Most Effective Educational Technologies

A friend of mine is studying to become a teacher. (But she's not one of my students.) :-)

She reached out to me recently, asking a question for an assignment she's working on for class. She was to reach out to practicing educators to get their input on some issues related to student development, and teaching adolescents. Here's one question this assignment raised:

What technologies are most effective to facilitate learning in adolescents?

Great question there, I think! Probably I love this question because it gets at the intersection between several of my loves in the field of education: educational technologies, teaching adolescents, and effective teaching techniques.

After a little thought, here is how I responded:

How to Make Homework that is Not Crappy

In a recent post I shared about a presentation I gave at a recent teachers' convention held on our campus. The title of my session was "Homework is Broken...But We Can Fix It!" If you've been reading the blog for some time, it probably isn't news to you that I think we can do better when it comes to homework in K-12 schools today. (If you want to read more, check out my #nomorecrappyhomework posts...)

Today, I got an email from a friend who was in that session. He raises some really thoughtful points about how he (and his colleagues) are wrestling with homework. Here's what he wrote (slightly edited for anonymity):

Understanding the Common Core

It is amazing and fascinating (and a little troubling) for me to see how people continue to react to the Common Core State Standards. The development of these standards began in 2009--that's seven years ago, people!

The troubling part for me is how politicized the whole conversation about the Common Core is. Many people seem to just be parroting things they have heard--for good or ill--about the standards, about how they are implemented, about the government's role, etc. Many times when I hear people singing the praise of the Common Core, I wonder if they have actually read the standards. Even more common, when I hear people demonizing the Common Core, I really wonder if they have actually read the standards. It seems to me that many people are concerned about the Common Core, or--perhaps more accurately--they are concerned with changes that they see in education today, and they lump any and all changes in with "the Evil Common Core." (Sorry, that was a little snarky, wasn't it?)

Friends, particularly if you are concerned about the Common Core, I encourage you to watch this short video to better understand what the Common Core State Standards actually are. This is a very fair explanation from Education Week (a well-regarded and respectable news source for issues related to American education) and lays out a concise explanation of what these standards are about. I believe this is a helpful way to be able to discern untruths or half-truths you might hear about the Common Core.

If you've ever felt opposed to the Common Core, and you've never actually read the standards, I encourage you to look at them for yourself. You can explore the whole body of the Common Core State Standards at corestandards.org.

Are they perfect? Certainly not. But are they a good way of articulating what students should learn at different grade levels in math and English language arts? I think they are helpful in this regard.

"I See My Name": To Know and to Be Known

It's the beginning of the semester, and I'm already struggling. Oh, I'm doing all right; I know my content, and I'm reasonably confident in my pedagogy, and I am as prepared as I can be. The struggle? Getting to know all my new students.

I teach Intro to Ed, which is a required survey course for all Education majors. If you come to Dordt College and major in Education, you'll take this course. I want to be clear: I love to teach this course; it is one of my favorites! But, because Education is one of our largest majors, I have a lot of students--about 80-100 each year, between the three sections that we offer. In the fall semester, I teach two sections of 32-35 students each. And here is the struggle: it's hard for me to get to know that many students when I only see them a couple hours a week.

When I was a middle school teacher, I had 40-60 new students every year, but it wasn't so hard to learn all those names. I think it was because I saw them every. single. day. and I was able to connect with them more quickly. With my college students, I only see them a couple times a week (actually, only once a week in Intro to Ed!) and so it takes me much, much longer to get all those names down cold. Last fall, I had most of them by the middle of the semester, but there were a handful of names that were elusive for me--five or six students whose names just wouldn't jump to mind for me.

And I hate that.

An Analogy to Help Teachers Understand Homework

I have been thinking and thinking about homework over the past few months--why teachers give it (many reasons), whether it truly advances learning (debatable), what the scholarly research says about it (it's complicated), and what parents can do to partner with schools on this issue (reply hazy, try again). (If you are interested in reading my past posts on this topic, feel free to read through this list of posts tagged "homework.")

I was recently struck with what I think might be a helpful analogy for teachers who are themselves perhaps wrestling with what to do about assigning homework. Here it is...

Imagine, teacher, that your administrator hands down an expectation that you are going to write detailed lesson plans for every single thing you teach. You are expected to do this every single day, and must submit them by 7:30 a.m. every day. If you are late, or if your work is incomplete, you will have to give up your lunch hour as a consequence. Every once in awhile, you get a stack of your lesson plans back from your administrator with "10/10" or "B+" or "78%" written on the top of them, but with no other comments, written or verbally submitted.

How would you feel about this situation?

