Harvard Ed. Magazine, Winter 2016

WINTER 2016

Learning from our...

September 18, 2015 During a discussion in Askwith Hall, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was many things. At times, talking about the need for more young people to go into education, she was serious. “We need you,” she said.

“This country is in real trouble.” She was thoughtful, reeling off sobering statistics about the exploding cost of higher education and student loan debt that has jumped $100 billion in one year. “I want you to think about that,” she said, letting the number sink in. “That debt load is squeezing more young Americans, and squeezing them hard.” During the question and answer period, when asked about the push to defund Planned Parenthood, she was fiery, nearly jumping out of her seat to talk. “This is not 1955. We had this fight. I thought our side won,” she said. “We’re not going back. … We’re ready to fight.” And toward the end, talking about her favorite teacher, Ms. Lee, Warren was teary-eyed. “She was wonderful. She kept telling me what I could do,” she said. “It’s a funny thing about Ms. Lee. I don’t have any particularly inspiring line from her, but what I remember is that she loved us.” to watch a video of the event:

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JILL ANDERSON

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

EDITOR IN CHIEF Lory Hough lory_hough@harvard.edu SENIOR DESIGNER Paula Telch Cooney paula_telch@harvard.edu DESIGNER Angelina Berardi angelina_berardi@harvard.edu ASSISTANT DEAN OF COMMUNICATIONS Michael Rodman michael_rodman@harvard.edu

departments 04 CONVERSATIONS 06 APPIAN WAY 42 NEWS AND NOTES 48 CAMPAIGN

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Katie Bacon Leah Shafer Jeff Wagenheim ILLUSTRATORS Catherine Lepage Marc Rosenthal Daniel Vasconcellos PHOTOGRAPHERS Jill Anderson Matt Weber COPYEDITING Marin Jorgensen Abigail Mieko Vargus POSTMASTER Send address changes to: Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 20 University Rd. 6th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138 Š 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Harvard Ed. Magazine is published three times a year.

contents WINTER 2016

Mistakes Were Made

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No Exceptions

There’s Nothing Soft About These Skills

And when they’re made in a classroom by students and teachers?

All the better.

Roland Fryer, a recent addition to the Ed School faculty, says he’s not deterred by the challenge he’s set for himself: erasing the achievement gap for all those students whose prospects are dimmed by it.

In a time when standardized tests are criticized by some for being educational cookie cutters, there’s growing interest in the skills young people need that go beyond academics.

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THE STORY HAD Our most popular article in the last issue was “Beyond Average.” The story focused on Lecturer Todd Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07, and his quest to help us understand that when it comes to people — including students — there is no average.

This issue of “fit” is exactly what helped Rose go from being that struggling student, the “troublemaker” with a 0.9 GPA in high school, to a Harvard professor with a doctorate. I cried when I read this article. I think about my students, think about their academic reports, which cannot define who they are. I do believe and see their talent as individuals, while I know their struggles in school as well. It’s time to focus on each one of them, to know them and draw out their potential. They can be the best of who they are. Can’t waste the gifts from God. — liz tipton xiao, fuzhou, fujian, china

8,943

UNIQUE PAGE VIEWS. READERS SPENT AN AVERAGE OF

8 MINUTES & 3 SECONDS

READING THE PIECE.

Great insight into what we are facing with making sure that all children are not treated as average and looking at cognitive ability versus age grouping.

— monica cabico A new and better way of framing an idea that has been around and a great idea of how to get it off the ground. And adjustable seats?

Now we take them for granted. So many great things seemed stupid or untenable once. (I said once, “Sell water.”) Individualized education NOW is not ridiculous. It happens every day in special education classrooms as much as the system allows — as much as we can get away with sometimes. You go boy! You get those Hollywoods to do it again. I wish I could help you — sounds like fun.

— claudia darrow, teacher, south shore charter public school

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I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article and it has made me more determined than ever to carry on trying to create more individualized programs for students here in South Africa.

— linda bradfield, johannesburg, south africa Valuable insights and an important read.

Our present educational system is desperate for the compassion and creativity Dr. Rose’s new pedagogical “lens” would help to provide. As educators, parents, and concerned citizens, let’s do what we can to make this vision reality.

— julie kraushaar zurcher, ed.m.’89

It takes compassion, interest, intelligence, time, and money (to buy the preceding things) to think of people as individuals and to plan with them rather than for them. Cheaper and easier to shoehorn them into educational and economic niches than to hire enough individuals (teachers, counselors, social workers, nurses) to work with individuals (students, jobseekers, clients, patients) as individuals. I wish there were enough testimonials from people like Rose for us to guess how much talent we would gain from an individual approach — and how much we’re losing now.

— pamela heydt, university of louisville

In our fall 2015 issue, the story on the Landmark School for students with languagebased learning disabilities (LBLD) spurred thankful letters from readers, especially Landmark parents and students.

Thank you for this article on Landmark! (“Decoding Drake’s Dream”) I am so very grateful that my child has this “second chance at school” — I only wish all LBLD kids could have the Landmark experience. I truly feel that because of Landmark, my child has a future. There is a huge need for reform in special education and parity in access to schools like Landmark and Carroll [School, in Lincoln, Massachusetts]. Without resources it is very hard to get district funding; it’s a long, hard fight.

—liza vincent holland My son became a student of Landmark as an eighthgrader this academic year. I am grateful for all the talented staff here.

— kathy janvrin gelsomini Thank you. Great article. If it wasn’t for Drake, I don’t know where I would be today!

— pete spezia, 1984 landmark graduate

Tell us your thoughts and ideas on Facebook or Twitter: harvardeducation, @hgse twitter.com/hgse facebook.com/harvardeducation youtube.com/harvardeducation

DREAM A look at the school that Charles Drake, Ed.D.’70, started more than four decades ago to help students who were like him: struggling with dyslexia and other language-based learning disabilities. by brendan pelsue photography by kieran kesner

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n the leafy campus of the Landmark School in Manchester, Massachusetts, math program director Chris Woodin, Ed.M.’89, stands in front of what can only be described as a contraption: a grid of ropes and pulleys attached to the side of a building, each rope with a plastic pennant flag tied to the bottom. Along the edges of the grid, numbers painted on boards mark out Cartesian coordinates — the horizontal edge is x, the vertical edge is y — so that the whole wall is a three-dimensional version of the graphing planes that generations of middle school math students have dutifully plotted out in their notebooks.

“Let’s take a simple equation: y=2x,” Woodin says with the gusto that tends to overtake him when he explains how he teaches math. “Okay, now if x is zero, what’s y going to be? Zero, because two times zero, right? So our flag here where the x value is zero” — he indicates the pennant at the far left corner of the grid — “is not going to move, right?

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“But if we take a step over here, where x is one, what’s the y value going to be? Two, because one multiplied by two is two, right? So let’s do that.”

Woodin hoists the x=1 rope until it is level with the 2 value on the y coordinate plane. “And if I keep going, pretty soon you’re going to have a pretty good illustration of what it means that y=2x,” he says.

He’s right. The rope grid is the abstract Cartesian coordinate system made physical, and it’s only one of many nontraditional tools he’s developed for teaching math concepts to students with language-based learning disabilities (LBLDs), the population Landmark has specialized in teaching since it was founded in 1971. On the same campus, he’s constructed an oversized clock, a gridded outfield for rotations and transformations, and a baseball wins-and-losses chart for percentages. In each case, the thinking is the same: If students can associate the abstract language of

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hen Drake founded Landmark, he was looking to fill a need he had experienced first hand. As a young man growing up with dyslexia in Braselton, Georgia, he often struggled with reading and writing despite public-speaking skills that helped him in a successful first career as a minister. One teacher even laughed when he wrote an essay about wanting to be a writer. To cope, he developed a technique of breaking reading tasks down into their smallest possible units — a practice that allowed him to count success in small ways and on his own terms.

These habits held him in good stead over the 10 years that he completed his doctorate at the Ed School, where he studied with Harvard Reading Laboratory founder Jeanne Chall, who empha-

sized an individualized, explicit, phonics-based approach to reading instruction. After graduating in 1970, Drake ran a dyslexia diagnostic center in Wellesley, Massachusetts, but found there was nowhere to send his clients once they were diagnosed. He had teaching experience from running remedial summer reading programs at Hebron Academy in Maine and decided it was time to start a school of his own. It would service students with diagnosed nonverbal learning disabilities and what they describe as “average to above-average” intelligence. And it would teach according to six core principles that still guide the Landmark School today: 1. Provide opportunities for success.

2. Use multiple modalities.

3. Offer micro-unit and structure tasks.

4. Ensure automatization through practice and review.

5. Provide models.

6. Include the student in the learning process.

These principles would be enacted throughout the curriculum but primarily in one-on-one daily tutorials where students would focus on their specific areas of weakness. Often, this meant breaking words down into phonemes and morphemes, their smallest parts, in order to decode the mechanics behind more complex ideas like meaning and syntax. But approaches varied.

All learners were different, Drake thought, and their instruction should be, too.

With little cash on hand, Drake procured a mortgage on an old brick mansion in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts, about 30 miles north of Boston, by using promissory notes from friends and HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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It took me 10 long years to get my son to Landmark and a village of supportive professionals who gave their time to make it happen. No parent should have to fight that hard with their school just so their child can learn to read. I am so happy it referenced the change needed in Washington as there are so many dyslexic supporters lobbying for change there as well as in Massachusetts. My son has been at Landmark a total of two weeks. He is a different person than he was prior to us getting him there and I will be forever grateful.

— nicole fuccione mitsakis

It only seems fitting that in this issue of the magazine, an issue that praises the importance of making mistakes when it comes to learning, we should point out two mistakes that we made in the fall issue: In our feature on the Landmark School, we wrote that Charles Drake founded the school to service “students with diagnosed nonverbal learning disabilities and what they would describe as ‘average to above-average’ intelligence.” According to Susan Tomases, director of marketing and communications for Landmark, that’s actually incorrect. “Nonverbal learning disabilities appear in people who often miss social cues, struggle with abstract thinking — essentially, they struggle with communication that isn’t verbal,” she says. “Oftentimes people on the spectrum have nonverbal learning disabilities. Our admissions department works very hard to recognize this distinction by reviewing applicants’ neuropsychological testing and through interviews. Our profile of students is quite narrow in that they have a language-based learning disability. In fact, they often excel socially and with nonverbal forms of communication. This may seem like a subtle difference, but in the world of special education the disparity is immense.”

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DANIEL VASCONCELLOS

harvardeducation.tumblr.com

On page 8, we clearly chose the wrong word in the story. “White Men Talking.” Chad Velde, Ed.M.’15, said beneficiary, not benefactor!

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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KE SN ER

Post a comment on the Ed. website: gse.harvard.edu/ed

DRAKE’S

problem-solving with specific physical movements that help them move through an equation’s component parts, then they are more likely to develop the bone-deep understanding of math concepts that will be essential to their high school careers. Woodin calls this method “whole-to-part” learning because the emphasis is on understanding the relationship between the question and the answer rather than on being right or wrong — a notion that flips traditional classroom dynamics on their heads.

Woodin’s approach is typical of Landmark, a combined boarding and day school that is known nationally and internationally for pioneering teaching methods that can transform the academic performance — and self-esteem — of LBLD students, many of whom arrive reading far below grade level and leave ready for college. The story of that success dates back to the school’s founder, Charles Drake, Ed.D.’70, who created a culture, with dozens of Ed School alumni, of experimentation matched with a unique clarity of mission. Over time, this combination has led to fruitful collaborations with researchers, including many at the Ed School, such as Professor Kurt Fischer, Assistant Professor Gigi Luk, and Lecturer Todd Rose, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’07. As Landmark nears its fifth decade, its outreach arm is consulting with school districts and finding new ways to reach educators. The hope is that as one small school on Boston’s North Shore continues to impact the lives of a small group of nontraditional learners, it can also have an impact on the national education conversation.

KI ER AN

Send letters (150 words or fewer): letters@gse.harvard.edu

DECODING

appian way

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For a year starting this fall, a little piece of Gutman Library will be on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. A rare book from Gutman’s special collections called The Freedman’s SpellingBook, published in 1866, will be showcased at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The book is so rare, says curator Nancy Bercaw, that special steps will be taken to preserve it.

“It will be displayed for one year and the pages rotated every three months to prevent deterioration of the ink,” she says. “It will be displayed on a book cradle built specifically for this object.

The light levels will be kept very low and there will be special light-resistant glass.” She jokes that when handling the object, “we definitely use gloves!”

Bercaw says the 168-page book will be part of the museum’s new slavery and freedom exhibit. It is the only curriculum-type book created specifically for freed slaves that will be displayed.

“We are featuring the speller in the section on emancipation and the importance of literacy in African American life,” she says.

“This theme runs throughout the exhibition and where possible we include books and newspapers written by or used by African Americans to express their vision of America.”

The book was published in Boston at 28 Cornhill (what is now Boston City Hall Plaza) by the American Tract Society, a nonprofit that disseminated Christian literature. The speller was part of a series created to educate former slaves after the Civil War ended.

Although designed to promote spelling and reading, the series also leaned heavily on themes like hard work, religion, and moral virtue.

The Freedman’s Spelling-Book, in particular, also seemed to assume that former slaves knew very little about speech. “The words which we use in speaking and writing are called language,” it says in the introduction. “The people of the United States use mostly the English language, because the first settlers came from England. Words are spoken in the throat, with the aid of the palate, the tongue, the teeth, and the lips. These are called the organs of speech.”

