Giving Students Meaningful Work
Homework Done Right
Janet Alleman, Rob Ley, Barbara Knighton, Ben Botwinski and Sarah Middlestead
Meaningful homework serves the curriculum and connects school and home.
Figure 1. Continuum of Meaningful Homework
Getting Families On Board
Families' approaches to their children's school and homework seem to fall into two extreme categories: completely hands-off and disconnected, or hypervigilant and demanding. Meaningful homework assignments can encourage all families to feel welcome.Early in the school year, teachers should communicate their vision regarding homework, including its purpose, their expectations for students, ways families can contribute, and how homework products will be used in class. Because meaningful assignments often look and feel different from the traditional assignments that parents are familiar with, set the tone early by communicating to families how valuable these assignments will be for their children and for the classroom learning community. Here are some important concepts to note:
- Basic skills will not go away. Rather, they will be combined with opportunities for students to apply skills in real-life situations.
- Most of the homework assignments will not have simple right or wrong answers. Instead, they will involve higher-order thinking and real-life application of knowledge and skills.
- Parents will be encouraged to talk with their children about the assignment and then jump in to provide a helping hand. This will not be considered cheating!
- Parents will be encouraged to participate in homework by adding their views, opinions, observations, or sharing their experiences. These responses will be appreciated and will make the in-school conversations more enlightening.
- The homework assignments will be aligned with existing curricular goals.
“Is homework the hill you want to die on with your students?”
—Bea McGarvey
Last year this issue played out on the pages of Phi Delta Kappan, where homework skeptic Alfie Kohn squared off against supporters Bob Marzano and Debra Pickering. Kohn accused researchers like Marzano of abusing research to support homework as a viable instructional strategy and maintained that homework disrupts families and does not significantly raise student achievement. In their response to Kohn in a later issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Marzano and Pickering claimed research supports the use of homework—even at the elementary level—but not its misuse.
ENGLISH JOURNAL
Fall 2010 -- vol. 100, no. 1
How to Create Nonreaders
Reflections on Motivation, Learning, and Sharing Power
By Alfie Kohn
Autonomy-supportive teachers seek a student’s initiative
… whereas controlling teachers seek a student’s compliance.
-- J. Reeve, E. Bolt, & Y. Cai
“The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do.”
“Motivation – at least intrinsic motivation -- is something to be supported, or if necessary revived. It’s not something we can instill in students by acting on them in a certain way. You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you can’t “motivate them.”
“On the other hand, what teachers clearly have the ability to do with respect to students’ motivation is kill it.[1] That’s not just a theoretical possibility; it’s taking place right this minute in too many classrooms to count. So, still mindful of the imperative to “write the other way,” I’d like to be more specific about how a perversely inclined teacher might effectively destroy students’ interest in reading and writing. I’ll offer six suggestions without taking a breath, and then linger on the seventh.”
- 1. Quantify their reading assignments. Nothing contributes to a student’s interest in (and proficiency at) reading more than the opportunity to read books that he or she has chosen. But it’s easy to undermine the benefits of free reading. All you need to do is stipulate that students must read a certain number of pages, or for a certain number of minutes, each evening.
- 2. Make them write reports. Jim DeLuca, a middle school teacher, summed it up: “The best way to make students hate reading is to make them prove to you that they have read. Some teachers use log sheets on which the students record their starting and finishing page for their reading time. Other teachers use book reports or other projects, which are all easily faked and require almost no reading at all.
- 3. Isolate them. I’ve been in the same book group for 25 years. We read mostly fiction, both classic and contemporary, at the rate of almost a book a month. I shudder to think how few novels I would have read over that period, and how much less pleasure (and insight) I would have derived from those I did manage to read, without the companionship of my fellow readers. Subscribers to this journal are probably familiar with literature circles and other ways of helping students to create a community of readers. You’d want to avoid such innovations – and have kids read (and write) mostly on their own -- if your goal were to cause them to lose interest in what they’re doing.
- 4. Focus on skills. Children grow to love reading when it’s about making meaning, when they’re confronted directly by provocative ideas, compelling characters, delicious prose. But that love may never bloom if all the good stuff is occluded by too much attention to the machinery – or, worse, the approved vocabulary for describing that machinery. Knowing the definition of dramatic irony or iambic pentameter has the same relationship to being literate that memorizing the atomic weight of nitrogen has to doing science. “School teaches that literacy is about a set of skills, not a way to engage a part of the world,” as Eliot Washor and his colleagues recently wrote. “Consequently, many young people come to associate reading with schooling rather than with learning more about what interests them.”[4]
- 5. Offer them incentives. Scores of studies have confirmed that rewards tend to lead people to lose interest in whatever they had to do to snag them. This principle has been replicated with many different populations (across genders, ages, and nationalities) and with a variety of tasks as well as different kinds of inducements (money, A’s, food, and praise, to name four).[5] You may succeed in getting students to read a book by dangling a reward in front of them for doing so, but their interest in reading, per se, is likely to evaporate – or, in the case of kids who have little interest to begin with, is unlikely to take root -- because you’ve sent the message that reading is something one wouldn’t want to do. (Duh. If it was fun, why would they be bribing me to do it?) s far as I can tell, every single study that has examined grades and intrinsic motivation has found that the former has a negative effect on the latter.[6]
- 6. Prepare them for tests. Just as a teacher’s grade can be every bit as effective at killing motivation as imported incentive programs, so a teacher’s quiz can hold its own against your state’s standardized exam. It’s not the test itself that does the damage; it’s what comes before.
- 7. Restrict their choices. Teachers have less autonomy these days than ever before. The predominant version of school reform, with its emphasis on “accountability” and its use of very specific curriculum standards enforced by tests, proceeds from the premise that teachers need to be told what, and how, to teach.
PRINCIPAL
January/February 2007
Rethinking Homework
By Alfie Kohn
1. The negative effects of homework are well known. They include children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities, and possible loss of interest in learning. Many parents lament the impact of homework on their relationship with their children; they may also resent having to play the role of enforcer and worry that they will be criticized either for not being involved enough with the homework or for becoming too involved.
2. The positive effects of homework are largely mythical. In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied. Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.
3. More homework is being piled on children despite the absence of its value. Over the last quarter-century the burden has increased most for the youngest children, for whom the evidence of positive effects isn’t just dubious; it’s nonexistent.
And teachers who have long harbored doubts about the value of homework feel pressured by those parents who mistakenly believe that a lack of afterschool assignments reflects an insufficient commitment to academic achievement. Such parents seem to reason that as long as their kids have lots of stuff to do every night, never mind what it is, then learning must be taking place.
RESOURCES
We are awash in articles and books that claim homework is beneficial – or simply take the existence or value of homework for granted and merely offer suggestions for how it ought to be assigned, or what techniques parents should use to make children complete it. Here are some resources that question the conventional assumptions about the subject in an effort to stimulate meaningful thinking and conversation.
Barber, Bill. “Homework Does Not Belong on the Agenda for Educational Reform.” Educational Leadership, May 1986: 55-57.
Bennett, Sara, and Nancy Kalish. The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It (New York: Crown, 2006).
Buell, John. Closing the Book on Homework: Enhancing Public Education and Freeing Family Time. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
Dudley-Marling, Curt. “How School Troubles Come Home: The Impact of Homework on Families of Struggling Learners.” Current Issues in Education [On-line] 6, 4 (2003).
Hinchey, Patricia. “Rethinking Homework.” MASCD [Missouri Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development] Fall Journal, December 1995: 13-17.
Kohn, Alfie. The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006).
Kralovec, Etta, and John Buell. The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
Samway, Katharine. “’And You Run and You Run to Catch Up with the Sun, But It’s Sinking.’” Language Arts 63 (1986): 352-57.
Vatterott, Cathy. “There’s Something Wrong With Homework.” Principal, January-February 2003: 64.
Waldman, Ayelet. “Homework Hell.” Salon.com. October 22, 2005.
