Why a Blog about Homework?

Homework is a hot button topic. Anyone who has ever been a student, is currently a student or who is the parent of a student has an opinion about homework. Today when I Google “homework ” I find 40,100,000 results. Many of these homework sites offer tips to help children with their homework and accept the status quo – that homework has been a part of the American public school tradition since the early 1900s and will remain a big part of our education system for many years to come.

I hope not.

But I didn’t always feel this way. I’m trained as a middle and high school teacher of English, history, and reading. During my teacher training, I accepted and believed in the validity of homework. After all, I went through school, did some homework, became a teacher and turned out fine, so homework must have helped me achieve those goals, right?

But I didn’t have a lot of homework as a child, and I didn’t mind doing the homework I did have. It wasn’t until I had my own children that I really began to question the value of homework. But, sadly, that didn’t happen until they were in the 6^th and 8^th grades. Why did it take me so long to really examine their homework and question its importance?

It took me so long because I believed everything I was told about homework. “It reinforces learning. It teaches discipline and responsibility. It prepares students for class…”

But what happens when it doesn’t do those things? What happens when I did everything I was told to do by the school – set up a regular homework routine, gave my children a healthy snack before they start their homework, provide a quiet, well-lit place for them to do their homework – yet they still struggled with it?

What happens when we explored more avenues of homework help for one of our boys in particular (multiple tutors, special education resources, psychological testing, medication) and he still struggled with homework?

At some point, I finally stopped blaming my child for his homework limitations and started blaming everything else around him. I blamed the school, I blamed the teachers, I blamed the administration, I blamed the system, I blamed myself, I blamed my parenting, I blamed it on his ADHD. But when the blaming didn’t change the fact that he still struggled with homework, and still had hours and hours of it, I finally changed my attitude about it.

All this homework turmoil was a blessing in disguise.

One day I finally started really looking at the homework he was being asked to do. I read “The Homework Myth” by Alfie Kohn and I had a revelation about homework. I agreed with almost everything Kohn wrote in that book, and felt a huge sense of relief that I wasn’t the only educated person out there who disagreed with the idea of homework and hated what it did to our family evenings, weekends and holidays. “Most kids hate homework. They dread it, groan about it, put off doing it as long as possible. It may be the single most reliable extinguisher of the flame of curiosity.” (17)

I found Sara Bennett’s website www.StopHomework.com and that became an excellent daily resource for me and helped me see that there were many more educated people all over the US who disagreed with the idea of homework. I also read her book, “The Case Against Homework,” and got many good ideas from it. I read countless Internet articles and more books on homework. I talked to and emailed people about homework. I learned about Challenge Success, Denise Pope’s program at Stanford. I started learning about many other pro-child programs that shared my views of homework. See the sidebar “Recommended Blogs & Websites”

I enlisted the help of a friend, Julie, who shared my feelings about education and homework. We got a small group of parents together to talk about homework. We found that as soon as we starting discussing homework as a group, the talk quickly morphed into discussions of parenting, education, standardized testing, ADHD, teacher-training, college admissions, curriculum development, student stress, AP classes, childhood obesity, mental health issues, competitive sports, tutors, over-scheduled lives, finding balance, etc. We concluded that there were many problems surrounding homework and no simple solutions, yet we wanted to do something about it.

We took an informal email survey about homework from other parents in our district and got 100 responses that we collected in a spreadsheet. We brought that along with many articles and books on homework to a meeting we had with our school district’s curriculum instruction director. A week after that, the district (which serves over 27,000 students) formed a homework task force to rewrite the outdated policy. I was fortunate enough to be on the taskforce as a parent representative. The taskforce had 19 total participants – a combination of parents, teachers and administrators.

We rewrote the policy in under a year. It was a difficult process where 19 opinionated individuals had to agree on something cohesive to be presented to the Board of Education. I personally enlisted Sara Bennett's help during this process. While I think the new policy is better policy than the original one, I think it still has a long way to go to being a really great, “outside of the box,” forward-thinking homework policy. To read the policy, go here.

For example, I would have liked to include an “opt-out” provision where parents could sign a statement saying they are opting out of having their child do homework with no negative consequences to the child. I would have liked to see a statement included about the fact that any homework assigned would not be graded. I would have liked to see shorter time limit guidelines on homework. I would have liked to see that homework would be the exception and not the rule. I would have liked it to be more similar to Toronto’s homework policy. You can read that here.

