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Instead of worksheets, elementary students will be required to read for 20 minutes each night.
One Florida school district is taking a radical stance on homework. Starting in fall 2017, the Marion County public school district has decided to replace all traditional homework with 20 minutes of mandatory reading time for its elementary school students. This goes against the current practice of sending students home with worksheets and assignments based on their daily lessons in the classroom.
The driving force behind this unusual decision is Heidi Maier, the new superintendent of the district. She told the Washington Post that she has based her decision on research that clearly shows the benefits of reading, both silently and aloud, for young children, whereas the benefits of nightly homework have yet to be backed up by legitimate studies, despite the fact that many schools and parents act as if it is.
A retro move, or a smart one?
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Tuesday July 25 2017, @05:31PM (3 children)
There's no way of telling without doing the experiment.
We need more experiments like this in education, with the caveat that methods and results should be published, whatever the outcome. In this way, we can build up a stock of different, successful, evidence-based methods for teachers to choose from.
Anecdotally, I took care of my four nephews for about a month, several years ago. I made time to read with them for a half hour per kid, individually, and read a chapter or two of Roald Dahl together, every day. Though all of them had been reading at below grade level, by the end of the month, all were reading at above grade level, and one was reading at three grade levels higher. Admittedly, I don't know if it was because of the individual attention, or the practice, or other factors, but the family does not, as a practice, read--they do outdoor activity or they watch television.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday July 26 2017, @08:36AM (2 children)
Are you suggesting that teachers should propagate best practice? Based on quantifiable results??? And that we should run control experiments rather than ensuring consistent failure?
You may wish to know that one of Bill Gates' TED Talks is on this subject and specifically in the context of mathematics education. Unfortunately, I find his motives highly suspect. Compare the size of his family versus his public statements about population reduction. Or concerns about his DRM birth control [soylentnews.org] prior to Windows10 forced upgrades [soylentnews.org].
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(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday July 26 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
Rightly so, but I might note that the tenor of his overall motivations (which I might also argue , pull him in various contradictory directions), nonetheless do not prevent him from being insightful on occasion...
To an extent (yes, I am replying seriously to facetious questions)--We need to run experiments; they need to be varied; they need to be rigorous, reproducible and reportable; and there need to be many of them--enough so that if you will, a "library of best practices" can be developed so that teachers can choose pedagogical methods that suit both their own and their pupils' needs.
I recognize that, schools, being composed of a myriad of small and large humans, are necessarily chaotic systems, which means that any "best practice," if applied in a one-size-fits-all manner, will backfire in some cases, and possibly in a spectacular manner; however, schools are also set up in multiple small, relatively similar, relatively discrete units, which would make good experimental platforms, and, at least in medium-to-larger schools or school systems, in large enough quantities to be able to identify the outliers, both positive and negative.
Parts of the problem, though, are inherent in the system. Competing requirements, standards and definitions of "success" from the national, regional and local make setting up experiments costly and difficult. Then again, school boards and the administrations they install tend not to last long enough to run meaningful experiments, and the perceived need for instant results can result in a fluke bad year derailing careful longer-term work. Also, parents don't generally like the idea of their children being subjects of experiments, due to the negative societal connotations of experimentation and of science in general, which makes for a careful balancing act between PR and the openness and transparency required in an educational setting. Finally, communities tend to be nostalgic about school-as-a-part-of-childhood (even if, as individuals, they had poor experience with school during childhood, and, while simultaneously admitting the failings of the system as a whole), and negatively react to any changes to or experiments in what, in their view, is "traditional" schooling.
I have no idea how to make a program of experimentation happen, but I have a feeling it needs to.
OTOH, based on my reading of century-old newspapers, complaining about the quality of education, schools, teachers and pupils, seems to have been the norm then as well as now, and I recall both Twain and Shakespeare making similar points--maybe "education" has inherent problems that will eventually emerge, no matter how we try to do it.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:34PM
I'm glad you answered a facetious question seriously because I was only asking a serious question facetiously.
I'd like to begin with a story about a man I knew. He worked in local government and performed various manual labor rôles as required. Sometimes, he would fix lights. Sometimes, he would cut grass. And sometimes, he would drive a snow plough or grit roads. This occurred in a region where chance of snow in any given winter was about 10%.
His observation was that annual budgeting was completely inadequate for this task. If there was snow, resources were always inadequate and the area would gridlock. Despite his best efforts, his managers would get complaints. The allocated budget would increase but it would invarably fail to snow during the following year. New administrative staff would join and ask "Why have we got this snow plough?" and the budget would get reduce. Eventually, it would snow again and there would be more chaos. What's happening here? Annual budgets fail to handle events which are less frequent than annual.
It is similar with nationalized healthcare. I've been told by staff that the UK's National Health Service has, on average, been re-organized every eight years. Not co-incidentally, government administrations during the same period have, on average, lasted approximately eight years. And what is the result? Top-down changes occur too fast to obtain the full benefit.
Similar meddling occurs in education and, presumably, at the same rate. So, changes invariably occur during a student's progression. Again, we have a system where changes exceed the rate of feedback - and that assumes any feedback or consequences. When I described accelerated learning [soylentnews.org], I was most concerned about the speed and accuracy of information transfer. However, the most successful systems [wired.com] have the tightest feedback loops.
I hate to fall into the trap of billionaire paternalism or something-must-be-done politics but is it fair for people to pay 100% of their taxes and receive less than 75% of the service? My understanding is that 25% of UK adults are functionally illiterate and the situation is worse in the US. Numeracy is better but algebra [soylentnews.org], statistics and calculus are hopeless.
The medical profession treats every patient like a guinea pig for the next. Apparently, this is the epitome of medical ethics. Perhaps schools should work the same way? The alternative is almost certain failure for millions of people.
On this basis, try anything because it is better than the current situation. Just, keep feedback loops tight, fail fast and make it really easy to propagate the best techniques. You are most certainly correct that multiple techniques are required. An example from basic literacy is phonics [wikipedia.org] which seems to work really well for a portion of students within the VAK [Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic] model [wikipedia.org]. Others learn better with key words. (This technique was favored by Dr. Seuss.) Others learn better by starting with the international phonetic alphabet prior to learning to read more typical arrangements of symbols. However, getting an undifferentiated class to follow one technique means that a random proportion of students gain at the expense of others.
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