Ed Copenhagen, director of Gutman’s special collections at the time the book was transferred to the Smithsonian, says the speller has been in Harvard’s collection for a long time.

“I wish I could take credit for finding the book and initiating the loan, but I cannot,” he says. “It has been in Harvard’s library collections since 1867!”

It was donated that year by Samuel A. Green, an 1851 graduate of Harvard College and 1854 graduate of Harvard Medical School who wore many hats: surgeon during the war, librarian for the Massachusetts Historical Society, member of the Boston School Board, and, for one year, mayor of Boston. — Lory Hough HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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DANIEL VASCONCELLOS

At the Ed School’s Alumni of Color Conference last spring, focused on equity and activism in education, Kirsten Olson, Ed.M.’98, Ed.D.’05, author of The Mindful School Leader, remembers one conference participant saying, “You know how we used to complain about the graduate school ‘bubble’ and how unreal it was? I want that bubble back!” This participant, an educator in her first “big” job after graduation, was burned out.

As Olson points out, school leaders often experience very high levels of professional stress and pressure. They can feel overwhelmed and don’t always take care of themselves. It’s not uncommon, she says, to spend 12 to 14 hours a day working or thinking about work.

The question becomes: How do you become an effective leader when your job offers little time for reflection?

One answer, Olson says, is mindfulness — a state of being aware and learning to be calmly focused on the present. When practiced on a regular basis, she says that simple mindfulness practices can help educational leaders slow down racing thoughts and manage that feeling that everything is urgent.

Initially, however, the tricky part can be figuring out how to fit mindfulness into an already crazy day. Olson offers educators three simple practices they can try to start: 1. Take three breathing pauses each work day. Schedule them into your phone using an app or have someone remind you. Give yourself 30 seconds to stop, breathe in deeply, notice where you are, and then empty your lungs with a deep exhale.

2. Step outside to look up at the sky once a day. It’s simple. “This takes no more than two minutes, and is better than excusing yourself to the bathroom when you need a break,” Olson says.

3. During a conversation with someone — student, parent, your most troublesome staff member — stop, pause, and look deeply into his or her eyes. Not with a sense of challenge, of course. Instead, practice something called “mindful listening” that encourages the thinking in your head to stop. — Lory Hough

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DANIEL VASCONCELLOS

kirstenolson.org

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Is being in graduate school anything like learning to move on a static trapeze? It is for Maiba Bodrick, a master’s student in the Language and Literacy Program. Here are a few reasons why: 1. Starting both took a bit of bravery. To come to Harvard, Bodrick had to move from D.C. and leave behind a job she loved teaching high school English and technical theater. To learn trapeze last year for fun, she had to learn to move and balance on a bar hanging from two ropes, often upside down, without supports.

2. They help her stay challenged. “I was propelled to come to the Ed School because of my teaching experience,” she says. “I taught in Arlington, Virginia, a very affluent community. There was a wealth of technology and opportunity for my students, but I still had kids who couldn’t read.

People think it’s just in the inner city, but these issues are also in the suburbs.” Bodrick noticed, however, a change in some students when they went from English to theater class. “They were more willing to approach a text in theater that they might not in English class. There was a different openness. It really got me thinking about motivation and environment.” Likewise, the trapeze pushed her, especially physically. “I’m competitive. I’m always looking for new challenges. I practice Bikram yoga. I do bodybuilding. Mud runs? I did the one with colored paint.

The one with fire. The one in the dark. But there’s so much more to learn with the trapeze.”

3. They keep her moving. “The movement in learning is big for me. I can’t study sitting down. I move when I’m learning, even when I’m reading.” Does she think she could read upside down doing trapeze? “Probably not.”

— Lory Hough

Own your story. Michael Lee feels strongly about this. That’s why he has no problem talking about his troubled past, which includes addiction and a best friend murdered when he was barely a teen. It’s why he’s been able to connect so well with the young people he works with at a homeless shelter in Minneapolis. And it’s partly why Lee, a poet and performer, is here in the Arts in Education Program, 1,300 miles from home: to figure out ways to help other young people create safe spaces to share their art and tell their stories.

He says that when we tell someone’s story for him or her, “we strip them of one of the most human qualities — the ability to declare that this is who I am, where I come from, where I am now, where I want to go, and how I want to get there.”

Storytelling is a way to reshape our paths, he says.

But “when service providers or policymakers tell stories of young people as a means of raising funds or passing legislation,” the young people “become reduced to the ways in which they are perceived.”

When he started working at the homeless shelter, young people would ask him to tell his story, to talk about his past.

“I had been in recovery for two years. I had been arrested.

I had been kicked out of my house,” he says, “but there’s a delicate balance. They would say, ‘We tell you so much about us, so tell us about you.’ But I told them I don’t have all of the answers. I also have to ask myself, who is this for? Am I sharing this for me, or is it for the youth? If I think it will help, I’ll disclose it for sure.”

He stresses that, in some ways, he was lucky. “I’m not exceptional. I made a lot of bad choices. But I had a great support network,” including teachers who encouraged him when he turned to writing after his friend was killed, and parents who paid for a local writing class.

JILL ANDERSON

Writer and activist Audre Lorde, he says, best describes his argument that other young people should have that same access as they try to tell their stories: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive,” and “You cannot, you cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own.

And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.”

Now back in school, Lee says he has time to think, to process what’s going on around him, and not just focus on the day-to-day. The downside, however, is that he really misses the young people he spent so much time with. “I have youth writing me. I have their pictures all over the walls of my apartment here. It was really hard to leave,” he says. “That’s family.” — Lory Hough @MichaelLeeWrite HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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As the Harvard EdCast celebrates its 200th episode of weekly podcasts featuring thought leaders in the field of education and beyond, with nearly 500,000 listens on various outlets, host Matt Weber, Ed.M.’11, director of digital communications strategy, shared a list of some of his most memorable interviews that have included academics, actors, authors, astronauts, and even the Queen of All Media.

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

NOAM CHOMSKY

FOUNDER, CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND 2/27/13

LINGUIST AND PROFESSOR 6/18/13

TEMPLE GRANDIN

ANIMAL SCIENTIST AND AUTISM ACTIVIST 3/31/14

ATUL GAWANDE

SURGEON AND AUTHOR 1/23/13

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN DIRECTOR 4/29/14

JAMES MEREDITH

CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST 7/10/13

RANDI WEINGARTEN

PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 6/10/15

RAINN WILSON ACTOR 11/15/11

OPRAH WINFREY

QUEEN OF ALL MEDIA 3/1/12

LOIS LOWRY DAVID BROOKS

AUTHOR 10/27/10

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER 2/1/12

WYNTON MARSALIS MUSICIAN 2/15/12

COLIN POWELL

ADRIAN FENTY

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FORMER MAYOR, WASHINGTON, D.C. HARVARD ED. MAGAZINE • WINTER 2016 • GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED 2/23/11

FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE 5/9/12 listen to these edcasts:

gse.harvard.edu/edcasts.

MARCIA RUSSELL, ED.M.’09, ED.D.’14

JOAN ALVAREZ, PPE PROGRAM PARTICIPANT

o u Y r Fa s a v tW

SCHOOL FIELD TRIP and

te o ri

Wh a

I got to go to the Field Museum in Chicago when I was six to see King Tut. Even then I knew it was national news and most people didn’t get to see the exhibit.

Though I probably didn’t realize exactly how old the artifacts were, I was aware that they were older and more elaborate than anything I’d ever seen.

The trip I’ll never forget was the first time I went to California for nationals. My previous trips had been to work as a migrant in the fields, but thanks to education, I discovered a new traveling line.

DOCTORAL CANDIDATE MATTHEW SHAW, ED.M.’14

Hands down: eleventh-grade trip to Washington, D.C., to participate in the Georgetown Model United Nations. It was my first trip on a plane, first trip to D.C., first trip on a subway, first visit to an Ethiopian restaurant, and my first engagement — though simulated — with law and policy.

STEVEN FAERM, ED.M.’15

The Boston Museum of Science because it was interactive learning.

The “play” made the learning stick.

MARTHA MADSEN, ED.M.’87

? y Wh

KAREN WOOD, COURSE COORDINATOR, OFFICE OF THE REGISTRAR

A favorite trip was to see a Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice, performed at Powhatan, a private school in Virginia. The costumes were elaborate and the acting professional. I was dazzled and completely enthralled. I was also amazed at seeing actors playing gender-bending roles.

ADAM MORROW, OPERATIONS COORDINATOR, DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNI RELATIONS

When I was in the first grade, our class went to McGhee-Tyson Airport in Knoxville, Tennessee. My favorite subject was always social studies, so I was amazed that people could go from rural southeast Tennessee to anywhere in the world in just a matter of hours simply by flying! It inspired me at a young age to want to see the world and travel.

Whale watch or Plimoth Plantation.

MYRA LALDIN, ED.M.’15

Our school was in the foothills of the Himalayas in Pakistan, surrounded by the gorgeous forests.

Our school would take us into the woods, and we’d collect weird bugs and tadpoles and then roast marshmallows.

I didn’t care much for the marshmallows, but there was something nice about being outdoors in the fresh air, getting our hands dirty. Made you feel alive. We should do more of that.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

IS D L OR W IO? R E O H N T RA-OS I E E R WHE E BARR P FELI

Finland! For the past six months, Associate Professor Felipe Barrera-Osorio was working on three research projects connected to education in Cambodia, Colombia, and Latin America while on sabbatical in Finland at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research and the Helsinki Center of Economic Research. What was his favorite memory living and working in the Nordic country? Spending time with family at the mökki, a cabin in the middle of the forest near Padasjoki. @felbarrera

In an academic setting, it’s not often that you can get an entire campus to read one book, all at the same time. But that’s exactly what happened this past fall, when students, staff, and faculty were given a free PDF version of Richard Milner’s book Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms and encouraged to read it as part of the Ed School’s community-wide conversation called Fulfilling the Promise of Diversity. Milner, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the school’s Center for Urban Education, spoke in Askwith Hall last fall. He wrote Rac(e)ing to Class because, as he told NPR in April, “I often found that teachers would shy away from and were very uncomfortable talking about race.” He said he believed that most educators had great intentions, “but I do believe they are grossly underprepared for the types of complexity they face every day in school.” listen to milner’s edcast:

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The walls are alive with the sound of … Askwith Forums.

Beginning this fall, anyone with a smartphone can scan Askwith posters lining the first-floor hall in Longfellow, and videos of the forums will instantly pop up. What’s unique about this new tool is that with a smartphone camera and the Digimarc app, users can scan anywhere on the poster — not just on a specific icon or QR code — and the Harvard Ed Scan technology reads an invisible watermark.

Next time you’re in Longfellow, take a swipe.

In November, Landon Patterson, a transgender teen from Missouri who made national news after being nominated homecoming queen — and then protested by the Westboro Baptist Church — spoke in Askwith Hall as part of the new student-run series, Out Front! LGBTQ Leaders to

MATT WEBER

Learn From. listen to patterson’s edcast:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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WISE WORDS

“Teachers are typically not trained to do this.”

HEATHER WEISS, director of the Harvard Family Research Project, talking about how the traditional parent-teacher conference is limited and teachers often don’t know how to maximize the benefits.

(Education Week)

“I worry when I see headlines about score declines.”

Professor ANDREW HO on how stories about the dip in SAT and ACT scores for the class of 2015 don’t tell the whole story, especially when trying to measure overall national progress in education. (TIME)

“The histories of resettled refugee children are often hidden from their teachers and other school staff in the United States.”

Assistant Professor SARAH DRYDENPETERSON, Ed.D.’09, writing about why the prior educational experiences of refugee children — not academic aptitude — may be the most significant indicator of how they will perform in U.S. schools. (Education Week) 14

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“It’s very hard to look into the eyes of a little girl like Sophie and deny that these issues are real.”

Assistant Professor ROBERTO GONZALES commenting on five-year-old Sophie Cruz, who slipped past Secret Service during Pope Francis’ visit to Washington this past fall. Cruz gave the pope a letter and t-shirt urging him to help resuscitate DAPA, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents. (The Washington Post)

“I find the whole idea of ‘testing’ senior executives to be ill-considered.”

Professor HOWARD GARDNER, discussing the best way to determine competency: letting those on the scene decide if the person is doing the job properly. (Fortune)

“I have serious doubts about whether the traditional teachermediated model of learning will survive the next 10 or 15 years.”

Professor RICHARD ELMORE, commenting in an article about self-organized learning and how students don’t necessarily need teachers to do well academically — they just need each other and the Internet. (Wired)

“I think the old history of education classes were deadly, a kind of forced march.”

KATHERINE MERSETH, senior lecturer, on how education history is rarely taught to aspiring teachers and that those teaching the courses are partly to blame because most of the classes just aren’t very good. (Education Week)

N E C A M A R ATA SUZ A N

1975

I was born in Québec, Canada, the first redhead born at the Montréal General Hospital in 41 years. In the words of author Roch Carrier, “the winters of my childhood were long, long seasons,” and thus began my love of snow and skating rinks.

My first favorite book was Up in a Tree, Margaret Atwood’s flight of imagination and can-do spirit.

1980

With my mom, dad, and brother, Michael, we moved to Cambridge, England, for a year, which became my first exposure to comparative education. The day I began kindergarten, everyone in my class already knew how to read. I didn’t. I did learn to read, but my most lasting learning of that year was hand games, especially “Say, Say My Playmate,” which I still play to this day with my dad.

1999–2002 1998 I taught middle school in Boston and in Cambridge.

