Homework: The useful and the useless
We’ve come a long way from the 1930s, when the American Child Health Association put homework next to child labor as a leading cause of child deaths from tuberculosis and heart disease.
Yet the value — or lack thereof — of homework never seems to go away. The issue has been raised anew by a story on the front page of the New York Times about a number of school systems around the country that are either reevaluating their homework policies or have already found new, less stressful ways of giving kids work to do after school.
Read full article >>The 12 qualities great teachers share
It’s the question of the year: What makes a great teacher?
Here’s one effort to sort out the qualities that all great teachers have. I suspect that any effort to create a definitive list is doomed to fail because great teachers are as different as the students they teach.
But here’s a list to start, and please write what you think is missing. This was written by Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. A version of this appeared on his website, Practical Theory. He wrote this some years ago when he was teaching at Beacon School, a progressive public high school in Manhattan.
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