The Line

Playing It Out

I took a picture last week for the blog of kids who had recently finished a book of choice. In it, you can see the distinct personalities of some of my students: Anita, sweet and proud; Angus, trying to look like he can hypnotize you though the camera lens (he’s reading Astral Travel); Jack and James, brothers in arms, using their stars as goatees. The stars are the results of a random post-Christmas trip to a local store, where packs of twelve were less than a dollar each. I started to hand them out two weeks ago, with no fanfare, to students who let me know they had finished reading a book independently. (I provide ten minutes each day for kids to read whatever they want, and wish I had more. Kids log their titles in an individual book log, which is a simple and effective way to chart progress towards a reading goal–no x or y plots needed, and they do all the work.)

I introduced the stars with some nervousness. I happen to work right down the road from Dr. Ed Deci, who has done thirty years’ worth of excellent and damning research on extrinsic reward systems. It can be best summed up as this: all those pizza parties, erasers, and sticker charts don’t work. They can even decrease a child’s internal motivation in school, which leads Deci and his colleagues to advise against using them except extremely sparingly. It makes the rabid and unexamined presence of rewards in school all the more worrisome.

Marzano discusses this research on rewards extensively in Chapter One. I wish he hadn’t concluded his thoughts on such a hopeful note about them (top of page 17)—I don’t think it’s justified–but I also appreciate the line he’s trying to walk. Human beings need to be supported in their good efforts, plain and simple. But how to do that without having my kids’ book logs be about acquisition and competition?

So far, a couple of weeks into using stars, I see both benefits and disadvantages. My seventh graders are young enough to be delighted with the stars, particularly when I make a point of telling them that they can do whatever they want with them. (Several of them, boys included, are accessorizing with the loose glitter.) Beyond that, though, kids are genuinely proud of earning them, and–surprisingly–aren’t flaunting them to their peers. I sense that my downplaying stars helps the kids accept them as recognition, not buy-off. (In my discussions about extrinsic rewards with middle school kids, it’s clear that students know when they’re being manipulated by rewards.)

However, I’ve also had enough students suddenly “remember” books they’ve finished, making me a touch suspicious. There’s no way to police this, of course, so I ask a few questions to see if they sound like they’ve actually read the book, and usually give them the benefit of the doubt.

I remain on the fence. The power of physical symbol—of something in the hand, reminding you of the good you’ve done—cannot be denied to students, nor should it be. So I suspect there’s a way to do this that is better than what I’m doing, but I haven’t hit on it yet. For now, I’m enough of a romantic to smile at the idea of my students walking around school, glowing with the golden dust of books they’ve read.

Stuck in My Head

On p. 15, sitting rather unobtrusively at the top of the page, is this statement: providing two formative assessments per week of teaching results in a percentile gain of 30 points. This nugget of information, is the one that I have most easily implemented. I asked myself: well, ok, Dina—do you make this average?

Truth is, I do and don’t. As an English teacher I have a natural bias against summative assessments (”A piece of writing is never done!” I declare to cheerfully groaning students), and so my formative assessment practice is pretty robust as a whole. However, I don’t often make two a week. It may seem an arbitrary figure, and fairly easy to sniff at for that reason, but the truth will out. When I made a concrete point of scheduling a formative assessment twice between Monday and Friday, I found I had a much healthier idea of what my kids did and didn’t know, and could adjust my teaching accordingly.

This, I believe, is the major benefit of discussing effective practice as Marzano does: it helps me identify, support, and refine good stuff I already do. I don’t think this happens nearly enough, as I’ll discuss below.

Take Away This

I should be thinking about the people I respect who were delighted to see this blog get up and going. But I find myself mulling over those people I respect who may not be so delighted.

A fellow English teacher over at Bill Ferriter’s wonderful blog, The Tempered Radical, recently left an understandably angry comment over the new and unsupported requirement of his administration to have teachers write learning goals with students, and create charts for those goals. (Sound familiar?) Ken Rodoff, one of the quirkiest and most thoughtful teacher trainers out there, sent me this fun clip, some lyrics of which are “Marzano, Marzano, Marzano . . . thirty years of instruction down the drain!” I wonder about the frustrated, if not hostile, audiences which may have driven him to create this humorous video.

You can see my response at Bill’s blog here, and I think it sums up my sorrow. In the “data-driven,” accountability-frantic school culture which has flourished under NCLB, a book like A&S can be seized upon as a silver bullet. Yet telling teachers to shove their established practice into a “Marzano box,” without first asking how much of that practice already is effective, leaves them feeling pigeon-holed and undervalued. Simultaneously, administrators who have recognized the great benefit of Marzano’s work are left twisting in the wind by jaded practitioners who have closed their minds to new information.

Dr. Marzano himself is aware of this danger and warns against it. Quoting another researcher, he writes in the Introduction: “I doubt whether another two decades of research will . . . help us specify a model for all seasons.” In otherwords, he is urging his audience to honor the fact that the book is about making the universal principles examined locally relevant: as much about the art of teaching as it is about science.

But is it, actually? Obviously I’m not too far into the book yet, but I find myself hungering for more real life examples of how Marzano’s science intersects with an effective classroom’s art–how graphing a goal can work in a social studies classroom as well as in a math one, for example, or how kids can still write good goals about content they haven’t learned yet.