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I provide students with extremely comprehensive study guides. My intention is that a student can actually compile all study guides to create a mini prepbook by the end of the year. While this takes some work, I want students to be studying the most complete set of information and I want to minimize confusion as much as possible. Targeted studying leads to better student results. My study guides include: full identification for artworks, all relevant terms as well as being defined, and I list possible artworks that could appear on SAQs so students know to study those.

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It's not hard to find a high school student who is stressed about homework. Many are stressed to the max-juggling extracurricular activities, jobs, and family responsibilities. It can be hard for many students, particularly low-income students, to find the time to dedicate to homework. So students in the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs program at YouthBeat in Oakland, California are asking what's a fair amount of homework for high school students?

TEACHERS: Get your students in the discussion on KQED Learn, a safe place for middle and high school students to investigate controversial topics and share their voices. https://learn.kqed.org/topics/29

Is homework beneficial to students?
The homework debate has been going on for years. There's a big body of research that shows that homework can have a positive impact on academic performance. It can also help students prepare for the academic rigors of college.
Does homework hurt students?
Some research suggests that homework is only beneficial up to a certain point. Too much homework can lead to compromised health and greater stress in students. Many students, particularly low-income students, can struggle to find the time to do homework, especially if they are working jobs after school or taking care of family members. Some students might not have access to technology, like computers or the internet, that are needed to complete assignments at home- which can make completing assignments even more challenging. Many argue that this contributes to inequity in education- particularly if completing homework is linked to better academic performance.
How much homework should students get?
Based on research, the National Education Association recommends the 10-minute rule stating students should receive 10 minutes of homework per grade per night. But opponents to homework point out that for seniors that's still 2 hours of homework which can be a lot for students with conflicting obligations. And in reality, high school students say it can be tough for teachers to coordinate their homework assignments since students are taking a variety of different classes. Some people advocate for eliminating homework altogether.
SOURCES Edweek: How Much Homework Is Enough? Depends Who You Ask Business Insider: Here's How Homework Differs Around the World Review of Educational Research: Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement? A Synthesis of Research, 1987-2003 Phys.org: Study suggests more than two hours of homework a night may be counterproductive The Journal of Experimental Education: Nonacademic Effects of Homework in Privileged, High-Performing High Schools
National Education Association: Research Spotlight on Homework
NEA Reviews of the Research on Best Practices in Education
The Atlantic: Who Does Homework Work For? Center for Public Education: What research says about the value of homework: Research review Time: Opinion: Why I think All Schools Should Abolish Homework The Atlantic: A Teacher's Defense of Homework
Homework in High School: How Much Is Too Much?

Author

Lauren Farrar

Lauren has a background in biology, education, and filmmaking. She has had the privilege to work on a diverse array of educational endeavors and is currently a producer for KQED Learning's YouTube series Above the Noise. Lauren's career has taken her to the deepest parts of the ocean to film deep sea hydrothermal vents for classroom webcasts, into the pool to film synchronized swimmers to teach about the pH scale, and on roller coasters to create a video about activation energy. And, she's done it all for the sake of education. Lauren loves communicating science! Follow her on twitter @LFarrarAtWork

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Homework in High School: How Much Is Too Much?

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It's not hard to find a high school student who is stressed about homework. Many are stressed to the max--juggling extracurricular activities, jobs, and family responsibilities. It can be hard for many students, particularly low-income students, to find the time to dedicate to homework. So students in the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs program at...

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Highly recommended

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"If I don't grade it, students won't do it." This reasoning leaves teachers with piles of work to grade, but I wonder how much of that time spent assigning points to student work results in improved student performance.

I fell into this trap at the start of my teaching career. I gave points for completing annotations, bringing books to class, and completing homework. By the end of the semester, I had over a hundred assignments in my grade book. I was exhausted by the neverending pile of paperwork that cast a shadow on my life beyond school.

A few years ago, I hit a breaking point. My grades didn't feel like an accurate reflection of my students' skills, and I was spending hours wading through paperwork instead of designing dynamic learning experiences for my students. Now, when I work with teachers, I encourage them to ask these questions: What is the purpose of this work? Why am I grading this?

Below is a simple flowchart to help teachers think about the purpose of student work.

Too often students are penalized for making mistakes on assignments that are designed to help them develop and refine their skills before an assessment. If teachers assign homework or in-class assignments with the goal of helping students to practice, I don't think that work should receive a grade that goes into a grade book. Instead, the goal of that work should be to help the student learn the material. Mistakes during practice should be celebrated as part of the learning process. If we penalize students who make mistakes while practicing a skill, we create an environment where mistakes are scary. This negatively impacts student motivation and can cause students unnecessary anxiety.

When students are working toward a finished product that will be assessed for a grade, they need feedback and support. If teachers create time in class to provide feedback, they shift the focus from the product to the process. Too often, students do not receive feedback until they have submitted a finished product and receive a grade. Feedback on a finished product is not useful to students. I'd like to see more teachers design blended lessons that allow them the time and space to provide feedback as students work. This feedback pays dividends because the final products will be stronger.

Assessments and finished products need a grade, but many teachers either grade holistically so students are unsure why they received the grade they got or they use monster rubrics composed of so many criteria that grading a finished product takes weeks. I suggest teachers downsize and keep grading more manageable for themselves and their students. Use a simple rubric and select 2-3 specific skills to grade. For example, if students complete a research paper, teachers can limit their focus to three elements, 1) evidence, 2) analysis, and 3) organization. If teachers narrow their focus to a few elements and enter those as separate scores in the grade book, students and parents will have a better sense of what to work on in the future.

The longer I spend in education, the more I have come to embrace the mantra "less is more." By grading less, we may actually give our students and ourselves more. The more time we spend grading work that doesn't fall into the category of assessment or finished product, the less time we have to provide feedback, design engaging lessons, and recharge physically, mentally, and emotionally at home.

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'If I don't grade it, students won't do it.' This reasoning leaves teachers with piles of work to grade, but I wonder how much of that time spent assigning points to student work results in improved student performance. I fell

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A few years ago, Amy Lopes, a veteran fifth-grade teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, learned that teachers at her school could try a mindfulness and yoga training along with their students. Her immediate reaction: "What a bunch of baloney!"

"I said, 'OK, I'll try it, but it's not going to work,' " recalled Lopes, who teaches at the William D'Abate Elementary School. "But, within a couple weeks, I just let go and became a learner along with my students, and my whole world has changed."

That training was given by a nearby nonprofit that had recently changed its name - from Resilient Kids to the Center for Resilience - because, said founder and executive director Vanessa Weiner, whenever trainers visited a school to work with students, "we kept hearing from teachers who said, 'We need this, too.' "

Teacher stress is growing, experts say, pushing educators out of classrooms and hurting learning. On top of chronic underfunding for education and the continued pressure of standardized tests, there's also the unrelenting pace of newer education reforms.

About 28 percent of teachers are "chronically absent" (more than 10 school days a year). Stress is linked to many physical ailments, including migraines, asthma, and heart disease.

The mounting stress levels have sparked a trend of "resilience" trainings and workshops, which typically include yoga, mindfulness and meditation. Some educators worry that the push for resilience lets a broken system off the hook, arguing that more energy should go toward fixing what causes stress, not just helping teachers endure it.

"As we can see from the abysmal teacher attrition rates still going on, we need to do something more than just ask teachers to buck up and meditate," said Jason Margolis, a Duquesne University professor of education.

But backers of these programs say that frazzled, emotionally exhausted teachers need coping strategies now, and that need isn't likely to disappear anytime soon.

Teaching ranks among the most stressful professions, according to Gallup research from 2014, in which about half of teachers reported high daily stress at work, tying medical professionals for the most-stressful jobs.

