If I had to name one educational author who sets educators off, it would be Alfie Kohn. The Educator’s PLN. http://edupln.ning.com. was fortunate enough to convince Alfie Kohn to talk with well over 250 educators about his views in a live Chat. Alfie is outspoken on a number of educational topics not the least of which is his stance on homework. No matter how Kohn positions it, and irrespective of the research used to support his position, all that some educators ever hear is that teachers should not give homework because it doesn’t improve or in any way positively affect learning. This flies in the face of a traditional tenet of education, “Thou shalt Give Homework”.
Kohn’s positions bring out the best and the worst in some people. One great example of academic debate at its best has been on-going over a period of several days. Two members of The Educator’s PLN, George Haines and Tim Furman have continued the most scholarly, thoughtful, and respectful discussion on the subject of Alfie Kohn that one could hope for. The vocabulary is inspiring. You have to love all those big educational words. All kidding aside, I have great respect for both men and their positions. It is a refreshing change from some of the name calling and disagreeable discourse that I have witnessed in the recent past.
Now that the Alfie Kohn video has been placed on my class’s Ning site and my students have been assigned its viewing, I need to strategize what they should take away from the experience. I am not creating Minnie me’s. I do not want to impose my will and a homework policy on them to guide them through their careers without them understanding or buying into it. After all, I am not an administrator.
Many of my views on homework were not my views through much of my career. Having my own children in school gave me a perspective that I never had in the first half of my career. I have come to appreciate that a student’s day in school begins at about approximately 8 and ends at 3. Many, but not all, are often involved with extra-curricular events for an additional two hours. This puts kids home between 5:30 and 6PM. Work in a little downtime and dinner and it is 8 pm. Of course the student is now ready to work, because it’s homework time. Each teacher has only assigned about 20 to 30 minutes of work, so each teacher feels that the assignment is not too much. That would be okay if the kid did not have five teachers all thinking the same thing. That could be on a given day two to three hours of homework. It is now 11 PM. I understand that does not happen every night, but I must wonder how often does it happen? I do not know an adult who would work those hours for any number of days in a week for no pay. There are actually departments, schools, and districts that enforce homework policies requiring teachers to give homework each and every night.
I am an English teacher. I know that I sometimes have no choice about homework, if I am to get things read. However, if I assign anything more than 10 pages, it probably will not be read by the class. How successful will my lesson be the next day when only half the students read the assignment? If I were to do a formative assessment, I should not be surprised that half the class does not get it. So much for the homework strategy. Another consideration: If I put no value on the homework, kids will recognize it as worthless. I must check it and provide feedback to give it value. Homework without value is more than worthless. It is punishment. Students will view it as working for nothing. How often do we hear “Why should I do that work? He doesn’t check it anyway.”
Skills and drills are important to some teachers and rarely important to kids. Some students might benefit by doing them. What about those who do not need those drills because they have a thorough understanding? How do those students, who do not need the drills, view them? If they clearly understand and can do the work, why are they drilling? Might they feel as if it is punishment? Can we assign the drills to those who need them and not to those who need them not? Is that a question of fairness? How can we say that only some of the students will get homework because they need to drill their skills? Are we calling some of our students dumb (their perspective) ?
I would love for my Methods students to realize that, if homework is important for the teacher to give, it should be important for the students to do. It should be creative and reasonable, because we are requiring overtime without compensation. We would resent that as adults, so why do we expect kids to buy into that concept without pushback? I love the fact That Alfie Kohn, George Haines, Tim Furman and my Methods students all challenge me to think, and reflect in order to amend, or change many of the traditions of education I followed so stringently for so many years in teaching. I only regret that I did not have the ability to do this earlier. That is what motivates me to work with pre-service Teachers. I think I will assign the reading and responding to this post as a homework assignment.
http://vimeo.com/9511857
My Island View 
Dear Tom,
I read your post and went back to my childhood where I had to study 2-3 hours more after school and the only feeling was boredom. But when I was a kid everything was about paper, pen and encyclopedia which is now totally different. Kids have their own computers and internet that makes everything easier and fun. The thing that teachers should consider here is how much? In my school, homework is scheduled and each teacher gives homework on stated days and so kids spend only 20-30 minutes everyday on homework. This looks fair enough to me. I think, content of the homework is much more important, because if the subject is interesting and fun enough, students will not feel like doing a HWRK. Keeping up with the time and finding the right homework are issues to be taken into consideration, I believe.
