I am excited to share that I have received official acceptance to Virginia Tech’s Instructional Technology Master of Arts degree program! I start this fall. My coursework will be completed online through Blackboard, so I will be able to remain in Georgia while attending school.
Category Archives: Professional Development
The Homework on Homework: Part One
As I promised earlier, I am reading the studies cited by Robert Marzano Classroom Instruction that Works. The first study I picked up is “The Effects of Homework on Learning: A Quantitative Synthesis” from Journal of Educational Research, November/December 1984 (full citation at end of this post).
Alfie Kohn’s claim in his rebuttal of my post at The Faculty Room was that none of the studies cited by Marzano, et. al. in the chapter “Homework and Practice” showed that “homework was beneficial for students.” Kohn accuses Marzano of misrepresenting the research on homework.
The focus of the Paschal, Weinstein, Walberg, 1984, which is not one of the five studies Kohn mentions in his criticism of Marzano, is a synthesis of “empirical studies of homework and of various homework strategies on the academic achievement and attitude of elementary and secondary students.” In the abstract of the study, Paschal, et. al. state: “About 85% of the effect sizes favored the homework groups. The mean effect size is .36 (probability less than .0001). Homework that was graded or contained teachers’ comments produced stronger effects (.80).”
As I said, this meta-analysis does not appear to be one of the five studies Kohn mentions in his post when questioning Marzano’s research, but it is in a chart on p. 61 of Marzano entitled “Research Results for Homework.” Perhaps it is not considered by Kohn because it is a meta-analysis or synthesis rather than original research itself. I do think it has interesting things to say about the effects of homework, however. Paschal, et. al. note that “[e]xtensive classroom research on ‘time on task’ and international comparisons of year-round time for study suggest that additional homework might promote U.S. students’ achievement.” However, the authors also note that writing on the subject of homework has largely characterized homework as “unwholesome, professionally unsupervised, or allow[ing] the children to practice mistakes.” Paschal, et. al. acknowledge that attitudes regarding homework seem to change depending upon a variety of factors.
Paschal, et. al. examined “15 studies that compared students with various qualities and amounts of assigned homework. These included the most frequent comparison, of students who were assigned and those who were not assigned homework.”
The authors conclude that “[t]he corpus of evidence shows a moderately large average effect size [0.80] of assigned homework that is commented upon or graded.” However, the authors also acknowledge that “much of the voluminous, 70-year-old literature on homework is opinionated and polemical, and surprisingly few methodologically adequate studies have been conducted.” I can attest to the veracity of the first part of that statement, given my own recent experience. Kohn was the only respondent to my original post who even brought up research.
Obviously, I want to read the five studies cited by Kohn and Marzano, as those studies seem to be at the heart of the contention between the two, but I felt this meta-analysis made it fairly clear that some homework was better than no homework. Marzano’s conversion table on p. 160 translates a 0.36 effect size to a percentile gain of 14. In other words, the average student who does homework (at least, according to my interpretation of the meta-analysis) will have score 14 percentage points higher on a standard bell curve measuring student achievement. An average student who does homework that is graded and receives feedback on that homework will have a score over 28 percentage points higher on a standard bell curve measuring student achievement. Sounds good to me. I encourage you to read the study yourself and draw your own conclusions, too. Feel free to leave them in the comments. I will be reading other studies and sharing my conclusions here, so if you are interested in the great homework debate, check back.
Marzano, Robert J., Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. Classroom Instruction that Works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2001.
Paschal, Rosanne A., Thomas Weinstein, and Herbert J. Walberg. “The Effects of Homework on Learning: A Quantitative Analysis.” Journal of Educational Research. 78.2 (1984): 97-104. Professional Development Collection. EBSCO. Weber School Library, Atlanta, GA. 7 March 2008. <http://www.ebsco.com/>
Classroom Instruction that Works
I read Classroom Instruction that Works by Robert J. Marzano, Debra J. Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock for an online professional learning course, and I’m very glad I did. The book discusses research-based strategies teachers can use to increase student understanding and achievement. It fits well with Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design.
The authors’ position is that teaching is a science, although it is frequently thought of as an art. I like this position because when we think of teaching as an art, we are more likely to believe a teacher either has it or s/he doesn’t. The Faculty Room examined this question some time back, and I wish I had read this book before I posted my response to the question. I was already of the opinion that good teachers can be made, but if I had read this book, I might have had more armor for my argument.
