[00:01] SPEAKER_00:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_01:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined once again on the podcast by Kim Marshall. Kim Marshall is the author of The Marshall Memo, now in its 15th year of publication, summarizing the most important education news and research. Previously a principal teacher and central office administrator with Boston Public Schools, Kim has been a leading consultant around teacher evaluation since 2002, and his book, Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation, is one that probably changed the course of my career more than any other. And we've talked about that previously on Principal Center Radio.
[00:55] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:57] SPEAKER_01:
Kim, very honored to have you again on the show. Welcome to Principal Center Radio. Great to be here. So we are here to talk about your new book with Jen David Lang called The Best of the Marshall Memo, Ideas and Action Steps to Energize Leadership, Teaching, and Learning. And as I mentioned in the introduction, the Marshall Memo has been something that you've produced weekly for a good number of years now. And there are thousands upon thousands of articles.
[01:25]
And this is kind of the greatest hits and then some. So talk to us a little bit about what you and Jen set out to do with this book.
[01:34] SPEAKER_02:
So every Monday, the last thing that I do before I go to bed, having written the Memo, And edited it with my wife, who finds a lot of typos, is to upload to the archive the pertinent information on each thing. The archive has grown like Topsy into this rather intimidating document. Some people use it. Other people shy away from it. And so what we did in the book was to say, can we go in, first of all, identify the key topics that principals are interested in and other school leaders are interested in. And then can we go into the archive and find the very best articles on each topic?
[02:06]
We thought it was going to be easy. It turned out not to be easy at all. I had already flagged the so-called classics in the archive, but it was much more complicated. And also we had 22 chapters, 22 key topics, and that was way too much for one book. So actually this is the first of two books. The second book is mostly written.
[02:25]
But the first one has the key topics of, you know, in the issue of sort of leader's toolkit, more good teaching and more classrooms more of the time, and structures for student success. Those are sort of the three big headings. And we grouped the articles and then did an intro for each one. And Jen's role was absolutely critical. First of all, she agreed to write a professional development section suggestions for each one. So every one of the 11 chapters in this book has PD suggestions from Jen, which is one of her specialties, that she does that with her publication, the main idea.
[03:01]
But then Jen became a key thought partner in the selection and sequencing of articles. And these groupings that you see are a lot of Jen's brilliant mind coming to work on this. And so that was what really proved to be so challenging was what are the best articles? How do we sequence them? Who are the authors that we really want to include in this? How do the ideas flow from one to another?
[03:24]
And by the way, there's a couple of great articles by you in there. And so that's the way it took shape. And it took a good year to do this.
[03:31] SPEAKER_01:
I love it. And yeah, Jen David Lang, author of The Main Idea, has for several years done something similar to what you've been doing with The Marshall Memo for many years, except her focus is on whole books, right? Every month she summarizes a book. She's done my book, Now We're Talking, and produces kind of a detailed but concise summary of the main ideas in a book each month. And you have been the designated reader for the education profession for quite some time now. How many different publications do you review every week for the memo?
[04:04] SPEAKER_02:
I subscribe to 60 publications. So what comes in each week is what I'm looking at each week. But I've actually ranged way beyond those 60 publications into a good 140 different publications. And some of the blogs I use, for example, Jennifer Gonzalez's blog is not on my core list, but I'm drawing on her frequently. So it's a whole lot of publications. And I'm just looking in publications, in magazines mostly, in journals.
[04:31]
Jana's looking at books. But we both had the same, we became friends when she first started. So she lives in New York, I'm down in New York a lot. So we sort of had dinner about once every six months exchanging sort of just ideas on how we get this out to our readers, summarizing what the key issues are, who are the people we most admire in the field, and a lot of overlap. So we're not competitors. We really have sort of collaborated.
[04:55]
And at some point, as I conceived this book, I said, why don't I involve Jen for the PD thing? And then she joined in also as a real key thought partner on how to choose and how to sequence and introduce these articles. Her husband is a guidance counselor in the New York City schools. She has two children. One just graduated from the New York City public schools, is in college. The other is in a New York City high school.