My refugee students inspired me to learn more about their previous homes, the nature of exile, and the process of building a new home.

2003

Scott and I moved to Uganda, bringing together his work as an HIV physician and my work with refugee families.

Living in Kampala and in two refugee camps, I learned how communities come together to create what they care most about: education for their children.

I followed my ideas about history teaching and national unity to South Africa, where I spent a year doing ethnography in high school history classes. It was a time of reconciliation and of immense belief in the possibility of transformation.

2007

Our daughter Khaya, was born, just after I completed my dissertation proposal at HGSE. My goal was a synthesis of parenthood and doctoral work, aligned with the doll from Botswana that I keep beside my desk — a mama off to work with her baby tied snuggly to her back.

1981

My family moved to Toronto, which quickly became home.

My mom hung a giant map of the world on our kitchen wall. Every time I go to a new place, I imagine myself on that particular map, orienting myself to the world from the stability of home.

1996

I made my first of now 16 trips to Juneau, Alaska, where my now-husband, Scott, grew up. After years of a city-girl identity, I came to love the forest and the mountains.

2010

Our daughter Mara was born, and she dove right into a globally-oriented life.

We have a huge map of the world on our kitchen wall.

Our whole family spends several months of each year in Botswana, where one of my research sites is. As we returned to Boston this year, Mara said quietly to herself, “Goodbye, Botswana-home.”

1987

I began grade seven at the University of Toronto Schools, a lab school of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where I would later do my postdoc. My English teacher, Mr. Baker, assigned me a project on the meaning of a word. I chose the word “community” and riffed on what I saw as the two essential parts of this idea: common and unity. I began to think about a big question that still preoccupies me: How much needs to be common to have unity?

1995

I joined my family in Montréal for the unity rally ahead of the referendum on Québec sovereignty. I embraced the slogan, “My Canada includes Québec,” but I began to wonder how my Canada might be different than that of others. These ideas shaped my undergraduate thesis at Harvard College where I looked at how Canadian history was taught differently in English and in French and how these understandings of the past shaped national identity in the present.

2012

I joined the HGSE faculty. I inaugurated my lab group and call it mowana, the Setswana word for baobab tree. Baobabs are truly incredible trees, growing very slowly but steadily, able to take in the resources that are available and to give back to the ecosystem the strength to persist even in drought. This tree represents the aims of our work on education in settings of armed conflict globally.

1991

I took part in an exchange program: Alix came to live with my family for three months and I lived with her family in Carpentras, France, for three months. When Alix returned to France, she left a key and a note with only one word: Venez! (come!) She had left me the key to her house, but in the process left me feeling like I now held the key to understanding how I could be part of a bigger world: through relationships.

2016

I am teaching the largest class ever of students for Education in Armed Conflict. I continue to be inspired by the work our students do to address some of the most intractable social inequalities and, in the absence of the stability of home, to help young people aspire to and build strong futures.

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The Selfie and the Senator Josh Delaney, Ed.M.’14, posed for a selfie with his boss, CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), before a signing ceremony in December with President Obama for The Every Student Succeeds Act. Delaney has been working as Warren’s education aide since September 2014.

“When the announcement was made, I was pretty electrified,” said longtime Washington Post reporter Dale Russakoff during a recent Harvard EdCast. Russakoff was referring to the announcement on Oprah in 2010 by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that he would be donating $100 million to help fix the troubled school system in Newark, New Jersey. Five years later, Russakoff went on to write The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?, a behind-thescenes book about what happened with that money, plus another $100 million that the city raised.

Russakoff and the book were celebrated in September during Gutman Library’s Distinguished Author Series. Asked why this story captivated her, Russakoff said, “I just assumed something fascinating would come of it, and whatever came of it, it would be an important story to learn from.” listen to the edcast:

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gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

Gender bias: It’s alive, well, and part of your teenager’s thinking, as least according to a new report released by the Ed School’s Making Caring Common Project. Based on a survey of nearly 20,000 students, many teen boys and teen girls — and some of their parents — have biases against teen girls as leaders. For example, the report found that 40 percent of boys and 23 percent of girls preferred male political leaders to female. Only 4 percent of boys and 8 percent of girls preferred female political leaders. The survey also found that, on average, mothers also expressed stronger support for student councils led by boys. As the report notes, “These findings may reflect the degree to which females of all ages in this country have been affected by stereotypes about their capacities. Given that mothers are typically role models for girls and that girls tend to be highly responsive to their mothers’ aspirations and expectations of them, these findings are concerning.”

What can parents and teachers do? The Leaning Out: Teen Girls and Leadership Biases report, which received widespread media coverage in places like The New York Times, CBS News, and The Atlantic, offers two toolkits: one with tips for parents, the other with tips for educators. Tips include:

AT HOME:

Mix it up. Proactively start conversations with your kids about how responsibilities get divvied up in your family. Talk about what is fair and balanced, rather than make assumptions about who does what based on gender. Create a chore wheel so that everyone gets a chance to participate in all the types of chores. Be willing to model behavior that doesn’t fit gender stereotypes and show kids that you can step outside your own comfort zone.

AT SCHOOL:

DANIEL VASCONCELLOS

Ask youth to participate in a series of quiet reflective writing exercises about what is it like (or, for boys, what they think it must be like) to be a girl. Have they ever felt discriminated against? Felt different than boys? Allow youth to share their writing, if they feel comfortable doing so.

Try the same activity asking students to reflect on what it is like to be a boy. — Lory Hough for the full report and toolkits:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

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Ever wonder what can be done to help kids in a community become more resilient when faced with serious challenges like crime increasing or a parent getting really sick? A new interactive game created by the Ed School-based Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University lets you try out different options.

Maybe you add community policing to a neighborhood or open a local health clinic. As you play Tipping the Scales: The Resilience Game, you have to really think about your choices, and with only 20 resilience bucks, you need to choose wisely.

Luckily, you don’t have to choose blindly. The game, released on the center’s website this past fall, gives users the chance to learn the histories of 12 young people in the community and shows how various choices would tip each person’s scale. One baby’s scale was tipped toward more negative factors: She had poor prenatal nutrition and teen parents who tried hard but who worked and were in school. Another child started with the scale

After a three-year project that showed the promise and challenges of video observation as a tool for teachers’ professional growth, the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR) has released a comprehensive toolkit to help educators get a successful start with video observations in their own communities.

The toolkit offers practical guidance that grew out of CEPR’s Best Foot Forward project, which set out to discover if it was possible to improve the classroom observation process by letting teachers record videos of their lessons and submit their best efforts to administrators for evaluation. Best Foot Forward project researchers, led

by Professor Thomas Kane, collected data in four states and surveyed hundreds of teachers and administrators and thousands of students on the use of video in the classroom.

The project’s findings were promising, with video-observed teachers reporting less adversarial and more helpful feedback than their in-person observed peers, and administrators saying that they could provide more concrete advice to their staff after viewing videos than they could after an in-person observation.

But the project also made clear that schools would need assistance in moving to video — that technological and other 18

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tipped pretty evenly: She was from a loving family but had a military mom who was away for long stretches of time. The goal of the game is to tip as many children’s scales into the positive as possible before your 20 resilience bucks run out. to play the game:

developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/resilience-game.

implementation barriers would have to be overcome. The Best Foot Forward Video Observation Toolkit lays out recommendations in four areas: • How to use video to enhance teaching by encouraging self-reflection, peer collaboration, and coaching and evaluation, among other models; • How to cultivate trust and safeguard privacy; • How to select the right hardware and software tools and train educators; and • How to pilot a video observation program and implement it at scale.

Best Foot Forward’s latest research results show the effectiveness of video as a learning tool for teachers. By filming themselves and choosing which lessons to share, researchers say, teachers became collaborators in their own professional development.

“Although administrators often think teachers won’t want to be videotaped, we found that most teachers are very receptive to the idea, as long as they are in control of the footage,” said the study’s director, Miriam Greenberg. “These findings open very exciting possibilities for more effective and targeted coaching and actionable feedback for educators.” — Leah Shafer This story originally appeared on the Usable Knowledge website: uknow.gse.harvard.edu .

ON MY BOOKSHELF

It’s a classic favorite: The Phantom Toll Booth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer. Every night when my father came home from work at the family shoe store he would read to me. I have precious memories of this. We marveled together at the puns in this book.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

I’ve been collaborating with a high school English teacher who was actually my mentor when I was getting my M.A.T. He has been teaching at a high-need urban school for more than two decades. We are currently coteaching a unit on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Teaching a book is one way to love it.

I get to deeply explore the language, the themes, the characters, and the period, with an attentiveness I might not bring if I was reading simply for myself. Yesterday one young woman said the kind of comment that just makes an English teacher’s day: “Thinking about how Janie [the protagonist] finds her voice is making me reflect on my own search for voice.”

Fiction. When I taught high school I always had this essential question hanging in my

classroom: “How do reading and writing help us better understand the world, ourselves and each other?” Albert Camus said, “Fiction is the life through which we tell the truth.” For me, it’s also where I seek truth, company, mystery, inspiration, escape, and empathy. I don’t know what I would do without books.

They Say, I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein truly demystifies academic writing.

This book has been so important to many young writers trying to wrap their minds around what college-level argument writing really is and has helped writing teachers scaffold skills for their students.

I loved Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover, a young adult book written in free verse poetry, about two adolescent brothers who play serious basketball. The climax really shook

me. I was also surprised — and delighted — by the mischief of El Deafo, another young adult read, about a girl whose Phonic Ear, a hearing aid, gives her superpowers, some of which will make you laugh.

The Cave by José Saramago. There, I said it.

Now maybe I will get to it this year!

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The first page is incredible and devastating. She begins with, “Jarvious Cotton cannot vote” because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a convicted felon.

She describes how five generations of men in Cotton’s family were denied the right to vote — by slavery, by the KKK, and by literacy tests and poll taxes. From the very first page this is a call to action.

— Lory Hough HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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Achieving Coherence in District Improvement

Becoming a School Principal

Confessions of a Headmaster

Susan Moore Johnson, Geoff Marietta, Monica Higgins, Karen Mapp, Allen Grossman

Sarah Fiarman

Paul Cummins

In this first-person account, Sarah Fiarman, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D.’09, shares what it was like starting out as a new principal after many years working in schools as a teacher. It’s her way, she writes, to talk to other principals, to provide a sense of camaraderie by saying, “This happened to me, too!” or “You’ll never believe what someone just said.” Also valuable is the practical advice she gives, such as recommending that you communicate more than you think you need to and know when to delegate and get out of the way. @Harvard_Ed_Pub

Kirkus Reviews called Paul Cummins’ new book “a memoir and manifesto for education reform.”

It received praise from notables like novelist Mona Simpson and John Densmore, the drummer for the Doors. And it’s entertaining, filled with funny insights from the 31 years that Cummins, M.A.T.’60, ran the progressive Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California — a school he founded that included a bevy of celebrity students like Jack Black, Zooey Deschanel, and Zosia Mamet.

What’s the best way to manage the relationship between a central office and schools? Surprised at how little research was out there on the intersection of the two, this team of Harvard professors, lecturers, and alumni set out to analyze and understand how large, urban school districts manage that relationship, offering real-life stories from five districts, as well as tips and best practices that make Achieving Coherence useful to practitioners. @karen_mapp HEP @Harvard_Ed_Pub

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HEP

Failing Our Brightest Kids

Reading, Writing, and Rhythm

Chester Finn, Brandon Wright

Rosalie Fink

In his new, co-authored book, Chester Finn, M.A.T.’67, senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordman Institute, argues that the United States in recent years has made modest progress in ensuring that young people from poor and minority backgrounds reach a minimum level of academic achievement. However, the same isn’t true for students already performing above the minimum — “those for whom reaching ‘proficiency’ is no challenge.” These students also “deserve an education that meets their needs.”

HEP @Harvard_Ed_Pub

In Reading, Writing, and Rhythm, Rosalie Fink, Ed.D.’92, a professor emeritus at Lesley University, offers teachers a new way to teach reading and writing to students using the arts, particularly rhythm, rhyme, and rap. For example, she writes, not only is rap fun, but “by integrating rap into the regular curriculum, teachers can use students’ out-of-school interests as assets to learning academic subjects in school.”

listen to finn’s edcast:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

read a full list of books featured in this issue:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

if you’re part of the ed school community and

you’ve recently published a book, mail us a copy or let us know:

booknotes@gse.harvard.edu.

HEP a book published by harvard education press.

— Briefs by Lory Hough HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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>

s MISTAKE

WERE MADE

And when they’re made in a classroom? Even better. by lory hough illustrations by catherine lepage

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He was a cool dude, and the ladies loved him. But even the Fonz had a hard time admitting when he was wr… wr… wrong.

And he’s not alone — or without good reason. When it comes to making mistakes, and accepting them, we’re a nation that’s a little conflicted. On the one hand, we have common sayings like to err is human and learn from your mistakes. And most of us love to hear struggle-to-success comeback stories, such as the one about Thomas Edison famously trying 1,000 times before inventing the light bulb.

Yet, as Kathryn Schultz writes in Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, despite the fact that making mistakes seems to be a part of who we are, mistakes are still not readily accepted. We act like they didn’t happen. We blame someone else. We feel embarrassed. Or, like Happy Days’ Fonzie, we stammer an apology.

“If fallibility is built into our very name and nature,” Schultz writes, “it is in much the same way the puppet is built into the jack-in-the-box: in theory wholly predictable, in practice always a jarring surprise.”

But this isn’t how mistakes should be viewed — especially in schools.

