TLN Teacher Voices

A Book for Any Teacher with ELL Students

Teaching English Language Learners Across the Content Areas
By Judie Haynes and Debbie Zacarian
(ASCD, 2010)

Reviewed by Julie Dermody, NBCT
Elementary ESL Teacher (NC)
Teacher Leaders Network

As an English as a Second Language (ESL) Teacher, I felt like I was attending church services while reading this book as I wanted to shout out, “Amen” to the suggestions the authors make in supporting K-12 English Language Learners (ELLs) in the content areas. This is a book I want to put into the hands of teachers in my district as they work to ensure their lessons are comprehensible for the growing number of ELLs within our classrooms.

As they share real-life examples from elementary, middle and high school classrooms, readers get a sense of modifications (some small and some more extensive) that can make a big impact on ELLs’ learning and success. While the elementary teacher in me wanted this book to focus more on elementary classroom examples, it is easy to understand how the middle and high school scenarios would apply to elementary situations (and vice versa).

This book is organized around strategies for working with ELLs in the content areas. The strategies support teachers as they are: developing classroom learning environments, writing lesson plans, planning small group instruction, teaching vocabulary, designing reading and writing instruction, assigning homework and developing assessments, and communicating with the parents of our ELL students.

The authors start by sharing the stages of second-language acquisition. This is critical knowledge to have of ELLs since classroom lessons need to complement the stage of a student’s English.

Throughout the book, the authors remind readers that while some teachers may feel an ELL is competent in English because their listening and speaking skills are strong, the capacity to do ordinary classroom work in English includes the ability to “communicate appropriately in social and academic situations by listening, speaking, reading, and writing.”

The authors address these four abilities across content areas. For example, through a middle school math lesson we see how teachers can help ELLs develop all four skills by writing and reviewing lesson objectives; writing and exploring key vocabulary; modeling expectations; providing practice opportunities; using pairs of students to support each other; drawing from students’ lives to create activities; making sure to ask questions that match levels of English proficiency; observing students during each task; having the students provide feedback as a way to check for understanding; and assigning homework that relates directly to the day’s lesson, engages family members, and includes sentence frames for academic vocabulary support.

Communicating with parents of ELLs is often difficult when translators need to be contacted for every note and newsletter teachers want to send — or for notes received from parents. The chapter in this book dealing with parent communication offers many excellent suggestions, especially when working with a translator. For example, they suggest doubling the length of the conference time to account for the extra time translation takes, speaking in uncomplicated sentences, and speaking directly to the parents, not the translator.

A home language survey is included at the end of this book. I do wish the authors provided this form in Spanish also.

Recently, USA Today published some revealing facts about the American kindergarten class of 2010-11. They report that about 25% of 5-year-olds are Hispanic, a big jump from 19% in 2000. They also report that schools face “linguistic challenges” as the number of 5-year-olds who speak English at home slipped from 81% in 2000 to about 78%, and the share of Spanish speakers in the U.S. grew from 14% to 16%.

Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative at the non-profit New American Foundation, told USAToday that, “we really have a long way to go before we understand what the best methods are” for supporting second language learners. One place to start would be to provide a copy of this book to educators across the country.

Julie Dermody teaches English Language Learners at McDougle Elementary in the Chapel Hill (NC) Public Schools. She recently renewed her National Board Certification (Middle Childhood/Generalist). She reviewed an earlier book by Judie Haynes here.

Expert Advice about Parent Engagement: An Interview with Larry Ferlazzo

The ever-resourceful Larry Ferlazzo joined the Teacher Leaders Network in 2008, to our great benefit. Larry was already well-established as a leading edu-blogger, widely known for his daily outpouring of useful (most often web-based) teaching ideas and resources. Larry entered the blogging arena with a tight focus on English Language Learners – a focus he still maintains – but gradually broadened his output to include many other topics, including one close to his heart: parent and community relationships.