While it's hard to say precisely how much stress educators face, experts say the sources of stress have multiplied in recent years, including a constant stream of new reform efforts, ranging from technology platforms to personalized learning initiatives.

"Too often in school transformation efforts, nobody acknowledges up front that it's going to be a slog, even when everybody in these schools wants to do something different," said Deborah Delisle, president of the nonprofit Alliance for Excellent Education, and a former assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration. "You have to recognize that before you get to the other side of that transformation, your stress is going to skyrocket."

"I love my students. I don't want to leave teaching. But I just felt really empty. Emotionally, I was at the end of my rope."

Amy Martinez, English teacher in Worcester, Massachusetts, on why she values resilience training

Teacher stress fuels turnover, and staff shortages are hitting districts nationwide. About 8 percent of teachers leave the profession annually, and only half of those leaving retire, according to a 2017 report by the Learning Policy Institute, an education think tank. The biggest reason non-retiring teachers leave the classroom, the report noted, is dissatisfaction at work (55 percent).
Related: Can mental health training for teachers reduce preschool suspensions?
Among teachers who stay on the job, about 28 percent are "chronically absent" (more than 10 school days a year), according to the most recent Department of Education statistics, which cover the 2015-16 academic year. While teachers can miss work for any number of reasons, stress can trigger a slew of physical ailments, such as migraines, asthma, obesity and heart disease. Indeed, that's why wellness - eating right, exercising and rest-features prominently in many teacher stress management plans, including the ones developed for the Atlanta schools working with Georgia State University's Center for Research on School Safety, School Climate, and Classroom Management.

The center's original mandate was to study a range of student mental health and safety issues, such as bullying. But the director, Kris Varjas, said that local school leaders kept telling researchers, "What we're really concerned about is the stress level of teachers."

When stressed teachers quit, it's often called burnout, but Doris Santoro, a Bowdoin College education professor, dislikes that term. Burnout, she said, wrongly implies that the ex-teachers simply weren't up to the challenge of their profession. According to Santoro, it isn't workload that usually pushes teachers out of the profession but rather a disconnect between "deeply held values about what teaching is and what students need, and what school leaders expect them to do."

Santoro, who published a book last year about why teachers quit, said school reform initiatives often rely on prepackaged curricula, for example, that rob teachers of the flexibility to adapt lessons to students and find creative ways to engage them. Frustration can build even when teachers agree with the premise of a reform.

"Teacher stress is often about teachers being frustrated with something that's not succeeding with their students."

Doris Santoro, Bowdoin College education professor

"Maybe they think what they're being asked to do is great, but they're being pulled into a training once a week and can't get any purchase in their classrooms," she said. "If you look more deeply, teacher stress is often about teachers being frustrated with something that's not succeeding with their students."

The attention now being paid to teacher stress sprang from the recent and growing focus on student stress and its impact on learning. The Center for Resilience, for instance, offers teachers a two-part training - first, building their own practice of mindfulness and self-care; then, a second round to help bring mindfulness to their classrooms, with breathing techniques, glitter jars (which students shake and silently watch settle) and other practices such as body scans (closed-eyes focusing of attention on different regions of one's body).

"Teachers are trying to manage classrooms just by saying, 'Calm down and pay attention,' but we need to give kids the tools to be able to do those things," said Weiner, and teachers need to practice those skills before they can pass them on to students. "The analogy is that you can't teach somebody to play piano if you don't know how to play piano."

Lopes, the fifth-grade teacher in Providence, credits mindfulness with a big drop in student behavior issues, and for helping de-stress her own hectic life, which includes two kids, elderly relatives she cares for and additional work hours at her after-school program.

"Mindfulness has allowed me to focus on what has to get done," said Lopes, "and not to judge myself so harshly if I forget one or two things."
Related: A cheaper, quicker approach to social-emotional learning?
Studies also suggest that lower teacher stress improves student learning. In 2017, for example, University of Missouri researchers compared students' behavior problems and their math and reading scores with their teachers' self-reported stress levels and coping abilities. Students with low-stress teachers had the highest test scores and the best behavior. What's more, in classes led by highly stressed teachers, students' behavior and math test scores got worse when those teachers reported less ability to cope with their stress (there was no significant change in reading scores).

Of course, these results show correlation, not causation. Does teacher stress contribute to student academic and behavior struggles, or is it the other way around?

"I suspect the relationship is reciprocal. They build off each other," said the study's lead author, Keith Herman, who wrote the book "Stress Management for Teachers" (2014) with study co-author and fellow education professor Wendy Reinke.

Patricia Jennings, a University of Virginia professor of education, agrees, calling it the "burnout cascade."

"I spent many years observing classrooms, and what I saw blew my mind," said Jennings, recalling a period earlier in her career when she helped young teachers improve their classroom management. "The teachers' own stress levels and emotional reactivity were causing problems in their classrooms." Emotionally exhausted teachers were more likely to overreact to minor student stumbles, and such reactions spiked student stress in turn, leading to more discipline issues, and so on, spiraling downward.

"I believe that teacher and student stress underlie a lot of our problems with learning. If we want to improve our test scores, then let's all calm down."

Patricia Jennings, professor of education, University of Virginia

"You can't learn when you're stressed," said Jennings. With adrenaline and cortisol coursing through your veins, you can't think deeply about a problem, or immerse yourself in a book, which is partly why schools have been adding "social-emotional learning" lessons to help students cultivate empathy, resolve conflicts and manage their emotions. But, it's hard to calm kids down with stressed-out teachers.

"I believe that teacher and student stress underlie a lot of our problems with learning," said Jennings. "If we want to improve our test scores, then let's all calm down."

To that end, Jennings has spent more than a decade working with colleagues on a 30-hour mindfulness-based professional development program for teachers called CARE (Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education). As part of the training, stretched across several weeks, teachers explore the cognitive and physical links to their emotions in order to better regulate them, and they role-play stressful classroom situations to practice mindful responses.

CARE proved effective in a 2017 clinical trial, in which 224 elementary school teachers interested in the training were randomly assigned to a participant group or to a control group that was waitlisted until the research was complete. Using a combination of teacher questionnaires and classroom observations, Jennings and her team found that CARE increased teachers' control of their emotions and reduced their stress, while also improving their sleep and making them feel less hurried overall.

But schools don't often put time or resources into fighting teacher stress until it grows into a serious problem and teachers are eyeing the exits, said Jennings.

"As we can see from the abysmal teacher attrition rates still going on, we need to do something more than just ask teachers to buck up and meditate."

Jason Margolis, professor of education, Duquesne University

"There's going to be a crisis coming soon, if there isn't one already," she said, noting teacher shortages and lower enrollment in teacher preparation programs. "Unfortunately, it may require a crisis for society to pay attention."

Early on a recent Saturday, about 100 Boston-area educators filled a local high school cafeteria that had been cleared of tables to make space for yoga mats and was softly lit by a winter sun. The gathering was part of a 200-hour training in mindfulness, meditation, yoga instruction and community building offered in several cities by a company called Breathe for Change, based in Madison, Wisconsin.

That Saturday was the fourth of 18 sessions in the Breathe for Change program, and the lead trainer, Tui Roper, announced that the day's theme was gratitude.
Related: Teacher shortages force districts to use online programs
"As teachers, we have trouble accepting gratitude. We brush it off a lot: 'This is our job.' And so, we block that gift of gratitude," Roper told the assembled, before instructing half of them to form an inward-facing circle and close their eyes.

The rest of the teachers paced silently around the circle's perimeter, and every minute or so Roper prompted them to touch the shoulder of anyone who had inspired them, taught them something, brought them joy or whom they loved, et cetera. As the shoulder touches continued, a second trainer walked inside the circle with a box of tissues as, one by one, the teachers gave in and cried.