“If you are in school and you don’t make any mistakes, then you aren’t really learning anything new,” says current doctoral student Maleka Donaldson Gramling, Ed.M.’11, Ed.M.’14, a former kindergarten teacher. In fact, says adjunct lecturer and former high school teacher David Dockterman, Ed.D.’88, “School is the one place that’s all about learning. It’s the one place where mistakes should be not only accepted, but expected.”

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B

ut why? Why should mistakes be an expected part of learning? As teachers and parents, don’t we need to protect kids from messing up?

The thinking these days is, not always. Of course, we need to protect kids from things that are truly dangerous, but life is full of missteps. If kids don’t learn early on how to handle them on their own, if they are regularly rescued by well-meaning teachers and parents, then they won’t develop the skills needed to tackle difficult things or bounce back from setbacks. Skills like perseverance and gumption. Author and former middle school teacher Jessica Lahey writes in her bestseller, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, “Every time we rescue, hover, or otherwise save our children from a challenge, we send a very clear message: that we believe they are incompetent, incapable, and unworthy of our trust. Further, we teach them to be dependent on us and thereby deny them the very education in competence we are put here on this earth to hand down.”

The result? Some kids become less engaged in their work, less motivated to try on their own, and less willing to take risks — even if the risk is simply raising a hand in class. Writes Lahey of her teaching days, “It’s not that students couldn’t get to a final draft, they couldn’t get even their ideas down. From a teacher’s point of view, that’s a nightmare! If they can’t take a risk, then certainly they aren’t raising their hand with an I-wanna-try-thisidea-out kind of thing.”

School culture is especially bent toward avoiding mistakes.

“The culture of classrooms and schools is developed slowly over time,” says Donaldson Gramling. “The teachers’ responses to mistakes contribute to the classroom culture; students are keenly aware of what is tolerated and what is unacceptable. Despite the rhetoric around mistakes being necessary for learning, I think it is rare that you truly see mistakes embraced and celebrated as learning opportunities.”

Instead, Dockterman says, “You’re supposed to know the one right answer.” In most schools, “success” is defined as getting high marks on tests, with results (and minimal or no mistakes) mattering more than the process of learning or the process of getting to the answer. And when the results aren’t good? Students feel embarrassed or shamed, like they’ve done something wr… wr… wrong.

During her 2011 TED talk, Schultz showed the audience a sample student’s test. The test was covered in red marks, with a giant C– at the top.

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“There you are in grade school, and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper: That’s the dumb kid, the troublemaker. The one who never does his homework,” she said.

“So by the time you’re nine years old, you’ve already learned that people who get things wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits … and the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes. We learn a lot of these really bad lessons really well.”

I

n some ways, these really bad lessons are working against what’s actually happening in the brain when we learn and make mistakes.

In one study, UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork found that adding challenging things to learning, what he calls “desirable difficulties,” can actually improve your ability to remember what you’ve learned long term. In other words, when a teacher tries to make learning as easy as possible and as mistake-averse, it works for the short term — students might remember the material for a pop quiz the next day — but long term, they won’t remember it as well.

How your brain reacts, though, depends in part on how you view mistakes. The brain produces feedback signals when we are learning, sending different signals when something is correct or not correct. University of Michigan Associate Professor Jason Moser found that people who think they can learn from their mistakes — what Stanford Professor Carol Dweck coined “growth mindset” — did better after making a mistake compared to those with “fixed mindsets” who believe your abilities are preset and so you can’t learn from mistakes. The brain of a can-learn person ends up responding faster to fixing a mistake, while negative attitudes about mistakes translate into a slower response and more mistakes made.

W

ith this is in mind, what can teachers and parents do to change the culture around making mistakes?

For starters, says Donaldson Gramling, who taught a course this past fall at the Ed School called From “Oops!” to “Aha!:” Leveraging Mistakes in Classroom Learning and Teaching, adults need to create “safe spaces,” so that young people feel comfortable raising their hands or sharing a best guess.

“There’s an emotional nature to the classroom and making mistakes,” she says. “If you’re not in a safe place, you’re not willing to take risks.”

In their book, The Straight-A Conspiracy, Harvard College graduates Hunter Maats and Katie O’Brien write that schools can foster safe spaces by helping students see that the red pen isn’t the enemy. “When students understand how to deal with errors, red means go,” they write. “One way to encourage that attitude is to take the most common mistakes that the class made on a test or quiz and analyze them together. The more open everyone is about the mistakes they’ve made and how they happened, the less significance any student will place on future errors.”

But in order for students to be open about their mistakes, you first have to create a sense of community, says Jennifer Wallace Jacoby, Ed.M.’11, Ed.D.’14, an assistant professor in language and literacy development at Mount Holyoke College. She’s found this to be particularly important in counteracting two hang-ups firstyear students in particular have: the imposter syndrome, where students feel unworthy of being at the school (“The admissions office made a mistake!”), and perfectionism, where students think that exposing imperfection is weakness.

In response, Wallace Jacoby says, “I always carve out time in every class for a check in. Sometimes I’ll ask a question and have students respond by relating it to something personal: Do you remember your favorite book growing up, for example. Sharing a little transfers over into a feeling of partnership in the learning and that it’s okay to share ideas.”

During class, she also allows herself to make mistakes.

“When a student asks a question I don’t know how to answer, I say, ‘That’s a great question and I don’t have the answer, but I’ll see what I can find out,’ or ‘Can someone Google that now for me?’” she says. “I try to show that I’m okay with not being the expert on everything.”

T

eachers and parents can also try to normalize mistake-making as much as possible.

As free jazz musician Ornette Coleman once said, “It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.”

Two years ago, during a segment on NBC News, Dockterman said one simple way to do this is to be frank with students about why struggling is an important part of learning.

“Actually teach them about [Dweck’s] growth mindset theory, that your brain is a muscle and it really is no pain, no gain,”

he said. “If you’re not going to use it, it’s not going to grow. So exercise it. Look for challenges. Expect struggle because that’s a signal that you’re learning. It’s hard, but that means something good is happening.”

And normalizing mistakes should start early. During one of Donaldson Gramling’s classes last fall, she showed a video on a Montessori school philosophy called “control of error.” Preschool students were given the freedom to try things out, with little or no teacher intervention. In one clip, children were transferring a liquid from one container to another. When there were spills, no teachers said “oops” or rushed over with paper towels. Instead, the students understood a simple mistake had been made and they would deal with it on their own. “The real learning happens when kids begin to understand how to pick through the wreckage, find the pieces that still work for them,” Lahey writes in The Gift of Failure, “and devise a strategy for future success.” That includes teaching kids, step-by-step, how to remedy a situation when a mistake is made. When her son was having trouble stacking wood in the backyard, instead of just getting mad at him for the constant collapsed piles, Lahey instead went outside and stacked with him, teaching him how to form supports at the ends of the piles and compensate for uneven wood.

Noah Rachlin, Ed.M.’13, a history teacher at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, started a project last year called “I Can’t Do That … Yet,” which is trying to help students — and teachers — see mistakes not as impenetrable roadblocks, but rather as a natural part of the learning process.

“Lately, I have started showing teachers and students videos of babies learning to walk. We all know what that process looks like.

It’s full of mistakes,” he says. You step, you fall. You wobble, you fall. “I don’t think it really matters whether it’s the baby learning to walk or the young person revising their English paper, perfecting their jump shot, or practicing for their piano recital. It is the right-sized challenge that promotes our greatest learning, and if we’re trying to do something new, it’s unrealistic to think that we’re going to do our best on our first attempt.”

The project’s curriculum uses research on motivation, Dweck’s mindset theory, and something called deliberate practice — the idea that you don’t need to have special talents to become good at something; you just need to make a deliberate effort to improve. A year into the project, Rachlin says students are more than accepting the shift in thinking — they actually seem to crave it.

“One of the things that I have been most struck by in leading this work is how thirsty students are for anything that helps them better understand their own learning,” he says. “While teenagers may not be developmentally prepared to always go it alone, there is a part of them that often craves a certain autonomy. Whether it be language around growth or fixed mindset, a better underHARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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standing of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, or strategies for deliberate practice or improved focus, we have found that students respond very positively to this work because they better understand their role as agents in their own learning.”

One student, for example, in feedback provided to Rachlin, talked about not giving up after receiving a devastating score of 49 on a chemistry test. “I was faced with two options: glide through the rest of spring term and accept the 4, or fight to bring my average back up to a 5. I chose the latter and immediately set to work on the material for the next test. Although this ‘mistake’ in chemistry class was very upsetting and had a negative impact on my overall grade, I did not let it dictate the success of the rest of the term.”

The area where Rachlin has hit roadblocks has been in full teacher buy-in.

“If a class doesn’t provide the space for reflection, practice, and revision” — the chance to rewrite a paper three times or reflect on why a student got #6 wrong on a test — “then it is really challenging for students to put these ideas into practice,” he says. Some teachers believe that focusing on mistakes will compromise academics. “Mostly because time spent on this is time not spent on something else.” Others feel resistant to anything new and different, anything that requires them to change their practice.

For her dissertation, Donaldson Gramling has been interviewing teachers about their take on mistakes. She says embracing mistakes isn’t always easy. “The stakes feel very high for teachers,” she says. “If you’re in a factory and you lose a couple cartons of milk, it’s okay. But in a school, you’re dealing with real lives.”

Jim Bopp, assistant principal for technology and instruction at Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix, says teachers also feel pressure to “push content and cover topics, and so nine times out of 10, the first draft is the also the final draft and students are never given the time to revisit their mistakes and improve.” In contrast, in his physics classes, he requires students who score lower than an 80 percent on an exam or lab to make corrections with him in person. “I’ve found this to be a very important way of helping students learn from their mistakes,” he says.

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But time isn’t always available — and it’s exactly what kept Wallace Jacoby from letting her daughter struggle with something practical: tying her own shoes.

“I tied the eight-year-old’s shoes for so long because we had to get out of the house,” she says. “I could have let her do it and fail five times, but I needed to get to work. It’s a big challenge.”

W

hile teachers and parents work on changing their mindset and the culture in school, they also have to help change the crushing need to be perfect — that same need that Wallace Jacoby sees with her students at Mount Holyoke.

Donaldson Gramling even saw it with her kindergarten students, who were making mistakes all day — and were usually totally fine with it. But she remembers some kids weren’t.

“Often in my class I’d let the kids know that I didn’t care whether they made mistakes as long as they tried their hardest. I would make erasers and extra paper available at all times so they could easily correct themselves or try again,” she says. “But I remember one particular student who just couldn’t bring herself to commit mistakes to paper. She was too nervous to push the edge of her ability.” Donaldson Gramling remembers that many of her kindergarteners’ parents really wanted their kids to succeed. For this particular child, “the internalized pressure to succeed at all times made her so risk-averse that it stifled her learning in the classroom.”

Julia Stevens, a current master’s student in the Teacher Education Program who took Donaldson Gramling’s class in the fall, felt that same pressure at her public high school.

“Because I was one of those kids who had to do everything right, I never learned from my mistakes or how to struggle through something,” she says. “I never had a support system saying it was okay to struggle.” It was especially difficult in the competitive honors program. “The way the tracking system worked, you were with the same 40 or so AP and honors students for everything. We even joked we were in honors gym.

It wasn’t a mistake-making environment. We didn’t have an official ranking system, but you could tell that everyone was trying to do better than the other person.” The fear that you wouldn’t get into a great college meant “it was high risk to make mistakes.” In her area of focus, chemistry and math, there was also a stigma among her classmates that there was one right

answer. “In English, you can argue a point, but 1+1 is always going to be 2,” she says, “so it was more obvious when you made a mistake.”

There was one area where Stevens didn’t feel the pressure to find that one right answer but instead could learn for learning’s sake: in the lab. “Trial and error is more accepted in labs.

You’re trying out a hypothesis,” she says. During college at Brown University, she worked on a summer research project that was all about trial and error. “It was 50 failures on trying to make something that inhibited bacteria growth. By the end of the summer, I hadn’t come up with a positive outcome, but I was able to look at how well my lab techniques had grown,” she says. “My productivity had improved.”

At Brophy College Preparatory, where Kendra Krause, Ed.M.’10, is director of the middle school for low-income boys, their new Innovation Commons lab (once the school’s library and run by Jim Bopp) is all about trial and error, with the expectation that there will be mistakes and lots of iterations.

“Essentially the goal is to get kids super comfortable with all sorts of high tech, like coding programs and 3-D printers, and low tech, like drills and sewing machines, in order to create pretty nifty projects,” she says. “The kids would tell you it’s all about making mistakes, and more mistakes, and more mistakes, until they create something they think is interesting. There is very little lecture or instruction. It’s kids figuring things out.”

Dockterman, who co-founded an educational software development and publishing company now run by Scholastic, sees the same openness to mistakes in the tech world.

“If you’re working in innovation, you can’t innovate without making mistakes,” he says. “The first time you do something, it isn’t going to work. So you plan for failure and set yourself up for good feedback. Software development is built around this.

Everything is constantly in beta now — this idea that we have to test things out as we get more data. Big software companies have 100,000 releases a week because they’re doing so many little tweaks and changes.”

Interestingly, Dockterman says, it’s in this area where he also sees kids who are terrified to make mistakes in other areas of their lives completely unfazed by mistake making.

“Video games, for example. Kids are highly tolerant,” he says.

“If something’s not working, they try different strategies. They think, ‘I failed 40 times, but I eventually got it.’” During the NBC interview, he explained, “Learning is an effortful process.

