Blog #10

“Homework should not be about rote learning.  The best kind deepens student understanding and builds essential skills (Vatterott, 2010).”  With this in mind, homework should provide further practice and application of essential skills.  Homework should be an independently attainable task with minimal or no parent support.  It should have a clear purpose and demonstrate students learning. 

Meaningful homework should reinforce learned skills and be appropriate for each student. While homework is a typical thing for most classes, give the students some choice in how they want to demonstrate or practice their learning.  For example, if a class is studying nutrition give the students a homework menu of a variety of choices and ideas to practice and apply their learning.  Possible choices could include: create a healthy meal for your family, create a family workout plan, create a recipe book that includes a variety of nutritional meals, plan a day’s meal meeting all nutritional requirements, etc…  Homework is meaningful when it relates to their life and they can apply what they have learned.

                Current homework objectives tend to include practice what you have learned by completing worksheets and reading logs.  While these forms of homework can be helpful in a sense it can be rather limiting and meaningless.  Very few applications and connections can be made with such homework practices and may further “prove” to students that homework is meaningless.   Homework objectives should rather consists of practice and demonstrate understanding.  Do not let this constitute an extensive project to be completed in a week.  Homework should be at a level that students feel competent and confident in completing in a timely manner.  Students should be able to walk away from the homework with a sense of confidence, pride, and relevance.

                Feedback on homework should be provided in a timely fashion and in various modalities.  Feedback can come from teachers, peers, and self, so long as it is given in an appropriate way.  The sandwich effect is a good rule of thumb: Mention the positive, then move on to the next steps/things to improve on, and end with another positive.  If students are practicing skills wrong, it is crucial to talk with the students in a timely manner to fix the misunderstanding before it becomes “learned incorrectly”.

                Teachers should be clear from the very beginning on their purpose and expectation on homework.  Communication could be conducted in a variety of ways such as, parent newsletters, conferences, e-mail, and school/classroom website.  It’s also important to communicate if homework can be completed with the aide of technology. 

                If homework is going to be utilized in classrooms then it needs to be seen as meaningful practice.  This needs to start from day one and continued to be used as an application of skills and learning’s.