Later, during a break, several of the teachers explained why they were there. Some said they were struggling to help students who were experiencing poverty or other trauma.

"We need to be not only teachers, but social workers, and nurses, and mommies, and daddies sometimes," observed Danita Kelley-Brewster, assistant principal of Boston's Charles H. Taylor Elementary School.

Other participants were simply worn out. "I love my students. I don't want to leave teaching," said Amy Martinez, an English teacher with the Central Massachusetts Collaborative, a multi-site special education partnership in Worcester. "But I just felt really empty. Emotionally, I was at the end of my rope."

Still, some education experts question the focus on teacher resilience.

Margolis has looked at ways schools can cultivate teacher-leaders to shepherd big new initiatives, "rather than bring in a lot of outside consultants to do top-down professional development."

In one model, trained teacher-leaders spend about half their time in their own classrooms and half coaching their colleagues, including co-teaching classes. "And when they meet, they talk about how to roll a reform out in a teacher-centered way, which often includes dealing with the stress of it," said Margolis. "If it's done well, then you get open honest dialogue about what's working and what's not, and 'How can we make this work at our school with our kids in a way that's least stressful?' "

Backers of resilience training say it's a matter of triage, and they need to help educators who are struggling right now.

Indeed, the large crowd of teachers at the Boston training was testament to the growing demand for coping skills. Not only did the participants give up several months of Saturdays, but most of them paid the $2,650 tuition themselves (Breathe for Change offers needs-based scholarships).

Proponents contend that more-resilient teachers make a stronger foundation to push for broader changes, both school and districtwide. According to Janet Baird, an associate with Bright Morning Consulting, which helps district leaders and teacher coaches add mindfulness to their usual focus on instruction and assessments, "If we boost the resilience of individual educators, then they'll have more energy to address the organizational and systemic issues."

Likewise, Kirsten Olson, founder of Old Sow Coaching and Consulting, which helps schools navigate transformation, argues that school leaders encouraging discussions about teacher stress can be a powerful first step toward an overall change in school culture. It's not easy to make room for these tough conversations in a workplace where, traditionally, Olsen said, "all the professional development has to fit into 90 minutes, once a month, on a Wednesday afternoon."
This story about resilience training exercises was produced by The Hechinger Report Join us today. , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
At Breathe for Change, the focus starts with the "transformation of self," then broadens to a focus on "transformation of relationships" and the "transformation of community." During a midday break at the Boston training, teachers sat on their yoga mats and ate packed lunches. Leaning against a wall, Martinez, the Worcester English teacher, looked forward to the outward-focused sessions, but was happy, for now, to give her own psyche some TLC. She recalled the first Saturday of training, when she walked in not knowing anyone.

"We started in a big circle, and just to know that there were 100 other educators here who understood what I'm dealing with, emotionally and academically, all the pieces of it," she said. "There was already a sense of community and connectedness that was very uplifting."

Martinez now starts her mornings with a brief guided meditation she found on YouTube. "I get to work with a much better spirit," she said. "I always had a joy in my work, but my energy was down. Now. I feel my energy is coming back, and I feel like my old self a little bit."

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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A few years ago, Amy Lopes, a veteran fifth-grade teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, learned that teachers at her school could try a mindfulness and yoga training along with their students. Her immediate reaction: "What a bunch of baloney!"

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Compliments of Gribble

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America's devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it's what today's parents and teachers grew up with themselves.

America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and '70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn't last either: In the '80s, government researchers blamed America's schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.

The 21st century has so far been a homework-heavy era, with American teenagers now averaging about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s. Even little kids are asked to bring school home with them. A 2015 study, for instance, found that kindergarteners, who researchers tend to agree shouldn't have any take-home work, were spending about 25 minutes a night on it.

But not without pushback. As many children, not to mention their parents and teachers, are drained by their daily workload, some schools and districts are rethinking how homework should work-and some teachers are doing away with it entirely. They're reviewing the research on homework (which, it should be noted, is contested) and concluding that it's time to revisit the subject.
Read: My daughter's homework is killing me
Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be "meaningful" and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.

"The first year was a bit bumpy," says Louann Carlomagno, the district's superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents' expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to "realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader-that was new."

Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. "The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I've had with parents," Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.

Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.

Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it's part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. "The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic," Schneider says. "Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework ... They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions."

Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. "I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families," he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. "They don't need it," Schneider says, "so they're not advocating for it."

That doesn't mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they're working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.

As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it's worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there's some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.

In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s, and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.

This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it's compatible with "the 10-minute rule," a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level-that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.

In Cooper's eyes, homework isn't overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found "little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student"; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with "concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities."

According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, considers homework to be a "reliable extinguisher of curiosity," and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper's 2006 meta-analysis doesn't establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children's (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn's prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)

In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn't help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork, while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students' success.)

Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. "If all you want is to cram kids' heads with facts for tomorrow's tests that they're going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores," he says. "But if you're interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn't merely ineffective, but counterproductive."

His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. "The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn't enough," Kohn says. What about homework's effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.

Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework's quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn't a catchall rule for what's best-the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.

Given that homework's benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it's a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn't done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs-things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.

Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it's important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. "The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system," he says. "Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing." In other words, many parents' own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn't rigorous enough. (This dovetails with-and complicates-the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)

Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. "They could do it, but they're afraid to do it, because they're getting pressure every day about test scores," Stengel says.

Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. "Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching," she says.

"In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework," Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. "If we had kids reading-anything, the sports page, anything that they're able to read-that's the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they're not. They're going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about."

"Exploratory" is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he'd like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. "We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago," Simpson says, "so it's been easy to say we aren't going to assign worksheets, we aren't going assign regurgitative problem sets." For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus.

Simpson says he thinks it's a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: "When our students can't make the connection between the work they're doing at 11 o'clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot."

When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she's pleased with the results, but she's noticed something funny. "Some kids," she says, "really do like homework." She's started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily-whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home.

Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It's usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they've managed their time.

In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they're particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. "They're making meaningful decisions about their time that I don't think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing," Bronke said.

The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it-to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it's actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class-to start with nothing, and add as necessary.

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America's devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it's what today's parents and teachers grew up with themselves.

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KQED provides Public Media for Northern California. KQED supplies local news, arts, food, cooking, science, and education information through public broadcasting, blogs, podcasts, video, audio, workshops, and events.

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Yet even with the well-documented evidence that sleep is necessary to learning, students continue to face increasing demands on their time. Kids often participate in extracurricular activities as well as hours of homework each night.

What's really happening during sleep?

Sleep happens in several stages, with each phase serving a particular purpose. The human body takes care of its physical needs first. Quickly passing through stages one and two, which are brief, the body settles into several hours of stage three and four sleep. During these stages, neurons in the brain have synchronized into a regular rhythm and the body begins to repair itself. The immune system is restored, muscles and cardiovascular systems are rejuvenated and the positive effects on metabolism and muscle growth from exercise take effect.

"If you didn't get a good night's sleep, it's really hard to learn new things because you didn't clear out all the synaptic connections."

"The reason to get a good night's sleep is really so you can enjoy the next day and so you can consolidate what you did the day before," said Dr. Matt Carter, senior fellow at the University of Washington in a recent webinar.

Towards the end of a typical six- to eight-hour night of sleep, the brain gets its chance at rejuvenation, during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. This is the stage that's crucial for learners because the brain solidifies all that was taken in the day before and clears out old, unnecessary memories to make room for new information.

