Hello everyone,
I seem to have hit a sort of nerve in talking about working hard versus working smart. I had discussions with both the principal and another teacher before either had read yesterday's email, and the discussions brought up other issues that are worth considering.
Working smart in the classroom may mean constructing lessons that accomplish multiple goals. You may do a project in which students create something. In the course of the creation, students will have researched their creation, read various source materials, interpreted the materials, worked with other students (incidentally practicing verbal skills), written a report of their presentation, and likely done a verbal defense of their project. Along the way, they may have accomplished a variety of goals within the original discipline, learned (hopefully achieved) multiple standards, and even reinforced standards from other disciplines. (Drama students work on projects in drama, for instance, but they achieve a variety of standards in English in history as a sort of auxiliary harvest.)
Working smart may mean allowing for multi-tasking. There is the obvious in which you set up the warm up, the students work, and you take care of the bureaucratic affairs (roll, enforcing tardy policies, handing out papers). You may proctor tests and grade papers at the same time, or give personal counsel to an individual while the class is working on group projects.
I have thought about a lot of ways of teaching reading and writing to reluctant students, and, for me, "working smart" sometimes meant finding the best way to get what I really wanted (which was for them to increase their reading skills). I had the hardest time persuading my students to read on their own, and at my best, I never had more than a third of the class (I would have thought a third was miraculous) that would do it. It was very hard for them to be held accountable for not reading, and, besides, my goal was not to find a way to fail them, but to find a way to get them to read when they didn't want to.
Writing was another difficulty. How could I get them to actually write something that was good when, even for me, writing is a process that includes lots of quiet thought and intelligent reading.
For me, working smart was facing realities. I learned that, since my students would read if we read together as a class, and they could easily be held accountable for writing outside class, that I would spend a lot of my class time reading with them, and have them write on their own. It wasn't ideal, but it was the smartest thing in the current reality.
From Mr. Del Cueto there were discussions along a similar line. Our discussions understandably veered off into what is a practical way to help students do well on the CSTs, and how we can smarten our work to accomplish the goal of raising our API.
This may take some more time to discuss, and it might be worth it to take a lot more than I have today. I want to pursue the idea of multi-tasking ad accomplishing what is practical, however.
It is essential for us to raise the scores, whether we resent it or not. We understand, however, that high school students across the board are doing more poorly on the tests than their elementary school counterparts. We have tried various sorts of motivational assemblies in the past, but they have had little effect, and they take class time that may be better used elsewhere.
Personally, it seems to me that students who strongly connect with their teachers will do their best of their teachers ask them to. (Conversely, students who don't connect with their teachers probably won't.) Mr. Del Cueto proposes using the next two weeks to review for the test. A mid-semester review can cover many things that would end up on our finals. Helping students with reading and math skills (if they are not normally in our subject area) are easily incorporated into reviews of regular things that would be on the CSTs. Work smart.
Jeff Combe
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