Doing What Is Best, and Not What Is Easy

Saw this gem on Twitter today...

Don't be afraid to be the elephant in the room. Stand up for best practices & what is best for kids. #teachergoals pic.twitter.com/3bDIBSxg8E

— Teacher Goals (@teachergoals) May 9, 2016

I am thinking about the teachers that just graduated from our program last week. I am grateful for the chance to work with them, to have deep conversations about what good teaching is all about, to mentor them. But I am also worried for them.

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.

Who Learns in Your Classroom?

Teacher, I'm going to ask a horrible, nasty question that you might not want to answer. But I think it has to be asked, and I hope you will reflect on it:

Who learns in your classroom?

I know when I first started thinking about this question, my immediate reaction was, "Why...everyone, of course!"

But I think that's the answer I want to be true.

If I'm really honest about it, not every student in my class learns. In fact, there may be days when few of them are actually learning.

Some students are distracted, unmotivated, or uninterested, and will not connect with the material because I do not make it relevant to them.

Other students will struggle, and maybe they will be unable to learn the content. Perhaps somewhere between my planning and the execution of the lesson, I missed something, or maybe they aren't developmentally ready for the material.

Still others already know the content I am planning to teach--they don't learn it, because they already know it.

This last group is the ones I'm really thinking about today. I think our school culture today is strongly focused on the low achieving, low ability students. Even the name of the legislation for funding much of public education--"No Child Left Behind"--emphasizes this fact.

And it's hard, right? They are smart kids. They are the ones who read ahead, who are bored by the stuff they already know. If they aren't causing trouble, it's easy to leave them to their own devices, because we're all so busy ensuring that no one is being left behind. We figure that things will work out for them, because they're sharp kids.

Is this okay?

Can I slack off and say, "Hey, there's only one of me and 20 (30?) of them. I can't be all things to all people. They're the smart kids; they'll be fine."

It would be nice to be able to say that some days.

But I think we need to get real about the fact that school is supposed to be about learning. Yes, that means we want low-ability, low-achieving students to learn. But that also means we should be providing opportunities for high-ability, high-achieving students to learn as well!

I think we need to reconsider what we are doing for gifted learners just as much as we think about what we are doing for struggling learners, and the kids in the middle too. How can we shift our thinking? We need to be deliberate about making school a place of learning for all of our students. Just this morning I read this article from Education Week entitled Gifted Ed. is Crucial, but the Label Isn't. Teacher, I encourage you to read it. Reflect on it. Discuss it with colleagues.

How are you going to make your classroom a place where all students learn something new every day?

The More Things Change...

We had a family gathering yesterday, and I wound up talking with my wife's 90+ year-old grandfather for at least an hour or so. I think my wife felt a little sorry that I was "stuck" with Grandpa for so long, but it was actually really, really great: he was sharing memories from his childhood and adolescence growing up in the ranchlands of the Great Plains.

He told great stories: a train ride from Chicago he remembers well. Breaking horses when he was a hired hand on a ranch. The amazing amount of dust that would seep in through through the cracks of the house during the years of the Dust Bowl. Grasshoppers and locust that would strip the wheat fields of anything green. Hitch-hiking 400 miles when he left home to move to Minnesota at age 16. His first paying job, where he worked for three dollars a day, and felt good about the money he made.

And--very interesting to me--he told about the country school he attended from grades 1-8.

There were about 30 students in the school at a time. Teachers rarely lasted for more than one year. He was humble about his academic work--didn't want to brag--but he completed the first and second grade in one year's time, and skipped the fifth grade entirely, because he would have been the only student...and the teacher asked his parents if they would be all right with him moving on to sixth grade early, so he would have classmates studying the same material.

Image by bdinphoenix [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

School and Life

I saw this online today, and it got me...

Tried to find a source for this one. Found it here, here, here, and here.
I wish people would make it easier to give proper credit for great images.
With thanks to @delta_dc for sharing it via Twitter.

What do you think?

Truth?

Or Fiction?

Please comment to share your reaction!