"In REM sleep your brain is basically replaying everything that happened during the day and consolidating what you've learned," Carter said. During the learning process, the brain's synapses fire in particular patterns. At night, those patterns are firing over and over again, strengthening the path. Equally important, there are many small details the brain remembers from the previous day that it won't need. During REM sleep the brain purges the unnecessary details to make room for new learning the following day.

"If you didn't get a good night's sleep it's really hard to learn new things because you didn't clear out all the synaptic connections," said Carter. The brain-rejuvenating functions happen in REM sleep, a later sleep stage, so if a student doesn't sleep enough he won't spend much time in REM.

Just as with adults, sleep-deprived kids won't be able to focus as well, and over time, the effects of sleep deprivation will wear on the body.

What's the solution?

Educator Madeline Levine and author of Teach Your Children Well says high schools should adjust their schedules to meet the needs of adolescents. School should start at 10 a.m. to help ensure high school students get the nine hours they need. That would go a long way in helping them to focus in class and could even prevent depression, a condition increasingly linked to lack of sleep.

And it's not just about the number of hours in bed - it's about the quality of sleep. "Sleep is something you can prepare for and be deliberate about," Carter said, adding that people assume sleep comes naturally to kids. But for young ones, it's especially important to establish a routine, not to eat carbohydrates before sleep, and to avoid bright screens before bed -- the glow biologically resets circadian rhythms that respond to how much light enters the eye. For kids who have trouble falling asleep, parents should teach them relaxation techniques like taking deep breaths and listening to slow tempo music - that helps the neurons fall into their synchronized pattern quicker.

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Why Sleeping May Be More Important Than Studying

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Yet even with the well-documented evidence that sleep is necessary to learning, students continue to face increasing demands on their time. Kids often participate in extracurricular activities as well as hours of homework each night. What's really happening during sleep? Sleep happens in several stages, with each phase serving a particular purpose.

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How I get all my students to be good at math

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How I get all my students to be good at math

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As a mathematics educator for the last seven years, I can attest that most folks believe they either are or are not "math people." And that idea of innate math ability is very harmful to both those who believe they possess it and to those who believe they don't. Furthermore, our new era of accountability (read test-taking) perpetuates this fallacy and clouds the message we want our students to receive in math class.

Not all the same: Algebra is not the same as geometry

There is most certainly no such ability that allows some students to pass algebra and others to fail. This argument is made forcefully and articulately in Noah Smith and Miles Kimball's recent article in Quartz, so I won't rehash the point except to say that math draws on a huge range of cognitive processes. Those who are weak at arithmetic can be very good at abstract mathematics. Many students who hate algebra love geometry. Each student I have taught, including those designated as gifted and those diagnosed with severe learning difficulties, has had strengths that helped him or her learn some topics in mathematics easily, and has had weaknesses that made learning other topics in math incredibly difficult. I tell all students alike that math requires perseverance and a willingness to take risks and make mistakes. These qualities are much more predictive of mathematical success than innate ability (if such a thing exists). Students often place themselves in the "not math people" category before they even know that each math teacher teaches it differently, or that different topics in math draw on different skills.

Overconfidence is just as harmful

How else is the belief harmful? For those who believe they are not "math people," it makes them feel helpless. Math requires effort, patience and time. You have to believe that eventually, you will be able to understand. You have to sort through what you understand and what you don't. You have to then formulate a good question and be courageous enough to ask the teacher to answer the question in front of a classroom, admitting that you don't understand something in front of your peers-some of whom groan and say, "But it's sooo easy. How come you don't get it!?" It's so much easier just to say," Hey, I wasn't born with this mystical mathematics ability so it's not my fault." But you would be wrong.

Math can make even the smartest people feel dumb and believing in an intrinsic mathematics ability isolates the stupidity. It's not me who's stupid, it's just one part of my brain that's stupid-and there's nothing I can do about that part of my brain so I don't need to humiliate myself in class tomorrow by asking the question I want to ask. People with this mindset keep getting further and further behind in math because if they don't feel themselves capable of learning something, they've let themselves off the hook and invest their mental energy in other realms.

Further, those who think of themselves "math people" can suffer from overconfidence. Recently I've been seeing a lot students (often male) claiming they know and understand everything so they don't need to practice or take notes. Their homework and test grades are still abysmal. I believe some of this overconfidence comes from the testing they've had to endure. These kids are bright and have learned test-taking skills easily so their standardized test scores are consistently high. But truly understanding math requires effort and perseverance and isn't worth the time if they can still perform well on tests. I have four students in one of my classes who frequently cite their high test scores as an excuse for not doing homework, not taking notes, or performing poorly on free-response tests. They believe themselves "math people" because they've been successful on the one measure the state cares about and they see no need to put more effort in.

Do we judge? Or do we educate?

Standardized testing helps perpetuate this fallacy on multiple fronts. There are two diametrically opposed goals we as a society have for public education and because we can't choose which goal is more worthy of attainment, we've been bogged down in ideological battles. Schools can be about sorting, or about educating. I think right now we want them to be about both, but this is impossible. Schools focused on sorting are obsessed with fairness. Only students who produce "A" work (as arbitrarily decided by the teacher or the state) get "A's." Honor roll highlights the best students, standardized tests rank schools and designate children as "below basic," "basic," "proficient," or "advanced." These rankings make it easier for colleges and employers to sort out the students they want from those they don't. In a world where schools are designed to sort out those who are going to college, those who are going into vocations, those who are going into unskilled labor and those who are going to prison, belief in innate math ability is appropriate. Those who have it are sorted into more difficult math classes, those who don't stop taking math as soon as possible. We test, judge and sort. Theoretically, the fear that they will be sorted into an undesirable category is what keeps some students motivated.

Our educational goal should be to help all students learn as much and as deeply as they possibly can, and to instill in them a love of learning. In Diane Ravitch's new book, Reign of Error, she cites a study conducted in the 1980s by Richard J. Murnane and David K. Cohen. Teachers given poor evaluations performed more poorly, while those given positive evaluations, even if undeserved, worked harder and were more willing to seek help for their problems. Though this study was about teachers, I don't see why it can't apply to students as well. When I give students a lot of credit for persevering showing them that their efforts are valuable early in the term, I get higher quality work from them as the term progresses because they don't give up when things get hard. Using grades to encourage perseverance rather than to sort or judge means that I don't need to inflate their grades at the end because the accumulated effort they've put in has allowed them to truly master the material.

There's a lot of research (see Daniel Pink's TED talk on the puzzle of motivation) that says people perform poorly on difficult cognitive tasks when there are extrinsic rewards for the successful accomplishment of those tasks. Students tend to have more difficulty thinking in math when they're under time constraints, extrinsic pressure or are fearful of being judged. My goal is to remove these pressures to help students perform better.

Here's an example demonstrating that rewarding students based on effort encourages them to continue to work hard. I taught a student for three years, through pre-algebra, algebra and geometry. She struggled in pre-algebra and algebra 1, almost always failing tests the first time and only passing thanks to credit for consistently doing homework, coming in for tutoring, and doing test corrections. She slowly increased in confidence and became a very capable math student in geometry (the best in the class at proofs). Here's an e-mail she wrote me after I left:

I wanted to thank you. Even though you are not my teacher anymore, you still help me all the time. You wrote in my yearbook to remember that I am good at math, and I always go back to that and it actually helps me when I am stressed about algebra 2. Whenever I think about it, I feel as though I can push through and actually do it. I am doing pretty well in it so far and I owe part of that to you.

She continues to receive low standardized test scores because she performs poorly under pressure.