@ekamin
I’ve always generally been against homework. I don’t think it’s useful for too many students and most homework given is no more than busy work anyway. The most useful part was always when the teacher explained how to get the answer on the one’s you got wrong. Well they could have just done that from the beginning.
However, as an ELT teacher I think the more exposure you have to the language the better. I think it’s a different ball game. Any homework I assign is optional and I try to make it interesting, but I think there is a lot of value of engaging with the language more, especially if I have weekend students I only see 2 days a week.
What do you think? Is there a difference in value between homework for language students vs. other subjects?
Tom,
Interesting post, and I love how you let your Methods students kick these ideas around. I also love how you let them make their own decisions regarding homework.
Homework is a topic that I have a real personal battle with for the same reasons you articulate in your post. As a history teacher, there are certain readings that I assign that I think my kids will find interesting, but if they don’t, it’s a lost cause. I’ve started having my kids do homework that pertains to current events and they seem to like it because there is a certain amount of freedom they are given in deciding the topic. Once they get the oppurtunity to share their findings, it just adds more relevance to the practice. Still, I try to use it sparingly.
History teachers frequently get bogged down with factoids. I try to make sure that my kids know that all I care about is them learning HOW to think rather than WHAT to think. This is one of the reasons I love Alfie Kohn. Though I don’t agree with some of his standpoints, he pushes me to think and reconsider what we do in education on a daily basis.
Thanks for another great post!
A great post. I must say that my view of homework has changed during the last 9 years. When I career changed into teaching, I was a believer that you had to give homework to be considered effective. As time went by, I realized that most of what I saw back was a cursory copy a friends quick answers and not much was gained.
Over the last 3 or 4 years, I have really scaled back the homework and don’t feel that I have lost much in the classroom. I give homework a couple of times of month and it usually involves something that cannot be accomplished in school because of filter issues (an MTV video evaluation project in marketing, etc.). I have found that if we work on something in class and someone needs more time than is allowed, they will need to complete part of it outside of class. I generally don’t allow them to not work in class and do it at home.
The exception to this is that I require current events from my marketing, ownership and law classes. The stories must be related to topics in class. I do believe that it is important to get out future leaders more aware of what is going on in the world around them. Too many students don’t check out what is happening and are having a hard time making connections to the classroom topics.
As a parent of an ADHD child, I hate homework time. He is extremely intelligent but unfocused at night. He is notorious for not completing his HW and getting poor grades because of it. Now, if I sit and put the pressure on, he completes his work but should that be necessary EVERY night? It has put many strains on our relationship. He has dreams of engineering as a career but his inability to accomplishing his homework will definitely make that route difficulty. He gets awesome test scores, but all grades drop when the missing work counts against him. Much of the work he is assigned is unfortunately of the busywork nature. Read these 2 pages and answer the 2 questions at the end, complete this worksheet, etc.
Tom:
Like you,my views on homework have changed over the years. At the very least, I find myself asking more “why and how and what and when and for whom” questions than ever before.
Like you again, I work with preservice and graduate teachers. But I’m no longer in the classroom, which makes any of my statements here suspect. I do know it is a far different classroom today than the one I taught in years ago.
Trying to emulate a Twitter approach, let me be terse and pithy here, at the risk of saying too little. I know you and your readers can fill in details and come to your own, more relevant conclusions.
I have come to believe that homework is like physical exercise: it’s specific to the activity in question. I used to work out on a Nautilus machine to help my worsening tennis backhand. It didn’t help. Suffice to say that, in addition to many other relevant issues, the muscles I was strengthening had little or nothing to do with my backhand.
