The greatest source of tears and heartbreak in our family, over all of our child-raising years, was homework. Like by far. Like 90%. Those unbidden, meaningless assignments, the mechanical worksheets, and odd-numbered math problems constantly led to friction, battles, resistance, weeping, and regret. It felt like the school was sending little hand grenades home with our kids, timed to explode just before a peaceful, playful, or relaxing evening could break out. That relentless assault on our family life still feels fresh, even though our kids are now 39 and 33.

        During this time, Elaine and I were both teaching, researching, and writing about progressive classroom practices – one of which was not worksheets. Nick and Marny knew very well what our professional principles were, so they could have called out our hypocrisy whenever we tried to enforce the evening’s dosage of drivel. But they didn’t often use that leverage; they knew we would marinate in our complicity. And we pretty much quit supporting school homework when they reached high school.

        And then there was the perennial pinch of being teacher-parents. You want to be a loyal employee of the district. You don’t want to accuse your colleagues of doing dumb or harmful things to children. And you recognize (or you should) that teachers get even fewer opportunities than normal parents to complain about things at school. When you are an educator, you simply can’t afford to be labeled, “One of Those Crank Parents.”

        If you resonate with these concerns, you may be fondly recalling Alfie Kohn’s entirely excellent book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (2006). Kohn likens homework for kids to the Second Shift for workers at the factory. You come home after eight hard hours and surprise – you have to go back to work! Kohn skillfully deconstructs every official rationale for homework. Decades of careful research studies have shown only negative outcomes for elementary kids and glancing, temporary ones for certain high schoolers. Then he runs through the more likely reasons that homework has been sustained against all evidence: upholding tradition, fostering obedience, providing ritual hazing (we had to go through it, now it’s your turn), developing a tolerance for toxic tasks, keeping kids off the streets, and finally, the redoubt of all scoundrels, the notion that homework “builds character.”

      For all the good work our friend Alfie did a decade ago, unexamined homework is still with us, in arguably more toxic forms. It’s bad enough when homework is menial, meaningless, and repetitive–a mere compliance ritual. But the content of homework-sheets can be even more corrupting than the process. We have just lived through another “Black History Month,” during which millions of kids came home with worksheets, mostly focused on Martin Luther King, (apparently the only African American leader of whom worksheet makers are aware.) This year’s assortment included MLK word-finds, matching exercises, fill in the blanks, word searches, and many more. Among the tasks:

1. Crossword puzzle clue for #7 Across:

Martin Luther King was assassinated during the month of __________.

2. A short historical text about MLK, followed by these instructions:

“Circle ten proper nouns and underline ten verbs.”

3. Freedom, peace, march, speech, Atlanta, minister, equal, dream, boycott, leader.
4. “Read these words and place them in alphabetical order.”
5. True-False: “Martin Luther King was a farmer.”
6. For those ready to further explore black heroes, another worksheet confides that Rosa Parks was “a tired seamstress who politely declined to give up her seat on the bus” because of her fatigue. Needless to say, the profile doesn’t mention that Parks had been an activist and leader of the NAACP for two decades and that she was tired of racism, not sewing.

Just in case you’re wondering, I am not making this up. These and hundreds more worksheets are available on the web for teachers to use, and reuse, and reuse. And these are not just time-wasters: they are desecrations of history and a pretty good example of how ignorance is engineered.

Just last week, a suburban Chicago teacher whom I follow on Twitter bravely began tweeting out photographs of her own young children suffering over the daily load of second-shift misery.

This is the face of my five-year-old doing useless homework when she would rather be playing. Five-year-olds don’t need homework. #ditchthehw

Tonight’s useless homework: track how many words you can read in 1-minute #ditchthehw

Things my kids could be doing right now instead of useless homework:

-reading

-playing with each other

-drawing

-talking to me about their day

-playing with their toys

-relaxing after 8 hours in school

#ditchthehw

So let’s get real. Let’s say you may work in a district where there is a serious Homework Policy dictating how many after-school minutes or hours kids are supposed to labor after school. So, let’s start by changing the categories of what counts as homework. Then, let’s design a time that’s stress-free, that invites kids’ curiosity and choice, and that doesn’t start battles between parents and kids, ruin whole evenings, and sell more Kleenex. Possible ideas for kids:

–Spend some time reading a book or magazine you have chosen.

–Go online to investigate a question that popped up in your life today.

–Interview family members about their work, interests, family-history.

–If you are in a literature circle at school, e-connect with classmates to discuss the book.