Even if I didn’t get exactly what I wanted in the homework policy, being on that taskforce was a good experience for me and has led to other projects I’m working on now. See the film “Race to Nowhere.” The experience also helped me formulate more conclusions about homework. One of those is that homework is not the cause of, but rather a symptom of many problems in education.

Teachers often give homework because they say they don’t have enough time to complete everything during class time. If we changed the mindset from believing that we need to teach a set amount of information in a limited time, to focusing on individual needs and learning goals of each student, we would approach education differently.

Without pressures from above to fulfill state mandates and without pressures from administration to teach to a test, teachers would ideally be free to collectively and creatively decide how students learn best. This is no simple task, however, and it involves a shift in thinking about the principles of education that will then naturally lead to a change in practices of education. See my sidebar for my favorite books on education. And, another great resource I just linked to is this "Too Much Homework" page.

The good news is that there are great teachers and schools doing this, successfully every day. See my sidebar “Noteworthy Schools/Programs.” Even a big, public school can learn from these smaller schools and teachers that have discovered how kids learn best. Learning is an organic process, not a linear one. We can’t fill up a kid’s head with knowledge, have him do his homework, take some tests, graduate and call it success.

We have to figure out what turns kids on to learning and how they learn before we can help them learn. In our new technological age of constant information, we have to shift from memorizing and regurgitating facts in school to making sense of all these readily-available facts by analyzing, synthesizing, creating, innovating and problem-solving. We have to move from teacher as expert, to teacher as facilitator. We need more student choice and voice. We also have to redefine success in this culture.

The truth is, I don’t actually mind if my kids have homework, AS LONG AS IT TURNS THEM ON TO LEARNING, and as long as it isn't just a spewing out of facts, and as long as it doesn’t consume their whole evening, weekend or holiday. But what I've observed over the last ten years is that their homework usually does TURN THEM OFF to the subject and it's usually a teacher-created exercise focusing on how well they follow directions rather than on how they synthesize and use information. I've only seen a few really inspired assignments through the years.

Sadly, what usually happens is this type of scenario: After doing a time-consuming English project last June, my older son said, “I’m so glad that’s done because now I don’t have to read another book until next year when school starts.” That was a perfect example of a homework assignment that killed the joy of learning (and reading!).

I hear comments like this from my kids much more often than I hear comments about how excited they are about what they are learning in school. The things that excite them in school are their friends, the extra-curriculars, and the precious few days without homework.

As I sit here typing, my son (who is doing his homework) just said "I hate school. But school wouldn't be that bad if we didn't have homework. Why do we have homework on the weekends?"

I rest my case.

Nurture Shock (not so shocking…)

I just read “Nurture Shock” by Bronson & Merryman. It may be another book to add to your list of parenting books to read, but quite honestly, I wasn’t “wow-ed” by it.

Each chapter sets out to “shock” parents by dispelling accepted beliefs.

In a nutshell,

Chapter 1 – says “when we praise children for their intelligence…we tell them that this is the name of the game: look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” (14)

Makes sense to me. Labeling kids is bad no matter how you label them. And over praising them makes them want to hear more praise from you instead of making them want to do something just for the value of doing it.

Chapter 2 – says “because children’s brains are a work in progress until the age of 21…this lost hour [of sleep] appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.” (31) “Sleep disorders can impair children’s IQ as much as lead exposure.” (33)

Again, this makes sense to me. I’ve always been really strict about the amount of sleep my kids get. Sleep restores health, allows the body and mind to grow, and makes us feel refreshed and ready for a new day. It is also a great cure for a crabby kid. Any extra IQ points for a good night sleep is just an added bonus in my book.

Chapter 3 – says “it’s important for parents to know that merely sending your child to a diverse school is no guarantee they’ll have better racial attitudes than children at homogenous schools.” (59) “The unfortunate twist of diverse schools is that they don’t necessarily lead to more cross-race friendships. Often it’s the opposite.” (60)

Phew, because it’s pretty homogenous here in my suburb and in many thousands of suburbs across America! The important thing for parents is to model good race relations.

