Memory at work in the classroom- literacy orientation

Francis Bailey and Ken Pransky's book, Memory at Work in the Classroom: Strategies to Help Underachieving Students, originates from their experience working with English Language Learners, a traditionally underachieving group. Their insights are true for many underachievers, especially those who have language weaknesses, regardless of whether they are language learners or not. In the opening of their book they discuss core social learning concepts: memory is socially and culturally constructed, there are two distinct communities of learners and quality learning interactions are predicated on mediated learning experiences.

Their idea of two distinct learning communities is an intriguing one. They group learners into literacy and non-literacy oriented. Literacy oriented ones usually come from families with more formal education. Schools are designed to work with these students and consequently they tend to be more successful in schools. Non-literacy oriented communities also want their children to do well, but tend to fail to support their children in as productive manner when it relates to school- they use less academic vocabulary and sophisticated grammar structures commonly utilized in school settings. They present the slightly modified chart below to highlight the differences between the two orientations (p. 29-30).

Non-literacy orientation	Literacy orientation
Limited ability to independently use written texts, such as dictionaries, references and subject matter texts to mediate their own learning	More ability to independently use written texts, such as dictionaries, references and subject matter texts to mediate their own learning
Limited metalinguistic awareness, especially at younger ages	Greater metalinguistic awareness, especially at younger ages
Limited ability to independently use genres of economic, etc literacy- academic,.	More skillful at independently using genres of literacy
Limited ability to independently and skillfully use a variety of written texts	Able to independently and skillfully use a variety of written texts
Often less willing to independently persevere in learning challenging content that is not seen as valuable or of immediate personal interest, especially as students get older	More apt to independently persevere in learning challenging content that is not seen as valuable or of immediate personal interest, especially as students get older
Smaller and less sophisticated knowledge of vocabulary (for ELLs this includes in their native language)	Larger and more sophisticated knowledge of vocabulary
Less developed grammatical complexity in oral and written language (for ELLs this includes in their native language)	More developed grammatical complexity in oral and written language
Typically less confident as an independent, self-directed learner in academic settings, needing more teacher direction	Typically more confident as an independent, self-directed learner in academic settings, needing less teacher direction

The authors fail to recognize the types of settings and skills in which non-literacy oriented students may be more successful. These might include greater social skills, community awareness and an increased ability to be successful when perfect performance rather than graduated performance is correct.

Obviously these children struggle in schools; their foundation in the art of doing school is remarkably less well developed. That does not mean they cannot be successful, rather that they need increased support to reach the same point because of their different orientation. Some of their general strategies to help them succeed include: developing relationships, increased vocabulary focus (not the present 20 words on Monday and test on Friday variety!), increased chunking and supported practice, more concrete and visual basis for learning, teaching weak executive function skills, and increased discussion and reflection time. Every classroom would benefit from these adaptations- not just ones with students with disabilities or non-native speakers. By increasing awareness of the challenges that orientation present, a teacher can modify instruction to develop and increase motivation as well as make explicit the keys to learning.

Memory at work: Attention Span

We've all had them: the students who have attention spans of gnats who need constant stimulation and still struggle with attending. Last year I worked in a preschool where morning circle was punctuated with a couple of students inevitably getting frequent redirections and reprimands to pay attention and keep their hands to themselves. At the time I postulated that the 45 minutes of circle was to blame, but as a guest in the classroom, was hesitant to comment as "my" student generally was on target with his behavior. Now I have research to use to help with this assumption. Francis Bailey and Ken Pransky wrote Memory at Work in the Classroom: Strategies to Help Underachieving Students. On page 87 they posit several rules of thumb for attention span:

• age +2 minutes
• 3-5 minutes per each year of age
• adults have 20 minutes

That rule of thumb is complicated with interest. If someone is very interested in something, they have a longer attention span than if they are not interested in it. This explains why those darlings with ADHD might be able to play a video game for an hour without a break, but can only work on a math worksheet for 3 minutes before getting wiggly.