In math especially it's easier to judge rather than to coax and reassure. Because there are always right and wrong answers, it's so easy for standardized tests to sort students into those who can get the right answers and those who can't. Standardized testing disregards the effort students have exerted and they deemphasize the processes of math. Students are left feeling helpless if they can't achieve. These tests judge students based on an arbitrary benchmark set by state politicians who have little understanding of what developmentally appropriate skills truly are. Like novice chess players, students learn the rules of math and combine and manipulate them to learn how to play the game. Like a novice chess player, a math student will learn just as much if not more from her failures as from her successes. Focusing on the process of math helps both low achieving and high achieving students learn true mathematical logic and not get discouraged because they can't reach a right answer, or bored because reaching the right answer is too easy. Many students know how to get the right answers on standardized tests but don't know how to think about math.

Parents, don't be a part of the problem

What can we do about helping students focus more on the process of math and on persistence, less on labeling themselves as "math people" or "non math people?" First of all, we adults need to model different behavior than I've seen demonstrated in my years as a teacher. The myth of innate math ability is perpetuated from generation to generation. When I tell adults I'm a math teacher, 90% of the time I get the comment, "I'm not a math person," accompanied by a look of sheer terror and either tentative stories of math humiliation or an abrupt change of subject. Once, a visiting school guidance counselor told my students, to my horror, that he hated math and not to listen to me when I told them math was important. They would never need it in the "real world." I've been writing this article in coffee shops, occasionally making comments to my husband. On three successive visits strangers have overheard my comments to him, asked me what I'm doing, then told me that there definitely are 'non math people' and that I'm looking at one. Upon elaborating my position though, all three changed their minds and have admitted the importance of math in their own lives (one was an industrial architect).

My students' parents also believe in this fallacy and sometimes, perpetuate an anti-math attitude. They don't use math at work, can't help their students with their math homework, and are convinced themselves that they're "not math people". Furthermore, because these adults have survived without math, they tell their children that math isn't necessary in the workplace. These adults have made their choices. They chose/were forced into careers where math wasn't required and so they convince their children that only the "math people" will ever get anything out of a comprehensive mathematics education. Our job as role models is to give our students the freedom to make their own choices, including lucrative choices in fields that require math. In my education courses, we were always told that modeling is more powerful than teaching. Adults are modeling this self-defeatist attitude.

If at first you try, you will succeed

In the classroom, we as teachers need to remove some of the stress we place on students and give them the freedom to fail. So many crossword puzzle enthusiasts (my whole family) look forward to checking their solutions against the key printed in tomorrow's newspaper while so many students dread seeing their returned math test. Why? Because the crossword puzzle enthusiast knows he will learn more about doing crossword puzzles if he checks the key carefully, whereas the math student sees the returned test as a judgment about his intelligence. Students need to see that the attempt is just as valuable as the result. In my classroom, I award students credit for all problems they attempt, regardless if they got the correct answer. I refuse to let students turn in tests until every question is answered and double checked. I penalize late work, but I always accept it because who cares when they learn, just that they learn. I admit my own mistakes and award students when they catch me in a mistake. Finally, I find it productive to simply acknowledge that learning math can be challenging; telling a struggling student that a problem is easy is one of the most dispiriting things you can say to them. Education needs to be about personal growth and teaching students to enjoy and revel in their knowledge, not on grooming students and sorting them for a job market that may be entirely different in 10 years. If students learn confidence, flexibility and that they're good at learning, they'll be ready for anything.
This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.

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How I get all my students to be good at math

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As a mathematics educator for the last seven years, I can attest that most folks believe they either are or are not "math people." And that idea of innate math ability is very harmful to both those who believe they possess it and to those who believe they don't.

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Students love it, and it makes personalized learning possible after the first test is given. Those who pass are done. Those who want a better score can focus on proven weaknesses.

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I have attached important pieces of my lessons in a column to the right of this one. I often use AP multiple choice and FRQs in class.

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I frequently have students work with a partner. This creates many more opportunities for teaching and learning than if it is just me talking.

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If our jobs are to focus on course content, and our assessments are centered on that (and that alone), then teaching skills as a separate course makes sense.

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What Would Happen If Learning in School Became More Like Working at a Startup? - EdSurge News

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At its most basic level, a startup is a learning machine—one that helps its founders understand and serve the real world in a manner that enables…

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Categories of Instructional Strategies that Affect Student Achievement

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Categories of Instructional Strategies that Affect Student Achievement

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How to Ensure Students are Actively Engaged 

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How to Ensure Students are Actively Engaged 

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"As a teacher, as you design a task you need at least three of those characteristics in there," Almarode said. More than that, the characteristics should be observable to anyone who walks into the room. For example, when Almarode walks into a room on a visit, he should be able to ask any student what the class is working on, what the teacher's expectations are and how it will lead to learning. He might also look for whether students are talking about the topic and bringing in their own experiences. These observations show him students are on-task, as well as emotionally and cognitively engaged.

The other thing he watches out for is whether the activity meets the expressed expectations. For example, if a student says the activity is to describe the phases of the moon, but the actual task only requires him to match pictures to vocabulary, then the activity isn't actually requiring students to describe. In that example, the cognitive engagement expected did not match the cognitive engagement Almarode saw in the work students were doing.

Effective feedback on work is another crucial aspect of three-dimensional engagement. Almarode knows how difficult it is for teachers to grade all the assigned work, but he's also convinced by evidence that shows immediate feedback is crucial to cognitive engagement and thus learning.

"If you give effective feedback to students you double the rate of learning," Almarode said. "So here's my argument: cut back on the volume of assignments and increase your feedback on those you grade and you will double the rate of learning."

That feedback doesn't necessarily mean returning fully graded papers the next day. Instead, after students turn in their papers, Almarode suggests handing out three papers that demonstrate what it looks like to have met expectations, to still be developing, or to be below expectations. Alternatively, the teacher could hand out a rubric and ask students to score a work sample. Both of these strategies give students a sense of how they performed, and the feedback comes while the process of writing is still fresh.

"Give them something to actively engage with immediately," Almarode advises. This feedback strategy doesn't mean teachers shouldn't assign other work, but he suggests doing more peer feedback sessions or dialoguing about the assignment to free teachers up for high quality feedback on fewer assignments.

Almarode realizes that his suggestions and strategies around engagement often feel to teachers like one more thing to do. He believes everyone within the profession needs to be better at filtering out demands on teacher time that aren't the most important for classroom learning. He said it's time to let go of old structures like math time in the morning or long staff meetings to go over procedures. When time is precious it should be spent collaborating, reflecting, improving and prepping. Administrators have a crucial job in protecting teachers time, not adding to long list of things they "should do."

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How To Ensure Students Are Actively Engaged and Not Just Compliant | KQED

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"As a teacher, as you design a task you need at least three of those characteristics in there," Almarode said. More than that, the characteristics should be observable to anyone who walks into the room.

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How Teachers Are Changing Grading Practices

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How Teachers Are Changing Grading Practices

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How Teachers Are Changing Grading Practices With an Eye on Equity | KQED

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Joe Feldman contends many of the earnest practices teachers continue to use are hold-overs from how they were graded and may actually be doing harm to student learning.

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Intrinsic Motivation is the Key to Student Achievement

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Intrinsic Motivation is the Key to Student Achievement

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. - When Destiny Reyes started elementary school, she felt highly motivated. Like most young children, she liked learning new things, and she excelled at school. She got good grades and reveled in her success, thriving in an environment that, at least implicitly, set her up in competition with her peers. She was at the top of her class, and she proved herself further by testing into a competitive, private middle school. But there, among Providence's brightest, it wasn't as easy to be at the top of the class, and her excitement about school - and learning - subsided. Eventually, she says, nothing motivated her. She went to school because she had to.

