I was wondering how many times you have been on the receiving end of "busy work." Have you ever experienced an assignment that lacked challenge and any potential for learning?
Take a look at each of the assignments in your unit plan. Are you asking students to do busy work?
Ask yourself, "do these assignments help student to explore the essential question?" The essential question isn't something that you discuss the first and last day. The essential question guides the activities that you do. You want them to do something about justice. Then the assignments ask them to explore justice in the texts you are reading. But, I think it has to be more than just exploring the idea in the canon. Are you tying in the "here and now," as Matt mentions below?
What are some examples of busy work that you have seen?
We've talked about sponges some times. I wanted to tell you my favorite "sponge." I had a library in my class, and students at all times either had an independent reading book or could grab a book out of my library. Any time there was extra time at the end, or if they had to wait on other students to finish, students picked up their books and read.
As "English Teachers," we are teaching reading, writing, and thinking. Above all, I hope that you go out and create a love of reading, writing, and thinking in your students. They won't all be English teachers, but you have the power to create some spark and inspiration. They may not teach English, but I hope that they always pick up a book. I hope that they always pick up a pen and write for themselves.
So, ask yourselves, do the lessons I provide ask students to do "real" work as opposed to "fake" work? Great unit plans will have students inquiring and asking questions and figuring out.
3 comments:
Disclaimer: I'm not intending offense, but discussion generation.
I think this is sort of an unfair question. I don't think any teacher develops a lesson with the intention of keeping the students busy, but it is the perception of the student that causes the activity to be "busy work," by what they are getting out of the process.
The blog for example (see disclaimer above)...do I feel like it is necessarily "busy work?" No, but do I feel like there are meaningful discussions generated, enough to be productive, coming out of it? No.
Does the end-result for the student change the perception of the assignment? Yes.
When the activity itself is not yielding the intended result, its function has become lost and the result is time consumption, "busy work."
A quick reiteration: I do not think this is Dr. Franklin's intent, but the outcome that has arisen. This is one of my main objections to further use of the blog during student teaching. In a different class, with different people, it may work fantastically as it should. But when the efforts and comments are shallow, I think we need to abandon efforts for more productive means, like reading quizzes or other methods.
Does this logic make sense? Or is this a bad example?
~Stan
I agree with both of you in different ways. I agree with Dr. Franklin in the fact that I know of plenty of teachers who have made their lessons based on what will keep their students busy throughout the class. Why? Because, those are the teachers that are the ones that don't genuinely care about the students.
I also agree with Stan that a bigger portion of teachers really do have good intentions for the work they give to their students. Good teachers try and plan good lessons that will hopefully engage their students in meaningful ways. Does it always work? No, because you're not going to catch the attention of every student. There's always going to be a student out there that thinks that what you're having them do is busy work.
That's why I think it depends on both the teacher creating the lesson and the student who's being asked to do it.
I think the boys are right. What a student considers to be busy work may not be deemed as such by the teacher. Sometimes that means that we need to listen to our students and sometimes that means that we just need to convey the usefulness of the assignment in such a way that our students *hopefully* no longer see it as busy work. And sometimes I think what started as a useful assignment/project can become busy work with a lot of repitition and/or monotony, which is why I think in cases like this, variety is essential.
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