In This Issue:

1. Rethinking homework

2. Fred Jones on dealing with nasty backtalk from students

3. What 21^st-century students need to know in mathematics

4. Nine possible ways to conduct a classroom discussion on a book

5. Does giving a laptop to each student improve teaching and learning?

6. Developing students’ question-asking abilities

7. Building urban teens’ awareness and assertiveness

8. Short items: (a) Teaching current events; (b) Trauma resources

 

Quotes of the Week

“Can a four-letter monosyllable control you and determine your emotions and your behavior? If so, then the student possesses a great deal of power packaged in the form of a single word.”

            Fred Jones (see item #2)

 

“Computer meets classroom: classroom wins.”

            Larry Cuban (quoted in item #5)

 

“A significant instructional shift takes place when a classroom culture is transformed from one where the teacher poses the majority of questions to one where a community of curious wonderers offer up their own.”

            Jeanne Muzi (see item #6)

 

“Before they complete high school, nine in 10 children will experience the death of a family member or close friend. One in 20 will lose a parent. This means that in almost every class, every year, in every school, there’s likely to be at least one grieving student, if not more. Grief is, indeed, a natural occurrence. We must not lose sight, however, of how extraordinarily painful grief is for children and the impact it can have on students’ learning, school performance, and social-emotional development.”

            David Schonfeld and Marcia Quackenbush in “Help for Grieving Students” in in ASCA

School Counselor, January/February 2017 (Vol. 54, #3, p. 20-24), no e-link available;

Schonfeld can be reached at [email protected].

 

“The human brain compares miserably with the digital computer when it comes to performing rule-based procedures. But that human mind can bring something that computers cannot begin to do, and maybe never will: understanding. Desktop-computer and cloud-based mathematics systems provide useful tools to solve the mathematical aspects of real-world problems. But without a human in the driving seat, those tools are totally useless.”

            Keith Devlin (see item #3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Rethinking Homework        

(Originally titled “Does Homework Help?”)

            In this Education Update article, Alexandria Neason reviews the research on the impact of homework, which is decidedly mixed. One study showed a correlation between completing homework and better scores on unit tests, but the link was weaker in elementary schools. Other studies found no strong evidence of homework leading to higher grades. “We still can’t prove it’s effective,” said education professor Cathy Vatterott, author of a 2009 book on homework. “The research is flawed and idiosyncratic.”

            What’s indisputable is that lower-income students find homework a challenge, and not completing homework has a disproportionate impact on their grades. Myron Dueck, a Canadian school leader and author, says one of the most serious effects of homework is “the exacerbation of social and economic inequities that already exist.” Students who are struggling with food insecurity, unstable housing, noisy and distracting home environments, inadequate computer access, after-school jobs or child care, and the normal challenges of adolescence often find homework too much to handle. And indeed, studies of high-school dropouts cite homework as one of the top reasons for throwing in the towel.

            Given this gap-widening effect (“We are basically punishing them for their poverty,” says Vatterott) what should schools do? Neason summarizes some possible policy tweaks:

            • Beef up the rigor and engagement of in-school lessons so that missing homework takes less of a toll on achievement. One district made a point of including music and sensory objects in heavily scaffolded lessons.

            • Give students opportunities to complete homework in school with a conducive study environment and good computer access.

            • Use homework to reinforce already-mastered skills or complete assignments that were launched in class rather than introducing new material. “Homework should reinforce students’ confidence in their abilities, not shatter it,” says Neason.

            • Don’t assign busywork. Each homework assignment should have a clear rationale and add value.

            • Don’t assign homework that requires students to buy special materials like poster board.

            • Don’t portray homework as a test of responsibility. Students may be ashamed to tell teachers about out-of-school struggles that make homework difficult for them to complete.

            • Rethink the weight of homework on grades. Students might be graded on what they learn rather than on process pieces such as homework assignments. One approach is to make homework optional and check for understanding with a quick quiz the next day.

            • Rethink zero-to-100 grading scales, which have a devastating effect when a student gets a zero for missed homework. A 6-5-4-3-2-1 scale mitigates this effect.

