Let me begin my discussion of homework with a sentence strand from the Old Fart School of Wisdom: When I was a child . . .
. . . all my teachers assigned homework. We had vocabulary exercises to complete, math problems to solve, stories to read, science and social studies chapters to complete and questions that followed to answer. I never really struggled with homework, although there were times that I found it tedious: We already did this in class, and I understand it, so why do I have to do more of it at home?
We tend to teach as we were taught, so when I became a teacher, I assigned homework, usually reading assignments from the novels or short stories we were studying. Funny thing, though. Many of my students didn’t do the readings. Many of those who did them didn’t understand them. Students were failing my class because of their homework grades.
Flash forward to 2011. I’m conducting a seminar on assessment for a group of first year teachers in Western North Carolina, and we begin discussing homework as an assessment tool. Corrie, a 7th grade math teacher, voices her frustration at the number of students in her classroom who don’t do homework.
“How many problems do you assign per night?” I asked.
“That seems like a lot. Have you considered assigning fewer problems?”
“They need the practice,” she countered.
“Let me ask you this. Are there kids in your class who understand the material, who do well on tests and quizzes, but are failing simply because of their homework grades?”
“Are you okay with that?”
I think a brief discussion about responsibility followed, and I may have suggested that their grade should not be a reflection of their sense of responsibility but of their competence in math. Ultimately, we came around to the crux of the issue. What is the purpose of homework?
This is something few of us bother to consider when we assign it. It’s just what you do. Teachers assign homework.
As a group, we began brainstorming reasons to assign homework:
· To complete work that was not finished in class
· To serve as a formative assessment for the teacher
I began troubleshooting each of these reasons.
Homework as practice: What if your students don’t understand the procedure, and they practice it incorrectly? Now you have a student with a much worse problem. It is far more difficult to expunge a skill that was learned incorrectly than to teach it in the first place.
Homework to complete school work: This has merit if the work is completing a reading assignment. On the other hand, if the language is extremely challenging—Shakespeare, anything written in dialect—students may complete the reading but have no understanding of it. In this case, you’ll have to reread the assignment in class anyway.
Homework as formative assessment: This is the most legitimate reason to assign homework, yet it is the reason least often cited by the teachers I know. The primary value of homework is as a means of checking whether one’s students understand what you taught. There are three major problems, however, with using homework for this purpose.
1. If you receive the assessment at the beginning of the class period the following day, you will not have the opportunity to adjust your lesson plan to accommodate students who did not understand.
2. If you collect homework every day from every student, you will soon find yourself buried under paper and unable to provide feedback in a timely enough fashion to do any good.
3. As mentioned earlier, if a student does not understand the homework, practicing it incorrectly will do more harm than good.
I asked Corrie, the teacher in my seminar, “How many problems does a kid have to do to demonstrate to your satisfaction that he understands the material?”
“I don’t know. Five, maybe.” The group agreed.
“Okay, so assign five problems. In fact, let the kids choose. Tell ‘em, ‘On page 198, there are 20 problems. Pick five.’ Now you’ve given them the illusion of choice. There’s one less reason for them not to do the work.”
Here’s the catch, though. In lieu of doing the problems as homework, have your students complete them as an exit slip. In the last five minutes of class, have them do these five problems and collect them as they leave the room.
Now you have a manageable stack of assessments that you can quickly scan to see who does or does not get it. You can give a mastery grade, but I recommend giving a completion grade instead. I don’t like penalizing students for going through the learning process.
For extra impact, and to show students that mistakes are useful, use the teaching tool "My Favorite 'No'" the following day. You can view it on the link below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rulmok_9HVs
At this point, many math teachers may be nodding their heads, but I can hear you arts and sciences folks crying, “What about us?”
Well, what was the objective of your lesson? Ask a few questions that require students to demonstrate their understanding of that objective:
If the objective in your English class was that students will understand how writers use figurative language to describe the indescribable, you could ask them to find an example of figurative language from the day’s reading and explain 1) what abstraction is this attempting to describe? and 2) why is it effective?
If your objective in social studies was that students will understand the effect of the Treaty of Versailles on post-World War I Germany, you could ask them to write a headline that might be seen in a German tabloid following the signing of that treaty.
If you “put the Google” on “exit slips,” you will find many possible questions to ask that will allow you to gauge immediately what the level of understanding in your classroom is. You might also want to invest in the book Making Thinking Visible. I may have mentioned this work in previous posts, but it’s full of good stuff—practical, useful techniques to help you help your students engage more fully.
I’d like to return to Corrie and my group of first year teachers from Western North Carolina. When we met the following month, I asked Corrie if she had tried the exit slips. Well, the woman had been transformed.
“Oh, yes! And I did like you said and let them pick the questions they answered. Well, some of ‘em are doing more problems than I assigned.”
No one’s homework grades were bringing their grades down, Corrie’s workload was reduced, and she was able to catch misunderstanding in real time.
Hurray for happy endings.
Next time we'll talk about assigning and grading writing.
