Like asking Sinatra for help singing ...

I try to be an elegant, erudite and articulate professional, but sometimes I turn into a geeky fangirl, and I just can't help it.

It happened again at the recent AVID National Conference in San Diego. Super Hero Educator Pedro Noguera was the key note speaker Friday morning and then hosted a "continuing the conversation" session, where I was willing to stand for more than an hour to soak up his insights into all things education in our country. (Luckily, a seat in the front opened at the last minute, and I made a mad dash for it.)

And then, when he finished his Q & A and nobody approached him, I sprinted to the man to see what he had to say about my current nagging problem:

With a 50-point grading scale, students can do well with tons of missing work. So my whole goal of focusing on learning instead of racking up points seems to have resulted in possible learning with no regard for completing assignments. Not exactly the purposeful journey into student wisdom that I had in mind.

Here I am, trying to explain this while simultaneously shaking with nerves in the presence of Dr. Noguera:



His advice: If I want students to do the work, I have to be there while they do it.

Sure enough, the assignments kids blow off are the practice stuff I assign as homework. The rhetorical precis in my AP class, AR in my senior classes. The tasks we work on together, such as collaborative, multi-step exercises along the lines of Cornell notes and essays, my kids ARE turning in those assignments. So ... hmmm.

I will certainly change how students complete rhetorical precis next semester. Those are such an important key to developing analytical reading and writing skills that I will refocus and carve out class time for those assignments.

However, in the same way I cannot keep my cool around really awesome people, at some cellular level, I cannot devote a bunch of time to good old sustained silent reading in my class. Come at me, if you will. But SSR in my classroom has resulted in a huge waste of valuable face-to-face time. I only see those kids for two hours every other day. That's my only time to work with them, create a culture, simply be with those little folks. No way I'm spending that time watching them turn pages. But ... I'm thinking about book groups, book chats, something collaborative that ties out-of-class reading to meaningful in-class reflection.

Chime in, folks who make that work.