Homework activities should be highly specific to the task needing development or reinforcement. Largely, they are not. They require all students to do the work of what only some need. Not surprising, this is also the Achilles heel of age-based, classroom-constricted, one-size-fits-all K-12 instruction as we know it. But even if, like me, you’d agree with that indictment, what would you do about it?
In the interest of promised brevity, here’s one idea to run up the poll-pole: why not require each student to have a Personal Learning Plan for each class in which they detail what they know, what they don’t know and what they need to do to know more….including homework.
They need that accountability and probably know best what will help. Parents and teachers could sign-off on their plan or encourage adjustments. It would put the students more in charge of their own learning. Duncan! Hello! Are you listening?
As for more skilled helpers to make homework meaningful, Kristen Swanson, in her wiki blog: (http://trailblazers.wikispaces.com/skype)
came up with this great idea to enlist Skype users who are also experienced educators, active and retired, to help learners of all ilk and need.
It doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine a Skype-based Homework Helpers International available 24/7…well, maybe eventually, to help make learning outside of the classroom, including homework, far more productive.
I happen to think they could help in the classroom too, but that may have to await a newer iPad with iSight camera and earphones too. Why, someday soon, we may even see classroom instruction become specific to the needs of each and every learner.
OK, I’m dreaming! But what’s a heaven for?
Tom,
thanks for sharing such a thoughtful post. I share some of the same line of thinking on homework. Kohn’s book the Homework Myth does so much to bust open this discussion.
Two messages I take from Kohn:
-At the very least, let’s change our default. Assigning homework for the sake of assigning homework is simply an outdated idea.
-What effect does homework have on student’s attitude towards learning? A great majority of students will tell you that they dislike homework. As a professional, I am not willing to do anything to jeopardize their attitude towards learning.
I have written about how the non-academic benefits of homework are mythical here: http://www.joebower.org/2010/02/myth-of-non-academic-benefits-of.html
And the importance of the attitude of a love for learning here: http://www.joebower.org/2010/02/attitude.html
thanks for sharing
Joe
http://www.joebower.org
I think a pluralistic society has to shun homework, because we are dealing with too many cultural, societal, and economic paradigms to expect one result from a number of variables.
I shun homework. I rarely did it as a kid, chose it as a necessary evil of university, questioned the masses of homework assigned to my children as they went through school, and refuse to expect my own students to do what I think they could learn and demonstrate much more effectively on site.
Hi Tom,
Great post. And thanks for the kind words. I would just like to say that that one of your tweets about respect during debate has helped me re-think the way I debate in forums (fora?). In person, I use a lot of humor and hyperbole, but I think that it’s a smart practice to limit those things inside learning communities. Without the benefit of body language, humor can fall very flat, very quickly. I also think it’s important to verbalize appreciation and respect because the lack of nonverbal cues can sometimes make a text feel like an attack.
Having said that, I’m getting TROUNCED by my learned colleague George Haines over at The Educators’ PLN, which is fine, because even if his case is more compelling than mine, I’ve learned a ton just from thinking the issue through. I’m going to try to rebut tomorrow—although I think we agree on 90% of the issue. George is another person who models best practice in online debate.
In your post, the key thing for me is this: “Many of my views on homework were not my views through much of my career. Having my own children in school gave me a perspective that I never had in the first half of my career.” I just think that’s so important because in this high-stakes, data-obsessed universe, I wonder if there’s going to be any such thing as wisdom any more. I believed in everything I did as a young teacher, and it all fit into my skill-set then, but as a mature person, I waste so much less time with kids.
Regarding this homework question, I agree with everything you’ve written, and I would just like to point out that a couple of days ago Robert Marzano sent out a tweet about his current effective strategies list, which has changed over time, and that homework is right up there at #9. I think I can explain how Kohn would take issue with that, and I’m going to try to do so in my debate with George, but it’s just a timely tweet—people should have a look at Marzano’s list. (I’d attempt an in-comment link but I know it will flop, and I’m out of time.)