Larry’s “first career” as a community organizer in the labor arena has made him not only a passionate but an authoritative advocate for school programs that work to ENGAGE rather than simply INVOLVE families. His long-time interest led to the publication of his first book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, co-authored by Lorie Hammond, a former middle school ESL teacher with a special interest in school-community gardens, who is now a professor at California State University-Sacramento.

In support of their book, Larry has developed a new blogging site focused specifically on engaging parents in schools. He teaches Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced English Language Learners (as well as native English speakers) at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California. In this interview, we talk about his parent engagement ideas and also learn about his upcoming books — one on teaching strategies that work with English language learners, and another (smiling) on everything else.

— John Norton, TLN co-founder and moderator

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Larry, it's fairly rare in my experience to find a teacher writing a book about working closely with parents. More often I've seen this kind of advocacy coming from reformers in the outside community who believe schools haven't been responsive enough to parents and families. Why did you feel compelled to write it?

Part of the reason I wrote it is because during my 19-year community organizing career prior to becoming a teacher my primary work with schools was through parents — parents who were working to improve their neighborhoods and their local schools. That experience grounded me in believing that "no school is an island" — that in order for schools to be successful they need to be connected to local residents, and for a neighborhood to be successful, it needs to be connected to the local schools.

As a teacher in a challenging inner-city high school, I can understand how many teachers and administrators feel that engaging with parents in a substantial way is just one more thing that they might not have time to do. I wrote the book to illustrate that, in fact, it can be done with less time that they think and get a bigger "pay-off" — for the parents, teachers, and students — than they could imagine.

How did your background shape your own parent interactions as a teacher?

My current perspectives come out of my direct experience as a teacher participating in the initiatives discussed in the book. After doing thousands of home visits as a community organizer, when I changed careers I naturally gravitated to making home visits to parents of my students. While I was doing them, I was able to use my organizing experience to connect to parents and help them use their energy to initiate projects that benefited everybody. For example, in one of my visits with a recent Hmong immigrant family, the father explained how impressed he was with our use of computers to help teach his daughter, and how he wished they could have a computer and the Internet at their home so he could use it to learn English, too. He shared that he couldn't get a drivers license because he needed to read English in order to pass the test, and the local bus system was not very good so it was difficult to attend adult school. 

I asked him if he thought other parents would share the same concern and, if so, would he be willing to organize a meeting. He agreed, and out of that we were able to develop a family literacy project that provides computers and home internet access to immigrant families so the entire household can improve their English.  Students in the program have averaged improvements in English assessments that are four times greater than those in a control group, and the project was named by the International Reading Association two years ago as the best example of using technology to teach reading — in the entire world.

This whole effort came out of the organizing process of listening to stories; helping people connect to others with the same story; helping them to develop a different interpretation of it and developing a plan to respond to it; and then putting it into action.
 
Who do you imagine to be good audiences for the book?

I think parents, administrators, teachers, and teachers-in-training might find this book useful. It's designed as a book very busy people can read quickly. I also think the framework of parent involvement versus parent engagement can easily be adapted to other aspects of community, school, and organization work.
 
You make a clear distinction in the book between what schools (and many PTO members) have traditionally called "parent involvement" and the more powerful descriptor "parent engagement." School leaders often complain about the difficulty in achieving "involvement." Might they have more success with "engagement" in your opinion?

Prior to becoming a community organizer, I ran soup kitchens and emergency shelters on Skid Rows. One day, as I was sweeping our front porch, a police officer pulled up and started yelling at me because we weren't controlling things too well — there were lot of complaints from neighbors.  One man who had passed out in front of our soup kitchen got up and told the policeman, "Officer, Larry tries. He tries hard. We just don't listen to him!"

We can continue to say what people should be doing (as I was doing back then) and feel frustrated about them not responding (as I often felt back then). In other words, we can continue to be "right."  Or, we can look at different ways of doing things and try them out. In other words, we could try to be "effective."

I explain in my response to your next question how I view involvement as different from engagement. I think using the engagement criteria can have far greater results than involvement, and it sure can't be any worse!
 