Chapter 4 – reminds us that we all lie a lot. It also suggests that “kids who start lying at two or three…do better on tests of academic prowess. Lying is related to intelligence.” (82) This chapter also reminds us that “parents need to teach kids the worth of honesty just as much as they need to say that lying is wrong.” (86)

I think this is an especially good point because so often when you ask a kid why they shouldn’t lie, they will say because they might get caught and punished. I find it so sad that this is the explanation instead of something like, because it hurt someone else.

Chapter 5 – says “the identification of very bright kids in kindergarten or first grade is not on too thick of ice…the IQ measures aren’t very accurate at all.” (101) “The problem is that young kids’ brains just aren’t done yet.” (98)

Of course! I always tell my kids not to peak too early because the best is yet to come.

Chapter 6 – talked about how often siblings fight. It also says that “for the most part, the tone established when they were very young, be it controlling and bossy or sweet and considerate, tended to stay that way.” (121) And, older and younger children “all said sharing physical possessions…caused the most fights.” (127)

Well, this wasn’t big news to me, but the next part was interesting:

“The kids who could play in a reciprocal, mutual style with their best friend were the ones who had good rapport with their younger sibling, years later.” (129) And, that “fantasy play represents one of the highest levels of social involvement for young children.” (129)

Chapter 7 – talks about how often teens lie to their parents and “the most common reason for deception is that teens are “trying to protect the relationship with [their] parents; [they] don’t want them to be disappointed in [them].” (139) This chapter tells us that the best type of parent to be is one who is consistent with rules, but also warm and loving, and open to having many conversations with their kids.

Again, this wasn’t shocking news to me, but the chapter is filled with other information about teens that is helpful, reaffirming and worth reading.

Chapter 8 – talks about a successful program called “Tools of the Mind” that is being used in preschools and kindergartens and helps young children master self-control. The teachers of the program ask children to come up with a written plan for the day followed by a lengthy fantasy play period. This program “is designed to encourage the early development of this Socratic consciousness, so that kids don’t just react impulsively in class, and they can willfully avoid distraction.” (167) Tools also involves a lot of student choice.

Tools of the Mind sounds a bit like Montessori and also like a style of learning called “active learning” I witnessed when I worked for the HighScope Educational Research Foundation. There, the preschoolers would base their day around a “plan-do-review” model which I think works well for ANY age group, in ANY educational setting.

Chapter 9 – says that “modern involved parenting should seem to result in a sea of well-mannered, nonaggressive kids” (182) but that some of the parenting we’re doing is detrimental, like letting kids watch many hours of “educational” TV programs like Arthur where a lot of the show is dedicated to setting up a conflict and only a few minutes at the end resolve the conflict. “Preschoolers have a difficult time being able to connect information at the end of the show to what happened earlier….[and] the “more educational media the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were.” (180)

OK, this was news to me, as was “watching educational television also increased the rate of physical aggression, almost as much as watching violent TV.” (181)

In this chapter they also talk about how it’s ok for children to see their parents argue as long as they also see the resolution of the argument. In fact, they claim, it’s healthier for them to see a resolved argument between parents than none at all.

Chapter 10 – says that Baby Einstein DVDs are basically worthless for helping babies learn language because babies must “learn from a live, human teacher.” (202) And, a “well-timed, loving caress” is just as important when communicating with your baby as is language. “How a parent responds to a child’s vocalizations…seems to be the most powerful mechanism pulling a child from babble to fluent speech.” (209)

Well, this doesn’t seem like a shocking discovery, but it’s good information for new parents and worth reading this chapter if you are curious about language development.

Even though I wasn't shocked by most of the findings in this book, I still recommend it.

Another California School District Revises its Homework Policy

I saw this in today's news about a Santa Monica school district. The more districts that rethink accepted homework practices, the better!