I really like the age + 2 plan. Some of those preschoolers were deeply engaged in morning circle which included calendar, weather, singing group songs, reviewing the day's agenda and a story. Some were not so deeply engaged. They were not the one checking the weather and need prompting to sing the "What's the Weather" song. Bland readings of stories without exciting previews, engaging voices, and teacher enthusiasm were less engaging to many. Collectively students needed more action- songs with motions and movement- and more hype. One challenge to teaching this age group is the constant need to be enthralled with whatever is going on regardless of how routine it is. These kids needed an activity change at least every 6 minutes and without it, were behavior problems.

Bailey and Pransky suggest both classroom and individual strategies to address the executive function of sustained attention (p. 90). From a classroom standpoint:

• Preferential seating- surround with good attenders, away from distractions
• discuss distractions and suggestions for dealing with them
• explicitly teach what paying attention and listening are and what they look like
• be intentional about time chunks
• include more steps to help break up longer tasks
• have part of the instructions for the group include specific training in behavioral expectations.
• use total participation techniques.

This is not just for our classic struggling students- the ones with IEPs and 504 plans or ADHD diagnoses. Many students without diagnoses benefit from these strategies so teaching the group makes sense.

Some students need more than the instruction for the group. Their strategies need to based on each child. From an individual standpoint:

• have a signal for redirecting students- with my preschooler, I used the sign for look
• establish a self-monitoring checklist
• utilize metacognition- when can the student focus, how does it feel, how can that information be used in the classroom
• have the student have a signal for waning attention: perhaps a break card

We can help our students develop better attention, but we need to start where they are and teach skills. While some students may need medication to help them learn these skills, medication only opens the door. They need instruction to teach them to step through. This is especially true as they age and have learned habits of inattention which must be broken before they learn skills of attending. A difficult task, but well worth the investment.

Getting things done

When I drive long distances, I like to listen to audiobooks. Over the years we have listened to a variety of works. While it is more challenging to listen to many nonfiction titles, I enjoy putting them on anyway. Over my last trip I listened to David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, an abridged version of the book. Allen is a personal productivity guru. He supports organizations and executives to help them become more productive.

One of his underlying assumptions is that most stress is caused by open loops in your life. Open loops being incomplete things that are in your mind. This could be the result of over-commitment or poor organization. One of his primary activities with people is to gather all things in an in box and then begin sorting. First they should be sorted into action or no action.
No action- trash (throw it away), maybe someday, reference (file)
action- can be done in two minutes or less (do it now) or put next action on the calendar.

His key focus is to determine what the next action is. Any project (something with more than one action step) needs to be broken down into the next action. His insistence that you determine next actions helps facilitate activity and avoid procrastination. Critical is breaking projects down by next action. Going out to dinner with your spouse requires many  actions: select a day and time, select a restaurant, get phone number, make reservations, select an outfit, clean the car, go out... You just need to do the next step. When you break things down into the next action, not worrying about all the subsequent steps it helps you to move on a project.

Interestingly, this fits neatly into my executive function research. Many of my students struggle with projects. They need help breaking down projects into manageable steps, much like the executives Allen works with. Being able to draw this comparison may help to normalize this activity for my students.

Dare to be different- differentiation and gifted children

When my daughter was in primary school her principal told me that no kids was teased or bullied because he or she was smart. I was too stunned to contradict him. Really. Kids will select any difference as a rallying point for teasing. As a bright child I was teased about my smarts, especially in elementary school. That some deny this happens is disturbing because it can deny a key feature of some children's experiences. Trudy H. Saunders's article, "Dare to be Different: How Teachers Can Eliminate Social Stigmatism While Differentiating Instruction," in the August edition of Teaching for High Potential, tackles the concept of stigmatization due to ability.