Reviews: Caring Teachers and Confident Students

Teaching as an Act of Love
by Richard Lakin
(iUniverse, 2009)

The Complete Guide to the Gap Year
by Kristin M. White
(Jossey-Bass, 2009)

Reviewed by David B. Cohen, NBCT
High School English & Counseling (CA)
Teacher Leaders Network

Newspapers (for those of us who still read them) and online reports provide a steady flow of stories that might induce stress in teachers and students. I find I can immerse myself in this constant stream and become dizzy — or step aside and feel marginalized when the education policy conversation is dominated by talk of data systems, national standards, and racing to the top without leaving a single child behind.

Meanwhile, the juniors and seniors I advise at my high school, and their families, are looking at the spiraling costs for public and private higher education and reacting with anxiety as they hear about increasing competition in college admissions.

With that backdrop, I’m glad I took the time to read a pair of books that were recently sent to me. Richard Lakin is a former teacher and principal whose self-published collection of anecdotes and reflections seems almost provocatively titled in this educational climate. Teaching as an Act of Love (iUniverse) provides a variety of vignettes and affirmations that span 40 years of educational experience. For the high school student and family, Kristin M. White’s The Complete Guide to the Gap Year (Jossey-Bass) provides plenty of information and resources to encourage students to look into other options besides heading straight to college after high school — options that can lead to greater confidence and maturity.

It’s sad to think how it almost seems trivial, if not frivolous, to talk about caring or love in education today. Richard Lakin challenges this trend toward emotional detachment in education by illustrating what teachers know and what so few non-teaching education reformers seem to realize: When relationships of caring and trust are in place, pedagogy and curriculum are much more likely to achieve the results that reformers demand. Without those relationships, there is no perfect system, no foolproof textbook or software, no scripted curriculum that will yield the broad and lasting effects we all want for our youngest citizens.

The bulk of Lakin’s book focuses on his experiences as an elementary school principal. His approach to problem solving and school improvement featured an admirable balance of practicality and humility. Small stories about seemingly inconsequential matters like a class pet may seem uninspiring at a glance, but as the parent of a third-grader and a first-grader, I am often reminded that Carmel the Guinea Pig and Jake the Snake figure much more prominently in my sons’ minds than do any state standards or publishers’ pacing guides. Thus, when Lakin describes how he negotiated with students and their teacher to reach a mutually acceptable solution to a problem with pet mice, we can see the benefits that follow from his willingness to change his mind and to consider the children’s feelings as a relevant factor in running a school. Lakin continuously asserts that his success in this situation — and in the larger context of promoting goals like conflict resolution and school literacy — came not from having guidelines or standards that were handed down “from the office,” but from remaining faithful to a belief that we must educate from the heart.

Lakin’s commitment to parent-school partnerships also resonates. He recounts the efforts that went into transforming a school culture of distrust into one of caring and communication. After describing what it took to be successful — detailing both the improvements and a few mistakes along the way — he concludes by noting that the effort took three to four years before really taking hold.

I paused for a few minutes after this chapter and reflected on the current climate I see and hear about in education. First of all, in those three to four years, many of our struggling urban and rural schools might see more than a 50 percent turnover in staff and families. Yet we know that building trust depends largely on stability. Secondly, I’m concerned that our systemic obsession with data actually becomes an obstacle to trust. While it is true that we must rely on more than feelings to measure educational outcomes, my trust in a school or teacher is rooted in my belief that they know more about my child than his test scores. When we churn through teaching staff and make a fetish of test scores, we do not arrive at a system that knows and cares about children as people.

The rush to college

Fast forward eight to ten years, and you’re looking at high school graduation. If you know any college-bound high school seniors, or remember being one, you know that there are three questions that dominate the senior year — questions that you may not want to ask but can’t help yourself. Where are you applying? Where did you get in? Where are you going?

I wish more of our high school seniors were able to subvert this ritual of interrogation by answering those questions in unpredictable ways. To help out, I’ll be recommending Kristin M. White’s book on gap-year programs. Maybe we’ll start hearing: “I’m spending a year in AmeriCorps to support local non-profit groups and gain some job skills.” Or, “I’m going to do a field research expedition in Brazil.” Or perhaps, “I’ll be earning credits at Portland State, but living, working, and studying in East Africa.”