[05:18]
So she's very close to the ground and does a lot of work consulting as well. So she's been a wonderful thought partner.
[05:24] SPEAKER_01:
Well, it really is an impressive collection, not just in terms of the individual articles, but the curation and the PD suggestions and a great guide to some of the big ideas. And I appreciate the fact that every week in the memo, you range beyond just education. It's not just education blogs. It's not just education research. It's not just educational leadership. It's also leadership beyond education.
[05:52]
I know you read quite widely in the leadership world, in the certainly in the reading research, all of the academic studies that are done that really are or should be the foundation of our practice in terms of having an evidence-based profession. You do what a lot of us wish we had the time to do, and I'm very grateful that you share in the memo the insights that you gather from that. I always keep a close eye out for articles that you summarize from Dan Willingham and and other researchers who really keep us close to the evidence base in our profession. Because it's so easy as practitioners to get away from that and to start to say, well, I heard secondhand, thirdhand, fourthhand, that this is a good practice. But you are going to the journal articles, in some cases, the journals that are quite expensive to subscribe to, and maybe most of us don't subscribe to technical journals on reading instruction.
[06:48]
But you're also looking at leading leadership authors that are household names, And putting that all in the memo each week. So I just wanted to mention that because it is something that I value greatly that we subscribe to at the Principal Center on behalf of our Instructional Leadership Association members. We actually buy a subscription and I know some state principals associations buy subscriptions for their members because it is hands down the best way to stay connected with the research and the thinking in the field. Not secondhand, not thirdhand, not fourthhand, but really directly connected through the memo. So thank you for that.
[07:23] SPEAKER_02:
Speaking of firsthand, I also really try to look for teacher and principal first person accounts. For example, last week in the memo, I did an article that was in Ed Week by a young Boston teacher named Colin Turner. who wrote a really searingly introspective article about being accused by two of his students for making a racist comment or two. And they didn't come to him, they came to a colleague, an African-American colleague who came to Colin who was white. And he was really upset at these comments because he considered himself an anti-racist, you know, progressive social activist kind of teacher. And he wrote this really candid article.
[08:03]
It's one of the most read articles on Ed Week. So I also look for articles like that, you know, real introspection, good quotes, good thoughts from people on the front lines. So here's an eighth grade teacher in Boston who did a superb job with this article. and really sort of showed his pain as well. And also what he specifically, what he did to bring home to people who have had a similar experience, and I've been there as well, you know, to bring home to them what you do in a situation like that, which is not to cry, or well, after you cry, what you do then. So I'm looking for articles like that as well.
[08:37] SPEAKER_01:
Well, to give people a sense of how the book is organized and how it might be used, let's look at a specific chapter, if we could. I'm looking at chapter six in The Best of the Marshall Memo, Critical Feedback and Difficult Conversations. So in every chapter, you've curated a collection of your summaries and you include the full summary referencing the original source and look at the... You have an overview that you and Jen have written to kind of frame the issues in that chapter.
[09:09]
And I'm looking at page 162, why principles avoid difficult conversations, where you're summarizing and reporting on an article that was in Education Week around teacher evaluation ratings and kind of why most teachers get the top rating most of the time, even if we know that not everybody is above average, so to speak. So walk us through some of the format here and how you envision schools and principals using these summaries.
[09:38] SPEAKER_02:
So just to look at the structure of this chapter, we really divide it into four sections. One is stepping up to the plate, which is about courage. One is the psychology of feedback, including the feedback sandwich, the well-known compliment first, then do the jujitsu chop, and then compliment at the end. Then the third section is dealing with toxic people, of whom I experienced a few when I was a principal in Boston, some of my more difficult moments. And then the final section is very nitty-gritty, sort of pointers for difficult conversations. So the specific article, which is one of 10 in the chapter, is why people avoid these conversations.
