I recently found a back issue of Educational Leadership in my “to do” pile. It was titled “If They’d Only Do Their Work!” and examined how to help students complete their homework. Here were their findings on how to help students engage in their schoolwork:
- Assign work that is worthy of effort. Make sure it is engaging and relevant – that kids have a reason to actually do the work other than avoiding a zero. Above all ask the questions – does is make sense? Is it necessary? Is it useful to what we are studying?
- Make the work doable. Design homework to require little assistance as it may not be available to them at home. It also helps to get homework started at school before taking it home.
- Find out what students need. Take time to help kids find out what they need to get the the homework done.
- Create a space and time for homework. This refers to systematic ways of helping students comlpete work. For example, several teachers in our school work before school and at lunch provding “structured support” for students who are struggling with homework. This has been a raging success for us.
- Make work public. Share your work with others. This is a very exciting thought given our abilities with online publishing…hmmm….web2.0…
- Collaborate! Ned to work with others to find solutions.
At first I felt quite guilty reading the article and thinking back to my beginning teaching days. I recall assigning many math questions for rote learning and giving little perspective to why and how they were to be completed. My frustration when few students completed the work was clearly a product of my poor preparation.
I’m excited to start my new computer science 30 course next semester as students will be making 90% of their work public via the Net. One of my primary objectives for the course, outside of content, is to increase student engagement. I’m glad I found this article.
3 responses so far ↓
1
Dean Shareski
// Jan 7, 2007 at 4:16 pm
When you talk about space and time it reminds me of a newstory I read a while back on McDonalds paying kids to do homework.
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/08/07/for_some_students_it_pays_to_do_homework/
Looking forward to seeing some of your students work. I’ve been thinking about intentionally assigning some of our central office staff to participate in comment on or viewing student work that is posted online. This would be one way of creating audience at least at an initial stage. Taking 5 or 10 minutes once a week to provide feedback to students is a small price to pay for what I think is big payoff.
2
Sunny Williams
// Jan 14, 2007 at 6:01 pm
The issue of homework is huge and is so consuming! I really think we all need to look at why homework is given. Too often it is assigned to get compliance from the students and has no real meaning. I get so frustrated when I hear, “We have to give students zeros for missing homework because it teaches responsibility.” I disagree. If zeros taught responisbility, students would no longer get zeros. Instead, zeros only teach kids how to get zeros.
I like the idea of making work public. Our system has internal discussion boards AKA blogs that teachers post to and that students then respond to, but we don’t post student work in ways it can be responded to. As a principal, I often go in to the discussion boards to see who is doing what and to read what our students are thinking. I respond and wait because the kids always find me to talk about the “conversation” we are having. Our system is fairly small so our students know most of the central office staff. When teachers ask, our central office staff goes in and responds too. What a wonderful way to build relationships and to have in-depth conversations with students.
3
Dustin
// Jan 14, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Thanks for the comments Dean and Sunny. I agree that giving zeros teaches exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do. In fact, if giving zeros out really taught responsibility then students should only ever need one to figure out that work needs to be completed. Too many times I have seen students, who are very capable, fail a class due to missing work. Our school is trying to make a difference with a student support program to avoid zeros whenever possible. This article, http://www.education-world.com/a_admin/admin/admin432.shtml, along with Dufour’s work on a pyramid of interventions got us started.
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