Before talking about what works in terms of differentiation, she talks about what doesn't- extra work and peer tutoring during academic time. It made me angry when I was looking at how my district worked with high ability kids and a parent stepped up to talk about how great his daughter's teacher was- she sent home the work at her level so that the child could do it with mom and dad during her free time. My nephew's teachers had him write longer reports- not different in any way other than increasing the length requirement. I talked with one parent whose child got to teach the struggling kids in class- this was a 2nd grader. How is that child really helping those struggling learners? How is it expanding his learning? My daughter talked about being paired up with a struggling learner on a regular basis because then the work would get done- yes, my daughter did it all. None of these showcase any skill in meeting individual student needs. They mostly constitute busy work.

So what should be done? Differentiation is a tool that Carol Ann Tomlinson promotes to meet the needs of diverse learners. I caution anyone against using one strategy for all kids, but done well, differentiation does meet the needs of most kids. Done well is the key term here. Saunders points out the consequences of poorly executed differentiation: academic stagnation, boredom and hiding. When my daughter's eighth grade English class tackled To Kill a Mockingbird over the course of three and a half months my daughter was not just bored and not challenged, but not learning. She read the book in under a week and then had to dabble through the curriculum with the class. Yes this was challenging reading for most of her classmates, but no allowances were made for her. A big move of CCSS has been close reading of challenging material. She was expected to annotate material, especially things that were confusing. When there is nothing there that you struggled with, forced annotation makes a student want to never read again. She could have been given a separate charge that required a deeper level of understanding. Parallel reading, research in lieu of work comparative character analysis all would have been ways to increase the challenge and maybe provided some learning opportunities.

To do differentiation well, Saunders makes a few suggestions: flexible grouping, learning stations, learning contracts and tiered lessons. A common myth is that gifted kids don't like group work. The real truth is they don't like group work where they have to do all the work if they want a good grade. They thrive on group work with their academic peers. Homogeneous classes, intentional clusters and pull out enrichments are all strategies to meet their need for cognitive challenge. Interestingly we have no trouble having varsity sports teams where the best players are with JV, modified and club teams for other levels. We would scream blaspheme if someone were to suggest a no cut everyone play rule for football, but that is totally what we do in academics. We grow in a skill set when the work is just right and our peers are there. Gifted kids also like interest based groups. This provides a central idea around which ideas can develop. Learning to work with diverse is important, and pulls our struggling students up, but too much destroys the educational opportunities of our brightest students.

Learning stations are common in elementary classes but far less prevalent as students get older. Stations can require that students work on material at their individual level with particular materials, be highly individualized, like computer based instruction, or enable students to stay longer at stations where they need extra help or show extra interest. They can be combined with contracts or tiers to meet student needs. I read about one teacher who had three levels of material at each station- and coded them with skiing terms for level of difficulty. Anyone could attempt material from higher levels but some students were required to work at certain levels to meet their needs. This could mean there were readings at different reading levels, higher level thinking questions at some levels, more or less nice to know information at some levels.

We need to teach our gifted kids to be proud of their skills. They need to learn how to work with challenges. They need to not try and hide their success because it leads to more boring work, constantly being paired up with struggling learners or teasing. Teachers first need to be aware of the stigmatization that these kids experience, then they need to figure out how to meet the needs of these difficult to educate kids.

Understand your Brain

Ari Tuckman wrote Understand Your Brain, Get More Done: The ADHD Executive Functions Workbook for adults with ADHD experiencing executive function issues and ready to work on it. As a workbook, it is meant to be done independently, but not necessarily sequentially. Having read it through there are repetitive, but if someone were to hunt and peck through the text, as the author recommends, this would be less of an issue.

