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Quantity discounts are available: email [email protected] or call 800-933-2723, ext. 5773, or 703- 575-5773. For desk copies, go to www.ascd.org/deskcopy. ASCD Member Book No. F22-1 (September 2021 PSI+). ASCD Member Books mail to Premium (P), Select (S), and Institutional Plus (I+) members on this schedule: Jan, PSI+; Feb, P; Apr, PSI+; May, P; Jul, PSI+; Aug, P; Sep, PSI+; Nov, PSI+; Dec, P. For current details on membership, see www.ascd.org/membership. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [to be inserted] 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ADVANCE COPY—NOT FINAL. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. Introduction ............................................................ 1 1. Round Robin Reading ................................................ 7 2. Teaching to Learning Styles ......................................... 26 3. Homework as the Default ........................................... .39 4. Formative Assessment Imposters ................................... 56 5. Standardized Test–Based Practices ................................. .70 6. Behavior Charts and Withholding Recess ........................... 91 Conclusion ........................................................... 106 Acknowledgments ................................................... .110 References ........................................................... 112 Index ................................................................ .125 About the Authors ................................................... .132 ADVANCE COPY—NOT FINAL. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. Introduction “Houston, we have a problem.” Apollo 13, 1995 We, Pérsida and Bill, have been in the field of education for 30 years. How long is 30 years? It’s long enough to have watched school boards sheep- ishly back away from mandates requiring female teachers to wear panty- hose with their dresses and skirts. It’s long enough to remember walking out of the teachers’ lounge smelling like a pack of Marlboros. Thirty years is long enough to have seen educational trends come, go, and then come back around again. And it’s long enough to have gained sufficient perspec- tive to say that some things in education haven’t changed a bit. We’ve also been married for 30 years, and we work in the same uni- versity, in the same department, and in offices two doors down from each other. On our ride home in the evening, we’ll talk about our day. Often, we talk about the amazing teachers with whom we work. And some days, after spending the morning pointing out the problems with ineffective or inadvertently damaging educational practices and the afternoon visiting schools where those very same practices are still alive and well, we’ll say to each other, “Why are we still doing that?” In other words, why do instruc- tional, assessment, and classroom management practices that we know to be counterproductive nevertheless stay in place year after year? 1 ADVANCE COPY—NOT FINAL. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. 2 WHY ARE WE STILL DOING THAT? The answer we gravitate to is a simple one: old habits die hard, par- ticularly when they are part of what Dylan Wiliam (2007) calls the unex- amined “scripts” of schooling. Most teachers spend about 13,000 hours in the classroom as students before they graduate high school. That’s a lot of hours soaking up habits that they will later consciously or unconsciously perpetuate, even after learning about best practices in college or univer- sity. “Teachers learn most of what they know about teaching before they are 18 years old,” writes Wiliam. He continues: In the same way that most of us learn what we know about par- enting through being parented, teachers have internalized the “scripts” of school from when they themselves were students. Even the best 4-year teacher-education programs will find it hard to overcome the models of practice their future teachers learned in the 13 or 14 years they spend in school as students. (p. 196) This book is about looking closely at those old scripts, seeing how they really play out today, and recommending many for retirement. We delve into familiar habits across the range of education practice (instruction, assessment, lesson design, and classroom management) that the research identifies as problematic and suggest positive alternatives that better sup- port student growth. A Critical Clarification Pérsida used to be a telemarketer. Every Sunday night for more than a year, she’d find her stomach tied in knots at the prospect of another gru- eling workweek spent cold-calling unfriendly strangers. Even getting somewhat good at it didn’t alleviate the worry; as anyone who’s done it can attest, telemarketing is brutal work. But teaching is arguably harder—in a keep-you-up-at-night, never-forget-your-worst-mistakes kind of way. It’s the type of work that can mess with your head. When Pérsida had a bad day as a telemarketer, she felt like a bad telemarketer; when she had a bad day as a teacher, she felt like a bad person. You can have 179 good days in a school year, but it’s that one bad day that you’ll remember forever: the day you lost your cool, or said something you wish you hadn’t, or didn’t speak up when you should have. ADVANCE COPY—NOT FINAL. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. INTRODUCTION 3 Before we begin to pick apart practices that you, reader, may have used or may still be using in the classroom, it’s important to stress that we know how hard teaching is, and we know the special regret teachers feel when they think they have fallen short of the duty they owe to their students. This is not a book of chastisement or a book to be used as ammunition or for self-flagellation. We are not writing it to be critical of what you or your colleagues do. If being perfect is the qualification for writing this book, we are cer- tainly not qualified; many of the revelations you will read about were sparked by incidents in our own classrooms. But if learning from mistakes qualifies us to write this book, then we certainly hit the mark. Our goal was to write a book that we wish had existed when we were starting out as teachers. With that in mind, we have focused on explaining the prob- lems associated with 16 established classroom practices. After we present the problems associated with these practices, we present better, easy-to- implement alternatives that meet the same, or similar, goals those prac- tices are intended to achieve. Here are the 16 problematic practices we address: • Round robin reading • Teaching to learning styles • Homework as the default • Using interim assessments as “formative assessments” • Asking, “Does everybody understand?” • Traditional Q&A • Data-driven everything • Publicly displayed data walls • Content breadth over depth • Adhering to rigid pacing guides • Teaching to the test samplers • An analysis-only approach to reading • Shortchanging science and social studies • Ignoring curriculum experts • Using behavior charts • Withholding recess ADVANCE COPY—NOT FINAL. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. 4 WHY ARE WE STILL DOING THAT? The Limitations of Research and the Rewards of Reflection Although you will encounter research findings that support opposition to current persistent practices that “feel right” but actually undermine stu- dent learning, in some cases there is little direct data proving that some- thing is a bad practice. Remember, much of what is studied in the field of education needs to be approved by a panel of reviewers whose sole pur- pose is to ensure high ethical standards.