For most students and parents, the idea of a gap year between high school and a traditional college experience is relatively new and full of uncertainty. White is an experienced academic advisor and counselor, and her book provides a concise examination of the reasons to take a gap year, and many different ways to go about it, depending upon the student’s goals, personality, and financial situation.

White has anticipated all of the main concerns that I would have and would expect to hear from students and parents. She cautions that a gap year is ideally not a “year off” to hang out or to travel without some aim, purpose, or structure. But what if students lose academic momentum and be less successful in college, or not even return? Will colleges let a recently admitted student defer matriculation? Will admissions offices look favorably on applicants who have taken a year off?

White supplies ample information to reassure readers on every count. The book is full of positive comments from students, parents, gap-year program staff, college admissions staff and instructors. As one of her final thoughts, White offers that “I never came across anyone who expressed regret over doing a gap year. Even students who had a traveling disaster or a challenge abroad or went on a program with a difficult community service all reflected on their year positively.”

Parents seem to be the main group in need of some convincing. After all, she writes, “Parents have spent the last eighteen years saving and sacrificing for their child’s college education. They have evaluated every cultural and extracurricular opportunity with a view toward college. They may even feel that their success as parents is measured by their child’s acceptance (or lack of acceptance) to a good college.” This particular comment seems aimed at a particular demographic – middle and upper-class families – but it rings true in my experience and shows that White understands why parents might resist the idea.

While she does caution that a gap year is not for everyone, White clearly suggests that more students would benefit from trying it. Why? “The generation that is in high school today is going to need more than a college degree to be successful. Developing a worldview is crucial to being able to thrive and prosper in a global economy. A gap year experience can set you on a path to seeing your world in a different way.”

I might not couch the argument simply in terms of economic prosperity when talking to my own students or family members, but it’s hard to disagree with the final part of the statement. Achieving a broader world view can help a student mature, which may also aid the transition to college in social ways. White invites readers to “imagine how the independence and self-esteem building of a gap year would positively affect the maturity and confidence of those who were likely to be influenced by the college party culture.”

The second half of the book is made up of listings and resources for every type of gap year experience or program you might think of, and many that you would not have considered. A few options are free to participants, covering all expenses and providing a modest stipend or education award, while some others are essentially private school or international study programs with costs in the neighborhood of $40,000. However, the majority of gap-year options entail costs nearer to the middle of these extremes, and they tend to offer experiences that last weeks or months rather than a full year.

Kristin M. White’s book is an outstanding resource for high school students and their families, and would be an excellent addition to high school libraries and counseling centers. Whether the student’s goal is academic maturation, cross-cultural immersion and language development, volunteer work, community development, or career skill-building, there are opportunities worth considering for those willing to venture off the traditional educational track in search of something more.

David B. Cohen is a National Board Certified Teacher at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto CA. He is a co-founder of the Accomplished California Teachers leadership network.

[NOTE: David Cohen received a complimentary review copy of Teaching as an Act of Love from the author. Kristin White's book was sent to TLN Teacher Voices. See our book review disclosure here.]

Inside a Hip-Hop Lit Class

Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity
By Marc Lamont Hill
(Teachers College Press, 2009)

Reviewed by John M. Holland, NBCT
Early Childhood Educator (Virginia)
Teacher Leaders Network

Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life is an ethnographic study of the development and implementation of a Hip Hop Literature class in a socio-economically at-risk high school. The book, written by Marc Lamont Hill describes the planning process, curriculum, themes, goals, and self evaluation.  What makes this book worth reading though is the dialogue. Like any good ethnographic study, Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life lets participant voices tell the stories. Hill is a popular commentator on race issues in the Washington Post, on Fox News, and on National Public Radio. He uses his students' words to describe what they are thinking, feeling, and understanding about Hip Hop, society, and their neighborhood. His deep understanding of the "text/songs" of the class, as well as literature and cultural study, make him an exemplary example of the "culturally aware" teacher.