Tuckman identifies 7 areas of executive function that often impact the lives of people with ADHD: response inhibition, working memory, sense of time, prospective memory, emotional self-control, self-activation, and forethought and hind thought. Each element has a chapter with strategies centered around two or three main ideas. For example, for working memory he identifies the following three basic ideas into which strategies can be categorized:

1. Make important tasks and items stand out more to make it more likely that your attention will stay focused on them.
2. The fewer distractions, the easier it is to stay focused on and remember what you should.
3. Write things down rather than keep them in your head. (p. 42)

This brings back college. Anytime I had a paper to write or a test to study for, the first thing I did was clean my room. I knew that if my room and desk were disheveled, I would be distracted and have difficulty focusing. Some people looked at me funny when I said I had a paper to write and they saw me taking the trash out or fetching the vacuum. It was what I needed to do. I learned to allot time in my process to pick the place up before I started and I was then able to complete the academic task at hand. People with ADHD often struggle against picking things up and putting them where they belong, but if they are put away, they become less distracting and you are able to accomplish more. This idea of limiting distractions is seen in several areas of the book, a testament to the challenge and thus the importance of this activity.

The book is full of place to be involved. It asks the individual to identify which strategies they have used, what their past experiences with the strategy was, obstacles that interfere with using the strategy and how and where it might be used in your life. For example, one element under the first category in working memory is "do it right away." When a permission slip came home I always immediately signed it, attached an envelope with any necessary funds and returned it to the child's backpack via a homework folder. Otherwise I forgot to do it. With my email, I try to immediately respond to anything so that I do not lose it in my in box.

After identifying past strategy use, the author asks you to select two from each category to examine in more depth. Then he ask the reader to select a couple of strategies to try out. He proposes making a written commitment to try them out and to visualize the rewards of using them. He also suggests including a personal reward for using the strategies. Once strategies have been tried out, he asks the reader to evaluate their implementation. His book stresses the idea that things are hard, and refinement of implementation is essential. He suggests looking at how they present lessons to learn about work, relationships and home life. This self evaluation is critical for helping to maintain motivation. Presumably learning to do better will improve your life. Recognizing that making a difficult change has benefits and what precisely those benefits are is essential.

While the target audience of this book is people with ADHD, others with executive function weaknesses would benefit from many of these exercises. While many of these tasks could be used with high school students, younger students would be likely to struggle with the self-evaluation and meta-cognition required to use this strategy without extensive support.

response on raising the bar

Once again the concept of raising the bar is in the news. We are confronted with this question- What should a diploma mean?

• Should a diploma be a minimum bar over which students should aspire to stumble over, as it has been for some states as some points of time?
• Should it be an elevated standard that denotes a level of achievement that will indicate students will be successful in college or a career, as the Common Core Standards advocates?
• Should it be something everyone should aspire to?
• Should it indicate some superior level of performance that everyone can achieve?
• Should an employer be able to look at the fact that a student has a diploma and believe that this student has the raw ability to be trainable in his environment?
• Is it something that must be earned or is it an entitled right?
• Is it about time served or amount learned?

Because we are not sure what a diploma should mean, our education system flounders, wandering this way and that, not doing a good job of meeting any of the objectives.

Kathleen Mikulka  addresses this question in her response to Maine's increased standards for graduation. Maine will require students to earn an 80 or better on 8 proficiency exams in order to earn a diploma. Problems abound around this idea, particularly the fact that the exams are locally developed and thus not comparable to each other or married to any standard. Mikulka's primary objection appears to be that her students with special needs might not be able to pass the exams and thus create young people "with no future."

If the exams are easy enough to be passed by everyone, a strategy that districts could take, they are meaningless. Employers or colleges want to see a diploma and know what that means. Students who lack the ability to apply themselves in a way to be successful on the exams (those with emotional disabilities are the largest group of non-diploma winners) or lack the ability to be successful on the exams might have a future confronted with limitations. Poor social-emotional skills will prevent them from being successful in the real world. Is it better to have students not fail in school but fail in life, or fail in school where maybe they can later learn the skills to be successful in life.