SM School Board Approves Revised Homework Policy

Hannah Heineman, Mirror Staff Writer

Homework assignments have always been part of the educational process for every student who attends school but sometimes questions arise about the amount of homework or the type of assignments that should be given. School Board members began grappling with these issues a year ago when they formed an ad hoc committee to help review, gather input, and craft an updated Board policy and administrative regulation on homework and makeup work. Committee members included parents, principals, and other District administrators. The revised homework/makeup work policy that was approved by the Board on October 1 noted that, “the latest research demonstrates that an optimal amount of homework has a positive impact on student achievement. The optimal amount of time students should spend on homework begins with 10 minutes a day in the first grade and increases by ten minutes per grade level, not to exceed a total of 120 minutes a day in the 12th grade of all classes combined. Research indicates that excessive homework may have a negative impact on students’ health and well-being. In particular, studies show that the health of students through 12th grade is compromised when there is insufficient time for at least nine hours of sleep and one hour of physical activity daily.” Prior to the vote, the Board heard from the broader educational community. PTA Council President Shari Davis expressed her organization’s full support for the revised policy. Parent Leslie Bochko voiced her support as well but emphasized the need for parents to be closely involved with the development of the individual homework plans that will be tailored to the individual school sites based on the policy. Bochko explained that, “homework just doesn’t effect the child that’s doing the work. It impacts the entire family.” Homework can diminish family time, leave less time for sports or the arts or cause “kids to have less time to just be kids.” Another parent, Debbie Bernstein who had been a member of the ad-hoc committee, echoed Bochko’s request that parents be involved with the development of the homework plan for each school site because this will give them “a chance to work with the teachers. We didn’t have a chance to do that as a committee and it’s important that we communicate with each other. The District’s homework policy was last updated in 1989.

The Importance of Play

Here are 3 paragraphs from a recent New York Times article called “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” By PAUL TOUGH

To read the whole article, go here.

Kindergarten:

“Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress,” warned a report released in March by a research group called the Alliance for Childhood, which is advised by some of the country’s most esteemed progressive-education scholars. There is now too much testing and too little free time, the report argues, and kids are being forced to try to read before they are ready. The solution, according to the report’s authors, is a return to ample doses of “unstructured play” in kindergarten. If kids are allowed to develop at their own paces, they will be happier and healthier and less stressed out. And there will still be plenty of time later on to learn how to read.

Check out The Alliance for Childhood and their recent report called Crisis in the Kindergarten. I once visited a Waldorf kindergarten and was so impressed at the simplicity of their kindergarten routines. The children were self-motivated, engaged, busy, exploring and happy. None of them were supposed to learn to read by the end of the year. Their day wasn’t divided into separate chunks of time for learning different subjects. They were baking, singing, chatting, playing make believe and fort building all day long. It was so soothing and refreshing and it felt so unhurried and developmentally appropriate.

Rewards and punishments:

In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried to improve children’s self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism, reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The message to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn’t control their impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers, was to train children by praising them for their positive self-control (“Look at how well Cindy is sitting!”) and criticizing them for their lapses. And in most American pre-kindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some form, is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those “external reinforcement systems” create “other-directed regulation” — good behavior done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of others, to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a kind of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting. Children learn only how to be obedient, how to follow orders, not how to understand and regulate their own impulses.

Alfie Kohn writes and lectures on rewards and punishments for both teachers and parents. Check out his books Punished by Rewards and Unconditional Parenting. I feel like there is too much rewarding done in classrooms across America. Children need to do something for the sake of doing it, not because they will get an extrinsic reward for completing a task. Only then will true motivation take place. Please, let’s stop the carrot and stick mentality! It’s so superficial and insulting to a student’s intelligence and ability.

Play vs. Work:

Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

Yes, why can’t play and work be fun? If school were more like summer camp and enrichment programs then students would have fun and enjoy working on their goals. Why do we separate school from fun? Why do most children remember field trips, friends and extra-curriculars fondly when they reminisce about school instead of remembering the subject matter they were supposed to have learned? We need to find students’ passions to help them learn what is engaging and give them a reason to work toward a goal. We need to stop telling them what their goals should be, but instead help them explore what it is that is both fun and work at the same time. Isn’t that the adult mantra -- love what you do, do what you love?

Life is not a multiple choice test.

I just finished reading "The Global Achievement Gap" by Tony Wagner.

I highly recommend this book.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

(xxi) Schools haven’t changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete – even the ones that score the best on standardized tests.

(xxiii) I have observed that the longer our children are in school, the less curious they become.

(xxv) Boredom continues to be a leading cause of our high school dropout rate.

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What business people say about new employees:

(2) I look for someone who asks good questions…I want people to engage in good discussion – who can look me in the eye.