Also, I think commenter Tom King is on to something with his exercise metaphor; I’ve been following the tweets out of the Learning & the Brain conference in San Francisco, and it appears that the brain-as-like-muscle metaphor is getting more and more support in hard research.
But intuitively, I think commenter Nick Jawarski is also onto something—I’m not sure we’re deep enough into our knowledge of the brain to really understand how the brain might learn science differently from language or math, etc. It may very well be that processes leading to automaticity in language are wholly different from those leading to, say, kinesthetic automaticity. In other words, I like Nick’s idea about language homework being an extremely important thing.
Anyway, as an English teacher, the one thing I’m totally sure of is this: to become a writer, you need to learn to struggle deeply with text and ideas, and that requires time and willingness to wrestle with ideas—and that requires homework.
I would strongly advise teaching teams to develop a culture of homework review—meaning, if you assign something, be ready to explain its value to your peers. We really do need to have peer review built into all of our practices, in my opinion. I could go on and on, but I see that I already have.
Many, many thanks for the engagement, and especially for the Educators PLN. I’ve learned more on that network than I have in all the graduate classes I’ve taken in the past decade. Whenever I tune in on this blog, I feel like I’m really going to learn something worth learning.
Hi Tom.
The saga over homework might just continue into perpetuity. Administrators, teachers, students and parents dialogue about it from year to year, and it appears to be a bone of contention for all of us with no resolve.
As educators, we need to understand our purpose in assigning the task at hand. Will there be utility usage for the acquired knowledge (homework assignment) or will it just become a decorator’s adornment for a parent night?
Time is a precious commodity that should not be wasted, least of all on homework that has no authentic goal or purpose. It is important for academicians to understand the walk our students take daily.
Therefore, why not make the students part of the equation, right? I did when I was teaching in a middle school. As an inquiry teacher, I assigned research to the students. I had them research the pros and cons of homework.
They were ecstatic because they became an integral part of the process. They researched a position (proponent or opponent), wrote in the school paper, prolifically generated research papers, polled teachers, guidance counselors, parents and administrators (interviewed everyone they could), debated and then prepared for a presentation to the board to hopefully effectuate change (sua sponte). They were driven and the excitement was contagious.
In sum, galvanize the troops and possibly get them to create questions and assignments that they feel will be relevant and germane to their own education:-0)
~~A pleasure to respond,
Robin
I polled some of my most successful senior students this week. They reported that until my homework (sketchbook) was connected with their own work (AP Studio Art), they only completed the work to fulfill the requirement. They hardly ever found value in the assignments. One student even reported that the assignments blocked her creative flow. She had kept an active sketchbook until I assigned sketching.
I will no be assigning homework sketches anymore. Instead, I am going to have to find a way to adequately give the same drilling practice inside my classroom with some sort of connected value.
I’m even sold on the idea of dismissing grades, but I have difficulty being the only one in the building with this mindset. I’m up against cumulative GPA, and class ranking, etc.
Another great thinking post Tom. My perspective on homework, like many commenters, has evolved as well. I’ve moved from a high school pre-cal teacher to sixth grade science teacher. That shift has made the no homework stance a lot more acceptable to some. However, I constantly wonder what I would do if/when I return to the math classroom. One of the things that is always said when alternate philosophies are discussed is, “Well, math is the exception. You have to ____ in math.” I’m not sure not that can really be said.
Homework, like any assignment must be meaningful for it to have value. Meaning can be defined any number of ways. For some meaning & value = grades. As teachers, homework has value because it is, we hope, part of the formative process for the student. A colleague quoted some research that said homework should not be assigned in the first 24 hours a topic has been introduced. Students need the overnight period for their brains to completely process what they’ve learned. Then homework can be assigned as practice and skill formation.
Without getting wordy, homework also has different meanings depending upon the grade level and ability level of the student. Two hours is not too much for a high schooler, especially if advanced classed are involved. Fifteen minutes for K-2 seems acceptable IMO.
