Down With Homework!

This week’s article summary from the Wall Street Journal is Down With Homework and it’s a follow-up to a previous summary on homework.

As educators, my wife and I taught very differently. She, teaching high school math, loaded on the homework every night and then collected, corrected, and graded it. It was tough on the kids and tough on her, but she and her school’s math department had a reputation of producing high achieving math students.

I was a middle school humanities teacher, and while most nights my students had reading assignments to complete at home, I overall went pretty light on homework. I even got to the point where my students completed all writing assignments in class because then I knew the work was truly theirs and not aided by parents or tutors.

Over the past couple of years a number of the schools our graduates attend have begun to lessen the homework load a bit in middle school due to parent complaints of lack of balance and free time at home. High school homework remains pretty intense, similar to when my wife taught.

I doubt homework will ever be eliminated, and, as you’ll see in the article below, many parents still want and like homework because it lets them see what their kids are learning in school. You’ll also see why some teachers continue to champion and value homework.

Joe

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School districts across the country are banning homework, forbidding it on certain days or just not grading it, in response to parents who complain of overload and some experts who say too much can be detrimental.

A new policy in Ridgefield Public Schools in Ridgefield, Conn., places nightly time limits on homework for most students. It is banned on weekends, school vacations and some other days off for elementary and middle-school students, and isn’t calculated into their overall grades.

The goal of the changes is to give students more time to read, sleep, and spend time with family, especially at the elementary level, school administrators say. “Student wellness is becoming a much larger issue,” said Mark Toback, superintendent of Wayne Township Public Schools in Wayne, N.J.

The average number of hours high-school students spent per week on homework increased from 6.8 in 2007 to 7.5 in 2016, the latest year available from the U.S. Department of Education. The average hours for students in K-8 stayed flat at 4.7 during those years.

Homework changes have been met with concern by some teachers, who say it takes away a tool to reinforce the day’s lesson, and parents who feel left out of the academic process.

Kevin Fulton withdrew his daughter from the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Houston after she spent her fifth-grade year at Yeager Elementary without homework because the school stopped giving it. She now attends a private school. “In my house, we’re very hands-on and homework is a way to determine if our child is falling behind,” he said. “I just think it takes parents out of the equation.” The Cypress-Fairbanks district said Yeager and other schools with no-homework rules can still assign personalized homework to struggling students.

Kauffman Leadership Academy, a public charter school in Cleburne, Texas, with grades 5-12, holds classes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to fit in needed lessons to prevent sending work home. The school opened in 2016 with the intent of having no homework after hearing from parents of prospective students. “We just heard a lot of parents complaining about how much the homework was eating into their family life,” Superintendent Theresa Kauffman said. “It’s amazing to be able to go home after a long day at school and not have anything to do, just be able to relax,” Kauffman student Karissa Olsen, 14 years old, said during a snack break that the school gives due to the long day.

Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University who has studied homework for over 25 years, found that homework has little impact on elementary students. Junior-high students showed higher achievement when doing homework up to 60 to 90 minutes a night and high-school students up to two hours. There were no additional positive effects after those time frames. Dr. Cooper said those who go over appropriate limits could become frustrated and lose interest in the subject area. It also could crowd out other activities, such as athletics, music and volunteer work.

Jonathan Cole, a high-school teacher in Lafayette Parish, said some teachers in the district are unhappy with the homework-grading ban. A good number of students skip homework because it isn’t going to be graded, he said. “We’re seeing some drops in some scores related to math, and that’s a skill that does benefit from some practice,” said Mr. Cole, who is also president of a local educator association. Even so, parent Laurie Lightfoot supports the new policy. “These kids have so much homework at younger and younger ages. And heaven forbid if they have after-school activities or want to spend time with family,” she said. Her 13-year-old daughter Madison said the change “does relieve a little stress.” Some students who aren’t turning in homework are being urged to do so by teachers, she said.

Kathy Aloisio, Lafayette’s director of elementary schools, said grades should reflect a student’s mastery of a subject, not homework, which some students can get help with at home. “Are we grading what the parents did, or are we grading what the child did?” she said. Norfolk Public Schools in Nebraska dropped homework for elementary school children last year. “It was pretty common that elementary students would take home 30 math problems every night, and might have additional homework after that,” said Superintendent Jami Jo Thompson. “It was a lot of stress on the child and the family.”

Dr. Thompson said students who are struggling are getting the help they need in school instead of sending the work home with them to parents, who have been supportive of the homework change. Now, parents with children at the schools in northeastern Nebraska, which go up to fourth grade, are asked to read with their children and practice math skills.

Multiple Intelligences: Widely Used Yet Misunderstood

This week’s article summary is Multiple Intelligences: Widely Used Yet Misunderstood.

Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences has significantly influenced education for the past 35 years.

As the article explains, Gardner’s basic premise is that intelligence encompasses more than what schools have traditionally measured, namely strong verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities.

Gardner widened the definition of intelligence to include musical-rhythmic/harmonic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, interpersonal, naturalistic.

This makes sense: while I don’t know how mathematically and verbally inclined they were, clearly Van Gogh, Chopin, and Jesse Owens were respective geniuses in art, music, and athletics.

Because of Gardner, I modified how I taught so my humanities classes, assignments, and assessments weren’t only for those who were strong verbally and analytically.

The problem for Gardner and his theory of multiple perspectives, as the article explains, is that they were erroneously linked with learning styles.

