By The Educator Collaborative Associate Member Kristine Paulson
I have three daughters in elementary school, and their backpacks are an endless stream of papers coming home. Fliers for fundraisers, dress up day reminders, field trip slips, homework, and classwork. So. Much. Classwork. And then there’s all the things they create at home. In an effort to organize our lives, all their work–from home and from school–goes into a file bin with their name on it in the kitchen command center until we can talk about them together (read: sometimes it waits until the weekend). After that, it’s on to the final sort: Keep, or Recycle? Work that’s a “Keep” matters enough to each kid to save and post on the fridge.
I recently laid out work from my middle daughter’s “Keep” pile next to her “Recycle” pile, and the difference was startling.
I present: Middle Child’s self-identified “Recycle” and “Keep” piles…
Recycle:
Keep:
Let’s talk about the recycle pile first. We have a cloze passage, an out-of-context “center” activity, a word search aligned with the Tier 1 curriculum, a vocabulary match and glue activity, a riddle ditto sheet, and an inference skill sheet based on a photograph. Many of these were printed from sites where teachers make curriculum materials and offer them for free (or for a small fee). None of these activities have any apparent connection to reading real text or writing for a real audience.
I also can’t tell much from any of them about what my middle daughter knows or can do with instructed vocabulary in writing or speaking or what phonics patterns she has a handle on spelling (with the exception of the photo inference task, which appears to offer the opportunity for some student-generated thinking and writing).
Now let’s take a look at the keep pile. We have a book about a superhero character named Super Fail who wants to help and always makes mistakes, a representation of the four seasons, a one-page illustrated solution to a sharing problem she had with her sister, and a labeled diagram of a layout for our backyard garden. The keep pile shows me the spelling patterns she has secured (er in pepper, ir in dirt, ai in fail); those she has approximated (the “ae” in fear, and the “ea” in please); spacial awareness and map-making skills; and a window into her social emotional development (e.g., How does SuperFail deal with mistakes, and How do we talk to one another when we are trying to share?).
And then there’s the kicker.
All of the “keep” work was created at home. My daughter uses literacy for authentic purposes at home all the time, and all she needs is blank paper and space. In this era of mandated curriculum, teachers are often provided workbooks and publisher created material for kids to fill in. How often do we make space for kids to use literacy skills to solve real, relevant problems? When do we give kids choice to create? How do we nurture joyful learning in our classrooms? Relevance, choice, autonomy, and nurturing joy are key strategies for engaging all learners in CAST’s Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. The UDL framework suggests strategies based on the science of how humans learn to support access for all learners to a meaningful education (CAST, 2024).
If we make more space in our classrooms for relevance, choice, autonomy, and joy, imagine the possibilities for the classwork our children choose to keep.
References:
CAST (2024). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Retrieved from https://udlguidelines.cast.org