I know it is hard to have a child who puts forth every effort only to fail or barely pass, but that is life. No matter how hard you try, there are things you will not achieve- as a middle aged 5'2" female with poor coordination will never be an NBA player, more than half the people who want to be president, in spite of trying very hard, never make it. I would rather have the hard working high school non-finisher on my team than the lackadaisical, diploma-granted, entitled one. Many employers will tell you that it is not cognitive skills that enable individuals to be successful in jobs but soft skills- things like punctuality, initiative, manners, diligence, and persistence. Some employers see a college degree not in terms of a person having particular content skills, but in terms of him being trainable. As employment tests have been increasingly thrown out of use by courts, employers have raised the education bar because it is a mark of work ethic, not acquired skill level. Yes, employers want employees who can write a decent report, read a manual, do basic arithmetic without a calculator, and speak intelligibly, but they also want them to show up on time, put away their devices, work for their full shift and be pleasant throughout. If we are only teaching the former "content" skills, our children find themselves with a limited future regardless of their diploma status.

We need to decide what it means to have earned a diploma. Then we need to focus our efforts toward that goal. Yes, some will not earn a diploma. Some people will never be in the NBA, paint award winning pictures, perform at Carnegie Hall or be employed at a fortune 500 company. That is ok. We need to view all work as valuable- regardless of its income potential. People have a future until they are dead. Yes, some will have to work their backsides off while others will seem to breeze through with no troubles.  When we see some jobs as more worthy, when we tell kids who are not going to be the top 1% or 20% or 50% they are not as worthy we have a problem.  Most are not going to be in that top 1% or 20% or 49.9999%, we need to get comfortable with whosoever we are.

Brain based teaching in a digital age

Marilee Sprenger wrote Br@in-Based Teaching:) in the Digital Age in 2010 and in the intervening years technology has certainly continued to advance with a rapid pace. Neuroscience has made huge discoveries as well. That said, there is much to glean from this book. One of the Appendices probably should be in the introduction- How the brain works is really what underlies many of her assertions.

Her research indicates a huge need for non-technology interactions. Like so many things moderation is important and variety is the spice of life. Kids who are glued to their devices need to learn to interact without them just as they need to be used as part of the learning spectrum. She talks about how the brain changes in response to stimulus. There is lots of research on this if you want some interesting reading (here, here, and here for example). Children who are exposed to huge amounts of fast-paced, visual input have more synapses around their visual cortex than those who do not. These children need to be trained in how to use focus when interpreting visual information as well as instruction in responding to auditory information. They need to work in groups and learn social skills that are often poorly developed because they spend so much time glued to their devices, even in social settings.

Sprenger cautions against, however, blaming technology for loss of creativity. She suggests looking at the loss of unstructured time for our kids as a large cause of limited imagination and creativity. This is not just in school where recess has been targeted for elimination to make way for ELA and math instruction, but with parents who plan exclusively organized events for their kids- team sports, classes, and parent supervised games have free play in the neighborhood playground. While the world is not necessarily a more dangerous place, we refrain from allowing our kids from traveling around their environment independently. A family recently had their children removed because they were allowed to walk home from the park independently. We need to promote unstructured time away from technology to promote well being for our children.

One strategy that Sprenger strongly supports is mind mapping. Using these graphic organizers helps kids form linkages and organize their important information. She also supports using music to link information in the brain. These two tools- music and mind maps- help to strengthen memories. We need to teach children to use these strategies if they are to effectively use them to enhance learning.


Many of us may have learned that people can maintain 7 pieces of information in our short term memory. Sprenger points out an important detail- that number grows as children develop. They begin with one bit of memory at age three and increase their capacity one bit every other year through the age of 15 (see the chart below).

Age	Number of memory bits
3	1
5	2
7	3
9	4
11	5
13	6
15	7

Sprenger's information forms a good foundation to understanding neurological function and the brain. While the pace of discovery is fast, understand the tenants she lays forth, will help teachers design better instruction for children.