As one school year ends and talk of another begins, I'm already wondering how I can convince my colleagues that assigning traditional nightly homework is a waste of time and a practice that has absolutely no effect on achievement.
As I've written on several occasions, a successful Results Only Learning Environment requires patience and perseverance. When students struggle early on with project-based learning and self-evaluation, I sometimes find myself wanting to return to worksheets and grades.
Of course, I don't give in to these urges. As I tell my students, we have to stay the course. It always pays dividends in the end.
I'm seeing these dividends now in a class that not more than a month ago, I was concerned might never adapt to results-only learning. Many students just didn't seem to be improving.
This week, though, it suddenly struck me that things were clicking. One girl, who has been a reluctant participant in our year-long reading project, was quietly devouring a book, unwilling to look up from her rapidly-turning pages. Another young lady, who had expressed dissatisfaction with the class earlier in the year, was eagerly bookmarking and annotating a web article she'd located, making a special effort to come to me and ask how the annotation looked. Two more students were sitting together quietly reading to one another from a novel I'd just distributed and asked them to read by the end of spring break.
I was amazed by the quality of production in the room. Patience with the results-only system had helped reluctant students develop into independent learners. It seemed like a long wait, but it was definitely worth it.
An education blogger I read often, Joanne Jacobs, recently posted a link to a traditional teaching program, called DI (Direct Instruction), created by someone from the private sector.
Although I had heard of this, I only knew that it embraces everything I'm against in education: scripted lessons, rules, worksheets and tests, so I had previously dismissed it without further research. The eBook Jacobs linked to on her blog about DI confirmed my suspicions -- that DI is one more in a long line of traditional systems that provide crutches for bad teachers and turn students into mindless automatons.
I decided to share my opinion about DI in the comment section on the post; I was the first. A few days later, I returned to Jacobs' blog to find dozens of comments. I was not surprised by the opinions, most of which were directly opposite of mine. Some outraged fans of Direct Instruction thought I was crazy and defended DI and other oft-used weak practices, like lions fighting for their young.
I was not angered by the comments; after all, these people were only defending what they believe in.
Rather, I began considering how difficult it is going to be to overcome these outdated teaching methods, so we can reform American education. If programs like DI and other scripted, basal-type systems can so easily influence parents and educators, how will modern, more progressive teaching methods, like results-only learning, compete?
I wonder, are we losing the fight with traditional teaching?
Let me begin this post with the precursor that no one has yet clearly explained the logic of homework, so the idea of a homework pass is even more elusive to me.
My 7-year-old, who has more homework than some Ph.D candidates, I think, announced today that she won a homework pass, because she earned stickers for, what else? Completing homework.
Huh?
Is it just me, or is this the craziest system in education? First, teachers inundate second-graders with hours of homework, which they, of course, hate.
Then, if the students complete enough homework, the teachers hand out a homework pass, which forgives future homework, as some twisted reward for doing homework in the first place.