Growing Dendrites

I had never heard of the book before today, but in an email hawking textbooks, I saw one title that caught my eye: Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites by Marcia Tate. I cannot vouch for the book at all; I have not read it, and I don't know the author.

But this title rings true for me.

Dendrites, in case you haven't studied human anatomy and physiology lately, are the branches extending from neurons (nerve cells.) Every thought that you have is the result of electrical impulses traveling from one neuron to another, and it is the dendrites that allow for all sorts of communication to happen throughout the body as they connect the neurons. Each neuron can have thousands of connections to other neurons, and all of those dendrites matter for thinking and moving the body.

Image by The Journal of Cell Biology [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

Why bring it up? Best we can tell, learning happens as the result of new connections between neurons. The saying (attributed to neuroscientist Donald Hebb) goes, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." And the idea here is that learning is the result of growing new neural connections, new dendrites connecting, "wiring" with other neurons. (Yes, yes, I know I'm simplifying the science here. If you'd like to learn more, you can read this page about axons, dendrites, synapses, and neurotransmitters.)

More Homework ≠ More Learning

It's been a while since I've blogged, and it's because I've been working on my comprehensive exams for the past few weeks. I ended up doing a sort of Twitter-fast in the process, because I just did not have the time to devote to those connections and conversations, though I love them so much and find them so valuable for stirring my thinking.

Today, I decided to take a break from other homework and just scroll through my TweetDeck for a few minutes. It felt good to be back, like having a cup of coffee with a dear friend and catching up. (There is probably some commentary about my love of technology there...)

And...wouldn't you know it...? One of the very first tweets I saw was a retweet from my Twitterfriend, Erin Olson (whom you should be following, if you are a teacher)...

#PLAEA #iaedchat https://t.co/HZnfo4TJYj

— Erin Olson (@eolsonteacher) February 6, 2016

The piece that was linked in her retweet here was intriguing to me, since I have an ongoing axe to grind about crappy homework. Here was the tweet:

"Homework in primary school has an effect of zero" (J. Hattie) https://t.co/PgWVPfaiL7 <- good read/interview #MTedchat

— Jon Fines (@JonFines) February 6, 2016

Friends, if you are convinced that homework is a good thing for kids, you really have to read this.

Here, I'll make it easy...just click this link: "Homework in primary school has an effect of zero."

Okay, I'll make it even easier...here are a few quotes from the piece. Just read these:

"Homework in primary school has an effect of around zero. In high school it’s larger. (…) Which is why we need to get it right." 

"It’s one of those lower hanging fruit that we should be looking in our primary schools to say, 'Is it really making a difference?'" 

"Certainly I think we get over obsessed with homework." 

"Five to ten minutes has the same effect of one hour to two hours." 

"The worst thing you can do with homework is give kids projects. The best thing you can do is to reinforce something you’ve already learnt."

These quotes come from an interview with John Hattie, an education researcher who has investigated over 130 influences on education and ranked them in order of the effect they have on student achievement (i.e., measurements of actual learning.) I've mentioned Hattie's list in an earlier blog post, where I noted that homework does make the list; it comes in at 88th place in terms of the effect it has on learning. There are so many other things we could (should?) be doing to improve student learning...why are we still assigning so much homework?

Let's get this right, my fellow educators: more homework does not mean more learning!

Image by David Mulder [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Do You Have the Guts to Ask?

Image by Alan Levine [CC BY 2.0]

After my last post, I tweeted a series of questions, challenging teachers (I suppose) to try asking their students for feedback about their teaching. Here's one:

What do you think you would hear if you surveyed your students about your teaching? #edchat #elemchat #mschat

— Dave Mulder (@d_mulder) January 14, 2016

Creating Better Homework

I've been on a tear lately against "crappy homework." I've written before about how I think homework assigned to "teach responsibility" is misguided; I still stand by this argument. More recently, I've been thinking about how bad most of the homework I assigned as a middle school teacher was, and how we can make homework better. I've also been encouraging teachers to think about homework from a parent's perspective, something I did not do enough of as a middle school teacher.

All of this has stirred up some good conversations with friends and fellow educators--I'm always grateful for feedback and pushback on my thinking!--but a common theme in response has been, "So what do you think we should do about this, Dave?"

Public Domain Image
via Wikimedia

That's fair. As Teddy Roosevelt once said,

"Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is whining."

And...I think he's right. So, lest I be accused of simply whining about the sorry state of affairs when it comes to homework, let's start thinking about how we might go about creating better homework.

Homework from a Parent's Perspective

I assigned a lot of bad homework over the years.

