The value of homework

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Abner Oakes

My son brought home a great assignment a few weeks ago – to identify around the house obtuse and acute angles – and he and I went a step further, taking pictures of the angles we found and emailing some of those to his teacher. (Geeky Dad that I am, I suggested to my son that he post them on his dormant blog, but it remains dormant. And I remain geeky.) My son told me that the next day his teacher pulled out the projector and shared his pics with the rest of the class – and, no, he was not horrified for being singled out. Phew.

I also appreciate that he’s given free reading as homework, something that the WaPo’s Jay Mathews highlighted in a column this September. Warms my heart to see my son spread out on the couch with one of the titles from the Ranger’s Apprentice series, pausing only to let me know when a character says “damn.”

The math assignment and free reading got me thinking about homework’s value – just what does it do for learning? – and a quick search landed me on this piece from the Center for Public Education. It reviewed the following questions and what the research on homework has to say about each:

  • Does homework affect student learning?
  • Does homework have other effects?
  • Does the effect of homework vary with student age?
  • How do different groups of students react to homework?
  • What types of homework assignments are effective?
  • How much time should students spend on homework?

Some highlights of this review:

  • Loud and clear: “The link between assignment of homework and student achievement is far from clear.” One study “argues that reviews on the link between homework and achievement often directly contradict one another and are so different in design that the findings of one study cannot be evaluated fairly against the findings of others.”
  • As for the non-academic benefits of homework, what two researchers called “the job of childhood,” homework “helped third graders learn responsibility and develop time-management and job-management skills. The students also learned to work on schoolwork when they did not want to and to adjust their attentiveness to the demands of a specific assignment. These and similar benefits, such as good study habits and independent learning, have been found by other researchers as well.”
  • As “students age, the positive effect of homework on achievement becomes more pronounced,” but some argue that these “findings may be attributed to various circumstances…For example, differences in students’ attention spans and study habits may account for differences in homework’s effects. However, it may also be possible that teachers use homework in early grades to establish routines, instill a sense of responsibility, and help students learn time management.”
  • A review of studies that examined “the amount of homework and its relation to achievement revealed encouraging findings” – that students who reported “‘more time on homework also scored higher on a measure of achievement or attitude,’ [a] relationship [that] held true across elementary, middle, and high school grade levels.”

I was most interested about types of homework, what Duke’s Harris Cooper has divided into four buckets:

  • Practice homework, the most common type, reinforces material presented in the classroom and helps students master individual skills.
  • Preparation homework introduces students to future material.
  • Extension homework has students apply previously learned skills to different contexts.
  • Integration homework requires students to produce a product by applying multiple skills.

While practice tends to be the most common – and I concur from my anecdotal perspective – it seems that “having teachers assign homework that prepares students for upcoming lessons or helps them review material that has not been covered recently may have more impact on student learning than assigning homework that simply continues the school day’s lessons.” Part of my interest in preparatory homework has to do with the flipped classroom, which I wrote about here. Teachers that use this structure have students learn new material as homework, to prepare for the next day’s class and application of that newly learned material. That structure and its impact on learning seem well grounded in the literature on homework.

Back to angles: I want to see more extension-related homework. I liked hunting around our house looking for different types, playing with kitchen utensils to create acute and obtuse angles – math manipulatives, I guess. Imagine the fun we’d have with the fractions unit that my son’s on to now, mucking around in the house for different representations of fractions. If the piano keyboard is the unit whole, for example, what fraction of the unit whole is each white key? If the stairs to the basement is the unit whole, what fraction is each stair? We could play with a bag of sliced bread, the checkerboard, window panes, even the number of beads on a string of beads. I know that, for the learner in our house, this application of previously learned material builds his conceptual knowledge of a topic – and can be fun too. How might it work for your learner?

I got the photo of the boy writing here. I got the kitchen tongs image here.

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Observations on charter school start up

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Abner Oakes

One of the charter schools in Nashville

My good friend and former colleague Ken McLemore, who runs this shop that assists charter schools in Tennessee, sent me and some others a great note a few days ago about his charter school-related observations over the last few months, as someone with a management and finance background. I asked him if I could re-purpose his missive for the blog, and so here it is:

Various charter school leaders (and I) believe the following themes are essential for the charter movement to be successful. Some of these are specific outcomes that schools might seek. Some are opinions as to how the work of charter schools should be done. Others are more akin to understandings the school’s leader and board should have.

1. Make the kids’ success the highest priority. Consistently demonstrate superior student success relative to the district’s traditional schools. Further, as these successes are attained (within the year or following the end-of-year testing), broadcast them widely. The education reporter for the local paper should be on your speed-dial.

