THE BEST OF THE MARSHALL MEMO
Carefully chosen summaries to energize leadership, teaching, and learning
About
Welcome! This website puts an amazing collection of ideas and resources at your fingertips. We've curated the very best article summaries from 18 years of the Marshall Memo, organizing them into topics with immediate relevance to front-line educators and those who support them.
This material was originally published in The Best of the Marshall Memo, Book One and Book Two (Epigraph, 2019 and 2020). Encouraged by several thought partners and supported by a generous foundation grant, we decided to create a website that would make the content freely available and foster peer-to-peer discussions on key issues.
The material under each topic has three unique features: it contains the best thinking from recent decades; it can be read in under an hour; and it's followed by professional development suggestions to guide successful implementation.
The ideas and action steps on this website are visionary and practical, jargon-free and readily accessible. We hope they will support you in sharpening your school’s vision and goals, rethinking old assumptions, engaging in productive debates with colleagues, and improving what students experience every day.
Kim Marshall
Jenn David-Lang
Kim was a middle-school teacher, central office curriculum director, and elementary principal in the Boston Public Schools for thirty-two years. Since 2002, he has provided one-on-one leadership coaching for principals and offered workshops, consulting, and courses on teacher supervision and evaluation, time management, effective use of assessments, results-focused teacher teamwork, differentiation, and curriculum unit design (in collaboration with Jay McTighe). Kim writes the weekly Marshall Memo, summarizing the best ideas and research in K-12 education, and is the author of a number of articles and books, all available at www.marshallmemo.com. Kim’s wife is a Massachusetts education lawyer, and their children are both teachers: seventh grade in Boston, high-school history in Philadelphia.
Jenn has worked as a teacher, school administrator, consultant, and founder of educational organizations for more than twenty-five years. Over time, she noticed that school leaders had little time for their own professional growth, so in 2007, Jenn founded The Main Idea www.themainidea.net. Her subscribers receive a thorough summary of an education book each month, connecting them with the latest and most compelling ideas on leadership, teaching, and learning. When Jenn is not up to her ears in books, she facilitates Masterminds (online groups of educational leaders learning together), gives workshops, coaches teacher leaders, and conducts school evaluations. Jenn’s husband is a guidance counselor in the New York City public schools; they have two children, one attending a New York City public school, the other in college.