The Five Steps of Homework (Part 1)

   When teachers/parents/caregivers direct students to "do homework," we're actually initiating a complex, 5-step process that can bring the night's homework production to a screeching halt at any point.

   I will admit that I was a terrible high school student. I just could not do my homework.Teachers made it sound simple, and students made it look simple. My parents screamed it simple: DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Somewhere along the line, between high school and college, I figured it out (though I'm still not sure how).

   Now I have three kids of my own, and 67% of them struggle with doing their homework. I have students, and the number one reason for failure in my classes is homework neglect. I talk with other teachers, and they concur. Kids fail because they don't do their homework.

   What is the big deal? Are kids stupid? Lazy? Distracted by the treasures of the digital age?
I refuse to believe any of the above about my own progeny. First of all, how would they have inherited stupid? (Please don't really answer that. Although, if that is what it takes to break the comment barrier...) Okay, so I know where lazy could have come from, and the panoply of digital devices is quite a contender. However, I think it comes down to the complexity of the five step process required to complete a homework assignment for credit.

Step 1: Know the assignment

   If students don't know and understand the homework assignment, they cannot do it. I know that some of us practice backwards design, and we want our kids trying to work it out before class. I'm not talking about understanding how to do the assignment; I'm referring to what the teacher expects to collect as the homework assignment itself.

   When we adopted our dog, we also received this pamphlet of great tips to help us as first-time dog owners. The most profound advice reminded owners that dogs are not evil or malicious. If the dog is not doing what we want (or is doing something we don't want), confusion is the culprit. I think it said something along the lines of "There is no such thing as a BAD dog, only a CONFUSED dog." My most-used advice for teaching is "There is no such thing as a BAD student, only a CONFUSED student."

   Teachers work with humans, and humans don't usually exert the time and energy necessary for malicious intent. When one of my beautiful babies becomes a handful, I ask myself, "How is this child confused? What can I do to clarify." I am as human as the next...human, and I have bad days and lose my patience sometimes too. This mantra often helps me to depersonalize the situation before I become unreasonable, and it focuses my thoughts on what I can control: my choices and my actions.

   Below is a list of things teachers, parents, and students can do to facilitate this first step of the homework process.

Teachers:

• Have a set location in your room where students can see what is due and what is coming up
• Have regular assignments when possible
• Communicate the homework assignment clearly and specifically (and in writing whenever humanly possible)
• Answer questions about the assignment in class
• "Post" the assignment somewhere where students can see it outside of the classroom (your district communication portal, your personal website, etc.)
• Review assignments together in class to reward students who did it and to bring meaning to the assignment
• Be very strict about due dates (if you take work at the end of the term, you are training your students to wait until the end of the term to do their work)
• Expect students to do the homework
• Be very conscious of the purpose of the homework and explain the purpose fully to students (no busy work)
• Randomly ask students to reiterate the details of the assignment throughout the class period (and especially at the end of the period before parting)
• Establish a reward system for those who manage all five steps (if an A were enough of a reward, all of our students would be doing all of their homework)
• Teach these five steps explicitly in class
• Know who does and doesn't have their work
• Establish "no opt out" policies that prevent students from getting out of work by "taking a zero"
• Converse respectfully with students who struggle (Which part/s of the process is causing the issue/s? How can you work together to tackle those issues?)
• Contact support team (campus resources, student caregivers, etc.)

Parents:

• Know where to find and how to use the teacher's communication tools (websites, grade portals, etc.)
• Use those communication tools often
• Keep a written schedule of recurring assignments
• Ask your children about their homework every day
• Talk with your children about the homework process
• Determine obstacles
• Create strategies to overcome those obstacles
• Communicate your concerns with your child's teacher
• Do not be afraid to offer negative consequences for poor academic performance
• Be consistent
• Have a place established for school work (make sure it is pleasing to your children and that they have easy access to everything they need)
• Praise and reward children for knowing what the assignment is and informing you
• Make homework an important and integral part of your family culture
• Value education in both word and action

Students:

• Know the steps of the homework process
• Know where you struggle
• Create strategies to overcome your obstacles
• Recruit assistance from your support team (parents, teachers, siblings, family, successful friends, etc.)
• KNOW your homework assignment
• Write it down
• Photograph it with your phone (with teacher permission)
• Program it into your phone (with teacher permission)
• Ask questions if you don't understand the assignment
• Make sure the homework makes sense to you before you leave the room

Four Ways Teachers Are Like Celebrities, Only Better

1) We get recognized.

2) We don’t have to worry about going out of fashion; we get new fans every year.

Last day of school                                                            

First day of next year

3) We often perform for a full house, or close to it.

Source

4) Our fans come to us (every hour, on the hour, like cuckoos).

Source

 We hope this made you smile! :-D

Comment below if any of these put a smile on your face or to share any similarities you might have found between teachers and celebrities.

Evidence-Based Urban Legends

Education treats the idea of "evidence-based" a little differently than the rest of the data-using world. We have fallen in love with the idea of a number. That number does not necessarily have to relate to the concept we are trying to support; if it is a number, it is good enough.

http://davidmlane.com/ben/

I learned my favorite evidence-based urban legend in a curriculum training. According to the slide (which was supposed to justify the county's choice in curriculum), 62% of students who took Advanced Placement (AP) courses at the time of the survey went to college.
Let's break this down, shall we? First of all, an AP course is a college level course. Any child who took the course and passed the test earned college credit. If 62% of the students passed the test and NOT ONE ever stepped foot on a college campus, some would still report the statistic the exact same way.
Now let's pretend that 62% of those students actually went to a college campus and even graduated from college. There's still a problem: the students who took the AP classes at the time of the survey were HAND PICKED for their performance and ambition. 100% of them were predicted to go to college. Only 62% of the students the school system designated as college bound actually made it.
Let's follow the extrapolation further. The curriculum publisher was telling us that these numbers meant that the AP courses CAUSED 62% of students to go to college. Therefore, if we put all of our students in AP courses, our college rate would rise substantially, to 62%. Suspiciously, even though the slide data was nearly 20 years old, there have been no progress monitoring reports  or updates since its original publication. I personally schedule each of my home children for 2 AP classes to give them a 124% chance of attending college.

http://davidmlane.com/ben/outlier.gif

Data-Driven Teaching Deserves a Dashboard

I want a teaching dashboard. I want to have access to all my data in a visual, logical, coherent format. I want to be able to select which section of data I view and manipulate those variables with simple, single clicks.

Dashboard Definition

(a sample dashboard from this blog)

"a graphical summary of various pieces of important information, typically used to give an overview of a business" -Google

In other  words, this is a way to measure performance, make conclusions about the results, and adjust accordingly.

 

Example

My dashboard clearly illustrates that blogs with directly related titles attract more readers than do my more creative titular efforts. The most aptly titled blog is earning the most reads. I have concluded that my readers (you, thank you) want to know the topic before they decide whether or not to invest the time. This is fair, and as the blogger, it is my job to be considerate of readers' needs. I will consciously title blogs with key words, and I will monitor the response through my dashboard. (Or you could just comment below to let me know how I'm doing... :-)

Dashboard Data in the Classroom

In education, we tend to act like business is our older sibling. Sometimes we ask to borrow stuff, sometimes we sneak it, and sometimes we buy similar things and pretend we thought of it ourselves. I will not try to establish the boundaries between business and education, but I would like to beg to borrow their dashboards (or steal them when business isn't looking).

I want to see a line graph displaying the attendance trend over time. I want to be able to segregate out by grade, subject, period, or even individual student. Or by day, or week. I want a color-coded pie chart demonstrating where students struggled most on FCAT by strand, and I want to be able to toggle from whole population to course to class to individual student from one menu. I want a place to collect, store, and display data I gather through classroom tests and even observations.

In a fantasy world, I would have one-click options for data-driven decisions. I want access to lesson plans, activities, and instructional materials for a specific Common Core standards based on my students' results.

I should be able to enter decisions as data points and see the response logically, objectively, and visually. If I notice that I have a much larger absenteeism rate on Mondays, I could start playing review games every Monday. I could enter that decision into a data point and track the trend. If attendance began improving on Mondays, I could continue with the planned activities. Conversely, if absenteeism rates increased further, I would know to adjust again in some other way. (For more advanced readers, please note that I am aware of causation vs. correlation and am simplifying for practical purposes. Although, if you wanted to comment about it...)

In order to collect, enter, and display the above data in any meaningful way would take dozens of hours away from my planning and preparing, hours that I do not have. I only have three options: postpone intense data analysis, make data-based decisions nearly blindly and hope, or send a fake text message to get business out of the house while I raid the closet.

Do you have any tools or strategies you use for data collection, entry, and management? Please comment below to let us know your process for making and monitoring data-based decisions.