• A variation on this is limiting homework to 10 percent of students’ grades or giving a grade of incomplete with time to complete it, perhaps during lunch or recess.

            • At the elementary level, eliminate homework entirely. Some elementary schools have stopped assigning homework and encourage students to play and read after school.

 

“Does Homework Help?” by Alexandria Neason in Education Update, January 2017 (Vol. 59, #1, p. 1, 4-5), ASCD member log-in access at http://bit.ly/2k4lvyc

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2. Fred Jones on Dealing with Nasty Backtalk from a Student

            In this Tools for Teaching article, classroom management guru Fred Jones shares his advice on how to respond to nasty backtalk from students. “If we can think of discipline management as a poker game in which the student raises the dealer (you) with increasing levels of provocation,” says Jones, “then nasty backtalk is going ‘all in.’ The student is risking it all for the sake of power and control. What separates nasty backtalk from whiny backtalk is not so much the words, but rather, the fact that it is personal. The backtalker is probing for a nerve ending.”

            The key, says Jones, is never taking anything a student says personally. If you do, you’ll probably feel wounded and respond emotionally, in which case the student has won.

            The first kind of backtalk is an insult. Students have a limited number of options, all of which have been used through the years:

• Dress:

-   Say, where did you get that tie, Mr. Jones? Goodwill?

-   Hey, Mr. Mickelson, is that the only sport coat you own?

• Grooming:

-   Hey, Mr. Gibson, you have hairs growing out of your nose. Did you know that?

-   Whoa, Mrs. Wilson. You have dark roots! I didn’t know you bleached your hair. Ha!

• Hygiene:

-   Hey, don’t get so close. You smell like garlic.

-   Hey, Mrs. Phillips, your breath is worse than my dog’s!

“Take two relaxing breaths,” says Jones. “When the sniggering dies down, the kid is still on the hook.” The key is staying rational, not getting angry, not showing that you’re upset. Remember, Calm is power, upset is weakness.

            The second kind of nasty backtalk is profanity. The words students use are all-too familiar to you, some low-grade and some “biggies.” Jones says the underlying agenda with student profanity is power. Power boils down who controls the classroom. And that boils down to who controls you. “Can a four-letter monosyllable control you and determine your emotions and your behavior?” Jones asks. “If so, then the student possesses a great deal of power packaged in the form of a single word.” If kids see the impact of these words on you, they will use the tactic repeatedly.

            So what to do? Jones advises thinking of the response to nasty backtalk in two time-frames:

            • Short-term response – Take two relaxing breaths, stay calm, and give the student “the look” – calm, almost bored, totally unruffled, while thinking of an appropriate long-term response. “Your lack of an immediate response is very powerful body language,” says Jones. “It tells the student, among other things, that you are no rookie. You have heard it all a thousand times. If the student runs out of gas and takes refuge in getting back to work, count your blessings, and consider getting on with the lesson.” How about what the other students think? They’ve just seen the backtalker try “the big one” and fail – and they saw you handle it with cool professionalism, and learned that profanity won’t work in this classroom.

            • Long-term response – Talk to the student after class. It’s quite possible that the student’s outburst was related to something that happened outside your classroom. In that case, delivering a consequence might make the situation worse. You might start off like this: “Vanessa, what you said in class today was not at all like you. Tell me, what is really going on?” You’ve opened the door and really don’t know what the student will say. Be patient. “Silence is truly golden since young people have a very low tolerance for it,” says Jones. “If you wait calmly, the whole story will probably come spilling out. Do not be surprised if the lip starts to quiver. Have some tissues handy.” Vanessa might need a pass to visit the nurse and pull herself together before going to her next class. And make sure she knows you’re available to talk more. This might be the turning point in a year-long relationship. 