Destiny, 18, is like most students in the United States. Surveys reveal a steady decline in student engagement throughout middle and high school, a trend that Gallup deemed the "school engagement cliff." The latest data from the company's Student Poll found that 74 percent of fifth graders felt engaged, while the same was true of just 32 percent of high school juniors.

One of the key components of engagement is students' excitement about what they learn. Yet most schools extinguish that excitement.

While 74 percent of fifth graders report feeling engaged in school, just 32 percent of high school juniors say the same.

It all comes down to motivation. In many schools, students do their work because their teachers tell them to. Or because they need to do it to get a certain grade. For students like Destiny, getting a good grade and outshining their peers - not learning itself - becomes the goal of school. For other students, they need minimum grades to be on sports teams or participate in extracurricular activities or please their parents, and that becomes their motivation. Students who do their work because they're genuinely interested in learning the material are few and far between.

But that's exactly backwards.

The teacher demands, the grades, the promise of additional opportunities - they're all external rewards. Decades of research, both about educational best practice and the way the human brain works, say these types of motivators are dangerous. Offering students rewards for learning creates reliance on the reward. If they becomes less interesting to the student or disappear entirely, the motivation does, too. That's what happened to Destiny in middle school when she no longer got the reward of being celebrated as the top of her class.

Inspiring students' intrinsic motivation to learn is a more effective strategy to get and keep students interested. And it's more than that. Students actually learn better when motivated this way. They put forth more effort, tackle more challenging tasks, and end up gaining a more profound understanding of the concepts they study.

Still, Deborah Stipek, a Stanford University professor of education and author of the book "Motivation to Learn: From Theory to Practice," is pragmatic about the role of extrinsic motivation.

"I think most realistic people in the field say that you've got to have both," Stipek said. "You can rely entirely on intrinsic motivation if you don't care what children learn, but if you've got a curriculum and a set of standards, then you can't just go with what they're interested in."

The problem is that the balance, in most schools, is way off. While some schools around the country are trying to personalize learning and, in doing so, to tap into students' interests, Stipek estimates that most teaching minimizes students' internal desire to learn.

"Ninth graders who have spent their whole life being told what to learn, some of them don't even know what they're interested in because they haven't been given the opportunity."

Beccy Siddons, teacher and advisor, Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, Providence, R.I.

In traditional schools, it's easier to offer a steady stream of rewards and punishments to keep students in line. And preparing students to succeed on state tests tends to discourage the lessons that let them explore their own interests. Teachers who want to inspire intrinsic motivation have to swim against the current.

That's not the case everywhere, though. Destiny's trajectory of diminishing engagement took a turn in high school. Instead of getting increasingly uninterested and disconnected from school, she became more engaged. That's because she enrolled in the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a public high school district in Rhode Island that goes by 'The Met.' She is now a senior.

The Met is at the extreme when it comes to tapping into intrinsic motivation. Students don't take traditional classes. They spend virtually all of their time learning independently, with support from advisors or at internships. Students all have individual learning plans and accumulate credits toward traditional subject areas through projects, self-directed study, internship experience and dual enrollment with local colleges. Almost everything they do, all day, connects to a personal goal or something they're interested in.

That's what inspired Destiny to enroll at The Met. "I thought, oh my God, I have all this power to choose what I want," she remembers.

Education researchers have been studying student motivation for decades, identifying the best classroom strategies to promote an intrinsic drive to learn. The Met puts many of them to use. Students learn through real-world, hands-on problem-solving; they tackle open-ended assignments that require sustained effort; they get the power to choose what and how they learn; they finish projects with something to show for their learning in portfolios and concrete products; they set their own academic goals; they need never focus more on a grade than the process of learning because they don't get traditional grades. All of these things come straight out of playbooks for inspiring intrinsic motivation, including Stipek's. And the impact on students can be profound.

"I thought, oh my God, I have all this power to choose what I want."

Destiny Reyes, on her first impression of Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence, R.I.

Destiny started high school with the academic zeal she left middle school with - meaning very little. Her freshman-year report card reflected that. While The Met doesn't give out traditional grades, students do get assessed on their mastery of the goals they set for each subject. The dominant note on Destiny's report card from ninth grade is "meeting expectations." She had very few instances of "exceeding expectations" and in some subjects, her mastery was only "in progress." In her sophomore year, things started to shift, and "exceeding expectations" started to become a more common assessment. By junior year, Destiny exceeded expectations in almost every subject and "in progress" was nowhere to be found on her report card. Gone was the middle schooler who didn't want to be in class. In her place was a driven young woman who again liked school.

Destiny's experience is common for Met students. On state surveys, these students report being more interested in their coursework, more convinced that what they're learning will matter to their futures, and more supported at school than their peers in almost every other district in Rhode Island. She and other students at The Met continually bring the conversation back to how much difference it makes to be in control of their learning.

Sarah McCaffrey, a 10th grader, appreciates the stark difference between The Met and her experience in middle school, "where it was just 'Do this, this, this,'" she said. "I like more hands-on, where I'm in control, rather than you're just going to tell me how to do it and then I do it. It's more like I'm in charge."

Marissa Souza, a 2017 graduate of The Met and now a sophomore at Rhode Island College, said she had similar motivations in high school. At The Met, she said, students set their own goals, based on their own assessments of their strengths and weaknesses, tied to the dreams they identify for themselves. "You're more proud of your work because you know this was your goal," she said. "You met your goal, you didn't meet a goal that a teacher or principal made for you."

"It really pushes you to be your best self," Marissa said.

It tends to take a little while for students to rise to the challenge, though.

Beccy Siddons, Destiny's advisor, considers watching that trajectory to be one of the most exciting parts of her job. As the main contact for an "advisory" of about 16 students who stay with her for their entire time at The Met, Siddons guides students through their internships, all of their academic work and, eventually, their college applications.

"Ninth graders who have spent their whole life being told what to learn, some of them don't even know what they're interested in because they haven't been given the opportunity," Siddons said.

That was Destiny as a freshman. Her first internship was at an elementary school in a bilingual classroom, a safe, familiar choice for the native Spanish- and English-speaker. Looking back, she's grateful that experience made her realize she didn't like teaching. But at the time, she didn't know what to try next. As a sophomore, she saw another student present about an internship at the New England Aquarium, and it piqued her interest. She first worked there as a junior and quickly discovered a deep love of sea life. She now has a favorite creature she didn't even know existed before: the puffer fish. And she has a career interest she otherwise might not have found until college, if ever: environmental science.

Siddons routinely oversees such meandering paths, and a key part of her job is helping students discover passions they didn't know they might have. The freshmen she welcomes to The Met are a far cry from the seniors she sends out into the world.

The early part of that transformation does take work, though. And while it isn't typical for schools to orient themselves around intrinsic motivation, hundreds do attempt it. Next Generation Learning Challenges has grown into a network of about 150 schools, all of which focus on tapping into students' intrinsic motivation in one way or another. The Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools represents 102 school districts doing similar work; EdLeader21 has another 300 districts, many of whom aim to inspire students' intrinsic desire to learn. And the Big Picture Learning network, built around the success of The Met, now counts more than 60 schools in the U.S. (and another 100 abroad).

In Chicago, a charter school made its commitment to this goal very clear, choosing the name Intrinsic Schools when it launched in 2013 to serve students in grades seven through 12. Learning there happens in "pods," large, flexible classroom spaces that let students rotate from independent work to group instruction to collaborative, project-based learning. Ami Gandhi, director of innovation and collaboration and a co-founder of the charter, said that in the first year, administrators blocked out "independent learning time" for students, expecting they would thrive with the period of freedom. Looking back, Gandhi calls that naïve.