–Work on an ongoing “passion project,” something you have decided to look into long-term (animal extinction, volcanoes, the Cold War).

–Watch TV shows with family and talk about them.

–Free write in your personal journal (or work on your novel/poems).

–Pick an adult in the community you want to learn from and apprentice yourself.

Let’s grow this list together. Meet me at #DitchTheHW.

Learn more about Smokey!

By Lester Laminack

Enjoy, as Lester guides you from teacher-centered to student-centered teacher read alouds!

When you reach the end of an article, a story, or a book do you reach for your notebook to answer a set of questions written by someone else?  Do you feel that your understanding of what you have read, your worth as a reader, hinges on being able to give the answers to someone else’s questions?  Probably not.  Yet it seems that much of our reading instruction relies heavily on having our students answer a set of questions after they complete a reading assignment.  Following reading with a set of questions is a longstanding practice in literacy education.  In fact, many commercial reading programs follow this pattern.  One well-known program assigns a point value to each title, then has the children read and log on to a computer to read and answer a set of 10 multiple choice questions. Other programs have students read then write answers to similar questions. And if we are teaching from a literature-based approach that doesn’t rely upon a commercially produced program we tend to have our own questions to hold our students accountable.

Questions Can Create Patterns

As teachers, most of us were introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy as undergraduates in a teacher education program.  We likely practiced developing questions for each of the levels in the taxonomy and began our teacher careers believing that it was our charge to develop good questions that would hold our students accountable and yield proof that they read and understood the assigned text.

We sat with our notepads at hand and read the books, articles, poems, and various other texts our students would read across the year.  We paused at various points in the text to draft the questions we would give our students.  We were attentive to character traits, shifts in the plot, nuances in word choice, the author’s use of simile and metaphor and figurative language.  We noted allusions to cultural references and other literature.  We were alert to the role of setting in the text, the way the author used dialog, bias, and narration.  We read closely and synthesized as we developed the questions we would present to the students.  Questions, whether presented by the program or developed by the teacher, may fall into a pattern or categories.  For example, questions about the main character, physical descriptions, main idea, vocabulary, opinion, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, inference, etc.

As students read and respond to the questions presented they begin to recognize the patterns as well.  Does this impact the way they read?  Does it shape what they tend to notice and pay attention to?  In other words, are they reading with the pattern of your questions in mind?  If the answer is, yes, then what are they failing to notice?  What is the cost to comprehension and attention and engagement?

Get In Touch With Ways You Read

Consider your own thought process as you read a text with the intention of writing questions for students to answer.  Are you beginning with a frame in mind? That is, do you begin with thoughts focused on Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?  Or do you begin with the intention of finding three detail questions, two questions about the character’s motives, three questions that require the reader to interpret, two that require analysis, and one that calls for synthesis?  If the answer is, yes, then how does this frame influence YOUR approach as a reader? How does that process differ from the way you approach a professional text or a book you have selected to read for pleasure?  How does the approach effect your engagement with and your comprehension of the text?  Chances are that you read differently when you read for pleasure than when you read with the intention of developing a set of questions for your students.

Who’s Doing All The Thinking?

I have come to believe that the person who is asking the questions is the person who has done the thinking.  As you read to develop the questions for your students you were summarizing the text at critical points.  You were evaluating the merits of details and the use of Literacy devices.  You were synthesizing information and generating new thoughts.  You were noticing were the text called for an inference or expected you to have adequate background knowledge to connect to a metaphor or allusion.  In short, you were doing the deeper thinking, the more thorough analysis as a reader in service to the development of questions that would yield the proof of your students’ connections and comprehension.

Time To Flip the Read Aloud

I invite you to try something the next time you are reading aloud to your students.  As the story draws to a close and your voice delivers the last line simply close the book and exhale.  Pause for a few seconds and let silence settle over the group.  Then, look at them and speak quietly:  “Think for a few seconds.  Don’t speak yet, just think if you could speak with (author, illustrator, character, expert—beekeeper if the story is about bees, etc) what are the three best questions you could ask?  Think about that, please.  I’ll ask you to share your questions in just a moment.”

Have your notebook ready to jot down the questions as they share. At the end of the day when the students have boarded their buses to leave, revisit those questions and place them into four categories: Vocabulary, Background knowledge, Schema/conceptual frame, and other.  Take note of where the majority of the questions fall.  Think about what this reveals to you about their understanding of the text.  

I’ve come to believe that I find out more about where their understanding fails by examining their questions than I ever got from checking their answers.  

Lester’s books are on Amazon!

