall memo.com or you can go to Principal Center dot com slash join if you want everything we offer in the instructional leadership. And you will get a Marshall Memo subscription so that you can keep up with the latest news and education research. And I'll try to share some of my favorites here on the Eduleadership Show as well. That's it for this episode. I'm Justin Baeder, and you can subscribe and read the transcript and find all of the links that I mentioned in this show at eduleadership.org.