How To Solve A Problem Like….Homework

Homework or home learning as many schools now call it is like marmite you either love it or hate it. This can be said either by teachers, students or parents!

Back in 1999 Ofsted questioned the value of homework – This article 20 years ago makes some good points still relevant today. Do parents do it? those with supportive parents get better marks? is it quantity or quality?

The Education Endowment Foundation (2018) published an article that claims homework has a moderate impact on student achievement at a low cost. Homework can add five months additional progress to a students achievement.

I am in my tenth year teaching year now and have fought an on going battle with homework. Many schools have a strict homework policy – that teachers must set x number of hours homework per week. This can lead to poor quality ‘timewasting’ homework to be set. Timewasting for the students as they complete it but do not learn anything from it, for me these are tasks like draw and colour a title page or do a wordsearch. These activities are low stakes for teachers as they require little marking but tick a box however students can spend hours on them, for little reward. I am strongly against this.

I have always tried to set ‘consolidation’ and rewarding homework, even if that means setting it less often. I used to set lots of ‘research’ type homeworks – however soon stopped this when I realised that some students had little or no technology or books to support the task, just copied and pasted/used Wikipedia, or just spent hours on it.

Over the past year I believe I have a system of setting homework that works for me. I use exampro to download past paper questions. These are not always on the topic in hand, but can also be from previous topics using ideas from the learning scientists Follow @AceThatTest

Retrieval Practice
Spaced Practice
Interleaving

Past paper questions are great because they are good consolidation activities for students, they know how long they should spend on each question (from the number of marks available), it supports literacy in science and hopefully will only improve exam technique by practice. Students will peer or self assessment homework (adding corrections) and I will take in and record the number of marks. This frees up my time, and allows me to see where gaps of knowledge are and how students are progressing. It also means on parents evenings I am able to have meaningful conversations as I am not trying to guess or remember what homework was like. When it comes to report writing, because the scores are RAG coloured in excel I am able to quickly highlight students strengths and areas they need to develop.

To add to this, I have used an idea from Follow @FergusonMr1 who suggested that he leaves an area blank at the end of his homework for students to add extra revision details.

I have also added information on where the content of the homework fits into the specification using extracts from ‘checklists’, so students know WHY they are doing it.

“People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” Simon Sinek

Checklists are student lists I give out at the start of every topic – I will blog about these at a later date but are created from the exam board specification.

All homeworks are printed on A4 (edited to fit) and I take them in and students keep them in a folder. Then in Y11, bish bash bosh – they have a series of revision materials ready to go.

In the mean time here are some examples.

This is following lessons on resistance – this one does not have space to add revision materials but does have space for student reflection. It can be downloaded along with the student checklist for the electricity topic here