If we only did things that would be easy, we wouldn’t actually be doing anything. It would just be practicing things we already knew. There’s that mix of the willingness to get up and try again. It’s based on the belief that my next try might have a chance at success.” Ed. 27

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no exceptions Roland Fryer

Headline to come

By Katie Bacon

A look at the life and work of one of the Ed School’s newest faculty members, Roland Fryer

by katie bacon photography by jill anderson

R

oland Fryer does not want to be thought of as an exception, even though at age 30 he became the youngest African American to receive tenure at Harvard, as an economics professor, and at age 34 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work using economics to study — and try to find fixes for — racial inequities in education and in American society in general. Fryer’s life’s work has become trying to change the odds. Trying to make his path less exceptional. Trying to increase the probability that African Americans can change their place in society, using education as the lever.

So that may be why Fryer — as a 25-year-old newly minted Ph.D. who had just come to Harvard to be part of the Society of Fellows — reacted so viscerally when a reporter from a major newspaper threatened to out exactly how exceptional he was: a man whose family members were in prison for dealing crack, who had grown up in a profoundly unstable home but had made it to the pinnacle of academia anyway. Fryer had always pretty much kept his life story to himself. When the reporter came to him saying he was going to pull back the curtain on his family life, “I was scared,” Fryer, now on the Ed School faculty, told me in his office in the Littauer building. “I was really worried that people around here would care. It was already enough that I didn’t feel like I belonged. But I didn’t want them to feel like I didn’t belong.”

Fryer went on the offensive, and decided to let Stephen Dubner (who at the time was working on the book Freakonomics with Fryer’s thesis adviser from the University of Chicago, Steven Levitt) reveal his story in The New York Times Magazine, in the 2005 article “Toward a Unified Theory of Black America.” It was a way of “putting it all out there so that nobody else could, so I didn’t have to go through it again,” Fryer says.

Fryer told of a childhood bouncing between the home of his grandmother, Farrise, in Daytona Beach, Florida (a schoolteacher during the day; she also worked in a deli making sandwiches in the early morning and at a liquor store at night to make extra money for the family) and the home of his father, Roland Sr., in Lewisville, Texas. Life with Roland Sr. was toxic: The elder Fryer drank, gambled, beat up his girlfriend and his son. He was fired from his job at Xerox for sexual harassment and later convicted of sexual assault.

At one point, when Fryer was around 12, he told his father: “If you could just not be a negative in my life, I can handle it from here.” But Roland Jr. had his own troubles; to make extra money he sold counterfeit purses and stole from the cash register at McDonald’s, where he worked. He drove his car around without a license, before he was 16, hung out with a tough crowd, got

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into fights, and carried a gun for protection. At one point he was arrested at gunpoint by the police, who questioned him for hours before releasing him (they had mistaken him for a drug dealer).

But there were some lifelines that Fryer grabbed on to. When he wasn’t spending time with his grandmother, he talked with her every day, up until her death about two years ago.

“She was the anchor in my life,” Fryer says. “She taught me everything I know, except for economics, though she would claim that she’s the original economist in the family, because she made so much out of so little.”

During his early years in Texas, Fryer would call his grandmother when he got home, and talk with her for hours until his father walked in the door. “I was telephone-parented by my grandmother,” he says. He was a good athlete, and while he didn’t discover his capacity to work hard academically until college (he recalls only two times before college when he studied), he put out his full effort on the football field and the basketball court, and received a scholarship to play basketball at the University of Texas–Arlington.

Once there, up through his first calculus exam, Fryer continued his pattern of minimal studying. But then he got a 45, and started to panic. “I can’t fail out of here,” he recalls thinking. “I don’t want the future that comes if you don’t graduate from college.” So he sought out a student making straight As and asked for her secret: 15 hours of studying per exam, she told him. This was when Roland Fryer Jr., following his grandmother’s example, started working prodigiously hard — and he hasn’t stopped. “I work as much as I humanly can. Sometimes it’s too much, frankly,” he says.

He thought about majoring in communications, English literature, philosophy, or sociology. But then, spurred by the worry of earning enough money after college, he took his first economics class, as a prerequisite for becoming a business major.

On the first day, the professor explained that economics is based on the belief that people are self-interested and maximize that self-interest. Then the professor began to talk about trade between countries and notions of comparative versus absolute advantage. Fryer glanced around the room and saw looks of confusion on people’s faces, though to him it all seemed both simple and elegant. “Things had never been so clear to me,” he says.

The class was at 8 a.m., and the professor had office hours beforehand at 7 a.m. Fryer would go each time, “with more ideas and more applications and more questions about what the tools of economics could understand.” (Now, as a professor himself, Fryer says he thinks those early-bird office hours were set with the assumption that no student would actually show up.)

But the natural affinity and skill he had for deciphering the equations and theories of economics were not the only things that drew him to the discipline. It was also that when it came to

“She was the anchor in my life. She taught me everything I know, except for economics, though she would claim that she’s the original economist in the family, because she made so — Fryer on the influence of his grandmother much out of so little.” understanding data sets, his life experience had little bearing. In economics, unlike in English literature class, “whether or not you’d been to Europe or where you’d summered didn’t matter, as long as you could solve an equation,” he says.

Fryer raced to finish his course work, earning his bachelor’s degree in two and a half years. For graduate school, he went to Pennsylvania State, but was able to do much of his dissertation work at the University of Chicago since both schools are part of the Big Ten network. The department in Chicago was influenced by a group of scholars who broadened the definition of economics to apply to issues and questions that were not traditionally considered a part of the field. Fryer fit right in.

“I always thought, ‘Wow, look at these tools; they’re so powerful, so clean, so carefully constructed. But they’re being used to study optimal corn growth whereas problems like affirmative action or immigration or gun violence — the ones we leave up to the talking heads — are the exact questions where your individual biases are likely to come in,’” he says. “They are exactly the ones where we need the most mathematical or technical tools.”

One of Fryer’s mentors was Gary Becker, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the economics of discrimination, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for this and other pioneering work that turned the lens of economics toward social problems.

“I tease that Chicago’s the only place where economics is taught as a full-contact sport,” says Fryer. “They didn’t care about who you were or what you were doing. The question was: Could you either come up with a formal analysis of it, or could you bring data to bear on it.”

An example is Fryer’s paper “Acting White,” spurred by his own experience as a student, of shying away from his academic achievement as a way to fit in. (Fryer mentions that people would sometimes ask him whether a paper like “Acting White” is really economics. “After being at a place like the University of Chicago and studying under Gary Becker, I’d say, ‘It is now!’”) As Fryer described it in an interview with The Washington Post: after basketball practice one time, his coach was going from player to

player, making sure their grades were high enough for them to be eligible to play. When he got to Fryer, the coach said, “I know you’re doing fine,” and moved on. “And I told him, ‘Hey coach, don’t do that.’ I wanted to be treated like everybody else in the locker room. I didn’t want to be singled out as anything.”

For the paper, Fryer came up with a new, objective way of measuring popularity. While previous studies had relied on students’ self-reporting of their social status, Fryer asked each student to list his or her friends, and then he cross-checked the friends’ lists to see whether they matched up. He combined the popularity measure with data on GPA, and found that while white students’ popularity increased with academic success, high-achieving minority students suffered socially. Fryer argues that this social pressure to underachieve has serious ramifications on how minorities do in school, and could even go towards explaining gaps in test scores and in admissions to elite colleges.

The study typifies Fryer’s work in several ways in that it takes one aspect of a larger societal problem, one that has a whiff of controversy about it, and finds an ingenious way to study it and quantify it.

Fryer came to Harvard in 2003 for a three-year research fellowship before joining the faculty of the economics department.

Arriving at Harvard, he says, was like “landing on the moon.” One of the people who helped him settle in was Harvard President (and fellow economist) Larry Summers, who would invite Fryer out to lunch each month to talk about his research. Summers appreciated Fryer’s relentless and creative search for hard data in a field where it can be difficult to set up a rigorous study using control groups. “Roland is an evidence-driven guy rather than prejudice, instinct, or tradition, and that’s clearly what is needed now,” Summers commented in a 2007 profile of Fryer in The New York Times.

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Systematically, Fryer set out to understand and quantify the problem of the black achievement gap in America, with the hope that hard, scientific data would shed light on the most effective ways to narrow the gap. To further this work, Fryer started the Education Innovation Laboratory, or EdLabs, as an incubator for testing out and implementing new ideas. At the foundation of Ed Labs are the studies that inform all of its recommendations. Fryer believes that writing peer-reviewed papers — creating the hard data that can shape questions of education — is the most important thing he does.

“Because it needs to be right. It needs to be fact-based,” Fryer says. “When you write something and it’s published in a good journal, it becomes part of the canon of what the next generation learns. It lasts for years and years. I was just reading [economist David] Ricardo, writing about the idea of comparative advantage in 1817. These ideas can last for a long time.”

Guest lecturing in a packed Sanders Theatre this fall, Fryer gave students in an economics class an intellectual tour of the dire nature of the problem, and of his efforts to build a scaffold of evidence-based research to try to help fix it. Dressed in jeans (he’d come that morning from New York, and said he hadn’t been willing to risk waking up his two-year-old daughter to grab his suit from her room), walking casually around the stage throughout the lecture, Fryer showed some 2011 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress of eighth-graders in reading and math. There was not one city — not one — where more than 25 percent of blacks or Hispanics were proficient in reading or in math.

“To me that’s a national emergency. How can we possibly have a country where that’s true?” Fryer said. “If you don’t have a sense of humor about this data, you’d literally jump off the roof.”

Some of the studies, he told the students, like his paper “Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination,” published in 2010 in the Handbook of Labor Economics, led him to conclusions that he didn’t want or expect to be true. This study showed significant differences between black and white outcomes: a 28 percent difference in wages; a 190 percent difference in unemployment rates; a 234 percent difference in home ownership. Yet when Fryer controlled for test scores, some of these disparities declined significantly; others melted away. The way Fryer saw it, the differences in how black lives turned out couldn’t be ascribed to racial discrimination per se, but to the fact that blacks were doing much worse in school than their white peers.

“I hated these results,” he told the class. “I called my grandmother and said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I know there’s discrimination in the world, but I can’t see that it’s causing the differences that I see.’” Yet the study hinted at how powerful an intervention education could be.

Many of his studies took him into controversial territory, including his investigation of whether incentives increase academic achievement (in most cases, no), and his investigation with Steven Levitt of whether there are systematic racial differences in mental ability among young children (no, when they’re under the age of 1; yes, as they get older, hinting at the importance of environmental differences). I asked Fryer how he reacts when studies draw personal criticism, as this latter one did. While some criticism seems to roll off his shoulders, he hotly resents when critics imply that a topic should be off-limits.

“When people say to me, ‘Why would you even look at the test scores of 9-month-olds?’ That I have no patience for. I just say, ‘What are you worried about?’ I am on a fact-finding truth

“It needs to be fact-based. When you write something and it’s published in a good journal, it becomes part of the canon of what the next generation learns. It lasts for years and years.”

— Fryer on the importance of hard data 32

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mission. And frankly I don’t give a s--- what anyone else feels about that,” he says. “If they have other facts, great, let’s put them all on the table. But I’m not going to, because of political convenience, not help kids [like the ones] I grew up with. This isn’t philosophy for me. I truly believe in the power of social science to change lives.”

And are good schools enough to change lives? That was the larger question Fryer was trying to answer with “Are HighQuality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement Among the Poor,” a study published in 2011 with Will Dobbie, then a Ph.D. student at Harvard Kennedy School. Fryer told the students in Sanders Theatre that he was trying to tease apart exactly where to intervene to shrink the achievement gap.

“Should you give them schools? Or neighborhoods? Or both?” he asked the class.

The scholars’ laboratory was the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), a 97-block area where students from both inside and outside the zone attend what are often called “No Excuses” charter schools (with strict behavioral and academic expectations combined with longer school days and frequent assessments), and residents receive a range of community services. Looking at data from students who lived in the HCZ neighborhood and attended a Promise Academy charter school there, and others who only attended Promise, Fryer and Dobbie found that by eighth grade, both groups had closed the achievement gap in math. (For students who started in elementary school, the achievement gap in English language arts was closed as well; but this finding did not hold true for those who started in middle school.) In other words, the authors wrote, it’s possible to address the achievement gap through education alone. (Writing about the preliminary results in 2009, New York Times columnist David Brooks made clear exactly how dramatic these results were. “Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts.” But whatever the results were, good or bad, Fryer was going to publish them and learn from them.

Geoffrey Canada, Ed.M.’75, the longtime president and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, describes how, when he first met Fryer, the economist told him: “‘I would love to do a study on the Harlem Children’s Zone, but there’s one condition: if it turns out it doesn’t work, I’m going to publish it and tell the world.’ And I said, ‘I think that’s terrific because if it doesn’t work, I don’t want to keep doing it!’ He is on an absolute mission and is prepared to follow the science wherever it leads.”

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Two years later, Fryer and Dobbie collaborated again on “Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City.” The authors found that traditional measures, such as class size, investment per pupil, and level of teacher education and certification, are not correlated with student performance. Instead, they identified five educational policies — frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and a relentless focus on academic achievement — that account for almost half the variation between good charter schools and ineffectual ones. This idea, which Fryer calls the five tenets, lies at the heart of his work.

“There’s a growing consensus that these five tenets, and maybe a few more, are enormously important in educating poor children,” Fryer told me. Fryer also said that his grandmother, who was always grudging with her praise and spent decades in the classroom, expressed the feeling to him that the five tenets were little more than common sense. “She said to me, ‘Baby, they pay you for that?’ I agree that the tenets are kind of obvious, but then the question becomes, if they’re so damn obvious, why aren’t we doing them?”

Next, Fryer wanted to test whether these five tenets could work well in traditional schools, bringing them to low-performing schools in Houston (and later on in Denver). But rather than studying the effects of interventions made by others, this time he was measuring the effectiveness of his own work. Fryer and his colleagues at EdLabs worked with the superintendent to apply the five tenets to the failing schools: helping to hire new principals and new teachers, setting up a culture of no excuses and high expectations, and implementing tutoring in reading and math. When he examined the data, he saw that the five tenets had about 70 percent of the effect in traditional schools as they had in charter schools.

While math scores improved substantially, reading scores did not, a result that Fryer has found in other studies as well. As he speculates in “Injecting Charter School Best Practices Into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments,” “[A] leading theory posits that reading scores are influenced by the language spoken when students are outside of the classroom … [The researchers] argue that if students speak non-standard English at home and in their communities, increasing reading scores might be especially difficult. This theory is consistent with our findings and could explain why students at an urban boarding school make similar progress on reading and math.”

The last study Fryer laid out for the students in Sanders was his most recent with Dobbie, “The Medium-Term Impacts of High-Achieving Charter Schools,” which starts getting at the real nub of Fryer’s quest. It’s not the educational results themselves that matter most; instead it’s the life and opportunities that a good education smooths the way for. The study gives evidence

that the influence of good charter schools can last long after the students have graduated, with effects on pregnancy rates, incarceration rates, and the numbers who go to college directly from high school.

“Those same schools that produced the high test scores produced a five-fold reduction in teen pregnancy,” Fryer told the class. “Let’s be human for a second. That’s pretty crazy.”

Fryer won the MacArthur “genius” award for “illuminating the causes and consequences of economic disparity due to race and inequality in American society … through innovative empirical and theoretical investigations.” This past April, at age 37, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given to the American economist under 40 “who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge” (and 12 times a precursor to the Nobel Prize in economics). But Fryer is still impatient: There is so much more work to be done in terms of building the knowledge base on how to improve American education, in math, reading, and beyond, on a broad scale.

“It’s not enough to show that we helped fix the schools in Houston and Denver — There are 20,000 kids in those schools.

But I’m not in this for 20,000 kids,” he says. “A million, maybe.

We do a lot of patting ourselves on the back because one program with 2,000 kids worked. That’s not enough, you know? I am just deeply unsatisfied with that.”

Essentially, Fryer wants to figure out what no one else yet has — how to create good schools for all those students at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, not just a tiny percentage of them.

That desire is partly why he formalized his connection with the Ed School in 2015 as a member of the faculty, whereas before his collaboration was less official. Through his experiments over the last decade, through his work with EdLabs, Fryer has distilled what works in high-performing charter schools, and he’s translated those tenets to improve low-performing district schools in Houston and Denver. But he hasn’t yet figured out how to take the five tenets to scale.

“That is part of what I’m hoping for with the Ed School, that they might be able to help me understand how to bottle that message,” he says.

Another way to share the message is through the students he teaches, advises, and works with at the Ed School. “For me it is not just about leading an organization that runs high-quality experiments in the field of education. In 20 years I need to be able to look back and say, ‘These are 200 new students in this field who are created by the work that we did,’” he says.

“It’s not enough to show that we helped fix the schools in Houston and Denver — there are 20,000 kids in those schools.

But I’m not in this for 20,000 kids. A million, maybe.”

— Fryer on the huge amount of work to be done in education Dean James Ryan helped recruit Fryer to the school and has similar hopes for the exchange of knowledge that increased collaboration could bring.

“Roland is doing some of the most interesting and important work in education,” he says. “His presence at HGSE creates more opportunities for our students to work with him and for our faculty to collaborate with him — and for him to learn from them as well.”

Roland Fryer does not want to be an exception. But it’s also true that he’s not afraid of long odds. It would be hard to find a starker challenge in American education than erasing the achievement gap for all those students whose prospects are dimmed by it.

Does that deter Fryer? Not at all.

“I have always been wired this way,” he says. “Give me a 1 percent chance of helping a million; I’d rather have that than a 50 percent chance of helping 20.”

— Katie Bacon is a writer and editor who has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe. Ed. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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There’s Nothing

A new emphasis on something that educators have known for decades: Skills not measured by standardized testing are important

About These

by jeff wagenheim illustrations by marc rosenthal

to children’s development

T

he North Carolina morning sunlight is peeking through the classroom window as the students assemble. It’s the beginning of the school day at Bruns Academy in Charlotte, and the children are gathering on a rug, just as they always do at 9:15 a.m. They sit in a circle and begin taking turns talking, their carry-on baggage of thoughts and feelings coaxed out of them by receptive ears.

Observing this scene might harken you back to your kindergarten days, but these are not 5-year-olds. This is Morning Meeting in an eighth-grade classroom.

“The value of taking this time at the start of the middle school day is no different than for a kindergarten,” says Jordy Sparks, who served as principal at Bruns, which encompasses preK through grade 8, as well as elsewhere in the CharlotteMecklenburg school district, before entering the Ed School’s Doctor of Education Leadership Program this year. “The matters brought to the circle might sound different, depending on the ages of the students, but for all of them it’s an opportunity to learn how to manage an emotion that could be an impediment to what they’re trying to accomplish during the school day.”

You’ll notice that Sparks used the word “learn” there. These top-of-the-morning meetings, which under his initiative came to take up the first 45 minutes of each school day at Bruns and later at Newell Elementary, are a central feature of a revamped curriculum that puts an emphasis on social-emotional learning — that is, development of character, empathy, selfmanagement, and other life skills that lie outside the domain of the three R’s. In a time when standardized tests are being criticized by some for being educational cookie cutters, there’s growing interest in this individualized and broadened approach to preparing children for challenges that their textbooks don’t address.

At Newell, for instance, the stated mission is “to develop young people to know their potential, grow their appreciation of learning, hard work, and effort, and empower them to go into the world and lead lives of impact.” To that end, the K–5 school’s website quotes an influential educator as saying, “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own.

And you know what you know. And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.” Those words might sound familiar if you have young children or remember your childhood. They’re from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss.

That children’s classic was published in 1990, the last book of the whimsical author’s lifetime, but Seuss was spreading the message long before that. Likewise, educators have known for 38

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decades that skills not measured by standardized testing are important to children’s development.

“Tests do provide us with important information about how schools are doing and how well-prepared students will be for what comes next, but they certainly don’t tell us everything that we need to know,” says Associate Professor Martin West, who has written extensively on the issue, including a recent paper with Brookings on measuring students’ related skills. “A lot of the current interest among researchers in the policymaking community, and among practitioners, is centered on an attempt to be more specific about what it is that is not directly captured by standardized tests yet contributes to students’ success. Which are the important skills? How do we measure them?”

He could very well have added one other fundamental question: Once we’ve identified these essential skills, what do we call them? Research is under way in various disciplines, each operating in its own silo, each group speaking its own language.

“I am a developmental psychologist, and we tend to talk about social and emotional skills,” Associate Professor Stephanie Jones says. “But economists talk about noncognitive skills, and neuroscientists talk about executive function and sometimes self-regulation.” So there’s term confusion — a lot of sameness using different words and a lot of differentness using the same words. That complicates matters when you’re talking about policy and putting research findings into practice.

Jones views this not so much as an impediment, however, as an opportunity. That there’s such broad interest, so much research in so many different sectors, is a good thing, she says, “representing an important moment in the field.” (Among the burgeoning initiatives out there is Making Caring Common, an Ed School project co-directed by Jones and Richard Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87, a psychologist and senior lecturer at the Ed School. It promotes kindness in children, which among other personal and community benefits helps make their schools positive learning environments.) Jones doesn’t envision the field organizing around a single concept or set of terms but says, “Still, we now have a huge opportunity to build coordination.”

To that end, last spring Jones launched a course, Beyond Grit: Noncognitive Factors in School Success, which seeks to synthesize the varied research and practices. “I didn’t want to teach a course in my own wheelhouse,” she says. “I could have taught about social-emotional learning, which is the term we developmentalists use, typically. But the course would have missed a lot of important and interesting stuff that’s coming out of the world of character and personality, out of the world

of social psychology.” So the course is designed to take a crossdisciplinary view at high-quality, rigorous research from all of these disciplines. “How can we bring it together,” she asks, “in a way that tells a cohesive story over the course of a semester?”

A vital element of that story involves an area of study that might seem far afield from child development: economics. But economics is integral to any shift in approaches to education. “It’s expensive to educate people in a way that relies on more interaction,” says economist and Associate Professor David Deming, who recently published a paper, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market.” “You need smaller class sizes. You need more faculty time with students. And the cost pressures we see in higher education push against making changes even when we believe they would be beneficial.”

The fact that stacks of rigorous research do not yet back the effectiveness of social-emotional learning also plays a role in stagnation. “There’s a bias toward things we can measure and understand better, so the fact that IQ tests and achievement tests have been psychometrically evaluated, systematically, for years means we have a pretty good way to measure developments related to academic skill,” Deming says. “We don’t yet have as many high-quality measures for social-emotional skills.

We just intuitively understand that they’re important.”

That isn’t enough for some with sway over school policy and budgets. When Sparks and his team in Charlotte were

revamping their curriculum to focus more deeply on socialemotional learning, abandoning lip-service measures such as the Character Trait Word of the Month and other window dressing in favor of devoting a full 45 minutes to Morning Meeting, they were questioned by some in the school district.

Can you afford that much time each day? Will you still be able to turn around proficiency test results? “I had to do some convincing,” Sparks says. “My theory was, if we get the student culture right, then academic achievement will be a byproduct.”

Student culture at Bruns took a noticeable upswing, but what really turned heads came two years later, after Sparks had moved on to take over Newell Elementary, a school facing significant disciplinary concerns. In the very first year on his watch, with a social-emotional curriculum in place, suspensions dropped by 45 percent schoolwide and overall discipline referrals went down by 32 percent. Sparks attributes that to a change in culture not simply among students but also among teachers. For the high-poverty population of students, having three-quarters of an hour to unload whatever baggage they brought into the classroom and leave it at the circle “allowed them to go about their business of being a student for the rest of the day.” And for teachers, Sparks adds, “being able to spend some protected time making intentional connections with the students was invaluable to their understanding of these young people.” Plus, the lessons taught during these meetings — on problem solving, on self-management, on HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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“

People have always known that there are things other than academics that matter. Many schools have given kids grades for academic performance and grades for effort, and there are lots of practices that reflect a recognition of the importance of skills not directly measured by tests.

But I think what’s happening now is that people are trying to be more specific about what exactly those skills are.”

—Associate Professor Martin West

responsible decision-making — would frame the school day and be referenced throughout.

Still, there’s resistance everywhere, from financially strapped public school districts to the most storied educational outposts for the affluent. In the case of the latter, asking parents to pay big bucks for tuition can lead them to have tunnel vision about what’s important. If the only reasonable return on their hefty investment is an acceptance letter addressed to their child from an elite university’s admissions department, they’re going to question any veering away from a proven road map for academic success.

At the Shipley School in Philadelphia, where yearly tuition for the upper grades amounts to around $35,000, head of school Steven Piltch, Ed.M.’84, Ed.M.’88, Ed.D.’91, acknowledges having to do some parental persuading. “If they’re invested in their children going to a certain university, they sometimes think only the numbers and grades are what matter,” he says. “I have to convince them that the nonacademic skills we teach are no less important. Those are the skills that allow someone to function as a person.”

Piltch has been in his position for 23 years. Back when he first started, “we used to talk about education of the whole person. We use different language today, but we’re still talking about the same thing. The difference is that we’ve made it a higher priority.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the amount of effort that goes into approaching a student as a whole person. “The easier part of our job is preparing students academically,” Piltch says. “No one leaves Shipley for college and reports back to us, saying, ‘Couldn’t read. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t do the math.’

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They leave here prepared for the academic challenges ahead.”

But the social challenges? And the integration of the two?

“We’re committed to working hard at that,” he says. “You want your students to know who they are. You want them to be willing to take risks, to slip, to fall, to get back up. If they can develop resilience and compassion and understanding, and can combine that with the ability to think in a critical fashion and express themselves in spoken and written word, I think they’re going to do pretty well.”

Senior Lecturer Mandy Savitz-Romer, co-author of the book Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success, believes the conversation with traditional educators and those who hold the purse strings — from public school district officials to private school parents — needs to be reframed. For one thing, she shudders whenever she hears someone lump together all of what a student gains via social-emotional learning under the leaky umbrella term “soft skills.” She’s not alone there. Everyone interviewed for this article expressed some degree of disdain for a term that seems to relegate the skills it’s describing to the backseat. On the contrary, Savitz-Romer insists, these are skills that drive education. “They’re foundational,” she says. “They are the building blocks for more academic skills.”

For example, a student’s ability to do well in math class, Savitz-Romer argues, is based in part on the degree to which that student believes he or she can do well. Beyond self-belief, she says, another factor is the student’s desire to do well in math, also known as motivational disposition. Then there is the student’s ability to self-regulate — that is, to remain focused, follow through with homework, and prepare for tests.

In this view, social-emotional learning is not a detour from a pursuit of academics. It’s an on-ramp.