Finally, at the risk of sounding overly idealistic, if we have properly engaged the student during class, homework as an extension of that assignment won’t be a burden. I daresay that if a teacher changes classroom sufficiently, the homework issue will take of itself naturally in the process.
Now that my two of my children are of school age, my ideas of homework are changing…as you mentioned in your post. I am currently reading Kohn’s book ‘The Homework Myth’ given to me by one of my colleagues just a few short weeks ago.
I totally get the idea too about requiring OT w/out compensation. Isn’t the compensation the learning experience? That is rhetorical, I guess.
Creativity is what I believe I need to encourage. I need to do more with the 51 minutes I have with my students each day to get more out of them. When I look at my 2nd grader struggling at night in her efforts and desire to complete homework, I can’t help but think how this damages her desire to learn.
Education is tough business and we have to keep working through these challenges in our ideology and philosophy. We need to keep working hard at finding ways to make our student’s learning authentic.
Beyond the perspective of the parent struggling to help kids complete an onerous burden of homework all year long, there is another sort of experience I’d like to share. I homeschooled my kids, read the research, and tried to take a long-term look at the kind of people I wanted my kids to become. Since my kids were pretty strong-willed, I didn’t have much choice but to allow them to set the timing and subjects for their own learning. It wasn’t always easy, but by allowing my kids to seek and savor their own interests, I found that without homework, tests, grades, or consistent curriculum, they were able to mature into competent and motivated students, tackling college with gusto and impressing professors all along the way. My third child graduated summa cum laude in December and is now a licensed teacher himself at age 23. He didn’t read until he was nine.
As a high school math teacher, I (quite stereotypically) assigned 20-30 minutes of homework every night. I knew my students had short evenings and other homework, but surely the homework I assigned was more important, right? It’s awfully easy to become selfish about one’s own subject.
I agree that homework doesn’t often give us the return on investment that we’d like. Regardless of a student’s level of intellectual engagement in the classroom, that student isn’t likely to be nearly as engaged at 11pm during their third hour of homework. For me, the structure of our textbook’s homework problems gave me hope that students’ time was being well-spent. First, homework problems reviewed a variety of material and didn’t drill a single topic. Second, I could assign all the problems and expect students to finish in 20-30 minutes. Third, and most importantly, the homework problems frequently introduced concepts that helped introduce the next day’s lesson.
In courses like history and English, it’s common to assign reading or other work that prepares students for an upcoming class. I’d like to see more of this in math. Does anybody else think this “preview homework” versus “review homework” distinction affects the overall conversation about homework?
Interesting discussion; if you teach long enough then there will always be shifts in your stance on things like homework. As a high school literature teacher I felt compelled to assign reading. That did not stop a number of academically successful students confiding to me on graduation that they never read the books. Yes there were lessons learned there. Over the years I have noticed that the pressure for homework has come from parents and colleagues; students rarely ask for it. I teach grade four-five now and homework intrudes from time to time.
What would be my current homework policy? Never send something home that cannot be done independently. Homework is application of attained knowledge and skills. With a parent’s agreement, I might set up a preview, review and practice plan. This would be something sustained and not an incidental extension of the day’s student learning outcome. If the learning has application outside the classroom, then a homework activity inviting that application is desirable. I invite students to extend what we have learned in class into their lives and to bring it back to the group. Homework is not the basis of assessment. Homework demands feedback of some sort.
I have students book off with their families for extended vacations. Give us work to do while we are gone, they ask. These days I tell them to keep a reflective journal on their journey and read some good books. I have asked them to Skype the class or check the class web site if technology is at hand. The last three did not take me up on that. I am hoping that will change. I think my vacation advice holds true for school nights.
“Always learn, learn all ways,” the milk commercial advocates. That guides after school activities. They have quick minds these young people. Their free time, and I think it is their free time, is an opportunity to apply what they know to their own world. Help shop and cook a dinner using numeracy skills, read for pleasure or the pleasure of others. