Reflections on Reading: What is our goal? What influences students?

By Kim Miklusak

Often we hear people bemoan a perceived or real decrease in sustained reading in our students.  Teachers express frustration that students don't read outside of class or are not reading at a level that teachers feel they should be at.

This year our Senior English students were doing independent reading choices for 20-60 minutes a week in class, and I know more classes have added this across all grades.  So as the Senior English teachers prepared for our Independent Reading Book Circles, I asked my students to do a brief journal entry on successes and barriers when it came to their reading.

In the words of Paulo Freire in Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare to Teach, he says, "As a practical-theoretical context, the school cannot ignore the knowledge about what happens in the concrete contexts of its students and their families.  How can we understand students' difficulties during the process of becoming literate without knowing what happens in their experiences at home or how much contact they have with written words in their sociocultural context?"

I want to share some of their responses here.  They certainly caused me to step back and reflect as we set our goals and targets for our unit: was our goal a quiz at the end?  Was our goal just to finish a book?  Was our goal to inspire a love of reading?  In the end our goal was to have sustained dialogue about a reading both within one book circle and across books.

What is the Purpose of School: students' perspective

By Kim Miklusak

We talk about purpose a lot in the Collab Lab, so much so that it's become a running joke.  But it's true: knowing the purpose of why we do what we do in our classrooms is the center of everything.  It guides everything from our goals to our assessments to our grades and everything else in between.

We decided it would be interesting to hear students' perspectives of school and classes--not any class in particular, but overall.  So we invited in a small group of juniors and (literally) grabbed some seniors as they were on their way out the door.  This is a group limited in that they are mainly AP English students.  We realize that this is just a small representation of our student body, and we hope to host this same type of meeting with other groups of students on the same and additional topics in the future!

We could write a year's worth of blogs based on what they talked about, and they could have talked another hour!  You can follow this link to read the entire summarized transcript of the conversation as it happened, but here are some points I found most insightful and interesting:

• Students felt that while academics held a great importance, obviously, that "soft skills" such as time management, character, networks of support, etc. are all equally as important.  We talked about whether these were skills teachers should teach or if they were simply expected.  Surprisingly (or not surprisingly based on this group) many students said it was self-accountability and self-awareness that were most important although they admitted that not everyone has a support structure or that it took some people more time to develop these skills.  This, interestingly, relates back to a previous post we had about Executive Functioning Skills.
• Students discussed at length the process vs. product of school.  They discussed why some teachers require notes and assignments to be completed in a certain way even if it wasn't the way a student learned best--again while conceding that it's not possible to completely individualize instruction.  They do advocate for options in the process of learning.  There were disagreements about whether habits of work and task completion were truly useful in the learning process.  There was also great discussion about why we average grades (unprompted, seriously!), that if by the end of the year they are able to demonstrate mastery, why were grades averaged from earlier in the year when they were not yet mastering materials.  Again, however, the conversation came back to the idea of grades being a reflection of where you are and thus not including "task completion" activities simply to bump up grades.
• Students brought up the importance of clear standards, the need to clearly know what they need to know and be able to do.  They talked about how class needs to be a reflection of the proportion of the assessments; that is, do we as teachers spend the appropriate amount of time on skills and topics in our instruction and in our assessment, and is that then reflected appropriately in our grade books?  Do we provide appropriate and timely feedback when we return assignments, holding ourselves to the same standards that we hold them?  This led into a conversation about the importance of critical inquiry and critical reading (again, unprompted!) with one student saying: 

  “The way we critically analyze or think, most of my classes taught me how to be a better writer or thinker, how to look through a different lens.  That’s what they’re trying to teach…when we leave this school there are a lot of” people who are not like you.  This will make you well rounded.

So many thanks to these students for their time and insight!  We appreciate their speaking with us today, and we definitely look forward to hosting more sessions like this in the future!

Why Do We Give Homework?

by Kirsten Fletcher

As a project for the District 214 Mentor Program, I recently sent out a survey to my school to find out what teachers really think about homework. The process alone of writing this survey was an educational one. I had the chance to collaborate with Rebecca Castro, a colleague at Wheeling who was doing a similar project. I also got feedback from several peers and administrators before sending out the questions. Their comments and corrections were incredibly helpful as I approached this touchy subject.

My goal in conducting this survey was to see if there was a general consensus about homework in our building. The following are some of the questions I asked:

• What is the main purpose of your homework?
• What type of homework do you usually give?
• What percentage does homework occupy in your overall grade?
• How often do you give homework?
• How much time should it take students to complete your homework?
• What percentage actually complete it on time?
• Why do you think some students do not complete homework?
• What are the consequences in your class for not completing homework?

As teachers, we all believe that what we do in the classroom is worthwhile and beneficial to learning. If not, we wouldn't be doing it. However, it seems that just within our building there is a wide range of perceptions about the benefits of homework. I received 78 responses from EGHS staff which were fairly evenly divided among divisions. Forty-eight percent of responses were from teachers of Honors or AP courses. Here are some of the results of my survey:

How long should it take students to complete your homework?

Most teachers reported that they offer students opportunities to earn credit for late work. When asked about the reason that most students do not complete homework, the most popular response was that our school culture makes it acceptable not to turn work in on time. Teachers also recognized that students' time constraints and lack of interest contribute to low completion rates. Some teachers (almost 20%) say that their colleagues assign too much homework and that this impacts students' ability to complete work for other classes.

The final question of the survey was an open-ended one. I wanted to know if teachers had any suggestions for improving the homework completion rate at our school. I was surprised at how many people took the time to give thoughtful responses. Some expressed frustration. Others talked about all the time commitments and other challenges that our students face outside of class. Many talked about the idea that students often don't do homework when they don't see the reason or purpose behind it. There seemed to be two major fields of thought. A significant group of teachers say that we need to assign credit (points) to homework and enforce strict deadlines in order for students to take it seriously. Another group of teachers say that homework must be clearly linked to assessments and that students will complete it (even without earning credit for it) if they see the purpose / value in it.

While this was only an informal survey, I hope that this exercise can be used to spark some meaningful discussions in the future about the purpose and relevance of homework to our students' learning. As I move into Summer, I am carefully reconsidering the role of homework in my own classes for the 2016-17 school year.