            A student who backtalks may very well be in an abusive situation at home, and lashing out at a teacher is a way of testing to see if you are as uncaring as other adults in his or her life and if you will respond as expected – with anger and another trip to the office. “What does surprise students in this situation,” says Jones, “is to find a teacher who says, ‘I can see that you are hurting. Tell me about it.’ It catches them off guard. Sometimes their defenses crumble because they are so unaccustomed to anybody caring about whether or not they hurt. Sometimes, healing is mediated by simply taking the time to ask and to listen. Without going that far out on a limb, you can answer the defining question in your relationship with the child, ‘Do you even care?’”

“Our calmness and skill,” Jones concludes, “allow us to say ‘no’ to backtalk while potentially strengthening the fabric of our relationship with the student rather than tearing it.” The more emotionally intense an interaction is, the more possibilities there are. “A student’s crisis in class, therefore, presents us with a rare opportunity… These heart-to-heart talks are some of the most precious moments between adult and child. They teach important lessons within a context that says that being ‘bad,’ while it leads to real consequences, cannot threaten the bond of caring.”

 

“Nasty Backtalk” by Fred Jones in Tools for Teaching, December 16, 2016, http://bit.ly/2jLsD3H

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3. What 21^st-Century Students Need to Know in Mathematics

            In this Huffington Post article, Keith Devlin (Stanford University) says that when he graduated from a prestigious university in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, he had a set of skills that “guaranteed full employment, wherever I chose to go, for the then-foreseeable future – a state of affairs that had been in existence ever since modern mathematics began some three thousand years earlier.” But by the year 2000, he says, his computational ability was “essentially worthless, having been very effectively outsourced to machines that did it faster and more reliably… In a single lifetime, I experienced first-hand a dramatic change in the nature of mathematics and how it played a role in society.” Calculators took over the ancient art of mental arithmetic, and computers and cloud-based systems executed pretty much any mathematical procedure – accurately and in less than a second.

            So what mathematics, if any, do students need to master in the 21^st century? Devlin has a very clear answer: “Whereas it used to be the case that humans had to master the computational skills required to carry out various mathematical procedures (adding and multiplying numbers, inverting matrices, solving polynomial equations, differentiating analytic functions, solving differential equations), what is required today is a sufficiently deep understanding of all those procedures, and the underlying concepts they are built on, in order to know when, and how, to use those digitally-implemented tools effectively, productively, and safely… The human brain compares miserably with the digital computer when it comes to performing rule-based procedures. But that human mind can bring something that computers cannot begin to do, and maybe never will: understanding. Desktop-computers and cloud-based mathematics systems provide useful tools to solve the mathematical aspects of real-world problems. But without a human in the driving seat, those tools are totally useless.”

            The most basic contemporary mathematics life skill, Devlin believes, is number sense. This has been defined as “fluidity and flexibility with numbers, a sense of what numbers mean, and an ability to use mental mathematics to negotiate the world and make comparisons.” Specifically, according to Marilyn Burns, number sense is the ability to:

-   Think and reason flexibly with numbers;

-   Use numbers to solve problems;

-   Spot unreasonable answers;

-   Understand how numbers can be taken apart and put together in different ways;

-   See connections among operations;

-   Figure mentally;

-   Make reasonable estimates.

All this may seem “fuzzy and imprecise,” says Devlin, but students who don’t master these aspects of number sense quite early in their education “struggle throughout their entire subsequent school and college years, and generally find themselves cut off from any career that requires some mathematical ability.” With a clear conceptual understanding of number sense, any skill in the K-12 curriculum can be mastered quickly and easily. Students still have to work at math, but the work will be relatively straightforward. And this is exactly the orientation of the Common Core standards.

 

“All the Mathematical Methods I Learned in My University Math Degree Became Obsolete in My Lifetime” by Keith Devlin in The Huffington Post, January 1, 2017, http://huff.to/2hIkZr2

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4. Nine Possible Ways to Conduct a Classroom Discussion on a Book

            In this article in The Reading Teacher, Sarah Lightner and Ian Wilkinson (The Ohio State University) say that classroom conversations about texts are vital to building vocabulary, content knowledge, reading comprehension, and higher-order thinking. Lightner and Wilkinson believe there are nine approaches from which teachers can choose, depending on their overall goals, what they’re teaching, and their students’ needs. These approaches get students acquiring information, making emotional connections, and engaging in critical analysis.

            • Literature circles – Each group of students chooses a book from sets chosen by the teacher and decides how much to read in preparation for regular meetings. Initially, students assume roles in the meetings – discussion director, illustrator, connector, summarizer, word wizard – although the roles usually phase out as students become proficient at managing peer-led discussions. The teacher circulates and intervenes as necessary. The goal of literature circles is to foster habits of sustained and engaged reading and provide a foundation for interpretation, prediction, analysis, and comprehension.

            • Book club – Small groups of students read the same text (chosen from books on a common theme selected by the teacher), write responses in journals, and use their responses to engage in discussion. There’s a whole-class “community share” and then small-group book club discussions, the goal being to enhance students’ awareness of issues on the theme or the historical background of the text. Teachers may also use this approach to enhance the quality of students’ conversations, build fluency, develop vocabulary, and improve comprehension.

            • Grand conversations – The teacher sets up several literature study groups, assigns a book to each one (or students choose a book from a list supplied by the teacher), gets students reading manageable chunks, and meets with each group for a few minutes a day to make sure they’re on track. The teacher may do a daily all-class read-aloud and pose a “big question” for discussion. When groups finish their books, they meet with the teacher to discuss story elements, their enjoyment and interpretation, and any personal connections.

            • Questioning the author – The teacher helps students see the author as an imperfect writer who may not always present ideas clearly. While reading the text with students, the teacher asks questions like, What is the author saying here? Why is the author giving us this information? Is the author saying that clearly? The teacher encourages collaboration by weaving together students’ responses as they collectively work to make sense of the text.

            • Instructional conversations – The teacher chooses a text, provides some background information, reads it with students, and leads a discussion focused on an interesting theme. The goal of this approach is to understand texts, learn complex concepts, and consider various viewpoints. It has been used successfully with English language learners and students with special needs.

            • Junior Great Books shared inquiry – Students read a text and the whole class discusses it with the teacher, focusing on interpretive questions that have more than one right answer. Students share their opinions, test various possible interpretations, and address the ambiguities of the text. The teacher then gives students a focus question for their note-taking as they read the text a second time. Students’ notes generate further discussion, and students consider and discuss significant words or phrases in the text. This approach aims to build students’ comprehension, critical thinking skills, and enjoyment of reading as they explore the literary canon of noted novelists, essayists, philosophers, and poets.

            • Collaborative reasoning – Students read a story or section of a story that raises a “big question” that could be resolved in a number of ways. Small groups of students then meet with the teacher and argue positions on the big question, give reasons for their positions, provide counterarguments, and respond to challenges. The goal is to critically consider competing points of view, with the teacher facilitating, prompting, and pushing for clarification.

            • Paideia seminar – The teacher chooses a text that contains key values and ideas being studied and leads students through multiple close readings. As the class discusses the text, the teacher challenges students to identify consequential ideas in the text, facilitates without talking too much, keeps students from straying from the focus, and asks open-ended questions that get students seeking understanding in the text, analyzing details, and synthesizing ideas.

            • Philosophy for children – Students read age-appropriate texts that address enduring ethical and philosophical topics. The teacher then asks students to generate open-ended questions about the issues raised in the text and selects one or more of their questions as the focus of all-class discussion. The goal is to develop strong reasoning skill, help students recognize the difference between good and poor reasoning, and get them thinking about important philosophical issues.

            Of course teachers can mix and match components of these approaches to accomplish their goals. Lightner and Wilkinson list the key variables:

-   Who selects the text?

-   What type of text is discussed?

-   How is the class organized?

-   When is the text read?

-   Is the discussion led by the teacher or by students?

-   Who decides what is discussed?

-   Who controls turn-taking?

-   Who decides if what students say is right or wrong?

-   Is the focus on authors’ intentions?

-   Is the focus on students’ emotional connections to the text?

-   Is the focus on textual analysis?

-   Is the focus on critical analysis?