[10:17]
And this brings me back to situations where I saw things in my classroom visits that I didn't particularly think were effective and in some cases really did not follow through. So here's some of the reasons that this article, which is by Liana Lois from Ed Week, was written in 2017, so a fairly recent article, So the first reason that people avoid it is that it's just too demanding. It's just too much work to document ineffective practices or mediocre practices. Then there's the issue of if you are going to do it, when are you going to do it? We're finding the time. Then there's the whole documentation challenge.
[10:54]
Then there's the desire for many people to give people a break, to be merciful. Because as the quote here from a Delaware principal is, somebody's job is in your hands. And the rubric is very subjective. So sort of pulling back for reasons of just human kindness, really. Then there's the whole morale piece, keeping the troops happy. And I had situations as a principal where I did something that was critical of somebody, really sort of dropped the anvil on somebody.
[11:22]
And a lot of other people rallied around that person, even if they knew that they were wrong, rallied around them. So just keeping people happy with the overall enterprise. And then there's the rationalization of, well, this person may not be terrific, but if I fire this person or if I push this person out or if I persuade them to transfer out, I might get someone worse. So the devil you know is better than me. And then the final one in this list is simple cowardice. It's just people really being gutless about stepping up to the plate.
[11:51]
And so this article, very nicely, and it's only like a page long, my summary of it, sort of lays out the challenge of being effective with when you see mediocre practices. And you, Justin, have always advocated getting into classrooms more frequently when you have your 500 visit challenge for the year, which people hear is a really daunting and yet really significant challenge. And so if you're taking your advice and getting into classrooms frequently, then you're going to see some mediocre and ineffective practices. And if you don't do something about it, then why don't you just stay in your office? Like, why would you go to all the trouble of visiting these classrooms? So this is really where the rubber meets the road.
[12:29] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and I love the recognition that we see in reading an article like this and hearing those firsthand quotes. And I appreciate how much trouble you go to to get those exact quotes and to cite the specific Delaware principal who had a quote that was just really helpful from the article. I mean, it's all there for people to access. And you see yourself, like you see your own practice and your own dilemmas. in these articles, and at least for me, I realize that the dilemmas that I faced as a principal, everybody else is facing those same dilemmas, and I don't have to think through them completely on my own. The thinking has been done, the profession has been steaming along for a good long time now, and the collective wisdom that's there is just remarkable, and in every case, for every article, you cite the original source, so people can go back and read the full article,
[13:23]
if they would like to, and that's an online source that's available.
[13:26] SPEAKER_02:
So one of the advantages of the summaries, of course, is that they're usually significantly shorter than the original article. And so in this book, which is 350 pages long, we've been able to actually include 128 articles. And if we had the full articles, it would be completely impossible. So the fact that many of these article summaries are only a page, page and a half long, some of them are a little bit longer, makes it possible for us to get a lot more ideas. And actually, if we're doing our job well, if Jen and I have done our job well here, most people will not need to read the original article. We give the citation.
[14:01]
People can find it on Google if they want to. But mostly, we've tried to do an intellectually responsible job of capturing the essence of each article. And by the way, speaking of Jen David Lang, I noticed that the very next article after the one that we were just looking at is actually by Jen David Lang and Douglas Stone. So there are some of our own writing in here. Jen's got this one with Doug Stone, who's the Harvard business professor who wrote Thanks for the Feedback, an amazing book that I think you have highlighted also in your work. And I've got a few articles that I summarized of my own work.
[14:34]
And of course, that's a real challenge. When I write an article myself, You know, should I include it in the Marshall Memo? Often I give the green light to my own articles, but I do make them shorter and more accessible. And so this is the challenge is, you know, principals don't have time to read. Principals, you know, are incredibly busy. I think as a principal, I worked, you know, 78 hours a week, and I'm sure you probably worked longer.
[14:56]
So when do you have time to read? So basically, the calculus of the Marshall Memo is what takes me 20 hours to do each week. So with the reading and the writing and the organizing, that's 20 hours a week that I do. You can read in 20 minutes. That is a favorable calculus. And I've polled readers.