Last year one of my article summaries was The Myth of Teaching to Learning Styles, which explained that regardless of how one likes to receive information—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—there are specific effective methods we all need to use to actually learn that information. i.e., store it in our long-term memory.

Gardner believes that there are many types of intelligences and that awareness of learning styles is important, yet he doesn’t want his ideas conflated with learning styles.

At the end of the article he poses some basic do’s and don’ts to use in the classroom.

Joe

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When Howard Gardner introduced his multiple intelligences theory 35 years ago, it was a revolutionary idea that challenged long-cherished beliefs.

At the time, psychologists were interested in general intelligence—a person’s ability to solve problems and apply logical reasoning across a wide range of disciplines. Popularized in part by the IQ test, which was originally developed in the early 1900s to assess a child’s ability to understand, reason, and make judgments, the idea of general intelligence helped explain why some students seemed to excel at many subjects. Gardner found the concept too limiting.

“Most writings about intelligence focus on a combination of linguistic and logical intelligences. The particular intellectual strengths, I often maintain, of a law professor,” Gardner explains. Having grown up playing piano, Gardner wondered why the arts weren’t included in discussions about intelligence. As a graduate student studying psychology in the 1960s, he felt “struck by the virtual absence of any mention of the arts in the key textbooks.”

That doubt planted the seed that grew into Gardner’s big insight: The prevailing idea of a single, monolithic intelligence didn’t match the world he observed. Surely Mozart’s genius was partially, but not fully, explained by an extraordinary musical intelligence. And wasn’t it the case that all people demonstrated a wide range of intellectual capabilities—from linguistic to social to logical—that were often mutually reinforcing, and that ebbed and flowed over time based on a person’s changing interests and efforts?

But if Gardner’s objective was to broaden and democratize our conception of intelligence—an idea that resonates deeply with teachers—the pull of the old model has been hard to shake. Today, the idea of multiple intelligences is as popular as ever, but it’s starting to look suspiciously like the theory Gardner sought to displace.

“It’s true that I write a lot and also that I am misunderstood a lot,” says Gardner who originally proposed seven distinct intelligences, adding an eighth a decade later. The big mistake: In popular culture, and in our educational system, the theory of multiple intelligences has too often been conflated with learning styles, reducing Gardner’s premise of a multifaceted system back to a single “preferred intelligence”: Students are visual or auditory learners, for example, but never both. We’ve stumbled into the same old trap—we’ve simply traded one intelligence for another.

It’s clear that children learn differently—teachers in Edutopia’s audience are adamant on that score—but research shows that when students process and retain information, there is no dominant biological style, and that when teachers try to match instruction to a perceived learning style, the benefits are nonexistent.

Still, the idea endures.

Over 90 percent of teachers believe that students learn better when they receive information tailored to their preferred learning styles, but that’s a myth, explains Paul Howard-Jones, professor of neuroscience and education at the University of Bristol. “The brain’s interconnectivity makes such an assumption unsound, and reviews of educational literature and controlled laboratory studies fail to support this approach to teaching.”

Students are also swayed by the idea. A recent study found that many students still hold to the conventional wisdom that learning styles are legitimate, and often adapt their study strategies to match these learning styles. But after analyzing the test scores of these students, researchers found no improvement. Instead, they found that tried-and-true strategies—such as viewing microscope slides online—worked equally well for all students, whether they considered themselves linguistic or visual learners.

The study highlights the value of learning through multiple modalities, which is an effective way to boost memory and understanding. A 2015 study found that students have a deeper conceptual understanding of a lesson when teachers pair lectures with diagrams. Students retain more information when textbooks contain illustrations because the images complement the text. When students use more than one medium to process a lesson, learning is more deeply encoded—and being overly reliant on a perceived dominant learning style is a recipe for learning less effectively.

So what should teachers do? Gardner recommends that “multiple intelligences should not, in and of itself, be an educational goal.” Instead, here are a few evidence-based dos and don’ts for applying multiple intelligences theory in your classroom.

Do:

·         Give students multiple ways to access information: Not only will your lessons be more engaging, but students will be more likely to remember information that’s presented in different ways.

·         Individualize your lessons: It still makes sense to differentiate your instruction, even if students don’t have a single dominant learning style. Avoid a one-size-fits-all method of teaching, and think about students’ needs and interests.

·         Incorporate the arts into your lessons: Schools often focus on the linguistic and logical intelligences, but we can nurture student growth by letting them express themselves in different ways. As Gardner explains, “My theory of multiple intelligences provides a basis for education in the arts. According to this theory, all of us as human beings possess a number of intellectual potentials.”

Don’t:

·         Label students with a particular type of intelligence: By pigeonholing students, we deny them opportunities to learn at a deeper, richer level. Labels—such as “book smart” or “visual learner”—can be harmful when they discourage students from exploring other ways of thinking and learning, or from developing their weaker skills.

·         Confuse multiple intelligences with learning styles: A popular misconception is that learning styles is a useful classroom application of multiple intelligences theory. “This notion is incoherent,” argues Gardner. We read and process spatial information with our eyes, but reading and processing require different types of intelligence. It doesn’t matter what sense we use to pick up information—what matters is how our brain processes that information. “Drop the term styles. It will confuse others, and it won't help either you or your students.”

·         Try to match a lesson to a student’s perceived learning style: Although students may have a preference for how material is presented, there’s little evidence that matching materials to a preference will enhance learning. In matching, an assumption is made that there’s a single best way to learn, which may ultimately prevent students and teachers from using strategies that work. “When one has a thorough understanding of a topic, one can typically think of it in several ways.”