On Curriculum Night

Dear Families,

Thank you so much for your active participation in this past Tuesday’s Curriculum Night. We hope that you left with a clear sense of how the curriculum that your child will experience this year is structured and some of the essential questions that they will explore. We also hope that you will use the evening as a springboard to help you to be an active participant in the curriculum with your child. When questions about the curriculum emerge, seek out your child’s teachers. Take advantage of the teacher blogs and use them as jumping off points for conversations. I have written elsewhere about the way in which we approach curriculum at LREI and those ideas were much on my mind as I left the building on Tuesday evening. As I imagine you were, I was truly impressed by our Middle School teachers and their ability to develop curricula that is experiential, relational and oriented to action.

While Curriculum Night is an opportunity to look at the big picture, it is also an opportunity to get clarifications about specific procedures and practices. Homework is often much on peoples’ minds. I include below some “big picture” thoughts on homework and its connection to the curriculum and to each student’s development as a learner.

Homework:
First and foremost, homework is practice; it is not a quiz or a test. Homework is not generally graded for correctness, but rather for effort and completion. That does not mean it should be done haphazardly or carelessly. It should be done in relation to the expectations established by the teacher. For example, spelling does not need to be perfect, but work should be proofread and errors that are caught corrected. In math, a problem may be done incorrectly, but students are expected to show how they arrived at their answer.

For us, the measure of a successful homework session is not one where everything is done correctly, but one where the work reflects a focused and committed effort on the part of the student. Practice is also a time for risk-taking and a natural consequence of risk-taking is error making; we learn from these mistakes.  So errors that are the result of risk-taking are useful for teachers and are an important part of the learning process. Errors that are the result of carelessness or lack of effort point to areas where students may need more support in terms of their study skills.

Homework will often be assigned as part of an on-going project. When this is the case, students are not expected to bring in a completed project when only a component of it is due. In most cases, the assigned homework will be used in class to teach students the next step in the project. So if your child is asked to write an introductory paragraph, she and you should not worry about the body and concluding paragraphs. Her teacher will take her through the rest of the process and the homework completed in the evening will often become the foundation for the class work for the next day.

It is also crucial  for us to know where your child is encountering challenges. Without this information, we cannot provide the best support. Your child should know that at some point during the year, he will encounter this kind of challenge; it is a normal part of the learning process; it is perhaps the most important part of the process.

So what can you do to best support your child? Here are a few ideas:

1. Make sure that you have read the homework section in the Student and Family Handbook.
2. If you are unclear about the particular expectations for homework in a class, first check on the teacher’s blog as this information is often posted there. If it is not on the blog, contact the teacher.
3. Each family will need to consider what level of intervention makes sense with regard to student errors and confusions. Some families will leave the identification and correction of any problems to the teacher (this is our preference), while some families will intervene more directly. As a guideline, it is helpful to address these issues by asking questions of your child rather than by telling or doing the work for her.
4. Help your child to understand the parameters of the assignment. Help him to budget his time so that assignments that are assigned over multiple days are worked on over multiple days. Extra effort is generally fine if it falls within the assignment parameters; doing more when it falls outside these parameters may not be helpful.
5. Your child should work independently on her work, but she should feel comfortable asking you for clarification and you should feel comfortable monitoring her progress.
6. Students should be able to complete most nightly assignments in 15-30 minutes. If it is taking substantially longer than this or if the 30 minutes is filled with tears and frustrations, you should intervene and stop the homework session. You can send an email or a note to the teacher or better yet you can help your child to feel comfortable seeking out his teacher first thing the next morning. This will help him to develop important self-advocacy skills that will be important for his on-going development as a learner.
7. In those cases where the level of anxiety or frustration is happening with some regularity or if you have specific questions, it is important that you bring your child’s teacher into the conversation. If you feel that this is happening in more than one class, it would make sense to touch base with your child’s advisor who can help you navigate through the problem.

One of our main goals in the middle school is to help students understand who they are as learners. As a result, it is important for students to come to terms with and own their areas of challenge and strength. This will allow them to better identify and use strategies that lead to success. In this way, students will come to see their challenges not as judgments of their worth, but as obstacles that can be overcome. Over time, these strategies will be internalized as habits and students will come to know what they have to do to produce their best work. Again, this is a process and students will work through it at different rates. We acknowledge that this can be frustrating for some students and for some families.

Homework is one medium we use to nurture excellent learning habits in our middle school students; students will over time grow into these habits. While we acknowledge that challenges can emerge because students develop these habits at different rates, students will master these habits as they move through the middle school. In those cases where a student really struggles with a particular learning skill, we will work with the student to develop alternative strategies that will help her to better manage the challenge so that she can produce her best work. It is our job to make this happens and we are most effective in this work when we are able to do it in collaboration with you.

From digital musings to the lived experience of students, here are seventh graders doing some of their initial research on their colonial topics. This research will inform their visit to colonial Williamsburg and will culminate in their exhibit at our annual Colonial Museum . . .

and the fruits of fifth graders’ labor as they explore the role that shelters play in the development of civilizations. This project is an important component of their Civilization Simulation project, which serves as a frame for their year-long study of ancient civilizations.