[15:15]
Every other year, I do a SurveyMonkey poll, and that's the average amount of time that most people spend on the Marshall Memo. But the disadvantage of the Marshall Memo that comes to you each week is that it's only as good as what happened to come in that week in the publications that I subscribe to. And so, frankly, it's kind of random. I mean, it's good. There's good stuff coming in, but it's kind of random. So what the book does is to look back over all 16 years of the Marshall Memo and pull together the very, very best in certain topics.
[15:44]
That's why we wanted to write this book, is to put together in very compact form so that each chapter is readable in a fairly short space of time. So we've got to think about how a principal would use this book because it is a little overwhelming. So actually, let me ask you, Justin. So if you were a principal back in Seattle where you were a principal, how would you, you know, when you got this book, when this landed on your doorstep, how would you put it to work with teacher teams, with teachers, with your board, with, you know, how would you use it?
[16:16] SPEAKER_01:
I think one of the first things I would do is look at the table of contents and think, what am I dealing with now? And can I get some tools for thinking about the situation that I'm in now by jumping to a certain part of this book? So I would look for immediate problem solving. on the one hand. And then I think I would also be looking for where I needed to make a better case about evidence-based practice to my staff or to my boss or to people in my district. Because again, often I think as practitioners, we just tend to do stuff that we hear about, but sometimes we're hearing about it second or third hand.
[16:53]
And I think any opportunity to go directly to an authoritative summary and even to the original source, if we want, is going to send us in the right direction. And you walk people through how to use the memo and how to use the book as well. So what's your recommendation?
[17:10] SPEAKER_02:
Well, there's certain articles that lend themselves to being read by an individual teacher. So for example, one of the issues I'm fascinated with is a strong recommendation from some math experts that if you're teaching fractions in third and fourth grade, you should no longer be talking about pizza slices. You should be talking about on a number line, fractions on a number line. Now that's a very interesting insight that I was not aware of until I read two or three articles saying exactly the same thing. And so that's an article that I would want to give to a third and fourth grade math teacher. And I want to sit down and talk to them about it and say, you know, does this ring true with you?
[17:44]
Because the research shows that when kids get to algebra in middle school or high school, there's a big difference with kids who use number lines versus pizza slices. And so it has a big downstream. It's not readily apparent to a third or fourth grade teacher, but it really has done. So an article like that goes to an individual teacher or maybe a teacher team. There's certain articles that I would sort of run by the whole step because they're really amusing. There's certain articles that I would brood about myself.
[18:12]
You have an article in this book that is one of my favorite time management articles of all time where you use the metaphor of low walls. And you talked about the business of principals assigning substitutes and how when you came into your school in Seattle, that was already in place. And so already you had a really good system for dealing with substitutes. But another thing is you had to have a low wall so that people couldn't just flood you and take up all your time, but they could get to you if it was really important. So a great metaphor. So a metaphor like that would be really helpful.
[18:43]
But there are a few articles, just a few, that really lend themselves to being read by the whole staff. And so I was just in Missouri earlier this week on Tuesday and talked to all the principals in Missouri, about 400 people in a big ballroom. And I had them read an article silently. And it took them about five minutes. I said, read it, underline it, highlight it, just read it silently so everyone read. And then I said, OK, at your tables, they were sitting in tables of four or five or six people.
[19:09]
Do a quick protocol of going around and using the last word protocol where one person says, here's what struck me about this article. Here's what I agree with. I like this quote. Here's what I disagree with. Go around. and then go around again.
[19:21]
And it just took 10 or 15 minutes after they read the article. And then we came back together as a whole group and shared out what are some of the key insights. This article happened to be one about the language we use in talking to our colleagues and to kids. And it goes through nouns, adjectives, pronouns, conjunctions like the word but is a critical word when talking to kids or writing college recommendations or all kinds of things. So that particular article was absolutely perfect for a general audience. And these principals walked out and said, wow, now there's definitely this article or other articles that I can use to have the whole staff read and have this whole group experience.