"I would go into the pod during that time and kids were just sitting there," Gandhi said. "I was like, 'What are you interested in?' 'Nothing.' 'What do you want to explore?' 'Nothing.'"

"If someone's been telling you what to do for nine to 10 years of your life in school, you really don't know what to do with that independent time," Gandhi said.

Teachers had to help equip students to take advantage of academic independence. At first, they didn't give students open-ended choices. They told them what they should work on in the independent time. Then they gave them a menu of options, slowly working up to the point where students could choose for themselves, entirely. After the first-year's naiveté, Intrinsic Schools teachers systematically prepare students to take control of their learning.

Another major challenge for schools trying to spark intrinsic motivation is to make sure that fun, engaging lessons also bring academic rigor. Several studies have found that projects and hands-on activities can be effective at intrinsically motivating students, but don't actually result in substantive learning.

Stipek, the Stanford researcher, said this comes down to teacher preparation and school design. Teachers aren't trained to design academically rigorous lessons that motivate students in the right way. And schools aren't set up to give teachers the time to do so. It is possible, though. Stipek directed the UCLA Lab School for 10 years, and she said her teachers - experienced and highly trained - consistently planned projects that engaged students' natural desire to learn while also forcing them to master concrete concepts and skills.

"It's not that it can't be done," Stipek said. "It's just really, really hard."

And because it's hard, it's necessarily risky. Many teachers - and their bosses - are afraid to experiment with this work. Stipek said the accountability movement, where states hold schools to strict standards for student performance on standardized tests, put a damper on teaching methods that prioritize intrinsic motivation. She believes accountability is important, but, in its latest form, has prompted teachers to focus on test prep. That prioritizes the testing outcome - the grade - rather than the learning process, a surefire way to kill students' sense of intrinsic motivation.

"It's not that it can't be done. It's just really, really hard."

Deborah Stipek, Stanford University professor of education, on designing academically rigorous lessons that also promote intrinsic motivation

Researchers have found that one consequence of using grades to motivate students is that they stop challenging themselves for fear of trying something hard and failing at it. The hesitance of teachers and administrators to take a leap with new learning opportunities is an extension of the same thing.

Destiny's school, though, breaks the mold.

Students don't do particularly well on standardized tests at The Met. Rhode Island gives every school a star rating based on test scores, graduation rates and other metrics. The Met graduates more students than the state average (90 percent vs. 84 percent), but its rating, just two out of five stars, is dragged down by student achievement on state tests.

School leaders, though, don't pay much attention to test scores. Nancy Diaz Bain, a co-director, said she and her colleagues prefer to keep track of state survey data about student engagement, parent feedback about their children's progress, student behavior, graduation rates and student performance in college courses. When students from The Met take and pass college courses in high school - which all of them do - they not only prove they can handle advanced coursework, they save money on an eventual degree, Diaz Bain said. And the other metrics about student engagement and success persuade school leaders that the model works. They also persuaded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to pour $20 million into helping Big Picture Learning expand The Met's model to other schools and President Barack Obama to highlight The Met up as an example in a 2010 speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (The Gates Foundation is also one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

For her part, Destiny feels prepared for what comes next. She'll finish high school this spring and then pursue a bachelor's degree. She plans to major in environmental science. While she knows her peers from traditional schools may have gotten a broader education, she expects the depth of knowledge she gained doing internships and related research projects will actually give her a leg up in college. And she'll enroll armed with a sense of intrinsic motivation to learn new things that many of her peers lost a long time ago.
This story about intrinsic motivation in the classroom was produced by The Hechinger Report Join us today. , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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Intrinsic motivation is key to student achievement - but schools kill it

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. - When Destiny Reyes started elementary school, she felt highly motivated. Like most young children, she liked learning new things, and she excelled at school. She got good grades and reveled in her success, thriving in an environment that, at least implicitly, set her up in competition with her peers.

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How do I deal with poor student choices?

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In APES I've found a lot of benefit in having some structured studying time in class where we can directly model studying strategies. For freshmen especially, working directly in self-quizzing and elaboration isn't always intuitive so the monitored practice is a great way to teach them these skills that they can use at home.

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In my lectures I put a set of practice problems, partner discussions, or Plickers quizzes every five slides. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what types of practice work best here but even as they are they've been a big help for breaking up the lecture into more manageable chunks.

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I lecture all day every day in Art History (excluding testing days). While this can get rugged for the teacher, I used the same practice in AP World History. Finishing lecture as efficiently as possible maximizes time for review at the end of the year, which I think is key to solidifying knowledge and finding success on the AP exams.

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Literally all of my materials are AP materials *or* I have written materials very closely following the models of questions/FRQs established by the AP. This means that every single time a student writes anything in Art History, or answers any multiple choice question the entire year long, they are practicing the skill sets needed for the AP and they are practicing at the correct rigor to best prepare them.

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I am super informally collecting data on how students view/treat homework. I have come up with a few statements that I think do a good job of encompassing your perspective on homework, but if there is nothing on there that really matches what you think, feel free to add your own statement.

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This is a document I stole/modified that is meant to be used in conjunction with test corrections (if you have to resort to those) to get students to identify their weaknesses and hopefully target those in the future. You have to get students to buy into the idea though, or it will just be more busy work that they don't care about.

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Increase S to S communication, Decrease T talk

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Increase S to S communication, Decrease T talk

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"Triad Protocol"
This is applicable to math, I don't know how it would translate to other classes:
-Divide students into groups of 3
Roles assigned as follows:
Scribe- Has a whiteboard and whiteboard marker and can only write. Is not allowed to talk or nonverbally communicate with other group members.
Problem Solver- Uses only words to describe the process of solving the problem in a way that the scribe can follow along and write on the whiteboard. Can point but cannot grab the marker or otherwise write.
Watchdog- Has the dual role of making sure the scribe and the problem solver are sticking to their roles, and makes sure the problem is progressing on track. Has the ability to speak to the problem solver and erase things that the scribe has written that are incorrect.

After this protocol has been taught, my role as the teacher is to go around and observe the mathematical communication and occasionally act as a backup watchdog if a group is going down a completely wrong path when solving the problem. It's mostly passive though.

There will be at least 3 problems in a set so each member of the group gets experience in each role. I believe the end result of this activity is that every student has communicated the problem solving process, physically written the solution to a problem, and watched a problem get solved and contribute if needed. These are all the things I would want a student to take away from a lesson, but I can't always be sure that's happening in a traditional lecture environment because stupid snapchat, minecraft, fortnite, and clash of clans.

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Invest in materials to turn your room into a Faraday cage that blocks incoming cellular signals so students can't be on their goddamn cellphones all the time.

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The take-home is that this law gives us the foundation for a mathematical relationship that relates charge and electric fields within a fixed volume of space. A Faraday cage encloses such a fixed volume of space, and, if the cage is made of conductive material, the cage's defining characteristic is that it prevents external charges from inducing electric fields within that volume.

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See highlighted column for responses from my actual students when I asked them about the new policy earlier in the semester.

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3.4 - Graphing Common Functions (Responses)

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A Brief Summary of the Best Practices in Teaching

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Listen to my interview with Marisa Thompson (transcript):
Sponsored by Peergrade and 3Doodler

Check out information about Marisa Thompson's Ultimate TQE Course at the bottom of this page!

So much of the learning we do comes from texts: articles, textbooks, novels, and all kinds of online publications. Sometimes, those texts come in less traditional forms; in fact, our use of the word "text" has broadened over time to include things like films, images, and even diagrams. Regardless of what form they come in, texts make up the bulk of how our students experience learning.

But too often, when we assign texts to students, we find that they don't experience them with much depth. One reason for that may be that we don't set them up to do that. In many text-based classes (English, history, science), the learning cycle often consists of (1) consuming a section of the text, (2) answering teacher-created questions about the text, (3) taking a test after several sections have been completed.

