Several weeks ago I asked my 5th graders as part of a collaborative typing assignment to list words they associated with school. Needless to see the results were not shocking but still made me sad. Part of me wants to dismiss this and say that kids need to suck it up and work hard to ensure they get the best education possible. While another part of me wants to say that we as teachers need to take a hard look at how kids see school. For grade 3 students homework is what they associate with school. Recess and gym are also big concepts for them. Fortunately so is math. Again boring is large, although not as large as for 5th grade. Can I make a jump here and say that students in this grade might benefit from active learning. Recess and gym (both active) are big concepts. Perhaps active learning will mean less boredom for our students. And I'm not sure if it is a pipedream, but can we do something with homework to make it more active. From my Wordle I can't make necessarily associate negative feelings with "homework" as that wasn't part of my survey.
We had been working on defining a vision and procedures for homework in our building. However, the work is slow and does not show any sign of being complete in the very near future. We've done all the reading on homework that we can put our hands on and we still can't come to agreement on the purpose, value, and best use of homework. All I keep thinking is that if homework takes two years (plus) then grading will take many more years.
4 comments:
Procedures for homework? A unified building set of procedures?
I'm interested, but a little lost. My two children (5th and 3rd) are in another school system and seem to do fine with varied forms of homework procedures. What's the driving force here?
Never mind unified, a coordinated approach at least protects kids from an overload, and a vacation policy also makes sense. The driving force is helping families to put school in proper perspective.
However, a collaborative typing list may only produce free associations. Would the analysis be more valid if the Wordle analysis came after kids put together a thoughtful paragraph about the strengths and weaknesses of school?
@Andrea
The driving force I believe is the most likely the amount between teachers of the same grade level/content area. Also, there has been parent questions (certainly justified) about the value of particular assignments. We have been talking homework off and on ever since study Marzano's What Works research. We realized that our homework procedures and beliefs did not align with Marzano's work on how homework can add learning/achievement.
@Anonymous
I am not even sure if we are shooting for coordinated at this point...although we certainly have the tools available. There are some days that students may have more than one test. Some grade levels keep a calendar (big whiteboard) to coordinate this while others use Blackboard to see what other teachers are assigning. We try to avoid double booking tests or big projects but I don't think much homework balancing takes place.
Re: the word association. I teach a relatively short class and getting a thoughtful paragraph would take several class periods which we simply don't have. I make no claims of validity on our little Wordle chart. I just find it interesting that different age students focus on different aspects of schools. Some students associate emotions while other associated concrete objects. For validity there are ample studies that show that (super super simplification warning) the older a K-12 student the less engaged they become with their coursework. This is not to assign blame.
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