[20:01]
And that was really powerful. So that in the book can be used in similar fashion. There are certain articles that are very specific for particular teachers, for groups of teachers, and then for the whole staff, and also for parents. For example, the finding that a significant number of American kids, teenagers, take their cell phones into bed with them, not just on the bedside table, but into bed. And the recommendation for parents is, for God's sake, put all the cell phones in the house, on a charger, in the kitchen, overnight, no cell phones in the bedroom. I mean, a very simple thing that will make a huge difference to sleep and sanity.
[20:35]
So I put a lot of time into the index. And in the index, for example, you might notice Cookie Monster is in the index. So you might be really curious about, well, you know, why did Kim put the Cookie Monster? Well, there's one article where that's a key thing. In the index, you can also see which authors had the most articles. So, for example, Doug Reeves has got a bunch of articles here.
[20:59]
Mike Schmoker, Pedro Noguera, Jennifer Gonzalez. You can look through at the And you can also, if you're curious, you can see the publications that were the most heavily used. And I can tell you the top three right now. By far, the most articles in this volume and also in the second one came from Fidelic Kappa. Dollar for dollar, pound for pound. I have found that that magazine has really terrific, thoughtful writing.
[21:24]
Number two was education leadership, educational leadership. Very solid stuff from there. I think 15 articles from there, 22 from Kappa. And then third in line, you'll be very surprised, is the Harvard Business Review. And Harvard Business Review has really strong articles on the psychology of leadership. So there are a number of articles on that.
[21:42]
And then the others are two or three each. So then I recommend the index and also really reading Jen David Lang's professional development. Every single chapter, she's got PD suggestions that are really solid, really thoughtful, like actual practical stuff. Like how can you put this to work in your school? So those would be the big things. But as you said a minute ago, I mean, there might be a particular issue that you're going to zero in.
[22:05]
And for example, chapter 11, the last chapter is grading practices. a lot of schools are grappling with the hundred point scale. How do you give zeros? You know, do you have, do you separate out discipline stuff from, from academics? I mean, these are, these are really hot issues. My son is a teacher in Seattle and his school is wrestling with this right now.
[22:28]
And so, you know, picking up a chapter like that, it has 10 or so articles with specific stuff on that, that can really, But it's zeroing in on what are the issues that are pertinent for you right now. If it's grading, if it's teacher evaluation, if it's planning and preparation, all these things, unit planning, lesson planning, and so forth. It's there, but wait for volume two, because we have another 11 chapters. We could not fit it all in one book, and volume two has got PLCs and a bunch of other pertinent issues.
[22:58] SPEAKER_01:
It's been amazing to just see the kind of mental map that you have developed from reading these 60 publications for years and years and the kinds of directions that you can send people in if they're interested in learning more. So I just have to put another plug in for the Marshall Memo. If people want to subscribe on behalf of their district, on behalf of their state principals association, talk to us about how they can do that and get the memo in addition to the book.
[23:26] SPEAKER_02:
So your people all get it, right? So but but here we're going beyond your people. So MarshallMembro.com is the website. I have not changed the pricing structure in 16 years. It's the same.
[23:37]
So essentially, with inflation, the price has been going down steadily over the last 16 years. It's dirt cheap. You know, there's a single subscription is $50, right down to almost like $5 a person for group subscriptions. And there's a super rate for a for example, if a district wanted to have me send it to one person and that person distributes it within the district, there's a super low rate for that. There are a fair number of all state subscriptions that are going on now, but some that are not. So it's real easy to get to and then any subscriber has access to the archive.
[24:12]
So you have a login to the archive if you have time for that.
[24:15] SPEAKER_01:
So again, the book is The Best of the Marshall Memo, and this is volume one of two planned volumes, Ideas and Action Steps to Energize Leadership, Teaching and Learning by Kim Marshall and Jen David Lang. And of course, pulling from the archives of the Marshall Memo, which you can find at marshallmemo.com. Kim, thanks so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio.
[24:36] SPEAKER_00:
My pleasure.
[24:37] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com radio.