For years, high school English teacher Marisa Thompson followed this same programming, and got typical results: Some students did the required work, but never seemed particularly invested in the books themselves. Others completed the questions unevenly, sometimes not answering them all, other times copying work from their peers. And when students didn't do the work, they got calls home and office referrals.

As this pattern repeated itself year after year, Thompson became more frustrated: The texts themselves were wonderful, but students weren't experiencing them the way they were meant to be experienced. Instead, they had shallow interactions with them, doing whatever surface work had to be done to get a grade.

Finally, she started experimenting with a different approach, and the way she teaches texts now is completely different from the way she used to. Her current approach, which she calls TQE, is similar to Socratic Seminar, where students lead a discussion on a given text, but with a few twists. Since implementing this new approach, Thompson has seen her students reading much more than they used to, and with much more depth than ever before. They are having college-level conversations about books in class, and for the first time, they seem excited about the books they're reading.

On top of that, Thompson's prepping and grading work for these class sessions is down to almost nothing.

What I love about this method, and why I'm sharing it here, is that I think it could be applied in a lot of different areas, not just with the study of novels. In any class where students need to read a text in order to learn, something along these lines could be implemented, and I think you'll find that the learning in your classroom gets much richer as a result. So as you read about TQE, think about how you might be able to apply it in your content area.

The Problem

As an English teacher, Thompson found that her students were experiencing books in a very shallow, grade-focused way.

"(I would) send students home, maybe get them started on Chapter 1, and then, Hey guys, go home and read Chapter 2. Come on back and we'll talk about it, and here's your list of questions; you're going to have a reading quiz. I realized I wasn't really assessing their reading with homework and quizzes. I was assessing whether or not they did their homework questions."

This method not only diminished the value of the books students were reading, it also led to other problems. "It made reading seem like a hassle," Thomspon says. "I started getting a bunch of cheating. One year I had 10 kids copy off each other. It turned this amazing story-this beautiful novel that everybody should read and enjoy and love-into a discipline problem."

Early Changes

Knowing something had to change, Thompson decided to try grading students only on whether their participation in class indicated that they had read the book.

"I said, 'Look. We're going to read this book, and we're just going to read it and talk about it. You're not going to have study questions. You're not going to have any reading quizzes. But I'm going to know if you read or not. I'm going to know.'"

These early discussions were similar to Socratic Seminar, where students came with questions and Thompson mostly observed. When a student participated in a way that demonstrated that he or she had read the book, their names would be crossed off of a chart. "And that was it," Thompson says. "The standard says, Be able to read and analyze at grade level. And if they're doing that, I mean, yeah, cross their name off. Move on."

For students who scored low on the discussion or who weren't initially comfortable with active participation, Thompson offered alternative means of assessment. "I said, hey, if I'm wrong with your score, then we need to come up with some sort of alternative: They were used to taking annotations, taking notes on their thoughts while they read-you can show me those. You can sit down and have a conversation just one-on-one, or you can take a test. So if you got an eight out of 10, and you're like, 'No, I want the 10 out of 10,' I have a multiple-choice test on the book."

Most of the time, Thompson's initial score on the discussion turned out to be accurate. "I did have a lot of students who had a B for their assessment, and they're like, No, I want the A. Great. And they took the test and then it was cute, because they were like Yeah, I didn't really read all of it. So my assessment was, on average, about 3 or 4 percent higher than what they were normally getting on their tests."

Right away, Thompson started to see changes in how her students were reading. "I had students who started reading more than they were assigned, and they were finishing the book early," she says. Some were even reading ahead.

Over time, Thompson refined her approach, adding small-group time before the large-group discussions, offering scaffolding to help students develop better questions, and structuring student contributions so that the richest questions got the most discussion time.

These changes have so elevated the level of discourse that Thompson sometimes feels like she's teaching college class. "And that's exactly what I tell them: 'What we just did, that was a collegiate literature course. That was amazing. You could walk into a college course and have this discussion.' And you can see that they're enjoying it."

The TQE Method

Here is the approach Thompson uses now, step by step:

1. Students Complete Assigned Reading at Home

Usually, this will be a segment of a longer text, like a few chapters in a novel. Students who show up having not completed the reading are invited to finish up in the hall during small group discussion (step 2) to catch up. They are welcome to return to class for the discussion when they finish.

2. Small Group Discussions (15 minutes)

When they arrive in class, students get into small groups, where they have 15 minutes to share thoughts, lingering questions, and epiphanies (TQEs) they have about the reading. Early in the year, Thompson provides stems to help students generate these (see below), encouraging them to move from the more simplistic ideas on the left to the more complex ones on the right.

3. TQEs on the Board

By the time the 15 minutes is up, each group needs to choose their top 2 TQEs from the group and write them on the board. Although these are meant to serve as the basis for the group discussion, they are not necessarily used as is.

"If they put something on there that is not at the quality or as thought-provoking as we need it to be for the class to discuss, we'll edit it together, the 40 of us," Thompson explains. "So it becomes a writing lesson."

Thompson also insists that when discussing a text, students use the author's name. When discussing Of Mice and Men, for example, she started by having students repeat the name "Steinbeck" five times. "I love Lenny and George. I love Lenny," she told them. "but he's totally fictional. So when you start asking questions like, 'Why did George do that?' George doesn't exist."

Instead, she has students practice asking questions like, "Why did hat theme is Steinbeck have George do that?" "W Steinbeck trying to convey to the rest of us by having his character do that?"

"It's not about the character," she explains. "It's not about the character's motivation, it's the author's purpose in providing that motivation for the character."

4. Class Discussion of TQEs

Thompson then moderates a whole-class discussion of the reading, using the TQEs that have been written on the board. This takes about 40 minutes of class time-she teaches on a block schedule, so there's plenty of time to dig in. When the class is actively studying a novel, they will have these conversations in every class meeting.

As for grading, Thompson simply records when students participate, and that's it. "I have a chart with their little pictures," she explains, "and I cross them off as I go. So I'm not necessarily grading them every single day. My student Sally might have participated a ton one day, and skipped the next day. But my standard-based grading says she is reading and analyzing at at least grade level. I don't need to score each of my 40 kids every single day."

"And the amount of planning is nil," Thompson adds. " I'm not creating, I'm not copying, I'm not collecting, I don't need to waste my time. My prep is reading before bed every night."

What Student-Centered Learning Looks Like

"We have all these really great aphorisms, these quotes about, 'Students should own their learning,' and 'Empower students,'" Thompson observes. "And it's like, well that's great, but how in the heck do we do that?"

Since starting the TQE process, Thompson has seen true student-centered learning in action: Students are in charge of the content of the discussions, and the ability to participate fully has become its own motivator for completing the homework.

"The peer pressure of Everyone's discussing this book- that becomes cool. To have an idea, to have an opinion. So the student comes in, and all of a sudden it's, "Wait, I read that part, and I think this," you know? And you want to talk about empowering a student? You just turned that student into a part of the classroom community." ♦

If you are a fan of the TQE method and you want to take it further, check out Marisa's Ultimate TQE Course. This course will revolutionize your reading and writing instruction and assessment through student-led inquiry, intentional teacher guidance, feedback that is immediately useful to students while eliminating the need for at-home grading, even for essays, and a personable approach to teaching and learning that leaves everyone in the room energized and engaged.

Cult of Pedagogy receives a portion of the Ultimate TQE Course sales that come through the link on this page.

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Deeper Class Discussions with the TQE Method

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Want your students to have rich, complex conversations about the texts they read? This method leads to the kinds of classroom discussions you thought only happened in college.