When the conversation turns to the future, specifically college, the message to kids often is misdirected. This is especially true for lower-income children. “Often they’re told the reason they should go to college is so they can make more money and better their standing in life,” says Savitz-Romer. “But if you look at developmental psychology, at the concepts of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators, you’ll find that using money as a motivator is not a very successful strategy, especially for kids who face formidable obstacles — financial, academic, social, or emotional.” What would be a better way to convey that same message? “Well, you could ask a student, who do you want to be? What kind of footprint do you want to leave in this world?” she says. “Identity development is a better first step toward supporting motivation. With some students, we have to spend time helping them believe that it’s even possible for them to go to college.”

Teachers benefit from the social-emotional focus as well.

When they participate in direct professional development, they add new tools to their classroom toolbox. And when they participate in class activities that are aimed at developing skills in students, they doubly benefit. They learn those skills themselves, and they see their students in a new light. That’s especially helpful when teachers are working with students far different from themselves.

“If you’re a teacher and you’re going through your class’ exercise in empathy, it’s less about determining how much empathy you have and more about seeing whom you have empathy for,” says Weissbourd. “If you’re a teacher who is at all mindful and self-aware, you ask yourself who is in your circle of concern. You think more deeply, and more individually, about the students in your class. And good data supports that teacher–student relationships matter. When students are connected to their teacher, they learn more. And when teachers develop social-emotional skills, the chances are higher that students are going to learn them as well.”

Teachers also use these skills for their own well-being.

“It’s hard to be an effective teacher when you’re as frantic and stressed as many are right now,” says Weissbourd, noting significant rates of low-level depression among childcare providers and teachers, a feeling of being helpless and hopeless owing to increasing demands and diminishing resources.

“When you’re feeling like that,” he says, “it’s hard to express empathy. It’s hard to be self-aware. It’s hard to self-regulate.

We have to relieve the stresses on teachers if we want them to help our students develop these skills. You can’t make progress

with kids if you’re not simultaneously making progress with the adults around them.”

Once students have made their way through the educational system and have entered the workforce, social-emotional skills become paramount. Anyone who has ever spent 9 to 5 in an office environment understands the importance of being able to fit in, to work as part of a team, to listen actively, to navigate through that culture. These are not skills taught in math class.

And even in today’s high-tech work world, with more people than ever before telecommuting and seldom experiencing faceto-face contact with co-workers, social-emotional skills are still front and center. A study of collective intelligence published last year found that when undergoing the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, which tests one’s ability to read another person’s mental state by looking at his or her eyes, the subjects’ scores on the test predict their ability to work in a group — even when that group is online, working remotely.

“It’s an interesting puzzle,” Deming says. “How can it be that as technology allows us to work remotely more easily, social skills are becoming more important rather than less? I think the answer is that you don’t necessarily need to be in person with people for these skills to matter. For example, think about the way people communicate by email or by text. Think about all the subtle cues people send. So yes, my ability to read emotions in someone’s eyes makes me a better collaborator even when I don’t see the people I’m working with. It has to do with the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

And this isn’t necessarily new. “People have always known that there are things other than academics that matter,” West says. “Many schools have given kids grades for academic performance and grades for effort, and there are lots of practices that reflect a recognition of the importance of skills not directly measured by tests. But I think what’s happening now is that people are trying to be more specific about what exactly those skills are.”

That’s a first step, which logically would be followed by developing ways of measuring skills and their effectiveness.

West believes we’re still at a very early stage of that, and he’s not disappointed that we’re not further along. “When you think about it,” he says, “we’ve had essentially a century worth of experience in developing tests to measure basic literacy and numeracy skills, and at this point we have a solid understanding how best to do that. I think we’re decades behind when it comes to approaching these soft skills with the same degree of rigor.”

— Jeff Wagenheim is a columnist at Sports Illustrated, founding editor of Wondertime magazine, and a former editor at The Boston Globe.

In school, he says, his social-emotional skills veered between underappreciated and undeveloped. Ed. HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

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news & notes Tom Sobol, M.A.T., died this past September from complications from Parkinson’s disease. From 1971 to 1987, he served as the superintendent of schools in Scarsdale, New York, before being appointed New York State Commissioner of Education by Governor Mario Cuomo. Until 2010, Sobol taught at Columbia’s Teachers College.

Betsey Useem, M.A.T.’66, Ed.D., is the vice president of the Philadelphia Education Fund’s board of directors. Until 2004, she served as the fund’s director of research and evaluation. The fund supports the development and implementation of statelevel education policies to improve student learning from preK–12.

Paul Cummins, M.A.T., published a new book this past fall, Confessions of a Headmaster. (See book blurb, page 20.)

Susan Bailin Steinkeler, Ed.M., retired in 2013 after teaching secondary school French and Spanish, most recently in the Portland, Maine, public school system. She says that she enjoys living in Maine with her husband, Sid Steinkeler, and “is proud of her children,” Jill, Jennifer, and Andrew.

Chester Finn, M.A.T.’67, Ed.D., recently cowrote Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students.

Finn is a senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. (See book blurb, page 21.) listen to an edcast with finn:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

Larry Stybel, Ed.D., recently wrote a series of articles called “The Future of Careers” for Psychology Today. Stybel is co-founder of Boston-based Stybel Peabody Associates, Inc., which offers leadership coaching and career management. @lstybel

In the winter 2005 issue of Ed., we ran a feature story about Wood Smethurst and the Ben Franklin Academy. Smethurst said the school was a “safety net” for students who didn’t fit in at traditional schools. “The Carnegie concept of awarding credit for classroom seat hours doesn’t fit us,” Smethurst said. “Many kids have no aptitude for that and can’t sit still.

We have cats, kitchens, and flower gardens. Kids can get up and do what they need to do. But they know they must also do their work.”

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Steven Adamowski, C.A.S., became superintendent of Norwalk, Connecticut, schools this past summer. Since 2011, Adamowski has worked as a special master for the Connecticut State Department of Education.

He has also served as superintendent of schools in Hartford, Connecticut; Chatham, New Jersey; Cincinnati; and St. Louis.

Susan Moore Johnson, M.A.T.’69, Ed.D., an Ed School professor, recently co-authored Achieving Coherence in District Improvement. (See book blurb, page 18.)

, Ed.D., cofounder and headmaster of the Ben Franklin Academy in Atlanta, died on July 14, 2015, just a few weeks after retiring. Founded in 1987, the school serves grades 9–12 and focuses on individualized attention.

read the full story:

Caroline Tompkins, M.A.T.’70, Ed.D., recently published her memoir, Principal: A Personal History, based on her 15 years as an elementary school principal in the Arizona borderlands.

Charlene Aguilar, Ed.M., joined the education section of Witt/Kieffer, an executive

Smethurst

(left to right): Ann Peck, Ed.M.’78, Joanne Huskey, Ed.M.’78, Lauren Richman, Ed.M.’78, and Carla Seal Wanner, Ed.M.’77, Ed.D.’85, had a mini reunion in Cambridge on October 7, 2015, for a presentation of Huskey’s book, Make It in India. The group was all part of the Ed School’s children’s television research lab in 1977–78.

search firm, as a consultant. Aguilar, living in South Bend, Indiana, has held numerous higher education administrative leadership posts, including director of undergraduate education initiatives and special assistant to the executive vice provost at the University of Washington and associate director for the Stanford Center for Chicano Research at Stanford University.

Sonja (Young) Anderson, Ed.M., published Sophie’s Quest, her debut novel for children ages 8–12. She writes, “It’s the story of an unlikely friendship between an owl and a mouse that develops while they are on a quest to the Holy Land.” @SonjaMarie9, sonjaandersonbooks.com, or Sonja Anderson, author on Facebook

Anna Shine, Ed.M, founder of the Harvard Square-based New England School of English, says she is happily employing another Ed School graduate, Ashim Shanker, Ed.M.’15. Shanker joined the school this past fall as academic director.

Other Ed School graduates working at the school include Martha Hall, Ed.M.’95, who has been with NESE since 1997 and is now the school’s director, and Samuel Odamah, Ed.M.’10, who also serves as the Ed School’s academic affairs coordinator.

Richard Finnegan, Ed.M., was honored with a professorship in his name, the Distinguished Richard B. Finnegan Professor-

ship in Political Science and International Relations, upon retiring from the faculty of Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Finnegan graduated from Stonehill in 1964 and returned to teach in 1968. At the college, he founded the international studies and Irish studies programs.

Felisa Tibbitts, Ed.M., relocated to Brussels, Germany, to head up research for Education International (www.ei-ie.org), the world’s largest federation of unions, representing more than 30 million educational personnel worldwide. She writes, “The advocacy work of EI dovetails well with my combined interests in human rights and education, and I’m enjoying being based in Europe again. Let me know if you will be passing through Brussels so that we can enjoy some of Brussels’ legendary food and beer!” felisalt@gmail.com

Dan Camilli, Ed.M., recently published Tee Ceremony: A Cosmic Duffer’s Companion to the Ancient Game of Golf, which uses cartoons and quotes from Buddha, Bhagavad Gita, and Bagger Vance to demonstrate the “way of golf.”

Rosalie Fink, Ed.D., published Reading and Writing with Rhythm this past summer. Fink is a professor emeritus of literacy at Lesley University in Cambridge and a former classroom teacher and literacy specialist in New York public schools. (See book blurb, page 21.) rosaliefink.com

Allison Webster, Ed.M., was named head of Dedham Country Day School in Dedham, Massachusetts. Previously, she served as assistant head at Shady Hill School in Cambridge. She also taught English and social studies at Shady Hill and at the Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Annie Jonas, Ed.M., professor and chair of the education department at Warren Wilson College, is an inaugural “engaged faculty scholar” with the North Carolina Campus Compact — one of only two selected from a competitive field of applicants from across North Carolina. The scholars program was started as a way to support faculty and encourage them to share their service-learning expertise.

Cheryl Watson-Harris, Ed.M., rejoined the Department of Education in New York City as director of a new borough field support center. The new centers replaced the city’s 55 Children’s First Networks. Prior, Watson-Harris was a network superintendent for Boston Public Schools, helping to develop a new district structure, and supervising and evaluating 16 principals.

She served as a principal in Boston for 15 years and started her teaching career in 1993 at Brooklyn’s PS 81.

John Tyler, Ed.D., professor at Brown University, is part of a team that includes John Papay, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D.’11, assistant professor at Brown University, and Ed School Assistant Professor Eric Taylor, that received a $4.99 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences to examine how state school systems can use teacher evaluations to improve instructional practice. The five-year award will support a research partnership between the Tennessee Department of Education and researchers at Brown, Vanderbilt University, and the Ed School.

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In Memory Royal Graves, M.A.T.’49 Elizabeth Gonzalez, Ed.M.’50 Mary Sandvold Baxter, M.A.T.’53 Raymond Biggar, M.A.T.’53 John Garland, M.A.T.’54 Tom Sobol, M.A.T.’54 Jean-Marie Cook, M.A.T.’55 Barbara Weissbrod, Ed.M.’55 Pamela Malone, M.A.T.’56 Deborah Beveridge, M.A.T.’57 John Morrison, M.A.T.’57 E. Alden Dunham, M.A.T.’58 Ruth Golden, Ed.M.’58 Michael Fay, C.A.S.’59 Ellis Hagstrom, M.A.T.’51, Ed.D.’60 Barbara Monay, M.A.T.’60 Richard Hyman Goodman, C.A.S.’60, Ed.D.’61 Donald Nickerson, Ed.M.’62 Saul Rogolsky, Ed.D.’63 Samuel Tatnall, M.A.T.’63 Roger Stanley, Ed.M.’64 Adele Carp, Ed.M.’66 Caroline Helmkamp, M.A.T.’66 Diana Montgomery Huggin, M.A.T.’66 Linton Deck, Jr., C.A.S.’65, Ed.D.’67 Ernest Hunter, Ed.M.’57, C.A.S.’68 Carol Schwartz, C.A.S.’68 William Garland, C.A.S.’67, Ed.D.’70 Wood Smethurst, Ed.D.’70 Jane West Young, M.A.T.’71 Joseph O’Keefe, Sr., Ed.M.’72 Sharon Perry, Ed.M.’74 Sanford Greenfield, Ed.M.’75 Joseph Scovell, C.A.S.’75 Frank Beck, Ed.M.’76 Dorothy Sheahan, Ed.M.’77 Justine Juarez, Ed.M.’78 Francis Harvey, Ed.D.’80 Susan Halligan, Ed.M.’82 Catherine Krupnick, Ed.D.’84 Thomas O’Donnell, Ed.M.’58, C.A.S.’85 Theodore Stein, Ed.M.’86 Robert Macdonald, Ed.M.’87 Janice Lovejoy, Ed.M.’89 Linda Stedman, Ed.M.’93 Adam Tanney, Ed.M.’05 Chris Harold Hokanson, Ed.M.’08 Yan Yang, Ed.M.’10, Ed.M.’15

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Aleza Beauvais and her grandson, Wilde.

Aleza Beauvais, Ed.M., is a seventh-grade ELA teacher in Gardner, Massachusetts.

She writes, “I love the energy and attention spans of seventh-graders and hope to continue teaching ELA as long as our wonderful administration remains in place.”

Recently, Beauvais spent time on her farm with Wilde, her five-year-old grandson (see photo). “Wilde kept his hands behind his back, so the llamas would see him as nonthreatening. His reward was a llama kiss!” Beauvais says her mother–daughter team of guard llamas help protect their sheep and goats.

Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D., recently co-authored Achieving Coherence in District Improvement. (See book Mapp blurb, page 20.)

