Homework needs correcting
AS YOU WERE SAYING . . .
As timeless as the change of seasons, a new school year is beginning in Boston. Parents are happy to have their children back in a routine; children are happy to see their friends again. New classes and new clothes are exciting, but the same struggle returns over waking up on time and completing all assignments. After a combined 38 years of teaching elementary and high school, we believe that homework needs serious rework.
Gone are the days when kindergarten students spent the day doing art projects, learning to cut and glue, playing with schoolmates, and learning the alphabet. The expectations for students now, from kindergarten on, are more rigorous and cognitively demanding.
Many districts are extending learning time even for elementary school. Children, like adults, need time to relax and decompress from a day of work.
For many families, homework dominates the limited time that they spend together each night. Parents want to be sure it is done correctly and with the best intentions support the completion of homework — often too much. This guidance can diminish the impact the homework was intended to have on learning.
Conversely, some students are unable to complete homework assignments and arrive at school feeling inadequate because they did not have access to help. These inequities bring challenges to both students and teachers. Furthermore, studies have shown that homework assigned in the elementary grades does not correlate to high achievement.
With this in mind, we need to rethink students bringing “work” home. Engaging with family, reading for pleasure, playing board games and participating in free play will provide the balance elementary students need while having a positive impact on achievement.
By the time students reach high school homework is necessary but should be used with a strategic focus in mind. Homework for the sake of homework is an old concept and not altogether useful. Honors and Advanced Placement courses by their very definition require extra homework. Students know this going in and usually enjoy the supplemental material.
Those who don’t enjoy the work find other ways — many of them self-defeating.
Today’s smartphone world takes copying and plagiarism to a whole new level. Homework apps give step-by-step copying instructions, and a term paper is a click way. Sure, work is “turned in,” but the intellectual task of problem solving is skipped.
Many teachers now use class time for what was traditionally homework. Teachers make sure the phones are away, and they monitor students working on the task at hand. In education jargon this is a “flipped classroom,” doing in class what used to be done at home and then doing at home what usually was done in class. Thus homework becomes either listening to lectures (on the Internet or podcasts), reading in advance for the next day, or reviewing basic but necessary tasks like multiplication tables or Latin declension endings.
We are not advocating that students simply skip homework, rather we urge districts to take a more thoughtful approach to both home and school instruction. Finland, widely considered the world leader in education, takes a less-is-more approach to homework. Massachusetts should too.