In one passage Hill describes his students' observations in relation to the contemporary analysis of literature.

"Jay's observations demonstrate Jay-Z's role as a modern trickster figure, constantly outsmarting authority (both the criminal justice system and White corporate gatekeeepers) and bragging about his exploits."

The same student later expressed why students tended to "sidestep" conversations about race in the Hip Hop class, even though the author had seen the same students explicitly discuss race in other classes in the school. Jay says,

When you in regular class, it's like a White class so you feel like you gotta stand up for Black people. when you in a Black class it's different. You don't want the [Whites] to feel uncomfortable the way we do in their class so we just talk around it. [emphasis added]

This book is an vibrant example of critical race theory applied to a modern inner city classroom. I can best describe Marc Lamont Hill as a fleet-footed boundary crosser. He speaks multiple languages at the same time. He speaks the language of the street (through his students' voices), the classroom, and the researcher. His research perspective is well grounded in relevant foundational texts from the critical perspective, including Gloria Ladson-Billings (who wrote the forward), as well as in popular sociological studies by Hip-Hop scholars like William Jelani Cobb and Halifu Osumare.

This is not a how-to book. It does not include planning sheets, suggestions for "texts" or discussion prompts. It is an incredibly well documented artifact of a successful experiment in bringing students' culture into the classroom and understanding that culture as a researcher and teacher. I recommend it because I learned things about myself, my students' families, and research. The book does not so much tell us how to bring our students' culture into the classroom as it shows us that it can be done, and how the benefits can be astounding to the students and the teacher.

Twittering with Parents?

When TLN Forum member Ellen B. asked about using Twitter with parents, tech-besotted Bill Ferriter, The Tempered Radical, had some good thoughts.

Ellen wrote:

I have been thinking about how easy it would be to keep in communication about my classroom with Twitter. What I'd like is feedback and/or stories about how it's worked for you.

1. Have you tried using Twitter with parents? How did that work for you?

2. Is there a downside, provided I have a school-only Twitter account?

I'm not looking to replace the other ways I communicate with parents, but I am looking to expand it beyond relying on my 8th graders to get papers home in a timely manner. Are there other ideas that have worked better for you?

Bill replied:

Twitter On, Ellen! While I'm not Twittering with parents yet---I don't want to have separate accounts for personal and professional use--it's definitely an idea worth pursuing because it's easy times ten for you. The messages that you post in Twitter are short, so it won't take you much time to update parents, and there is no concrete, direct way for people to reply---so you're not generating a ton of responses that you've got to spend time answering.

The other thing that I love is that you can Twitter from anywhere--including most phones--so posting the last minute thing that you think of after you shut down your computer and walk out the door is no sweat at all. The process of making updates is so much easier -- and the expectation for volume of content is so much lower than a teacher website -- that the process of communicating is no longer intimidating.

Another benefit is that parents don't have to be Twittering to follow your update. All Twitter users have their own publicly available page where people can read their Tweets. Here's mine:

http://twitter.com/plugusin

So parents could just bookmark that page and see your updates right away. And each Twitter page has it's own RSS feed, so if you have any tech savvy parents who are using feed readers, they can get your updates automatically.

What barriers can I see? The only one that pops to mind is that parents who are Twitter users can flame you in the @replies section if they wanted to--and those @replies can be seen by a broader community of people than the email blasts that parents pop off every now and then.

But that risk isn't prevented by NOT having a Twitter account for class updates. Parents using Twitter---or writing blogs, or talking at the grocery store, or sending email, or using short-wave radio (I know, I know, I'm exaggerating)---can always find ways to criticize teachers if they want to.

So in the end, I say go for it!

City Kids on the Front Row

City Kids, City Schools, edited by William Ayers, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Miche and Pedro Noguero. The New Press, 2008.