Learn more about Lester Laminack, check out his website!

Follow Lester on Twitter @lester_laminack

By Steven Kellogg

         In a celebrated poem by Robert Frost called “A Tuft of Flowers,” a worker mentally sends a message to a colleague who has labored earlier that day on the same task with which the narrator is concerned, and he says: “Men work together, I told him from the heart, whether they work together or apart.”  And that’s the way we work, as librarians and teachers of reading on one hand, and authors and illustrators on the other. We are colleagues and co-conspirators who put our energies separately, but together, into the very important and exciting work of turning kids on to books, giving them a passion for their written and spoken language, and opening them up to its vast communicative and artistic range.  

        As creative partners, we depend upon each other to do our work with care and sensitivity. You rightfully expect authors and illustrators to put into your hands’ books whose words and images can be effective tools for reaching, inspiring, and moving the children in your care. Happily, that expectation is being validated by a surge of interest in literature-based reading programs throughout the country. It seems to be fueled by the growing conviction that children don’t become particularly excited about basal readers, workbooks, ditto sheets, nor do they file into libraries to check them out. They do become excited about stories and pictures that capture their imaginations. Like all of us, they are drawn to works that communicate in the language of feeling, which is the way that elusive thing called art so effectively reaches us. And the communicative power of art, as it is utilized in its varied means of creative expression (from architecture to painting to literature to drama), has been a compelling outlet for every culture and civilization since man’s beginnings.

        An increased emphasis on the role of children’s literature is a challenge to librarians and teachers as well as to their partners in publishing. Your role in our collaboration is to share the books with care, enthusiasm, creativity, and love so they have the maximum opportunity to reach their audience as effectively as possible. Although authors, illustrators, editors, art directors, designers, and printers all work together to produce a book, it’s not until the book is actually read and looked at that it really comes to life. Until that moment, it’s a darkened theater—a tableau frozen on a stage in a vacant auditorium. But when the teacher, librarian, parent, or friend opens the cover and shares the book with a child, the theater is illuminated, and, as the pages turn, the curtain rises and falls on successive acts and scenes. Through that reading and sharing the words come to life, and the illustrations move and flow with action, feeling, and vitality.

        Of course, each book must stand on its own merits and earn applause and approval from whoever experiences it. But if you bring a child and a book together with a sensitive understanding of that particular book—if you recommend and share and read the book aloud as if you were a part of its creative life—then that book has a much greater chance of being special to that child. And you will be remembered as being part of that book, and part of that gift, as surely as if your name were engraved on the jacket and the title page: a colleague, a co-conspirator, a creative partner.

        I have loved picture books since my childhood, and I recall with deep gratitude the relatives who were sensitive enough to give me books as gifts and to share both the books and themselves in magical read-aloud sessions. I had a passion for drawing as a child, and I used to make up my own tales and illustrate them for my two younger sisters, Patti and Martha, in a ritual we called “telling stories on paper.” On a rainy Saturday afternoon, or just before bed, I would sit between them with a stack of paper on my lap and a pencil in my hand, and I’d spin some kind of a bizarre yarn while scribbling illustrations to accompany the narrative, passing them first to one of the girls and then to the other. I found the process of “telling stories on paper” enormously compelling, and during those early days, before the blessings of editorial intercession were available to me, I would rattle onward with interminable enthusiasm until my dutifully attentive sisters were each buried under piles of pictures or comatose with boredom.

        My childhood fascination with illustrated storytelling persisted into young adulthood and shortly after graduating from college I began sending manuscripts with accompanying sketches to major publishing houses. When I was offered a contract to illustrate George Mendoza’s stories “The Hunter,” “The Snake,” and “The Hairy Toe” in a forty-eight-page book entitled GWOT! Horribly Funny Hairticklers, I was ecstatic.

        I had a wonderful time putting the book together, and I sent copies off to various friends, particularly those who had encouraged me to make the leap into publishing. Among these was a couple who lived in New York with their precocious but rather shy four-year-old-daughter named Helen. They were concerned that exposure to stories like “The Hunter,” “The Snake,” and “The Hairy Toe” that were assembled in a book entitles GWOT! might prove to be a traumatizing experience for her. But because I had illustrated the book and inscribed it to their Helen, they dutifully read it to her at bedtime. Several nights later, my wife and I were invited to their apartment for dinner, and in response to my knock the door swung open and there stood Helen in a ruffled party dress. For a moment she remained poised with a sweet hostess smile on her face. Suddenly, it transformed itself into a jubilant mischievous leer, and she screeched “GWOT! I Love You!” It was obvious that the book had not traumatized her in the least, and indeed her parents, to their ultimate despair had to reread the stories night after dreary night for many, many months.

