Spring Lake Park High School Principals Blog

Greetings,

Soon we will be starting to discuss next years budget.  This will prove to be a challenging process.  As a district we could be looking at finding a way to save up to 2.2 million for next year and another 2 million the year after.

For our high school we will need to have discussions with staff, students and parents about what that means for us.  It will be important to look at and have in-depth discussions about learning, staffing, programming and our schedule.  This will no doubt be difficult but is needed to ensure that we will continue to provide the tools our students will need as they enter into the global economy.

I welcome your thoughts, ideas and input as we go through this process. Please visit our district website for more information. www.springlakeparkschools.org

Greetings all,

 Homework has a rightful place and is an important part within the assessment plan of student learning. However, let’s also make clear that we need to shift the majority of this work to be in the assessment for learning sphere.  This in general means that we cannot assess and report on a students learning by using homework other than its intended purpose.  This is having it as a way for a student to practice, reflect and develop and for the teacher to use it as reinforcement for what was taught and as a check-in to see if the student is getting it.  Many times homework is devalued by:

1. Using homework as an extension of learning beyond the classroom
2. Teaching responsibility
3. Thinking that more homework is a sign of rigor

In dong this we lose the fidelity of achievement because we can’t determine if the student really did learn the target we intended the student to grasp.

We as educators often make incorrect assumptions about homework. Vatterott(2009) in Rethinking Homework wrote that if we truly want to take into consideration the equity, fidelity and the socio-economic factors when we are assigning homework, the following advice is followed (Payne, 2008):

• Do not assume the child has a quiet place to do homework.
• Do not assume the child has a parent home in the evening.
• Do not assume the child’s parents speak and read English.
• Do not assume the family has money for school supplies.
• Do not assume the child has access to material such as the internet, paper, magazines and other research resources.
• Do not assume the child has time in the evening to do the homework.
• Do not assume the child understood what was taught in class which then how can they expect to complete the assignment?

So to wrap up, what is the recommendation from those that have spent time on this?  Not only do they report on this but I see this in practice by many of our teachers’ here at Spring Lake Park High School. We also see this as an expectation we have moved to since we started down this journey of following our Learning Community Framework:

• Assign reasonable amounts of homework (high school should be no more than 10min. per grade level according to the National Education Association).
• Differentiate homework for individual needs.
• Be sensitive about the limitations of home environments.
• Accept that not all students can or will work at home.
• Remove failure as an option by minimizing the weight of homework on the final grade or eliminating the grading of homework.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

I’m excited to start this new blog as another form of trying to communicate.  Please visit this page at least weekly for updates and other information that may be helpful to the members of our school communtiy.  I also encourage you that if you have any comments please feel free to post them here.

Frank Herman, principal Spring Lake Park School