Reviewed by Marjorie Larner

If you were suddenly transported to a desert island with your urban school in tow, and you could only have one book, I would strongly recommend City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row. Whether you are looking for practical ideas for the classrooms; research and statistics; essays from related fields of social justice, politics and history; or spoken word, poetry, memoir or fiction, you can find a beautifully written, relevant and thought-provoking selection.

This book will stimulate discussion, deepen understanding and inspire further teaching and learning to reach every child in our schools. This is not light reading, nor is it disheartening or tedious. There is a vitality and energy in each selection that leaves me with more understanding of what I can do and why I must continue in the effort— feeling motivated rather than discouraged.

As a collection, it works as a resource where you can search by writer, topic or genre. It is also a powerful read with a cumulative impact if you start at the beginning and read sequentially. I find myself regularly going back and re-reading, finding pieces to share with colleagues, to use in workshops and seminars or to offer to students for examples and inspiration. My copy became so full of sticky notes that I had to start color-coding them.

City Kids, City Schools is a treasure trove for anyone with interest and concern for our children and education, looking for authentic perspectives, information, and real stories from people in the front row, engaged in the everyday struggle of school. The list of well-known authors and everyday heroes is long. You can move from

• Linda Christensen’s account of discovering a way (through a “Curriculum of Empathy”) to get her students involved in a novel by teaching them to “enter the lives of characters in literature, history, or real life whom they might dismiss or misunderstand…”

• to Marion Unas Esguerra’s poem “morning papers,” dealing with “issues of language, culture, prejudice, and assimilation that many immigrant children in urban areas—and their parents—must confront...”

• to Grace Boggs’ call to "root students and faculty in communities…and engage them in the kind of real problem solving in their localities that nurture a love of place and provides practice in creating the sustainable economies, equality and community that are the responsibilities of citizenship.” 

As Ruby Dee writes in the foreword, “City Kids, City Schools holds the banner high for a more rewarding quality of life (by) reminding us of our responsibility as citizens to work for, to insist on, and to ensure a free, quality education to every child. It will not happen without our vigilance, our profoundest commitment—especially those of us whose voices, like mine, like those in this book—have been nourished by some of the great minds that steady and enlighten our lives. This book engages all our sensibilities toward the glorification of our remarkable species.”

If you were allowed a second book on your desert island, consider an earlier and similar collection also edited by William Ayers (and others), titled City Kids, City Teachers (1996), now available in a new edition. In the foreword to that book, the late Ossie Davis wrote a summary that applies to both of these wonderful resources. “In this book, our cities’ students and teachers share their problems, their prospects, and their plans. It is vital that all of us look deep into these pages, to listen and to learn….Look to these pages for guidance and light.”

Marjorie Larner is an instructional coach in the Colorado public schools and a facilitator for the National School Reform Faculty. Also see Larner's recent interview of Managing Diverse Classrooms (ASCD, 2008)

Parents & Responsibility for Learning

In the TLN Forum daily discussion, Ms. S. wrote:

On the question of how to communicate effectively with parents, here’s a situation that kind of stumped me this year. In my new school, parents are much more involved than in my old school, which is a great thing. However, I encountered some unfamiliar situations that go along with that.

Sometimes a parent of a struggling student (usually struggling with work habits, not so much skills) asks me to call them any time their child doesn't complete the work in class or bring in a homework assignment. "Call me every day if you have to," one parent tells me.

Some have asked me to email detailed descriptions of any assignments their child doesn't complete in class or on time. Sometimes, to do this effectively, I have to explain concepts we worked on that day which the child should have paid attention to or come to me after class for help with.

I applaud these parents' efforts to get involved on behalf of their children, but after a while, I'm not sure who it serves for me to basically repeat lessons for a parent so they can then pass them on to their child. It enables the child not to pay attention in class, and it makes demands on my time that are not fair.

In the future, if a pattern like that emerges with a particular student, I'll call a meeting with student and parent and try to address the problem another way, as well as lay down some limits on extra help when a student is not showing any commitment during class time.