 

“Instructional Frameworks for Quality Talk About Text: Choosing the Best Approach” by Sarah Lightner and Ian Wilkinson in The Reading Teacher, January/February 2017 (Vol. 70, #4, p. 435-444), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1547/abstract; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

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5. Does Giving a Laptop to Each Student Improve Teaching and Learning?

            “The effects of new technology on teaching and learning are one of the most hotly debated topics in U.S. education,” say Binbin Zheng, Chin-Hsi Lin, and Chi Chang (Michigan State University) and Mark Warschauer (University of California/Irvine) in this Review of Educational Research article. Skeptics point to the failure of previous technological innovations to change basic classroom dynamics; Stanford professor Larry Cuban famously said, “Computer meets classroom: classroom wins” and computers are “oversold and underused.”

Zheng, Lin, Chang, and Warschauer believe Cuban may be right if computers are sparsely scattered among classrooms, but they say that when each student has access to a computer, it’s a different ball game. Their meta-analysis on the efficacy of one-to-one laptop programs concludes that the potential effects “are radically different from those of radio, television, and film, which explains why computers, unlike those previous technologies, are bound to have a very different educational fate from the one suggested by Cuban…” Their findings:

• The teaching-learning environment – One-to-one computer access increased student-centered, individualized, and project-based instruction, enhanced students’ engagement, and improved teacher-student and home-school relationships. Students were generally enthusiastic and used their laptops productively for drafting, revising, and sharing writing and for personal access of information.

• Academic achievement – Students with one-to-one access showed significant improvement in science, math, English, and writing, with increased quantity and genres of writing.

• Adult attitudes – Teachers’ initial reaction to one-to-one programs was much less positive than students’, the main concerns being their limited technology savvy, insufficient PD and technical support, uncertainty about how the technology would affect them, and fear of losing control of their classrooms. “As a result,” say Zheng, Lin, Chang, and Warschauer, “some teachers reportedly had difficulties creating a learning environment ‘where learning drives the use of technology, instead of the other way around.’” In schools without high-quality professional development and tech support, these negative attitudes persisted, but when teachers had good support, they were usually on board and able to integrate the laptops well within a year.

• Teaching 21^st-century skills – The authors found evidence that one-to-one access improved students’ reasoning, information-finding, problem-solving, collaboration, and critical thinking skills, but the studies that report these findings were not as rigorous and robust as those on academic achievement and the teaching-learning environment.

• Equity – One-to-one laptop programs improve computer access for students from low-income families, but do they close achievement gaps? The researchers found mixed results on that question, with the critical variable being whether teachers used the laptops for higher-level skills. “The relationship between technology and inequality is quite complex,” say the authors, “and it will take far more than distribution of computers to address the issue. Laptop programs that include sufficient technical and curricular support and that focus on the particular needs of low-SES learners, such as by emphasizing  writing skills, are likely to be more successful in bridging divides than programs that lack support and focus.”

• Future prospects – Zheng, Lin, Chang, and Warschauer conclude that the “falling price of hardware, software, and wireless access; the increasing digital literacy of teachers, students, and parents; the growing sophistication of educational technology applications; and the rising need for computers to be used in student assessment all suggest that one-to-one laptop programs are going to continue to expand in K-12 schools.”

 

“Learning in One-to-One Laptop Environments: A Meta-Analysis and Research Synthesis” by Binbin Zheng, Mark Warschauer, Chin-Hsi Lin, and Chi Chang in Review of Educational Research, December 2016 (Vol. 86, #4, p. 1052-1084), http://bit.ly/2jKiAeS; Zheng can be reached at [email protected].

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6. Developing Students’ Question-Asking Abilities

(Originally titled “Five Ways to Strengthen Student Questioning”)

            In this Education Update article, New Jersey enrichment specialist Jeanne Muzi suggests ways to build students’ question-asking skills:

            • Pass-arounds – Have students handle a series of interesting objects (hardware, photographs), then generate and evaluate questions.

            • Q-stem  – Have students pick a sentence-stem (How…? Why…? Are there…? Is it possible if…?) and generate as many questions as they can on a topic they’re studying.

