Education Week: Best Homework Practices?

What is the best approach teachers can take towards homework?

Here Larry Ferlazzo has assembled some answers from some edu-experts as well as answers from in-the-trenches teachers:

Education Week’s Best Homework Practices

Opinion: Learning faster without teachers

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/27/opinion/ted-prize-students-teach-themselves?c=&page=1

Edutopia: Reinventing a Public High School with Problem-Based Learning

Really interesting video. I really like the summit based on a real-life issue.  I wish one of the teachers would post the mechanics of setting up and implementing what appears to be a very engaging activity for a wide swath of students. Plus, I would want to think through how this activity was evaluated for individual marks and not for catch-all group marks.

teacherken: A warning to college profs from a high school teacher

 Posted by Valerie Strauss on February 9, 2013 at The Washington Post.

From The Washington Post: “For more than a decade now we have heard that the high-stakes testing obsession in K-12 education that began with the enactment of No Child Left Behind 11 years ago has resulted in high school graduates who don’t think as analytically or as broadly as they should because so much emphasis has been placed on passing standardized tests. Here, an award-winning high school teacher who just retired, Kenneth Bernstein, warns college professors what they are up against. Bernstein, who lives near Washington, D.C. serves as a peer reviewer for educational journals and publishers, and he is nationally known as the blogger “teacherken.” His e-mail address is kber@earthlink.net. This appeared in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors.”

By Kenneth Bernstein

“You are a college professor.

I have just retired as a high school teacher.

I have some bad news for you. In case you do not already see what is happening, I want to warn you of what to expect from the students who will be arriving in your classroom, even if you teach in a highly selective institution.

No Child Left Behind went into effect for the 2002–03 academic year, which means that America’s public schools have been operating under the pressures and constrictions imposed by that law for a decade. Since the testing requirements were imposed beginning in third grade, the students arriving in your institution have been subject to the full extent of the law’s requirements. While it is true that the U.S. Department of Education is now issuing waivers on some of the provisions of the law to certain states, those states must agree to other provisions that will have as deleterious an effect on real student learning as did No Child Left Behind—we have already seen that in public schools, most notably in high schools…”

Tornado of Change in Education

An interesting post by Will Richardson (thought-provoking as usual) about the value of a college or university degree. He also points out and questions (as I am starting to) the assumption that university is the best / only / necessary path to take after high school. http://willrichardson.com/post/36888521605

Classes a la carte: States test a new school model

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE8B50LE20121206?irpc=932

Today’s Meet

What is Today’s Meet? From their website, http://todaysmeet.com/:

Imagine you’re giving a presentation where you can read the mind of every person in the room. You’d have an amazing ability to adjust to your audience’s needs and emotions. That’s the backchannel.

Using Twitter at social media conferences has become a great way to do just that. But Twitter isn’t appropriate for every situation.

• Your audience isn’t on Twitter.
• You don’t want the discussion to be public.
• You need to see only relevent updates.

That’s where TodaysMeet comes in. TodaysMeet gives you an isolated room where you can see only what you need to see, and your audience doesn’t need to learn any new tools like hash tags to keep everything together.

TodaysMeet is a good way to have a quick convo in a relatively quiet place.

TodaysMeet helps you embrace the backchannel and connect with your audience in realtime.

Encourage the room to use the live stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs.

The backchannel is everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter.

The backchannel is where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give youthe most immediate feedback you’ll ever get.

Instead of ignoring the backchannel, TodaysMeet helps you leverage its power.

Tapping into the backchannel lets you tailor and direct your presentation to the audience in front of you, and unifying the backchannel means the audience can share insights, questions and answers like never before.

Here’s an example of Today’s Meet being used in my Grade 12 University level English class as we navigate our way through Hamlet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAVEAT:

When my grade 12′s first got on our Today’s Meet ‘meeting room’, their habits of doing and saying whatever they want on the Wild West internet took over and a few of the students started writing ‘shout-out’s’ to other students — and to me — such as, “Whaddup” or “Mr. Cooke brings the boom”. And then some students started to get a little cheeky or mildly inappropriate by making jokes, including joking about the word — wait for it– ‘butt’. Needless to say, I had to simultaneously chastise them for writing that while reminding them that this is for school purposes and that it is permanent, and that I would shut it down if they couldn’t use it properly. They did settle down, and what transpired was a really interesting and, I think, powerful experience in the classroom — using the ‘backchannel’. But because their thoughts appear live right in front of them, they thought it was ‘cool’ and they were all engaged.

Seeing is Believing—Visible Learning and Teaching

An article from www.essentialeducator.org summarzing John Hattie’s research on Visible Teaching: 

What is Visible Learning?

“Visible Learning is a book that includes 15 years of research and synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses related to influences on achievement in school-aged students. It builds a story about the power of teachers and of feedback, and constructs a model of learning and understanding. Hattie’s book is about “the power of directed teaching, focusing on what happens next through feedback and monitoring. This approach informs the teacher about the success or failure of their teaching: making learning for both the teacher and student ‘visible’.”

Visible learning also brings…”

19 Bold Ideas for Change (in Education)

I have been following Will Richardson by reading his articles or his tweets for a few years now and he never fails to

Who is Will Richardson? He is “an outspoken advocate for change in schools and classrooms in the context of the diverse new learning opportunities that the Web and other technologies now offer.” www.willrichardson.com

Here is a quick 5 minute presentation he gave recently. (The slide titles are below.)

1. Give open network tests — not open book tests.
2. Roll Your Own Textbooks.
3. Be Googled Well.
4. Flip the Power Switch.
5. Change the World. — Broaden scope of lessons
6. Don’t “Do Your Own Work.”
7. Learn First. Teach Second.
8. No More Workshops for Teachers.
9. Share Everything.
10. Ask Questions You Don’t Know the Answers To.
11. Repeat after me: “I want to be found by strangers on the Internet.”
12. Unlearn. Relearn.
13. Resume. Shemesume.
14. Stop Googling. Get a Network.
15. Go Free and Open Source.
16. Create an “Uncommon Core.”
17. Don’t Deliver… Discover.
18. Disrupt the System.
19. SCREAM!

iste-presentation from Will Richardson on Vimeo.

Will Richardson: Should We Connect School Life to Real Life?

Should We Connect School Life to Real Life?
October 5, 2012 | 6:00 AM |

Excerpted from Will Richardson’s new TED Book Why School: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere. Richardson offers provocative alternatives to the existing education system, questioning everything from standardized assessments to the role of the teacher. In this chapter, “Real Work for Real Audiences,” Richardson envisions students creating work that is relevant and useful in the world outside school.

By Will Richardson

So what if we were to say that, starting this year, even with our children in K– 5, at least half of the time they spend on schoolwork must be on stuff that can’t end up in a folder we put away? That the reason they’re doing their schoolwork isn’t just for a grade or for it to be pinned up in the hallway? It should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.

I’m not even necessarily talking about doing something with technology. (Let’s face it, though: Paper is a 20th-century staple that has severely limited potential, compared to digital spaces.) There’s lots of creating our kids can do with traditional tools that can serve a real audience. Publishing books, putting on plays, and doing community service are just a few examples.

But what if we got a little crazy and added some technology into the mix? We could tell our kids, “You know, in addition to taking that test on the Vietnam War, we want you to go and interview some veterans, then collect those stories into a series of podcasts that people all over the world could listen to and learn from.”