Page 15 - THE Journal, March 2017

to something else, such as the Kentucky Academic Standards.
Although Williams categorized Common Core as “cooling down,” she isn’t overly concerned that the standards are on the way out. “I think most of the states that adopted them right when they were released are [sticking] to them. These governors who come in and say, ‘We’re throwing them out,’ it’s like, ‘Too late, baby.’”
Karen Cator, president and CEO of Digital Promise, has a different take: that the standards themselves were actually less important than the way they were developed. The very process of states “getting together to design the level of standards for students at various grade levels that everybody could agree to,” she said, can’t be overlooked.
“Whether or not states call it the Common Core or they change the name or they change some words or they adjust it slightly, the importance of it is absolutely not lost,” she said. “The fact remains that that process was incredibly important and it continues to drive the ability to expect
a high quality education for students regardless of what state they live in. Because of the politics of it and the rhetoric around it, people have forgotten that that was actually the core work — articulating those high standards for students wherever they lived.”
The Flipped Classroom
Even as organizations such as the Flipped Learning Global Initiative promote the idea of teachers
assigning instruction or video through online platforms that students do at home and then allowing the kids to practice their skills when the teacher can work with them back in the classroom, the novelty of flipped is cooling down.
“I don’t think of flipped learning as something [where] you have to completely overhaul everything you’re doing,” observed Kelly Mendoza, who manages
the professional development program for Common Sense Education. “You can flip a lesson here or there and have great results around that. But I don’t see it as a hot topic
in terms of demand.”
Sean Nank, a math teacher at Oceanside
High School in California and a member of the faculty at both California State University San Marcos and American College of Education, cautions his students pursuing their master’s degrees in education. “If one of my students at the university wants to do a thesis or project on a flipped classroom, the first thing I tell them is to be very careful in the details of the way they do it, because the research
is showing contradictory results. Some research is showing it works great; other research is showing it makes no difference; and still other research is showing that it’s actually detrimental. So it really matters how you flip the classroom.”
On top of that is the digital equity challenge. What do you do, she pondered, “when some of the kids just don’t have access to technology at home?”
Homework and Grading
While homework and grading aren’t necessarily the same topic, what’s happening is that they’re not getting
the same kind of reception in schools they’ve traditionally received. Part of Nank’s reticence on flipped learning, for example, is tied to research on homework as a whole. “There’s a lot of research that says if you give too much, homework
can actually be detrimental to students’ learning. So if we’re flipping the classroom, we could be giving them too much at home,” he said, quickly adding. “I could be wrong; I’m not entirely sure.”
Ross agreed with Nank’s concerns. “There’s not a whole lot of research to support homework as it’s traditionally done. It’s usually the wrong form of homework,
or it’s too much, or it’s no homework. Nobody’s got a handle on homework, but almost everybody is backing away from it.”
Likewise, Ross has perceived an equity issue intrinsic to homework. “My wife and I both have multiple graduate degrees. When our kids bring home homework, we pretty much can help. But there are parents that aren’t as well educated or as well resourced as we are, or they’re working three jobs just
to get by. They can’t help their kids.” While Jeff Knutson, senior manager
of education content for Common Sense Education, gave a nod to equity concerns as well, he also questioned just what’s being graded when homework is assigned. “If completion of homework is the thing you’re grading, in some ways that could be seen
as a behavior. At what point are we grading for behavior versus grading for students’ competency?” he asked.
The hardest part, Knutson said, is making the homework “meaningful — an extension of what happens in the classroom, not just busy work.”
On top of that, he added, homework is on the decline because work-life balance has become a topic for the adult workplace. “It’s a big question on a lot of people’s minds. As the world becomes more connected 24-7, we have to question what is healthy, what is the right amount of work for someone to do.” Those same conversations are “also taking place in education.”
Grading isn’t cooling down so much
as taking on a new form. “We’re moving to a wonderful time when we finally start making a distinction between grading and assessment,” Ross said. “There are things that kids do that should receive feedback but not necessarily be graded.”
As a former sports coach, he said, “Every day in practice, I gave every kid on my team feedback. I didn’t give them a grade. It was just-in-time feedback they could consume, that they could see a model for and that they could practice. Then the game was the test. Schools are moving in that direction, and it really makes me happy.”
What Knutson said he finds troublesome about the topic of grading is that it’s hard to do right. “People are looking for new ways to measure student learning, new ways to accurately capture that. To accurately measure what your students have learned or how well has always been a challenge.”
Ultimately, these are two areas whose temperature “depends on the community,” said ISTE’s Williams. “I’m not sure when you talk to national leaders they talk about homework. But when you really get into the parent community, those are hot topics.”
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