Looking back to the beginning of my teaching career, I'm embarrassed about the kind of work I assigned. As I shared in my last post, I never really learned how to write "good" homework, and I just sort of emulated my own teachers, and gave my own students the kinds of work I remembered being assigned.

And so it was that I assigned ridiculously lengthy math assignments. I gave my middle school math students problem sets like, "Do p. 188 1-51 odds" (because the answers to the even numbered problems were in the back of the book. Can't have them peeking, and just copying down the answers!) And usually they would have some time to get started in class, and usually what they didn't get done would become "homework."

Sound familiar?

But let's look at this a moment...

Let's Fix Homework

In a recent post, I shared some of the research that has been done about homework and it's effectiveness (or lack thereof) for helping elementary, middle school, and high school students learn. This has led to a lot of conversations with fellow educators, both face-to-face, and via online connections. It's clear to me that this is something teachers feel pretty strongly about...and to be fair, I have some strong opinions on this topic as well.

I think we can do better than what we've "always done" with homework. I don't think that much of the homework assigned in schools today is doing what we think it is doing. And, if I'm going to say it baldly, I think some teachers are being downright lazy in the work they assign to their students.

If we're serious about helping students learn, let's make sure that the work we assign is really going to help students learn. And that goes for in-class work, certainly, but for out-of-class work too.

Teacher, how confident are you that the assignment you are giving your students is really going to help them learn? I mean, really help them learn, and not just be "something for them to do" or "something that I can grade and put in the grade book."

My friend, Alice Keeler, recently tweeted about something that got me thinking. She is a fantastic teacher, and is thoughtful about her teaching practice. In a series of tweets, she pointed out that throughout her professional training as an educator--both in undergraduate teacher education courses as well as her Masters degree--she was never instructed in how to create "good" homework. And as I reflected on this, I realized that the same is true for me. We mentioned homework in passing in several courses, but we never really talked about how to really create homework that was well-designed to help students learn. And now that I'm a teacher educator...I'm thinking that I'm probably doing a disservice to my students--future teachers--and even to the students and families they will eventually serve; we better talk about homework now!

This makes me wonder about how many of the hundreds of thousands of professional educators in the world today have ever really thought deeply about the quality of the homework they assign. Are we really assigning homework because we are sure it will help students learn? Or are we assigning it because we feel like we "ought to" or out of some vague sense of, "Well, I'm sure homework helped me learn...so I probably should assign some to my students too...?"

We can do better than that, teachers. Let's fix homework.

Image by Corey Seeman [CC BY-NS-SA 2.0]

Our Job Is 'Kids'

Oh. My. Word.

I have some fantastic students--future teachers--and they often impress and amaze me. But every once in a while, one of my students speaks with such wisdom and clarity that it makes me take a step back.

In Introduction to Education I assign my students a weekly reflection paper about the readings and discussions we have in class. These short papers help give me insight into how they are understanding the course material, how they are making connections, how they are learning.

In a recent reflection about the tasks inherent in planning for instruction, one of my students wrote this gem:

Because we are the teachers planning for each day, we need to know what we are teaching. We need to know the content and curriculum – not just know the facts, but application also. As teachers, our job is “kids.” We learn content to teach the kids. We learn to be aware of kid development. We learn to form activities and friendly classroom for the kids. We learn to be a leader for kids.

She made connections here between several different ideas we had discussed at earlier points in the semester: she is showing how it all hangs together for her, which is great!

But that phrase right in the center of this paragraph...wow, it got me! Here it is again, in case you missed it:

As a teachers, our job is "kids."

How about it, veterans? Do you still think of it this way? What is central to your work as a professional educator? Policies and procedures? That high-stakes test that's coming up? The latest district initiative? Meeting minimum standards?

Or are you in it for the kids?

Why are we teaching? Here's the voice of wisdom from a future teacher: our job is "kids." 

Image by Ilmicrophono Oggiono [CC BY 2.0]

Freshman Expectations: "You Aren't In High School Anymore!"

Yesterday I posted a bit about good pedagogy, and technology, and navigating change in today's educational environment. My friend Ed replied and his point got me thinking some more about one part of the discussion fodder I shared in that post in particular: the idea that there is a real difference in expectations for learning in high school vs. learning in college. He was responding to a quote I shared in that piece that came from an article entitled "Message to My Freshman Students."

You see, I teach a lot of freshmen, first year college students. As in, they were just in high school in May, and then show up in my college class in August.

So I'm thinking now about how I can better help the freshmen I teach in Intro to Education understand the difference in expectations for their learning from high school to college. Because if I'm going to expect them to be dramatically different learners than they were in high school, they need to understand the difference.