Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Tough Love for Seniors


As we continue to see more and more of our seniors here at Assabet Valley attending two and four year colleges we have certainly answered the call in providing them with more and more high level Honors and AP courses.

However, the way we teach these courses is most critical to the readiness and rigor they will see as college freshmen.

A couple of years ago I read an interesting piece in the Marshall Memo on a different approach to teaching seniors. The article details one school in Worcester's (my hometown) decision to take a "tough love" approach to teaching their seniors in order to get them truly ready for the challenges they will encounter the following year. They wanted to shock their top seniors and take them out of their comfort zone while they still can oversee them if things get too difficult.

Some examples of the new approaches were:

- Syllabi similar to those in college;
- More classes conducted with college-like lectures;
- Tough-love refusal to accept late papers unless an extension had been granted;
- Tough exams based on textbook reading;

This is certainly something to consider for our senior students.  Particularly the ones in our top courses.
Its an interesting discussion as we move forward  with the continued College and Career Readiness debate that is so prevalent in education today.

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