BC Education

This morning, I heard on radio news that President of BC Teacher Federation has announced to "not give out homeworks to kids that are under grade 4 to let them enjoy being a kid."

Im not sure how everyone thinks about this, but personally, I am shocked to hear because as we learned in psyc, kid's brains are easier and faster to absorb knowledge, and by not giving out homework, the only benefit I see is for the teachers who don't need to correct them.

I've did a search on just education and homework in general on google, and interestingly, this is what I got.


We're told to go easy on students, B.C. teachers say

Professionalism being undermined by policy that is ‘dumbing down’ public education

By Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver SunMarch 15, 2009Comments (101)
StoryPhotos ( 1 )


Professionalism is being undermined by a policy that is ‘dumbing down’ public education.
Photograph by: ., CNS filesTeachers complained Sunday that school principals are ordering them to never give zeros when marking class assignments, to accept late work and to allow students to rewrite tests as many times as it takes for them to get good marks.

Such orders are being delivered in many schools around the province by principals who have embraced a program called Assessment for Learning, and it’s undermining teachers’ professional autonomy in the classroom, delegates said at the annual meeting of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.

“When principals say you have to retest over and over and over again, that is a violation of professional autonomy,” Burnaby teacher James Sanyshyn told delegates at the three-day meeting.

It’s as though B.C. principals recently attended a “can’t-give-a-kid-a-zero conference,” another delegate added.

Some warned that the imposition of top-down assessment practices is “dumbing down” public education and will ultimately result in more families turning to private schools.

Burnaby delegates were particularly incensed, saying teachers are in the best position to evaluate student performance and they should decide what assessment tools they will use. The BCTF says principals are using Assessment for Learning to boost student performance and graduation rates in their schools.

It’s being presented as a cure-all and a best practice, Burnaby teacher Frank Bonvino said, adding: “It’s good that these new theories are being discussed . . . but it’s got to be up to the individual teacher to decide how or if or when they’re going to implement these things in their classroom.

“Sometimes when I hear administrators talk about best practices, I think . . . that’s just a buzzword they use for teachers’ autonomy is going to get screwed,” he stated. “At the end of the day you have to have control and you have to be comfortable with what you’re going to teach in the classroom.”

Union vice-president Susan Lambert said student assessment has become a political issue in schools because of standardized tests and a requirement for schools to show continual improvement in student achievement. “There’s huge pressure on [principals],” she said. “You set a goal for your school and if you don’t meet that goal you’re seen as a failing principal.”

Delegates also approved plans for an aggressive, year-round media campaign to promote public education over private education and to increase pressure for more public-school funding.

But creative action must be the priority leading up to the May 12 provincial election if teachers hope to make education a vote-determining issue, union president Irene Lanzinger told delegates. That’s because the government’s so-called “gag law” restricts advertising by the BCTF and all other third parties.

“We need to make news, use new technologies and engage our members like never before,” said Lanzinger, who is unopposed in her bid for a third one-year term as president. “We all need to make sure the public and our members know how important this election is.”

Delegates plan to protest today in downtown Vancouver. Lanzinger urged teachers to continue with the effort that resulted in the election in November of many trustees who are willing to challenge the Liberal government — notably in Vancouver and the Comox Valley.


jsteffenhagen@vancouversun.com

http://www.vancouversun.com/News/told+easy...2821/story.html

This post has been edited by 黑兒 on Mar 17 2009, 08:22 AM

*credit from BC teacher federation website

Down with homework!
By Alfie Kohn

After spending most of the day in school, students are given additional assignments to be completed at home. This is a rather curious fact when you stop to think about it, but not as curious as the fact that few of us ever stop to think about it. It’s worth asking not only whether there are good reasons to support the nearly universal practice of assigning homework, but why it’s so often taken for granted—even by vast numbers of teachers and parents who are troubled by its impact on children.

The mystery deepens once you discover that widespread assumptions about the benefits of homework—higher achievement and the promotion of such virtues as self-discipline and responsibility—are not substantiated by the available evidence.

The status quo
Taking homework for granted would be understandable if most teachers decided from time to time that a certain lesson really needed to continue after school was over and, therefore, assigned students to read, write, figure out, or do something at home on those afternoons.

That scenario, however, bears no relation to what happens in most American schools. Rather, the point of departure seems to be, "We’ve decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week). Later on, we’ll figure out what to make them do." This commitment to the idea of homework in the abstract is accepted by the overwhelming majority of schools—public and private, elementary and secondary. And it really doesn’t make sense, in part because of what the research shows:

There is no evidence to demonstrate that homework benefits students below high-school age. Even if you regard standardized test results as a useful measure (which I don’t), more homework isn’t correlated with higher scores for children in elementary school. The only effect that does show up is less positive attitudes on the part of kids who get more assignments.
In secondary school, some studies do find a relationship between homework and test scores, but it tends to be small. More important, there’s no reason to think that higher achievement is caused by the homework.
No study has ever confirmed the widely accepted assumption that homework yields non-academic benefits—self-discipline, independence, perseverance, or better time-management skills—for students of any age. The idea that homework builds character or improves study skills is basically a myth.
Overtime in first grade
In short, there’s no reason to think that most students would be at a disadvantage if homework were reduced or even eliminated. Yet the most striking trend in the past two decades has been the tendency to pile more and more assignments on younger and younger children. (Remember, that’s the age at which the benefits are most questionable, if not absent!)

Even school districts that had an unofficial custom not so long ago of waiting until the third grade before giving homework have abandoned that restraint. A long-term national survey discovered that the proportion of six- to eight-year-old children who reported having homework on a given day had climbed from 34% in 1981 to 64% in 2002, and the weekly time they spent studying at home more than doubled.

In fact, homework is even "becoming a routine part of the Kindergarten experience," according to a 2004 report.

The negative effects
It’s hard to deny that an awful lot of homework is exceptionally trying for an awful lot of children. Some are better able than others to handle the pressure of keeping up with a continuous flow of work, getting it all done on time, and turning out products that will meet with approval. Likewise, some assignments are less unpleasant than others. But in general, as one parent put it, homework simultaneously "overwhelms struggling kids and removes joy for high achievers." Even reading for pleasure loses its appeal when children are told how much, or for how long, they must do it.

Even as they accept homework as inevitable, parents consistently report that it intrudes on family life. Many mothers and fathers spend every evening serving as homework monitors, a position for which they never applied. One professor of education, Gary Natriello at Columbia University, believed in the value of homework until his "own children started bringing home assignments in elementary school." Even "the routine tasks sometimes carry directions that are difficult for two parents with advanced graduate degrees to understand," he discovered.

What’s bad for parents is generally worse for kids. "School for [my son] is work," one mother writes, "and by the end of a seven-hour workday, he’s exhausted. But like a worker on a double shift, he has to keep going" once he gets home. Exhaustion is just part of the problem, though. The psychological costs can be substantial for a child who not only is confused by a worksheet on long vowels or subtraction but also finds it hard to accept the whole idea of sitting still after school to do more schoolwork.

Furthermore, every unpleasant adjective that could be attached to homework—time-consuming, disruptive, stressful, demoralizing—applies with greater force in the case of kids for whom academic learning doesn’t come easily. Curt Dudley-Marling, a former elementary school teacher who is now a professor at Boston College, interviewed some two dozen families that included at least one struggling learner. In describing his findings, he talked about how "the demands of homework disrupted... family relationships" and led to daily stress and conflict.

The "nearly intolerable burden" imposed by homework was partly a result of how defeated such children felt, he added—how they invested hours without much to show for it; how parents felt frustrated when they pushed the child but also when they didn’t push, when they helped with the homework but also when they refrained from helping. "You end up ruining the relationship that you have with your kid," one father told him.

And don’t forget: The idea that it is all worth it because homework helps children learn better simply isn’t true. There’s little pro to weigh against the significant cons.

Playtime matters
On top of causing stress, more homework means kids have less time for other activities. There’s less opportunity for the kind of learning that doesn’t involve traditional skills. There’s less chance to read for pleasure, make friends, play games, get some exercise, get some rest, or just be a child.

Decades ago, the American Educational Research Association released this statement: "Whenever homework crowds out social experience, outdoor recreation, and creative activities, and whenever it usurps time that should be devoted to sleep, it is not meeting the basic needs of children and adolescents." It is the rare school that respects the value of those activities—to the point of making sure that its policies are informed by that respect. But some courageous teachers and innovative schools are taking up the challenge.

A new approach
There is no traditional homework at the Bellwether School in Williston, Vermont, except when the children ask for it or "are so excited about a project that they continue to work on it at home," says Marta Beede, the school’s top administrator. "We encourage children to read at home—books they have selected." She and her colleagues figure that kids "work really hard when they’re at school. To then say that they’re going to have to work more when they get home doesn’t seem to honour how much energy they were expending during the day."

Teachers ought to be able to exercise their judgment in determining how they want to deal with homework, taking account of the needs and preferences of the specific children in their classrooms, rather than having to conform to a fixed policy that has been imposed on them.

High-school teacher Leslie Frothingham watched her own two children struggle with enormous quantities of homework in middle school. The value of it never seemed clear to her. "What other ‘job’ is there where you work all day, come home, have dinner, then work all night," she asks, "unless you’re some type-A attorney? It’s not a good way to live one’s life. You miss out on self-reflection, community." Thus, when she became a teacher, she chose to have a no-homework policy.

And if her advanced chemistry students are thriving academically without homework, which they are, surely we can rethink our policies in the younger grades.