2. Actively and routinely engage the community. Have plans, activities, and expectations that will result in 20-30 community members visiting the campus each month.

3. Acknowledge that an effective launch team may not be good at running the school. The make-up of the initial board and leadership team may need to change some.

Many moons ago, I helped with the launch of DC's Chavez school

5. Adopt proven high performance education models rather than trying to invent everything yourselves.

6. Plan for and move rapidly to multiple sites. Single site schools will have a more difficult time reaching the economies of scale which are necessary for a financially sustainable operation. In addition, investors (venture capital firms and foundations) generally discriminate between their investment alternatives using three key themes: student success relative to the norm, the ability to impact increasing numbers of students, and the organization’s financial leadership and sustainability. At a minimum, plan to have three to five sites in five to seven years.

7. Staff thinly – three to five non-teaching staff at each site. Outsource the talent that is needed for facilities, back-office, charter authorizing and renewal, transportation, and the various compliance tasks required of the school. It might also be most effective to outsource professional development work, although staying true to the educational model may require this work periodically be done by the school’s leaders. Student recruitment may also be an area that can be designed and coordinated by a third party.

The Nashville Prep image came from here. The Chavez school image came from here.

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Prospective parents visiting classrooms

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Abner Oakes

Jay Mathews had a great post in today’s WaPo, highlighting two schools, one private, another public, and their refusal to let prospective parents visit classrooms. He wrote that, “I suspect many other schools, public and private, have the same knee-jerk restrictions on outsiders hanging around a classroom to feel the vibe. I am wondering how they know this would cause trouble if they have never allowed it.”

Like Mathews, I find the attitude puzzling. Don’t get me started on the reaction of the private school admissions director. Mathews wrote, “She had all the power and no need to cater to outsiders,” but if I were the school’s headmaster, I’d be very troubled by this sort of attitude, no matter the size of my school’s wait list. It lacks any semblance of thoughtful client service, and I hope the director’s reaction comes back to bite that school in the backside, as word gets out to other prospective applicants.

This barring of parents from visiting classrooms tells me a lot about the school’s or district’s culture. Wait, let me try that from a different angle: The allowing of parents – of any appropriate visitor – into a school’s classrooms tells me a lot about that school’s culture. I have been in many schools where there’s an open attitude about open classrooms. In these schools, when I come to visit, teachers and kids pay little attention to me. They might say hello when I enter the classroom but then ignore me and go back to work. “Oh, I get a lot of visitors,” the teacher will tell me later, referring to the variety of people that visit her classroom: Her principal and other school-level personnel, district-level folks, parents and other community people, even visitors from other schools and districts. Yes, these schools have schedules and work to ensure that visitors do not become a distraction. And visitors are not allowed during times when there’s state testing or some other important in-class assessment. But these schools treat parents as they should be treated, as important customers, and have an open, transparent approach to their classrooms and their school.

I like what a friend and superintendent of a small rural district had to say when I asked him about its policy: “We go above and beyond getting parents in the doors to see all of the outstanding teaching and learning going on. However, we try to schedule a proper time that would be good for the parents, teachers, and students together. It is very important that the students are the center focus for all involved.”

I got the above image from here.

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Writing, reading, and teaching poetry: Messages in bottles

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Abner Oakes

One of my favorite classes in high school was a quarter-long course I took on vocabulary. Yeah, I know: I was doomed even then to be an English major. Mr. Whalen taught the class, each day we memorized ten words for a quiz, and it was where I got introduced to and began to revel in Latin and Greek roots. Pugnacious evolved from the Latin word for fist, pugnus. Gregarious from the Latin grex, which meant flock or herd. Corpulent, the Latin corpus, body. Prolix, the Latin liqui, to flow, also from which liquor and liquid come. Oligarchy, the Greek oligo, few or scant. Octopus, the Greek podos, foot. I was giddy.

I think also that I was giddy since Mr. Whalen was cool, at least to this impressionable sophomore. He wore black turtlenecks and jeans; they would’ve been black jeans, but back in the mid 70s, black jeans hadn’t been invented. He shaved his head before that was cool and marched up and down the aisles of our classroom, revealing the mysteries of loquacious, keening, limn, miasma, and hoi polloi, puffs of dust from chalk-covered hands.