         Helen and her family moved to the West Coast, but I continued to send her my books as they were published. A few years ago, the second oldest of my stepdaughters was married and Helen, now a young woman and an established television actress, flew east with her parents to attend the wedding. I had not seen her in quite a few years, and, as the deception in our backyard was nearing its end, Helen and I strolled along the edge of the woods together, and she brought me up-to-date on all that had been happening in her life. And of my books, which are still on her bedside shelf. She told me that whenever she opens them, the words and the pictures are a magic carpet to her childhood. She feels that she is once again a little girl snuggled against her parents as they read the stories aloud, and she happily loses herself in the illustrations that were once spread across their laps.

        In reflecting on Helen’s involvement with her books, I realize I had known something intuitively when beginning my career that I am convinced, thirty years later, is indeed true. Too often, I think, we define children as a bland herd, and we do not adequately recognize the complicated variety of personalities that they, as a group, represent.

        There should be made available to kids, as well as to adults, a delicious smorgasbord selection of books that deal with many facets of human experience. We should provide books that present an opportunity to explore a great range of emotions, exposing children to stories and images that inspire laughter, tears, shivery-spooky feelings, flashes of glowing, loving warmth, and insight. They should be acquainted with books that contain the creative approaches of many different authors and illustrators so that each young reader can find the ones that speak to him or her with particular clarity and poignance.

        Helen’s recollection of the way in which her parents shared books with her is also revealing. I believe that the picture book’s finest hour occurs during a read-aloud session when the book is bridging two laps and uniting the reader and the audience. The reading adult’s voice unlocks the magic of the story, inviting the child to enter the lives of the characters and to explore the landscapes that are delineated in the illustrations. There is a special warm and personal quality to the participation in that shared experience that is not duplicated while seated in front of a television set in a darkened room, and it is important for all of us who love children and books to continually express the value of reading aloud.

Check out Steven Kellogg’s website

Don’t Miss These All-time Favorites by Steven Kellogg:

The Island of the Skog

Paul Bunyon

Best Friends

The Mysterious Tadpole

Pinkerton Behave!

Jack and the Beanstalk

 

By Gravity Goldberg

Let’s face it. By 1:00 pm a third of us are wishing for a diet coke, a third want a Macchiato, and another third want a power nap. Being the kind of teacher who plans purposefully, patiently meets students where they are, and keeps up to date with the latest tips and research can be exhausting. Of course there are also the unplanned events that claim our attention like parent emails, unexpected meetings, and the social interactions that seep into our classrooms and fill it with peer drama and mediation. While that caffeine and sugar boost give us a quick fix it also leaves us jittery, rounder around the waist, and crashing later in the day. This led me in search of other, healthier, and more sustainable ways to get that much needed energy boost.

By looking at the research from positive psychology and sociology I found that one of the best things we can do for us and our students is to focus on building from strengths. It turns out that we train our brains to look for whatever we think matters most. If we believe that focusing on strengths is important we will begin to look for them and then find them everywhere with every student. On the other hand, when we look for what is not working, we can also find that everywhere. The biggest difference is that strengths make us feel good and when we feel good we are happier, more energized and more successful teachers.

Every day I sit with a reader and ask him about his process. I get curious about what this particular reader thinks about, notices, and does as he reads. I really listen. Then I allow myself to be impressed by what he already knows how to do. By focusing on a reader’s strengths I fill up on positivity that can’t help but give me a boost.
After noticing a strength I explain it to the reader so he can also relish in the hard work that is paying off. While giving the feedback I really take in his change in facial expression and demeanor. The toothy grins, the rosy glow, all show me just how much the reader feels his pride. His pride gives me even more of an energy boost. Finally, I sneak peeks at the reader for the rest of the day, and enjoy the energy ripples of communicating to students what they already do so well.

Of course this does not mean I only reinforce strengths when I confer, as I also teach students strategies, but the teaching comes second. At first I had to train myself to look for what the reader could do so I could build from strengths. I put sticky notes on my conferring clipboard to remind myself of my intention. After a few weeks of daily practice it became more natural and now it is automatic.

Think this is all fluff, like whipped cream atop a latte? Think again—
this positivity practice makes a difference. The next day, and the next day after that, you see its impact on the reader. In psychology, they call it the helper’s high. In teaching, I’m thinking of it as a double shot of positive feedback that gives each of us a needed boost.

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