Using the Marshall Memo and the Best of Memo Books
By Kim Marshall
February 23, 2020
The Marshall Memo is a weekly digest of the best ideas and research from a wide range of publications. Every Sunday, I sit down and read through the journals and magazines that came in that week (I subscribe to more than 60). I dog-ear the 8-10 articles that stand out as the most relevant and helpful to front-line educators – principals, lead teachers, instructional coaches, and superintendents. On Monday, I write short but comprehensive summaries of the articles I’ve chosen, and by late evening (after a proofreading and editing session with my wife), I’m ready to send the Memo out to subscribers in all 50 states and 71 other countries.
The beauty of the Memo is that what it takes me 20 hours to produce each week, subscribers can read in 20 minutes. I get a lot of feedback that the Memo is a weekly burst of professional development, and that a lot of the ideas are put to work by school leaders. In addition, many principals clip and share articles with colleagues, and some have their whole faculty read a Memo summary “live,” discuss it in small groups, and then consider its schoolwide implications.
Helpful as the weekly Memo is for educators, there’s an important limitation: the articles I summarize on Monday are those that happened to come in the week before. I that sense, the content of the Memo is somewhat random; it doesn’t focus on one theme, the way magazines like Phi Delta Kappan and Educational Leadership often do.
As the Memo went into its second and third year, I saw this as a limitation and responded with two enhancements. First, I started filing all articles in an online archive by topic, author, publication, date, and grade level. This made it possible for subscribers to search for articles on a particular topic, basically creating their own customized theme issues of the Memo (but with a much wider scope than is possible with a time-limited education magazine).
Second, as the number of articles in the archive grew into the thousands, I began to highlight the best of the best – the “classics” that I believed would really stand the test of time. Now subscribers could constrain a search to a smaller number of highly valuable articles. A good number of subscribers take advantage of this feature every week.
But I know that the majority of educators don’t have the time to do this kind of archival searching – and that realization led me to the idea of a best-of-Memo book. Working with Jenn David-Lang, who summarizes an education book each month in The Main Idea, I combed through the Memo archive of more than 8,000 summaries, decided on topics of highest interest to school leaders, chose the best articles under each topic, and sequenced and grouped them. Then Jenn wrote professional development suggestions for each chapter. Book One of The Best of the Marshall Memo was published in September 2019. Its eleven chapters address strategic planning, time management, teacher evaluation, coaching teachers, classroom management, and more. Book Two, with another eleven chapters, is due this summer.
How can educators make best use of these books? Jenn and I suggest that you use it as you would use a cookbook. You identify an issue in your school or district that needs attention – for example, coaching teachers. You make that chapter available to a working group, have them read it (which takes about an hour), then convene to discuss the key insights from the articles in the chapter. Finally, you decide on a course of action – perhaps more research, perhaps policy changes, budget initiatives, hiring, etc. The value of the book is that you can be sure the very best ideas on each topic are in that chapter, sparking good discussion and wise decision-making.
Alternatively, you might decide on one article that has a credible solution to a central dilemma you’ve been wrestling with – for example, the downsides of traditional teacher evaluation. After convening key stakeholders, you might have everyone read the article silently, discuss is in small groups using a protocol, and then make decisions as a full group.
The Best of Marshall Memo books provide the very best thinking and research from over 16 years. They can be an invaluable resource for school leaders at all levels – in the ways just described and others you will invent. But please keep reading the weekly Marshall Memo! I find great material each week, and I don’t want you to miss anything.
Kim Marshall, formerly a Boston teacher and administrator, coaches principals, consults and speaks on school leadership and evaluation, and publishes the weekly Marshall Memo www.marshallmemo.com.
The Best of the Marshall Memo: Book One:
Ideas and Action Steps to Energize Leadership, Teaching and Learning
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