Classroom Instruction that Works discusses nine teaching strategies:
- Identifying similarities and differences
- Summarizing and note-taking
- Reinforcing effort and providing recognition
- Homework and practice
- Nonlinguistic representations
- Cooperative learning
- Setting objectives and providing feedback
- Generating and testing hypotheses
- Questions, cues, and advance organizers
One teaching practice I questioned as a result of reading this book is the way I check homework. Research has shown that timely feedback on homework is important; however, the way I generally check homework is through reading quizzes and notebook checks. I also need to do more direct instruction in note-taking and summarizing. UbD has been great for helping me set objectives and generate and tests hypotheses.
Many teachers reading this book will feel vindicated by the research presented, but it think it will make all of us, whether we are new teachers or seasoned veterans, look seriously at our practice.
Death of a Salesman
I have been struggling with writing a UbD plan for Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. I think have have one sketched out, though I still need to create guiding questions for various pieces of the unit, including YouTube videos and a selection from Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat.
In looking at the plot and themes of the play, and perhaps because it is so much in my thoughts lately because of my professional development courses, I made a connection between the play and the modernization/globalization or flattening of the world that our students will need to contend with in their work lives. One chapter of The World is Flat in particular came to mind — “The Untouchables” — as I began thinking about connections. I opened my book only to see Friedman himself referred to Willy Loman in that chapter. It must have been there in my subconscious because I had recently read it, but I was grateful to have my connection thus solidified.
I struggled to come up with a performance task that is relevant and addresses my essential questions, but would also be engaging. I think I have one. I am fairly happy with the unit as it stands because I think it is a unit that connects a past Miller was familiar with to a present and future he probably could not have imagined, and I think it will have interest and relevance for my students. You can check out the unit at the UbD Educators wiki.
UbD Wiki: Summaries
Miguel Guhlin has joined the UbD Educators wiki and wants your help. He is posting UbD chapter summaries and wants input from other wiki members.
I want to ask wiki members a question: Miguel suggested that we unlock those summary pages to allow nonmembers to participate. What do you think? My idea was that allowing editing by wiki members only would prevent vandalism, but it also closes participation — I have not denied membership to anyone, nor do I plan to (unless they join then vandalize the wiki, which seems unlikely), so perhaps the point is moot.
Check out the summaries and add your thoughts. I’m really excited about Miguel’s work and plan to begin adding my own ideas this weekend.
Teaching Today, Part 2
In a recent post, I discussed three cultural markers that have made teaching more difficult for those of us who teach today than it was for our own teachers. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the ways in which teaching is a lot easier for us today than it was for our forebears.
The World Wide Web is a huge repository of lesson plans and learning experiences for our students. Our students today have information at their fingertips in a way we never did. If I don’t know the answer to a question a student asks, I can look it up instantly. When I was student teaching in 1997, I had to write something like twelve weeks of lesson plans. It was grueling and hard, and the ERIC databases we were pointed toward weren’t much help, nor was our on-campus curriculum and materials center. I imagine student teachers today have a much easier time with this particular task — they can draw from lesson and unit ideas shared freely or at low cost by other teachers who have tried them out. In addition, state standards and educational organization standards are widely available for student teachers to study and access. I can’t remember that I was given a copy of any standards by my professors, but my mentor teacher did allow me to photocopy her copy of Georgia’s QCC standards.
Technology has also allowed us to create and save documents easily. I still have a file cabinet, but almost all of the stuff inside it exists on my hard drive. That wasn’t true when I started teaching. Software has made it easier for me to keep track of the documents I create. We don’t need to save handouts in a file for 20 years like our antecedents did. We can save them on hard drives, CD’s, flash drives, or other media. In fact, we can even scan documents we don’t have in our computer and put them there.
We can take professional learning courses and college courses online (in some cases), obviating the need for trekking to schools across town one or two evenings a week in order to earn PLU’s for our certificates or advanced degrees. We can work more or less at our own pace at a time that suits us. Online learning gives us a certain amount of freedom over our learning that our own teachers didn’t have.
Technology has also allowed us to collaborate. I never would have dreamed we’d have something like the UbD Educators wiki five years ago. I couldn’t have imagined that blogging and social networks would spring up around educational interests. Now we can connect with teachers of our own discipline and others, and we can share ideas, commiserate, plan together, write together, research together, and help one another in a million ways that wouldn’t have been possible when our own teachers were in the classroom.
Our world has become small, and some have said, flat through technology as well. Collaboration isn’t limited to teachers; students can also work together and learn from each other. Students in Bangladesh and Camilla, Georgia can learn about globalization together and continue the work with other students around the world. Students in Atlanta’s Jewish community can teach students in Idaho about the Holocaust or connect with students in Israel and explore what Judaism means together.
The more people we have working together, the better our results are. Because we can share and collaborate in ways our own teachers never would have imagined, teaching is, in this way at least, easier for us than it was for our own teachers.
Teachers Can Be the Worst Students
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I am currently taking two online professional development courses through a local school system. Both are book studies, and if you look in the sidebar, you can guess which two books. The interesting thing to me is that one group is active, dynamic, and interested in conversation about the book we are reading. Participants are posting resources. Participants are actually reading each other’s posts and providing feedback that instigates discussion. Interestingly enough, a large number of the participants are not currently teaching, but they are taking the course to keep their certificates current.
The other group does the bare minimum required. Many of the response posts are bland recapitulations of the poster’s points with a somewhat encouraging “I agree” stamped on. We’re reading a really interesting book, and the discussions are just mind-numbing. I think the majority of this group is in the classroom, too.
I really hope these teachers are not accepting the kind of work they are producing from their own students. On the other hand, part of me wants to say that if you aren’t willing to be a good student, it doesn’t make much sense to be a teacher. I think the best teachers genuinely like to learn. I know, I know. A lot of professional development is stupid. But these two online courses really aren’t! That’s just my opinion, I guess, and clearly the majority of the other participants don’t agree.
I find the dichotomy really interesting.
UbD Educators: Suggestions?
I have mentioned before that the UbD Educators wiki has grown quiet. I think there may be two reasons for this:
- We’re all busy educators who have difficulty finding the time to create, post, and/or comment on others’ posted UbD units.
- We’re not getting what we need out of the wiki.
It’s not in my power to alleviate the first problem, and believe me, I hear you there. However, the second problem is much easier to address. The wiki is only as good as we make it. If you need a feature that the wiki doesn’t have, add it. If you have trouble keeping up with new pages and discussions, try subscribing to the site’s various RSS feeds (you can keep up with all changes or just changes to one page). If you want to make a change, but you aren’t sure, ask the wiki members about it on the Suggestions page. the majority of the wiki’s members have not yet contributed either unit plans or discussions. I want to hear your voice! I don’t mind lurkers, but we have the potential to make this wiki a huge repository of ideas and discussion about UbD, and we can only do that through teacher contributions.
Happy New Year
This year, I had the opportunity to teach British literature for the first time — the course that made me want to teach English — and I had a wonderful time. I will be handing the course over to a colleague, and I hope she will enjoy it, too.
I also had the opportunity to go on a trip with the juniors last January.
My students collaborated with the Reflective Teacher’s class on a Holocaust project and with students at Neveh Channah Torah High School for Girls on a Israel/Judaism project.
I had the opportunity to meet up with other edubloggers at EduBloggerCon.
I was delighted to be invited to blog with Grant Wiggins. My teaching practices were transformed by his book with writing partner Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design, and I consider it one of my greatest accomplishments this year that the UbD Educators wiki was established, even if it became somewhat quiet. I hope it will catch on, and I still occasionally receive requests to join it.
In the coming year, it is my hope that my proposal for a course centered around Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces will be accepted and that I will be teaching British literature again. I would also love the opportunity to participate in more Flat Classroom projects with other schools and teachers — interested parties feel free to contact me. I am looking forward to reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman as part of an online PLU course I am taking beginning next week.
The Faculty Room
Meg Fitzpatrick, editor of of the UbD e-journal Big Ideas, invited me to contribute to both the e-journal and a new blog they are announcing today: The Faculty Room. Please come on over and join in our conversations (my first post on the blog should appear some time tomorrow). You will find other “familiar faces” over there. Also, now seems as good a time as any to remind you that the UbD Educators wiki is a good resource for you to post, share, “borrow,” and obtain or leave feedback on UbD lesson plans.