Tips for Parents: Are Your Student's Assignments On Grade-Level?

Students can do no better than the assignments they are given.

This mantra lies at the heart of teaching. Teacher assignments and instruction are the vehicles through which knowledge is or is not transmitted to students. In working through an assignment, students apply, wrestle with, and consolidate their knowledge. Simply put, students won’t learn information and skills they are not asked to learn in order to complete their assignments.

After analyzing thousands of assignments teachers have given their students over the last ten years, I have uncovered the nasty fact that there are blatant inequities in the availability and distribution of knowledge among students in classrooms and schools. Teachers’ assignments provide insight into why and how students fall behind and stay behind.

Let’s look at an example of a 10^th grade history/geography assignment. The following task appeared on an end-of-unit test in a south Florida public high school, the unit being the Age of Discovery. There were no other geography questions on the test. The steps we are going to go through here are a modified version of the first three (of six) steps of the FLEX Team analysis I developed to use with teachers.

Assignment: Draw a map of the Caribbean, labeling major cities and geologic features.

STEP 1: First, let’s look at the teacher’s purpose in asking the questions. What is the academic purpose of this assignment?

• Know general shapes of the Caribbean islands, major cities and geologic features

STEP 2: Once the teacher purpose is established in step one, let’s look at what a person would need to know and be able to do to complete the task successfully?

• Basic recall, no analysis
• Memorize the islands, major cities, and basic geologic feature
• Don’t even need to know where the Caribbean is in order to fulfill expectations.

STEP 3: Now let’s identify the standards that apply to this assignment. Unfortunately, the benchmark that best fits the 10^th grade assignment above is the grade 2 benchmark (2002 Sunshine State Standards [Florida]):

• use simple maps, globes, and other three-dimensional models to identify and locate places.

Wow! That’s certainly not what we want, an eight grade gap between what students should be asked to know and do and what they are being asked to know and do! In order to fix that, let’s look at two of the Florida geography benchmarks for 10th grade:

• use a variety of maps, geographic technologies including geographic information systems (GIS) and satellite-produced imagery, and other advanced graphic representations to depict geographic problems.
• understand the advantages and disadvantages of using maps from different sources and different points of view.

As you can see, the 10^th grade standards require that students analyze information and figure out how to apply knowledge to a complex situation. They still need to know facts, but then they are asked to show the relationship between them, to analyze. With this in mind, we can rewrite the assignment to address the second of the 10^th grade geography standards, focusing on those geographic issues that were important during the age of discovery.

Revised Assignment: How does Mercator’s 1633 map of the New World differ from Kircher’s 1665 map? If you were going to sail from Europe to the New World, which map would you use and why?

STEP 1: Again, let’s look at the teacher’s purpose in asking the question. What is the academic purpose of this assignment?

• Analysis of information, written proposition-support response
• Mercator’s projection and its purpose
• Kirtcher’s projection and its purpose

STEP 2: Now, what would a person need to know and be able to do to complete the task successfully?

• Analysis of information, written proposition-support response
• Understand the navigation technology used by the explorers and its limitations
• Mercator’s projection and its purpose
• Kirtcher’s projection and its purpose
• Where explorers generally started, where they ended up

STEP 3: Now let’s identify the standards that apply to this revised assignment. We wrote the assignment to specifically address the second of the 10^th grade geography standards but we will also need a writing standard to help focus students on the organization of the response (2002 Sunshine State Standards [Florida]).

• understand the advantages and disadvantages of using maps from different sources and different points of view. (Geography)
• uses an effective organizational pattern (in this case proposition-support) and substantial support to achieve a sense of completeness or wholeness (for example, considering audience, sequencing events/ideas, choosing effective vocabulary, using specific details to clarify meaning). (English Language Arts)

By examining assignments in this way, establishing what was expected and what background knowledge is required to complete the assignment, we are able to establish how rigorous the expectations are. Then, just for good measure, we compare the assignment to the standards for that grade. If there is no match, we have to rethink the assignment. For more examples of FLEX Team analysis, click here.

But now the question is, how do we teach all kids to successfully answer these rigorous, grade appropriate questions? Instruction. "Students can do no better than the assignments they are given," may be our mantra, but it is only half of what needs to happen. "Students can do no better than the assignments they are given AND the instruction they receive." In my next post, I’ll talk about what rigorous instruction looks like, but in the meantime think about what it would take to instruct kids to be successful on the assignment we started with and what it would take to instruct kids to be successful on the assignment we ended up with.

Tips for Parents: What is Academic Writing?

Writing is thinking. If you're not writing clearly, you're not thinking clearly. People cannot think without language, let alone communicate with others. There's no other way to teach "higher order thinking skills" or "critical thinking skills" than to ask students to write analytical responses to rich questions--not narrative or poetry. Like dieters looking for a magic pill, the educational system has tried and will try everything before doing what works.

Most of what is being explicitly taught about writing in schools focuses on the creative aspects of writing fiction or poetry; relatively little focus is put on the types of non-fiction academic writing that students will need to succeed in life and school, like the six non-fiction text structures, sentence (idea) combining, and transition words and phrases. My clients have never asked me to write a story about the results of a workshop. The IRS has consistently rejected my poems about why I need a payment plan.

If this focus on narrative, creative writing sounds illogical, that's because it is. The system focuses on writing as a creative art (as fiction is), rather than a learned, structured skill (as non-fiction is). Elementary school teachers explicitly teach narrative, descriptive writing and then hope that the students intuit how to transfer those skills to write clear, concise analytical responses to complex questions in secondary school. Parents are left to wonder why their children are not able to analyze and synthesize information. Many a parent whose children I work with confide that they are worried because their children write nonsense, that their thinking is superficial and simple. And it is, because they have never been taught any differently.

I can't tell you how many times I've had secondary teachers say to me, "These kids can't write!" Well, that is why they are in school, isn't it? To learn? Or students say to me "I know it, but I just can't explain it." Guess what? There's no such thing as knowing something without being able to explain it. That Emperor is buck naked and it's about time somebody noticed! Clarity of thinking doesn't happen accidentally. We forget that writing is nothing more than thinking made visible. To follow an other's thinking, communication needs to be logically organized and effectively communicated. How to do it needs to be taught, explicitly and systematically in every subject. There is no substitute, no magic pill that will make it happen without actual writing.

Middle and high school teachers often say to me, "I don't teach writing, I teach science (or social studies, or math). However, every teachers teaches thinking--or should do. While non-language arts secondary teachers may not teach grammar, usage, mechanics, and style, they need to teach students how to think and express complex ideas and information in their discipline--using the organizational structures and technical vocabulary most useful to that discipline.

So parents--ask your children's schools and teachers for more non-fiction, analytical writing across all subject areas. Ask when they will do it, why aren't they doing more of it, and what kinds of writing they are doing instead.