Alfie Kohn is the author of The Homework Myth.

http://bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle...e.aspx?id=14902

This post has been edited by 黑兒 on Mar 17 2009, 08:23 AM

just to add: BCTF had refused and boycotted to administer provincial tests like Foundation Skills Assessment in January, which in Feb they were ordered by B.C. Labour Relations Board to end the boycott because it is their "primary duty" to do so.

original text:

B.C. teachers ordered to end boycott of FSA tests


By Janet Steffenhagen and Catherine Rolfsen, Vancouver SunFebruary 2, 2009Comments (57)
StoryPhotos ( 1 )

Grade 7 students at Corpus Christi School write their Foundation Skills Assessment test.Photograph by: Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun filesThe BC Teachers’ Federation had not yet decided Monday evening whether it would obey a Labour Relations Board order to end a boycott of provincial tests in reading, writing and math.

BCTF president Irene Lanzinger said her executive was meeting Monday night and BCTF locals would hold meetings with teachers today to discuss their next actions in the ongoing dispute over the controversial Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) tests.

“We have very strong teachers in this province and they feel very strongly about this issue and I’m sure they’ll have lots to say to us about what the next steps will be,” Lanzinger said, adding that she hoped a decision would be reached by Wednesday.

Labour Relations Board vice-chairwoman Lisa Southern gave the teachers’ union until 4 p.m. Wednesday to tell its members that the boycott is cancelled.

“I find that administering /supervising the FSA tests is prima facie work which teachers are obligated to perform,” Southern wrote in her decision, released Monday afternoon following a three-hour hearing.

She said the ruling will mean “business as usual” for schools that are required to deliver the tests to Grade 4 and 7 students this month.

The BC Public School Employers’ Association brought the case to the board, saying the tests are required work and any boycott amounts to an illegal strike.

Employers’ association CEO Hugh Finlayson said Monday the ruling was clear and he expected teachers to follow it.

“It’s not a choice for us or a choice for the BCTF to follow their ruling, it’s an obligation, a legal requirement, to follow the rulings,” Finlayson said. “And we would expect that the BCTF will ... direct its members” to do so.

Finlayson said he didn’t want to speculate about what might happen if the BCTF or individual teachers continue to boycott the test.

Education Minister Shirley Bond said she had offered to meet “education partners” — including the BCTF — to discuss improvements to the FSA including proposals based on a testing model in Ontario.

But until such policy talks can bring about change, the 2009 FSA must proceed, she said.

“We expect teachers to do that work,” she said in an interview. “The FSA is going to continue to be done in this province.

“We all respect the work that teachers do and this is also very difficult on them,” Bond said, noting that teachers have been getting conflicting messages about whether they must administer the tests, with government saying yes, but their union saying no.

Lanzinger said she was disappointed by the ruling.

“This test takes an enormous amount of time away from kids’ learning in February, and we made the argument that it’s within our professional autonomy rights to decide what happens in our classroom in terms of instruction and curriculum and assessment,” she said.

During the hearing, BCTF lawyer John Hodgins said any order forcing teachers to administer tests that they believe are useless and potentially damaging would be “an insult to (their) professional dignity” and cause irreparable harm.

Hodgins asked the board not to issue any orders but to refer the matter to arbitration so the language of the contract could be interpreted.

But Chris Leenheer, lawyer for the employers’ association, said the fact that teachers have opposed the FSA since it was introduced in 2000, but administered the tests anyway, shows they accepted the tests as part of their workload.

BCTF members voted in favour of the boycott in December.

jsteffenhagen@vancouversun.com, crolfsen@vancouversun.com

© Copyright © The Vancouver Sun

http://www.vancouversun.com/teachers+order...5664/story.html

only have the time to read the first part...
just want to comment on "never give a 0 mark to assignment"

I think this make sense.
if a teacher just gives a 0 mark and give it back to the kid
一個小孩拿了零分又代表了什麼
代表沒學到東西? 代表老師沒教好?
不管代表什麼, 如果給了成績就不用重寫, then at the end of the day, or, at the end of the year, is this actually helping the kid?
如果需要重寫, 那第一次不管有沒有給0分就都毫無意義了
所以要給零分到不如什麼分數都不要給

One should look at this in many aspects.
As a tutor for 2 years and as a student for many years, I haven't seen a 0 on any work, so "can't give a child zero" policy has actually already been exercising. But let's think about what are the circumstances that a teacher has to give a zero?
1. Turn in a blank hw?
2. Turn in a blank test? Or did not study test so did not get anything right?

I strongly believe in encouraging the students to do better, but if the students come to abuse the system in future by throwing out "hey you can't give me a zero! At least I tried!" How can a teacher really perform his/her job as a teacher?

Anyways, please read on, this policy is not the main point why i post this on here~