I think it was Mr. Whalen and that class that was the beginning of my love of teaching poetry. It took a while for that to kick in, for I remember never being much of a poetry-liker or -reader and not having teachers that pushed us when it came to poetry. Ms. Fox and Ms. Drazba taught us some in high school, but I better remember our inflamed discussions about Flannery O’Connor short stories than about Robert Frost poems. I took no poetry classes at college, and when I first started teaching, I did not bring much enthusiasm to its teaching, fitting in a poem here or there when I had breaks from Lord of the Flies or Romeo and Juliet.

Richard Wilbur

But Mr. Whalen’s class stuck with me, and I think that it was several poems by Richard Wilbur that turned me – their formal structure, their play with rhyme, the importance of words – in fact the turns these poems took on a single word. The word figure in the fourth stanza of The Writer. Fleshed in June Light.

And so I got hooked and felt I had to make up for all that lost poetry time. I took a poetry-writing class in graduate school with Wyatt Prunty and then another at Brown, just down the street from where I was teaching. A colleague and I began to team-teach a creative writing class, and as part of that class – and future ones – I just started writing with my students, playing with language, with the Mr. Whalen words that caroused the aisles of my head – copacetic, noisome, bunkum, vim, bevy.

Friend, former student, and poet (see here) David Roderick shared with me his own path.

David Roderick

“I bet I was a student in some of those high school literature classes you taught,” he wrote, “in which poetry only found a place in the seams of other more ambitious teaching projects. Junior year I remember doing some Frost poems, reading the poems aloud, but the overall coverage of poetry was thin. This didn’t bother me back then. Though I was also a student inherently inclined toward stories, sentences, and words, poetry intimidated me. I wasn’t mature enough to settle into a poem’s evocations and ambiguities. Even later, when I became a teacher of adolescent boys, I still found myself uncomfortable with the genre. Pressed with the charge of teaching a whole unit of poetry, I floundered. Mostly I cheated my way through the unit by sharing a lot of sports poems, with a dash of Langston Hughes and Frost.”

“In college I immediately signed up for the fiction workshops. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was in over my head. I could craft beautiful sentences and could really develop a sense of atmosphere, setting, mood. However, I couldn’t build drama or flesh out characters. My attempts at dialogue were stilted, and in every story I foolishly chased after a Flannery O’Connor-like epiphany. Of course my efforts were overwrought. Probably what happened is that I was inhabiting the wrong genre. Instead of fleshing out a character or sharpening the arc of a plot, I fussed over the rhythmic sounds of sentences and made a fetish out of arranging syllables into a pleasing rhythm.”

James Tate

“I didn’t even know it was poetry I was after until, on the brink of graduating, a friend shared with me a poem by James Tate, call Deaf Girl Playing.”

“I like to think that for each of us there are specific poems that are waiting to charm us. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said that a poem is ‘a message in a bottle,’ composed in solitude and cast into the world. It can only forge a relationship with the reader if it happens to find the right one. Tate’s poem served that role for me just as Wilbur’s poems did for you. I was old (mature?) enough to receive that poem, and it became something of a ‘gateway’ poem for me. I would remain intimidated for a good while longer, but my guard came down just a little bit. Eventually this put me on the track of reading and enjoying poems on my own and then writing them.”

Thanks, David. Gateway poems, yes, and gateway people too, such as Mr. Whalen for me. And my former student David, an already fine writer in high school who pushed me to listen more carefully when he read and talked about his writing, to speak more thoughtfully about his work, to just be more aware as I taught. Our students are messages in bottles too, if we take the time to remove that crinkled up note, press it out flat so that we can read all that’s written, and respond in kind, floating with them in the warm Pacific of the classroom.

Dictionary image from here. Richard Wilbur pic from here. James Tate image here. David’s pic came from here, where you can also read his poem Green Fields.

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Teaching character

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Abner Oakes

Back in this post, I wrote about school culture, its importance, and the hard work it takes to make it a genuine and on-going part of the school. Too many schools try to get it through shortcuts, as they “build their so-called culture around character issues, with words-of-the-week aligned with positive character traits – it’s Responsibility Week!”

In a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, What If the Secret to Success is Failure?, character gets divided into two categories – moral character and performance character – and we read about one school-based character program that tries to teach the moral kind, with attention given to statements such as “Treat everyone with respect” and “Be aware of other people’s feelings and find ways to help those whose feelings have been hurt.” Nothing wrong with teaching kids the character traits related to those statements, but the article suggests a character education reboot, identifying character strengths that are performance-oriented – curiosity, zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, and optimism – and the teaching and measurement of them. The article shares classroom observations from New York City’s KIPP Infinity Charter School, as teachers deliver “‘dual-purpose instruction,’ the practice of deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson.”