            • Partners and Questions – Have student pairs look at a lesson-relevant object (an artifact, photograph, art image) and take turns asking and answering questions about it. Which questions are most revealing and why?

            • Whose eyes? – Display a thought-provoking image (a historic photograph, contemporary illustration), give students time to think about it, and then have them generate questions that might be asked by someone in the background (for example, a little girl at the end of the line in a photo of Ellis Island).

            • Question-a-go-go – Hang up an interesting photograph, blueprint, quote, artwork and over the course of a week have students post questions about it on sticky notes. Then discuss and display the questions on a Depth of Knowledge rainbow according to level.

 

“Five Ways to Strengthen Student Questioning” by Jeanne Muzi in Education Update, January 2017 (Vol. 59, #1, p. 8), http://bit.ly/2jQz9YY

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7. Building Urban Teens’ Awareness and Assertiveness

            In this Teachers College Record article, Scott Seider (Boston University) and ten colleagues from B.U., Harvard University, Simmons College, and Tufts University report on their study of high-school students developing the ability to recognize, analyze, navigate, and challenge the social forces that contribute to race and class inequality. Previous research has shown that this ability (dubbed sociopolitical development) helps marginalized youth improve their resilience, academic achievement, and civic engagement.

Seider et al. studied ninth graders in six high-poverty urban charter schools, all of which made a point of fostering their students’ awareness and activism. Three of the schools were avowedly progressive, three were guided by “no excuses” pedagogy and principles. The study had these major findings:

• Students at the progressive schools showed significant improvement in their ability to use critical thinking to analyze the causes of racial inequality. This seemed to be because the schools’ ninth-grade curriculums emphasized historical and social content around power, privilege, and oppression.

• Students attending the no-excuses schools showed significant improvement in their sense of efficacy around using adaptive strategies to navigate settings in which race and class inequality were prominent. This seemed to be because the schools took active steps to get students comfortable with unfamiliar environments and processes, including college visits and the admissions process.

• None of the schools were successful in getting their students to commit to using these “necessary building blocks” (analyzing and navigating) to challenge the social forces and institutions contributing to race and class inequality. Why? The researchers hypothesize that it was students’ lack of agency and the paucity of opportunities to exercise agency – that “many of this study’s adolescents had difficulty imagining a role for themselves in challenging or combating these social forces.” Students’ ability to take constructive action against injustice and inequality might very well develop in the later years of these high schools, where coursework and discussions are the building blocks to the next level.

“Further research is necessary,” the authors conclude, “to understand the pedagogy and practices that show promise in catalyzing adolescents’ analytic and navigational abilities into a powerful commitment to collective social action – the ultimate goal of sociopolitical development.”

 

“Preparing Adolescents Attending Progressive and No-Excuses Urban Charter Schools to Analyze, Navigate, and Challenge Race and Class Inequality” by Scott Seider, Daren Graves, Aaliyah El-Amin, Shelby Clark, Madora Soutter, Jalene Tamerat, Pauline Jennett, Kathryn Gramigna, Jennifer Yung, Megan Kenslea, and Sherri Sklarwitz in Teachers College Record, December 2016 (Vol. 118, #12, p. 1-54), http://bit.ly/2klgTDI; Seider can be reached at [email protected].

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8. Short Items:

            a. Teaching current events – In this New York Times article, Michael Gonchar suggests 50 ways to use current events in the classroom:

https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/50-ways-to-teach-current-events/?_r=0

 

“50 Ways to Teach with Current Events” by Michael Gonchar in The New York Times, October 7, 2014

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            b. Trauma resources – In this ASCA School Counselor article, Katy O’Grady suggests these films as resources for working with students who have experienced trauma:

- “Resilience” – http://kpjrfilms.co/resilience/

- “Paper Tigers: One High School’s Unlikely Success Story” – http://kpjrfilms.co/paper-tigers/

- TED talk by pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris –

www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime

 

“Transforming Schools with Trauma-Informed Care” by Katy O’Grady in ASCA School Counselor, January/February 2017 (Vol. 54, #3, p. 8-13), no e-link available

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