 

 

 

Teacher centered business seeking like for partnership, possibly more

Website landing page...check
Blog...check
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn...check, check, sorta
It is now time to start seeking partnerships. As we are not launching until January, we are not currently charging for these partnerships. We want to find like-minded businesses with whom we can trade links and cross-promote.
We are primarily interested in working with four types of businesses:

1. Businesses that offer teacher discounts
2. Businesses started and/or run by teachers (whose success directly benefits a teacher/s)
3. Not-for-profit organizations that are in some way related to or benefit education and/or educators.
4. Businesses that offer products or services that help teachers (Remember: teachers are people too, so almost any business fits into this category. However, we will give priority placement to businesses that benefit teachers most directly. i.e. the Suncoast Schools Federal Credit Union before a consignment clothing store. OR, if the business offered a teacher discount, it would net top priority.)

 If you have a business that fits into one of these categories, contact us through the website landing page (or any of the contact pages, really). Please make "business" the subject, and include up to 50 words (this will be your ad copy) in the body. All listings must include an image, so don't forget that.
If you know someone who may appreciate this opportunity, please share this post with them.
If you would like to suggest a business to us, please do so through the contact form with a subject heading of "suggestion." Or you could simply comment below.

We hope to get this feature up and running by the end of next weekend, but there are no guarantees in life. Please subscribe for updates or follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Thank you for your support!

What a good partnership can look like

Thirty page likes and chocolate nachos, life is sweet

I spent the entire day today pleading for "likes" on Facebook.
It paid off! We hit our goal of 30 "likes". In fact, we made it to 36 and climbing. Yay! Thank you!
Having at least 30 likes grants us access to the insight panel, an fb page dashboard. I have only played with it a little, but it works much like our Google Analytics and the dashboard here at Blogger. In other words, it will really help us to see what is most important to post, which will help to prevent us from wasting your time. Thank you again!
If all of this gratitude makes you uncomfortable because you have not yet "liked" us, feel free to remedy that here. :-)
To celebrate, the boys and I went out for chocolate nachos. Below are two awful photos (sorry). The first shows the nachos as they came, the second is what was left after less than five minutes. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day at least as much as we enjoyed our nachos!

This is what the plate looks like when it arrives.

This is what it looked like 5 minutes later.

Value Add Memories

We, my students and I, had a rough year last year: one that almost ended my teaching career. Yet when I look back, all I remember is the good. Cognitively, I know that I felt frustrated and ineffective, but I do not feel frustrated or ineffective when I review the year.
As I combed carefully through my Value Add scores from last year, I wasn't thinking "darn that brat for earning only one star" or "I wish I'd have had twenty of her, she who earned me three stars."
I was remembering their faces and our experiences together. I was proud of the students who did well, and worried about or upset for those who did not perform as well as expected. I do not even know how I "did" because I was not thinking that way.
This selective memory reminded me of a children's Christmas book that caught my eye because it had "teacher" in the title. Apparently, Santa lost his list, and he went to teachers to determine if students were worthy of gifts or not. I will reluctantly admit that I became a little goose-bumpy and moist-eyed when every teacher proceeded to say good things about every student. It was well done, just on the bearable side of sappy without crossing over to cheesy.


I have personally benefited from selective teacher memory. Now that I am safely ensconced in my former high school, my dream school, I can freely admit that I was a terrible high school student. Running into former teachers terrified me for years into my teaching career.
I would see one of my teachers in a training and feel certain that he or she would call me out. I was afraid to apply at my old high school because some of my former teachers still worked there. I figured they would corner the principal and give him a preventive earful (like my senior year when they refused to work with me if I was in the same class as my best friend).
Instead, my teachers began recruiting me. When I finally worked up the nerve to go for it (it was either that or leave teaching), my teachers were overwhelmingly supportive. They made calls and recommendations and gave me insider knowledge. When I was hired, they introduced me around and sang my praises and thanked me for coming to help.
None of them, not one of my former teachers, shows any sign of remembering what a frustrating student I was. Daily I resist the urge to ask "You do remember me right? The girl who slept or talked and turned in no work and still set the curve anyway? You're not confusing me with a better-performing classmate, are you?"
But I don't think they are confused. I think we teachers are just wired to remember the good. Regardless of stars or politics or pay scales or test results, at the end of the school year, the Value Add is the opportunity to impact the life of a student and the knowledge that each student has positively impacted our lives in turn.

I realize that Value Add measures, the politics around them, and their impact on our lives outside of the classroom via pay and emotional tolls are touchy subjects. Hopefully you understand that your value both to your students specifically and to society in general cannot be measured with tests, graphs, numbers, or graphic aids. How do you measure your value? Please comment below to tell us what you hold dear to remember your value, even without numbers to confirm it.