Ms. F. remembers:

Parents came in to a conference and demanded that I keep their 16 year old son after school anytime he did not complete all of his work in class or have his homework when he arrived. He was in my last class of the day, and they wanted me to tell him to stay, then go to the office and call the mother to inform her, then go back to stay with their son one-on-one while he completed all the work.

At the time, we had no after-school tutoring or detention. I did frequently set appointments and help students both before and after school, but these parents wanted this on a daily basis with no prior arrangement.

The father was in construction and said that he often builds five houses at a time, and if one were mine I would expect him to spend just as much time on mine as on any of the others. To this day, I cannot believe that the obvious response did not occur to me: "Yes, but I would not expect you to spend most of your time on mine."

Susie found a partial technology solution:

I've also had some parents request that I call every time their child missed an assignment, and provide extra copies of everything to them. This past year I made an effort to have a class website and put almost everything on it, including class agendas and just about anything I created on my own. This relieved some of the problem, thought not all of it.

Still, it was a good step. I also found that maintaining the website helped me be organized, and I didn't have to carry everything around because I could access things from home, too. All assignments were plainly posted on the site. I realize that there are still many families without internet access at home (or their printer is out of ink, etc.), but overall, I was very pleased with how this improved the situation.

More and more teachers are using blogs or wikis to keep parents in the loop.

Kathie became email-shy:

This discussion reminds me of why I am email-phobic with parents. I recently had a gifted young male student with ADHD who only wanted to play around with his calligraphy pens during his two hours in my class. I had a wonderful conversation after Open House with his dad, who was very impressed by my presentation. Once I had shared my concerns, he asked me to email him whenever his son had work to complete. Which I did. This led to a lot of wasted time, and in the end, I was the one he blamed, not his son.

Eventually the principal yanked him from my class, as well as my partner's, who had him for math and science. The kid ended up triumphant because, from his perspective, he'd gotten us in trouble. I think I will be planning in the future for some process other than email. The message may be the same, but somehow even over the phone you can provide a mood or tone that may soften the message sent. When you have 150+ students, any offer of daily access may carry an enormous burden for the teacher and sometimes very little for the student.

Renee offered a strategy and a warning:

Two comments on this topic:

1) While personal contact and on-going communication with parents is generally a good thing, a more time-effective approach is a class web-page or generic class newsletter type email (students can help maintain this by the way) to keep a running record of "what we did in class today." It could be a running journal (maybe in Word or a blog), updated daily by a designated student reporter, with copies or excerpts of lesson plan notes, etc. sent as an attachment or posted in some way.

With a little planning to set this up, it is easier than it sounds, but the benefit is when a student is absent, or just doesn't get it all, there is a place where the student and/or parent can go to find the information. (Back in the pre-technology days, I'd have students do this manually in a large three-ring binder in the room. The daily record could be copied by absent students.) Then, if additional clarity is needed, the student can contact the teacher. Web 2.0 tools make this much easier to do now.

2) Time after school: I would be very cautious about making a standing commitment to work after school daily with any one student, except under rare circumstances. I might (and have) set aside after-school time for anyone who wants to come that day and get extra help. If a parent tells me (up front) that their child is going to need extra help every day to keep up--I'd start looking at past records and asking for a needs assessment or an IEP.

Situations such as this are why I favor letting students work at their own pace towards the curriculum objectives, and setting individual goals for each grading period for each student (with parents involvement in that goal setting).

Nancy asked: "Who's responsible?"

All of these interesting stories and comments seem to be focused around whose responsibility it is to learn. One of my beefs with on-line gradebooks, open to parents, is that they can shift the responsibility for tracking learning to someone other than the learner. As several of the stories here point out, once someone other than the child can be blamed for failure to meet responsibilities, that someone probably will be blamed.

And once students pick up on the fact that someone else has shouldered that responsibility of staying on top of materials and assignments, they lose interest in what they're actually learning. It becomes a game: it's about filling in boxes, getting grades, negotiating credit. Hoop-jumping through the school stuff (or playing Teacher vs. Mom), not grappling with skills or engaging concepts.

When we take responsibility for learning out the hands of our students, we all lose.