Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Any parent who has battled with a child over homework night after night has to wonder: Do those math worksheets and book reports really make a difference to a student’s long-term success? Or is homework just a headache—another distraction from family time and downtime, already diminished by the likes of music and dance lessons, sports practices, and part-time jobs?

Allison, a mother of two middle-school girls from an affluent Boston suburb, describes a frenetic afterschool scenario: “My girls do gymnastics a few days a week, so homework happens for my 6th grader after gymnastics, at 6:30 p.m. She doesn’t get to bed until 9. My 8th grader does her homework immediately after school, up until gymnastics. She eats dinner at 9:15 and then goes to bed, unless there is more homework to do, in which case she’ll get to bed around 10.” The girls miss out on sleep, and weeknight family dinners are tough to swing.

Parental concerns about their children’s homework loads are nothing new. Debates over the merits of homework—tasks that teachers ask students to complete during non-instructional time—have ebbed and flowed since the late 19th century, and today its value is again being scrutinized and weighed against possible negative impacts on family life and children’s well-being.

When it comes to math homework, parents often feel that they HAVE TO HELP their kids get everything right. Many parents take on the role of Untrained Math Teacher at home as well and can often undercut well planned lessons and units. This can often cause more damage, frustration and distress than we want. A major message of my book, Hacking Mathematics: 10 Problems That Need Solving, is that questioning is at the heart of learning mathematics, not answering. So here’s an infographic for you to share with parents who want to help their kids that will teach them how to promote questioning and will keep the learning in the hands of their kids and the teaching in the hands of their teachers.

Whether or not you are for doing away with homework altogether, I think we can all agree that it needs a bit of a makeover.

One forward-thinking teacher in Eugene, Oregon, might just have the vision that we’ve all been looking for. Mel Dormer, whose daughter attends Howard Elementary in Eugene, shared her daughter’s fourth-grade homework guidelines with Scary Mommy recently, and we were absolutely blown away. In a good way.

Schools should draw up "homework contracts" with parents to make sure work is completed at home, a new report recommends.

Parents would commit to ensuring their children finish their homework, whilst teachers would agree on setting “high quality” homework and providing “regular contact” and necessary support to parents.

The report, published by The Social Market Foundation’s commission on inequality in education, found that pupils with parents who make sure they complete their homework before they do other activities, like watching TV, score almost two points (1.93) higher in verbal reasoning tests aged 11.

“There is no evidence that any amount of homework improves the academic performance of elementary students.”

This statement, by homework research guru Harris Cooper, of Duke University, is startling to hear, no matter which side of the homework debate you’re on. Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught? That millions of families go through a nightly ritual that doesn’t help? Homework is such an accepted practice, it’s hard for most adults to even question its value.

When you look at the facts, however, here’s what you find: Homework has benefits, but its benefits are age dependent.

There are many aspects of my more than decade-long career as a teacher that I'm proud of. My reputation for giving lots and lots of homework is not one of them.
For most of my teaching career, I taught fifth or sixth grade. Sometimes I gave more than two hours of homework. Kids complained a lot, though parents rarely did, at least not to my face. I think parents mostly felt the same way I did: that homework was the best way to practice new skills, that it teaches responsibility and helps to develop a strong work ethic, and that it's an opportunity to reflect on new learning.

But most of all, my students' parents and I were more than a little afraid that our kids would fall behind—behind their classmates in the next classroom, behind the kids in a neighboring school, behind the kids in other countries. Homework was considered one of many ways to prevent that from happening.

I wasn't entirely wrong about all of that, and I still believe a lot of those things. But only for middle and high school students (and not hours of assignments). Not for elementary students, and certainly not for kindergarteners or preschoolers.

Last year I wrote about a new strategy of not checking homework but assessing understanding through short quizzes. I thought this might be a good time to follow up with the results of that endeavor.

So, we are halfway through our second 9 weeks of school, and this is the first year where I started out not checking homework. In August, I carefully explained to students that there would be suggested homework problems and that even though I would not check their homework, there would be frequent quizzes to check their understanding.

The initial response was, “yay, no homework,” which quickly turned to “why does my grade look like this?”

"The quality of homework assigned is so poor that simply getting kids to read replacing homework with self-selected reading was a more powerful alternative," said Professor Richard Allington.