(20) We’re looking for less linear thinking—people who can conceptualize but also synthesize a lot of data.

(26) Kids just out of school have an amazing lack of preparedness in general leadership skills and collaborative skills…They lack the ability to influence versus direct command…the only kind of leadership young people have…is one that relies on obedience versus the kind…demanded by…teams and networks.

(31) Today’s employees must adapt to change; they can’t be satisfied with the status quo…we look for employees who have a passion to embrace new ideas.

(111) In today’s world, it’s no longer how much you know that matters; it’s what you can do with what you know.

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More quotes from the book:

(7) The [AP] kids…don’t know how to observe. I ask them to describe what they see in the microscopes, and they want to know what they should be looking for – what the right answer is.

(9) While No Child Left Behind was well intended, its implementation is, in fact, putting all of our children further behind in acquiring the new survival skills for learning, work, and citizenship.

(17) Schools need to let kids be much more curious instead of learning to pass tests…Throw out the textbooks! We’re getting what we measure, but we’re measuring the wrong things.

(34) The skills needed to be a successful knowledge worker today continue to evolve and grow in importance everywhere – except in our schools.

(47) Sure, sports are important, but why don’t we see more public celebrations of academic achievement in our high schools?

(75) If we do not allow our students to ask why, but just keep on telling them how, then we are only going to get the transactional type of outsourcing, not the high-end things that require complex interactions and judgment to understand another person’s needs.

(91) Knowledge of mathematics did not even make the top-ten list of the skills employers deemed most important.

(93) We keep hearing that all students need more math and science courses, but I believe that all students need more engaging and relevant math and science courses.

(98) Did you know there are now over 750 colleges and universities that do not rely on either the SAT or the ACT to make most of their admissions decisions?

(105-6) AP courses were originally designed in the 1950s as a way for the most academically advanced students to take a college-level course while still in high school…[Now] too many students who have passed AP exams lack either the academic skills or the depth of understanding required for true college-level work.

(113) A hidden cost of the teaching and testing that dominates high schools today is its negative impact on student motivation to learn for pleasure or even to continue in school at all.

(115) Life is not a multiple choice test.

(115-6) The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is an open-ended, ninety-minute performance assessment…to solve real-world problems…the CLA is less than half the cost of an AP exam—or about $40 per student—and so there is no reason public schools couldn’t use this test as a way of determining whether their students are college-ready. [see: http://www.collegiatelearningassessment.org/]

(123) Go in and watch some of our teachers teach writing. And it would make your hair curl. Very formulaic and incredibly repetitive so as the drum any glint of creativity from a child’s heart.

(124) Factual recall tests are also about ten times cheaper to develop and to score – which is another obvious reason for their popularity with state legistlators.

(128) If your goal is to improve student learning – and that is the only goal that really matters—the first problem that you have to work on is to improve teaching and the coaching of teachers.

(142) I truly believe that viewing and discussing videos of teaching and supervision is the single most effective strategy for improving instruction for all schools; yet it is almost never done.

(146) Studies show that nearly one in two teachers who start out in the classroom leave after just five years…the national cost of this teacher dropout problem is over $7 billion dollars a year.

(154) There are wonderful and effective teachers in every school across the country…but these teachers and schools are the exception—what I call the random acts of excellence in a system that is more frequently characterized by mediocrity—through no fault of the majority of teachers and administrators who want to make a difference in students’ lives.

(162) I realized that just because teachers were using research-based strategies and providing a quality learning environment, they weren’t necessarily engaging students in using their minds well.

(170) These kids can do amazing things when you build the learning around what interests them.

(175) Continuous partial attention [ie, multitasking with technology] describes how many of us use our attention today…we want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.

(178) Students are increasingly impatient with the lecture style of learning and the reliance on textbooks…and crave more class discussions.

(179) The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian—to know how to navigate through…complex information spaces…Navigation may well be the main form of literacy for the 21^st century.

(180) Web surfing fuses learning and entertainment, creating infotainment.

(181) [The Web] is a vast and ever-expanding palate for personal creativity and self-expression—especially for young people growing up today.

(187) What is needed…is an older generation that better understands what drives the younger generation and has learned how best to harness and focus its energies.