This is what hits home for me in this article and about this character-related work: KIPP teachers plan for and deliver lessons that teach these traits, not just hope they pop up in classroom discussion and that the discussion then rubs off on the kids. There is intentionality – plan for it in the classroom and it will happen – as too many character programs get left on the walls, literally, just posters with words or sayings that become pablum.

George Saunders

Also in that issue of the Sunday magazine was this short piece from author George Saunders, in which he wrote about two teachers important to him and this lovely paragraph:

“Now, at this distance, I can see how important and unlikely these teacherly interventions were. They were young teachers (in their mid-20s), they were making lives for themselves, they were surrounded every day by hundreds of us blustering, cynical, musk-smelling 1970s kids, resisting positive influence with all our sneering Aerosmith-­inflected might. It all could have been different for me and would have been, if not for whatever it is that makes an older person – busy person, tired person, finite person – turn toward a young person and say, in whatever way is needed: ‘Of course you can. Why not? Give it a try.'”

So, yes, there needs to be that intentionality in the classroom, as the character program gets enacted through the instructional program, and it takes a caring adult to make it all happen. An active and successful character initiative is driven by caring people; they connect with students in and out of the classroom, using the lessons that emerge in the classroom to build on moments that happen out of it, and vice versa. As this monograph called School Connectedness states, “Ensure that every student feels close to at least one supportive adult at school.”

I was lucky to have several middle and high school teachers and coaches that took an interest in my development as a person: Mr. Mungiguerra, Mr. Jacobs, Ms. Drazba, Mr. Whalen, Coach Astorino, and Mr. Pfeffer, who taught me US history and coached soccer. He connected class discussions on the Bill of Rights to what was happening in the news or in our own lives, no matter how much we rolled our eyes, and he allowed us the space in class to be playful, to question, to think, always with an emphasis on doing the right thing. The same happened during soccer practice, as we practiced the zest, grit, and self-control (see those performance qualities above) that Coach Pfeffer preached. All middle and high school students should be so lucky to have a supportive adult like him.

I got the curiosity photo from the New York Times online version of the article, which is here. The George Saunders photo came from here.

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Looking for a school or district report card?

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Abner Oakes

You and your family are moving to a new state, and you have some idea of where you are moving – a metropolitan area, for example – but before you make any firm commitments, you want to get some sense of the schools in that general area, as finding the right school for your kids is a priority. Sure, you can go to GreatSchools and get their ratings, but you actually want to go to the source, the state’s education department, and look for the school’s annual report card, even the report cards of the school districts you are looking at. (Many parents think that the school district will have these report cards on its site, and while some do, the state education agency is the fount of this information.)

As part of some research, I’ve been doing just that: Combing the websites of state departments of education for their report cards on school buildings and school districts and discovering that – duh – not all state education websites are equal. You’d hope that these reports would be front and center on the homepage, allowing people to access them with just one or two mouse clicks. At the Colorado Department of Education website, for example, a tab at the top identifies its SchoolVIEW portal; a quick click and you can access all kinds of performance data for that state’s schools and school districts. Well done, Mississippi: At the state agency’s home page, click on “State, District, & School Report Cards,” which comes under “Frequently-Visited Agency Links.” Or better yet at Washington State’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, see on the right side – “State Report Card.” Could not be easier.

See below. Each state is hyper-linked to the school and district report card page for that state. I also write out the steps of going from the state agency’s home page to that report card page and give a thoroughly unscientific rating for each state of that process: very easy, easy, so-so, hard, and impossible, of which there were none. I liked it when state agencies actually used the phrase “report card,” and I’m not a big fan of scrolling. Here goes:

  • Alabama: So-so – click on “Accountability Reporting” on the right menu and then on the button that reads “Click Here to begin Accountability Reporting System”
  • Alaska: Easy – scroll down to “Report Card to the Public” – click on “Report Card to the Public” at that new page
  • Arizona: Easy – “School Reports/School Results” on the left side – “Find a Report Card”
  • Arkansas: Easy – scroll down to the “School Performance” button – click on “NORMES School Performance”
  • California: So-so – hover over “Testing and Accountability” at the top and go to “Adequate Yearly Progress” – then “AYP Reports” (I mark California down a notch, for its actual report card link is no help whatsoever – a dead end.)
  • Colorado: Very easy – click on “SchoolVIEW”
  • Connecticut: Easy – scroll down to “Quick Links” – “Connecticut Education Data & Research”
  • Delaware: Very easy – at the home page click on “District & Charter School Profiles” under “Schools”
  • District of Columbia: So-so – “Adequate Yearly Progress” under “Popular Links” – then click on “No Child Left Behind”
  • Florida: Hard – “Data & Statistics” on the left – then “Assessment & School Performance” on the left – scroll down to “FCAT – Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test” and then scroll down to “Interactive Search by School & District”
  • Georgia: Very easy – “School Reports” on the home page
  • Hawaii: Hard – “Reports” on the left to “Student Performance” – “NCLB 2011 Final Results” – “Final AYP Reports by School” (And the reports are embedded in a 289-page PDF. No slicing and dicing with that monster doc.)
  • Idaho: Easy – “Programs” at the top – “Report Card”
  • Illinois: Very easy – “Interactive Report Card” under “A-Z Index”
  • Indiana: Very easy – “Find My School”
  • Iowa: Easy – “Data & Statistics” to “District & AEA Reports” – then click on “Iowa School Profiles – NCLB Requirements Report”
  • Kansas: So-so – “Data, Media, & Reports” at the top – “Building Report Card” on the right
  • Kentucky: Easy – “About Schools and Districts” and then “School Report Cards” on the left
  • Louisiana: Very easy – click on “School/District Performance” at the top – on the right you will see links to go to reports for schools and for districts
  • Maine: So-so – click on “No Child Left Behind” under “Featured Links” – then “State Report Card” on the left
  • Maryland: Easy – under “Testing,” click on “Maryland School Assessment” and then the report card URL
  • Massachusetts: Very easy – “Massachusetts School & District Profiles/Directory”
  • Michigan: Very easy – under “Hot Topics A-Z,” click on “School Report Cards” – search is on the left side of the page
  • Minnesota: Very easy – on the right “School Report Cards”
  • Mississippi: Very easy – “State, District, & School Report Cards” under “Frequently-Visited Agency Links”
  • Missouri: So-so – “MCDS Portal” – “State Assessment” button – “State Assessment Dashboards” – click on “Student MAP Proficiency”
  • Montana: Easy – “Reports & Data” and then “NCLB Report Card” – click on “Generate NCLB Reports”
  • Nebraska: Easy – under quick links, “State of the Schools Report” – then click on 2009-2010 data and see the buttons at the top for school and district reports
  • Nevada: So-so – “Assessments, Program Accountability, & Curriculum” – then AYP “by Counties”
  • New Hampshire: Very easy – “NH Profiles & Report Cards”
  • New Jersey: Very easy – see “School Report Card”
  • New Mexico: So-so – go to the A-Z directory and then “AYP 2011” – scroll down to “Detailed AYP Reports”
  • New York: So-so – “School Report Cards” from “Quick Links” – select a school year – and click on “Accountability & Overview Report & Comprehensive Information Report”
  • North Carolina: Very easy – on left “NC School Report Cards”
  • North Dakota: Very easy – called “School District Profile”
  • Ohio: Very easy – under “Families,” called “School Performance”
  • Oklahoma: Hard – click on “Parents” and then scroll down to “Accountability & Assessment” and click on “Site Report Cards” (Oklahoma wins the “Smallest Font Size and Most Links on One Page” award at this page for parents)
  • Oregon: Very easy – on the right side – “Report Card”
  • Pennsylvania: Very easy – “Academic Data & School Report Cards”
  • Rhode Island: Very easy – “School Report Cards”
  • South Carolina: Very easy – “Report Cards” on the right
  • South Dakota: Very easy – “State Report Card” on the right
  • Tennessee: Very easy – “Report Card” on the left and then on the “TDOE Report Card” button
  • Texas: So-so – on the left click on “Testing/Accountability” and then scroll down to “State Accountability Ratings” – click on “2011 Accountability Ratings”
  • Utah: Easy – “Data & Statistics” to “Educational Data” to “Accountability/School Performance” on the left side to “U-Pass School Reports”
  • Vermont: So-so – under “Families & Communities,” click on “School Data & Reports” – then “Public School & District Reports” and then “Assessment Report”
  • Virginia: Very easy – “VA School Report Card” to “School, division, and state online report cards”
  • Washington: Very easy – on the right side – “State Report Card”
  • West Virginia: Very easy – “Data” on the left column and “School & District Data”
  • Wisconsin: Very easy – “Wisconsin Information Network for Successful Schools” and then “Data Analysis”
  • Wyoming: Easy – the “Data, Information, & Reports” button on the right side and then scroll to “Every Student Counts – State Report Card”

What have I missed or got awry?

I got the US map at this page.

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