Mapp is a senior lecturer at the Ed School and director of the school’s Education Policy and Management Program. @karen_mapp

Peter Mueller, Ed.M., was named principal at Basalt High School in the Roaring Fork School District in Basalt, Colorado. Prior, he was a director of conservation programs in Southwest Colorado with The Nature Conservancy.

Jude Higdon, Ed.M., was recently promoted to associate vice president for information technology at Minnesota State University– Mankato.

Adam Bunting, Ed.M., joined Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, Vermont, as principal. This is not Bunting’s first experience with the school: He was a student, a teacher, and a house director before becoming principal. @abuntcvu

Darcy Madden, Ed.M., was recently named the executive director of Social Venture Partners Boston. Social Venture helps grow nonprofits by providing them with access to professionally skilled volunteers and financial resources. Previously, she was executive director of Read to a Child.

Matt Underwood, Ed.M., is in his ninth year at the Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, where he serves as executive director. In 2015, the school was named Georgia Charter School of the Year by the state charter schools association, an honor that was accompanied by a $50,000 grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation. The school’s teacher residency program has also expanded to four other Atlanta schools, district and charter, supported by $4 million from the federal Investing in Innovation (i3) program and several local foundations.

T. Greg Prince, Ed.M, completed the Ed.D. program in educational leadership at East Carolina University, graduating in December 2015. He continues to serve as vice president of advancement and external affairs at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland, as well as executive director of the Salisbury University Foundation.

Laura Barr Sargent, Ed.M., is the author of a series of books called Hop On Reading that use the Orton-Gillingham approach to help early, struggling dyslexic readers.

Hoponreading.com, @HopOnReading

Sarah Fiarman, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D., a former school principal, recently published Becoming a School Principal: Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn. (See book blurb, page 18.)

Chike Aguh, Ed.M., was named the inaugural chief program officer at EveryoneOn, a national social enterprise democratizing education and opportunity by closing the digital divide through high-speed, low-cost Internet service and computers and free digital literacy courses to over 30 million low-income Americans. He oversees all national initiatives, regional teams, strategic partnerships, performance management, and communications.

, Ed.M., recently published Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth. For 25 years, she helped create and lead information literacy and research skills programs at Brandeis University. Currently she is the director for research at Consulting Services for Education in Newton, Massachusetts. @lesliestebbins, lesliestebbins.com

What started as an exciting experiment — all the world’s information at our fingertips — is evolving into a complex information environment where competing interests vie for our attention. We used to consume our information after it had been filtered for us: by publishers, editors, booksellers, libraries, and others. While there are significant downsides to having an elite group decide what we see and don’t see, we have gone to the other extreme. The gatekeepers are gone, the gates have been flung open, and those with the most strategic marketing plans and search engine optimization strategies are often the ones that win our attention. Who do we want in charge of answering our information queries and giving us advice?

Alumni: Have You Claimed Your HarvardKey Yet? Harvard has a new alumni directory! Claiming your HarvardKey gets you access to the new directory — the most complete and comprehensive database of Harvard alumni and students anywhere. Robust and secure, the directory allows you to: • Search in easy and flexible ways, in a secure environment.

• Connect with fellow alumni from across the university. Catch up with classmates you haven’t talked to in years.

Stay in touch with colleagues from your program.

• Build your career network by reaching out to alumni in industries, specialties, and companies of interest to you.

• More easily communicate with current students, who now have access to the directory.

• Manage access to the alumni.harvard email forwarding tool.

• This new database replaces the post.harvard site and is the only verified network of Harvard alumni anywhere. It is your trusted source of information about fellow alumni and is available for your exclusive use. Find the directory and other enhanced online features at alumni.harvard.edu.

But first, you have to claim your HarvardKey. Visit alumni.harvard.edu and click on the alumni directory to get started.

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Professional Education at HGSE Inspirational and practical. Supported by community. Grounded in research. Focused on impact.

With more than 40 programs in preK–12 and higher education, professional education at HGSE provides the latest research, strategies, and tactics to inform your practice. Learn from and with fellow practitioners from around the world — online or on campus, as a team or on your own.

Certificate in Advanced Education Leadership — online

Women in Education Leadership

Faculty Chair: Elizabeth City, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’07 Next module begins February 15 gse.harvard.edu/ppe/cael

Faculty Chair: Deborah Jewell-Sherman, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’95 March 3–5 gse.harvard.edu/ppe/wil

Crisis Leadership in Higher Education

Scaling for Impact: Strategies to Enhance and Expand What Works in Education

Faculty Chairs: James Honan and Herman “Dutch” Leonard February 29–March 3 gse.harvard.edu/ppe/clhe

Faculty Chair: Monica Higgins March 9–11 gse.harvard.edu/ppe/sfi

For a complete list of programs, visit gse.harvard.edu/ppe.

Elizabeth Weinbloom, Ed.M., ran for the Somerville Board of Aldermen in Ward 6 this past November. She is the director of lesson plan development for Gradesaver, a Cambridge-based company started by two Harvard College students in 1999 to help other students edit and revise essays. They also sell literature study guides. @LizWeinbl

A dog named Duck reads a magazine named Ed. Courtesy of Matt Weber, Ed.M.’11, and current doctoral student Nell O’Donnell Weber, Ed.M.’10.

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John Papay, Ed.M.’05, Ed.D., assistant professor at Brown University, is part of a team that includes Brown Professor John Tyler, Ed.D.’98, and the Ed School’s Assistant Professor Eric Taylor, that received a $4.99 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences to examine how state school systems can use teacher evaluations to improve instructional practice. The five-year award will support a research partnership between the Tennessee Department of Education and researchers at Brown, Vanderbilt University, and the Ed School.

Shane Kwok, Ed.M., became the new principal of the Tampines Secondary School in Singapore. Prior, he was vice principal of Innova Junior College. As he told the Straits Times after his appointment, “I hope to focus not just on academics, but also on helping the students discover their passion.”

Justin Reich, Ed.D., recently became the executive director of the PK12 Initiative at MIT, a collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson Academy for Teaching and Learning, to support teachers using digital learning tools and environments, especially in the STEM areas. Reich, who taught in MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program for the last four years, will also become a research scientist in the university’s Office of Digital Learning. @bjfr

, Ed.M., an AP English teacher at KIPP Academy Lynn Collegiate High School, recently became a top-10 finalist for the 2015 Fishman Prize for Superlative Classroom Practice, from an initial pool of 800 teachers. In August, she was one of 12 national winners of the Harriet Ball Excellence in Teaching Award, which recognizes teachers from the KIPP network.

Stocklin began her career at Central High School in Helena, Arkansas, as a 12thgrade AP literature and English teacher, and as a Teach For America corps member.

Anita Wadhwa, Ed.M.’09, Ed.D., published Restorative Justice in Urban Schools: Disrupting the School to Prison Pipeline, in January 2016. She is the restorative justice coordinator at the Academy of Choice in Houston.

Ryan Wise, Ed.L.D., was named the director of the Iowa Department of Education. He had been the department’s deputy direcWise tor since 2013.

Prior, he served as managing director for growth strategy and development for Teach For All and as executive director of Teach For America in South Dakota. He began his career as a history teacher in Nebraska and Mississippi. @ryanwise read a q&a with wise:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

This past fall, the Ed School’s website featured a profile of Jennifer Stocklin, in which she talked about the awards and her passion for teaching students to write — and to get that writing out in the world for others to read. She said, “I believe so much that my students’ writing is worthwhile and that they’re writing about serious things that should be read by people other than me. The number-one thing I care about is how we can get our students’ writing out into the world so that their voices can be heard.” read the full profile:

gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

Geoff Marietta, Ed.M.’13, Ed.D., recently co-authored Achieving Coherence in District Improvement. (See book blurb, page 18.)

He is the executive director of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, which was established in 1913 in Pine Mountain, Kentucky.

Rachel McCall, Ed.M., joined the Woodlawn School in July 2015 as head of the upper school. Located in Mooresville, North Carolina, the independent K–12 school emphasizes hands-on, project-based learning.

Come to this year’s Alumni of Color Conference!

This year’s theme:

Emma Herzog, Ed.M., is the new principal of Whittemore Elementary School in Waltham, Massachusetts. Herzog served as dean of curriculum and instruction at the Leahy Elementary School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and principal intern at the Hurley Two-Way Dual Language Immersion School in Boston.

Educators as Architects: Building a Mosaic for Democracy Now! March 3–5, 2016 alumniofcolorconference.org @HGSE_AOCC

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Inside the Campaign: Collaborate on Questions That Matter One priority of the Campaign for Harvard Graduate School of Education is “Collaborate on Questions That Matter.”

The idea is that we will support our faculty as they focus their collective attention on the most important issues in the field. We believe that pressing problems in education are best addressed by teams of faculty trained in multiple disciplines, who work closely together and with those in the field. In this issue of Ed., we take a closer look at some of the questions Ed School faculty are tackling and how support from the Dean’s Venture Fund is getting these important initiatives off the ground.

What is the Dean’s Venture Fund?

These critical resources help launch collaborative research projects and other new programs.

So far the Dean’s Venture Fund has provided $6.5 million to enable the Ed School to seize new opportunities for impact. Here are some of the initiatives that have launched so far:

Are today’s TEEN GIRLS

poised to CLOSE THE

gender gap?

What role

CAN SCHOOL

counselors

PLAY IN expanding

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Making Caring Common You may have seen the recent report, featured by CBS News, The New York Times, Good Morning America, and others, showing that teen girls face biases about their leadership capacities (see story, page 17). This is just one example of the questions raised by the Making Caring Common Project, a national effort to make concern for others and the common good priorities in child raising. Senior Lecturer Richard Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87, and Associate Professor Stephanie Jones co-direct the project, which uses original research to offer resources for educators, parents, and caretakers, such as a bullying prevention toolkit and steps that can be taken to create a culture of caring and respect in schools.

Strengthening School Counseling Making CaringAdvising Common and College You may have seen the recent report, featured by CBS News, The New York

With support the Dean’s Venture Fund, showing Senior Lecturer Mandy Times, Goodfrom Morning America, and others, that teen girls Savitz-Romer face biases and Eric Waldo, Ed.M.’03, executive director of First Lady Michelle Reach about their leadership capacities (see story, page xx). This is just Obama’s one example Higher initiative, led a 2014 national convening of education leaders to discuss of the questions raised by the Making Caring Common Project, a national increasing access to college for Americans.

A White House report, Counseling and effort to make concern for others and the common good priorities in child College The Road Ahead, summarized ideas and and Associate solutions that arose raising.Completion: Senior Lecturer Richard Weissbourd, Ed.D.’87, Profesatsor theStephanie event, including ways to improve training and professional development for Jones co-direct the project, which uses original research to offer school counselors; scalable, data-driven innovations; and strategies for expanding resources for educators, parents, and caretakers, such as a bullying preventhe of and school counselors students. tionreach toolkit steps that can so be they takencan to serve createall a culture of caring respect in report, schools.

Toand read the full go to gse.harvard.edu/ed/extras.

GSE.HARVARD.EDU/ED

Can cash INCENTIVES reduce the

DROPOUT

RATE IN Colombia?

How can

ALL STUDENTS

have a fair

CHANCE at success?

Innovative Education Interventions in Colombia The mid-size city of Manizales, Colombia, faces a significant high school dropout rate as well as low quality of education, as shown in standardized tests. Associate Professors Felipe Barrera-Osorio and David Deming are testing interventions in Manizales, including teacher rewards and cash transfers to students who graduate and enroll in postsecondary education. By advancing understanding of the impact of incentives and accountability on educational effectiveness, Barrera-Osorio and Deming hope to influence policy not only in Colombia, but worldwide.

The Education Redesign Lab Under the direction of Professor Paul Reville, the Education Redesign Lab aims to design and implement a new education “engine” that will ensure that all students, especially the economically disadvantaged, have a fair chance of mastering the skills and knowledge necessary for success. Reville and his team envision three core components of this new learning engine: expanded, differentiated, and personalized schooling; comprehensive health and well-being supports; and highquality and accessible out-of-school learning opportunities. The Dean’s Venture Fund enabled the lab to create an organizational infrastructure and strategic plan to focus its advocacy, field work, research, and network building, which have generated additional funding.

The Campaign for

HGSE

$250 million goal $180 million raised (as of 10/31/15)

11,400+ 89% gifts made to of all gifts made by

the campaign

HGSE alumni

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

49

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Holliston, MA Permit No. 20

Harvard Graduate School of Education Office of Communications 13 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138

We so loved the back cover of our last issue (fall 2015), featuring Avery, the daughter of Larina Mehta, Ed.M.’06, that we decided to highlight future back covers of Ed. with more cute kids (and cute pets) reading the magazine. In this issue, we feature Juniper Soto-Suver, the granddaughter of Robert Soto, Ed.M.’84, reading in the Marin Headlands, California. Juniper is wearing her mother’s baby tee from 1984 — the year her grandfather spent at Harvard. Soto writes, “She plans to be part of the 2037 graduating class in the field of cognitive cybernetics — a research focus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the 2030s.” If you’re an alum or faculty or staff member, send us a high-resolution image of your little one with information about the photo and it may just end up on a future back cover! send your pics to

classnotes@gse.harvard.edu

and put where’s ed? in the subject line.

•• Since this photo is usually silhouetted against a white background, photograph your subject against a contrasting, simple background so our designer can easily cut out around it.

•• Try to keep shoulders, arms, and hands fully visible whenever possible.

•• Photos must be high resolution. Those over 1MB are best.

•• Don’t send fuzzy or dark photos.