(188) The older generation defined itself by what they wear and own; this generation [the Net Generation] defines itself by what it creates and co-creates with others, and others build on.

(190) School is boring for kids today because it hasn’t caught up with what kids can do outside of school.

(194) You have to make the work more interesting and allow [the kids] to work in different ways. They are prepared to work just as much and just as hard—but not at a desk eight hours a day.

(194) [Young people] bring a lot to the table…they can connect in new ways, they collaborate, they are visual learners, and they have great spatial awareness…Put them in teams with traditional workers where they can learn from each other.

(199-200) The overwhelming majority of students today…want to be challenged…they want to know why they are being asked to learn something. They want learning to be an end in itself—rather than a means to the end of boosting test scores.

(205) Young people who have discovered their passion are far more likely to have the will and discipline to learn and do the difficult things that school and work often require.

(210) Rigor is being in the company of a thoughtful, passionate, reflective adult who invites you into an adult conversation which is composed of the rigorous pursuit of inquiry.

Examples of schools that work:

1. High Tech High Schools in San Diego County: http://www.hightechhigh.org/

2. Big Picture Schools: http://www.bigpicture.org/

3. Coalition of Essential Schools: http://www.essentialschools.org/

Tony Wagner’s 7 Survival Skills for Teens Today

(ie, what schools should be teaching & what kids should be learning):

1. Critical thinking & problem solving

2. Collaboration and leading by influence

3. Agility and adaptability

4. Initiative and entrepreneurialism

5. Effective oral and written communication

6. Accessing and analyzing information

7. Curiosity and imagination

Obama’s Extended School Year Plan

You can read about Obama’s thoughts on extending the school year here from a recent Comcast.net News report.

“…the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom," says Obama.

I say the challenges of a new century demand better time in the classroom.

“Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

"Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Duncan told the AP. "I want to just level the playing field."

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it's not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).”

I say let’s stop counting and comparing hours or days in school and start concentrating on the quality of instruction here in our public and private schools. Let’s also stop trying to compete with other countries but focus on learning how to cooperate with and work with others both here and abroad to meet the demands of a new, global century.

NASA is a good example of a program that integrates great minds from different cultures to work on common goals. Right now if you Google the International Space Station, you can see who is on it -- crew members from Russia, the U.S, Belgium, and British Columbia. Ten people from different parts of the world all working together.

The international space station is one good example of what can be accomplished when people from different nations come together and work on a shared interest. I'd like to see more of this kind of cooperative learning in our classrooms. Learning that really promotes and encourages working in a team instead of competing against others. It's not easy to work in a team, but it's important that we teach our kids how to do it well if we want to live and thrive in a global world.

But teamwork isn't the only thing that needs to change in public education. I think President Obama should focus on redefining the quality of instruction, instead of focusing on the amount of time kids are in school. If he asked me, this is the list I’d give him to meet the challenges of a new century in our public schools. I call it the G.P.S. - Guidelines for Public Schools:

· Fewer rewards & punishments – get rid of the carrot & stick mentality

· Teacher as guide, not expert – the "Guide on the Side," not the "Sage on the Stage" idea

· Student-centered curriculum – student interests & choices before teacher & curriculum mandates (find student passions & explore them)

· Change short subject chunks of time into large projects & themes that involve all disciplines

· Minimize competition – get rid of awards & honors/advanced classes, no tracking – all abilities should be together (unless severely special ed)

· Promote true cooperation and sense of working together among students and teachers

· Mix age groups (to learn from each other)

· Homework is the exception, not the rule (and only when it is meaningful & turns the students on to learning)

· Grading doesn’t exist in elementary & middle school

· Standardized testing doesn’t begin until high school, and then only minimally

· Assessments are performance based and not standards based

· Give as much time & money to the arts as to the traditional subjects like math, science & history

· Incorporate vocational & technology training into high school years

· No federal mandates tied to money, just federal guidelines or suggestions

· Give parents more choice in where to send their children to school

Why do kids love summer so much? Because it’s more enjoyable than school! If school were as interesting and fun as summer, kids, parents and teachers wouldn’t mind a longer year. See my earlier post about summer camp learning.

Your thoughts on Obama’s longer school day? Take the "Diablo" Magazine poll at: http://www.diablomag.com/