Homework
What did your education professors in your teacher prep programs during college tell you about homework?
We didn’t talk about it at all, except for our classes we had homework we were expected to complete between sessions.
For something we were taught to take for granted as a default part of the education experience, homework is surprisingly complicated and controversial.
Some educators are completely anti-homework, while others think it adds value. I had one teacher in high school who even assigned lots of homework because, “It will keep the students out of trouble.” (I didn’t dare tell him that the students who needed to be kept out of trouble weren’t doing the homework in the first place…)
How much homework per night did you have to do as a student?
In APL’s Effective Teaching workshop, they shared that the number of minutes of total homework students receive per night should be based on the student age in a formula - basically start with 10 minutes in first grade and add 10 minutes per grade.
In their framework, homework should be:
The entire assignment should be work students can do independently (don’t use homework as an excuse to make students learn new material outside of class)
A small amount of homework should be based on what was learned today, a larger amount should be about content from the last several days, and a small amount should be long-term review for memory retention.
Homework should only help a student as a bonus to their grades, not bring grades down.
Homework should never be used as a punishment. (And by extension, never punish an entire class.)
If you’re going to assign homework, you ought to provide time at the end of class for students to start it with a partner. People are more likely to complete things they’ve partially started.
Make sure to go over homework in class the next day. This shows that you value the learning and time spent by students.
However, research that has come out in years since has been interesting as well.
As shared in a 2018 Edutopia article, “What’s the Right Amount of Homework,” (https://www.edutopia.org/article/whats-right-amount-homework) they shared that for elementary students, the benefits of homework are negligible and teachers may be better off just asking students to do optional activities like reading together with a parent.
For middle school, there are benefits, but if you assign more than a total of 90 minutes per student it can backfire and reduce their scores. For high school, the time limit for homework seems to be two hours, after which it can start leading to health issues.
Bear in mind that students with special needs will take longer than their peers to complete homework, and not all students have the same resources, spaces, silence, and support at home to complete homework.
Be aware that the quality of homework is important, too. Look no further than the #workshits hashtag on Twitter to see some examples.
A great article that distinguishes between valuable printed resources we may ask students to complete and ones that are mindless busywork is “Frickin’ Packets” by Jennifer Gonzalez at The Cult of Pedagogy. (https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/busysheets/)
If anyone would like to join me, I think step one is to begin a movement to get rid of word searches as homework or graded activities. I hate word searches. It used to be quicker and more engaging for me to write essays.
As noted in the article - and I can personally attest to this after having witnessed it as a student and when visiting classes as a tech coach - homework is usually graded. However, if homework is practice on the way to mastering a concept, is it right to grade it for correctness? It seems like a bit of a punitive move to punish someone for making mistakes just after they started learning something.
I’ve been pondering how I’d approach homework if I were to switch to teaching high school social studies. Ideally, I think I’d either put it into students’ hands somehow that they’d use their time outside class to help manage their progress through the classwork OR use homework as a practice tool and preview. For example, maybe on one side would be a handful of long-term review questions on key things from the whole year to date (inspired by the book, Powerful Teaching by Pooja K. Agarwal and Patrice M. Bain) and on the other side maybe a graph, political cartoon, or “Caption This” activity that practices the skills of analyzing those resources but pertains to the next day’s lesson. The preview content would then be the bell ringer discussion for the next day.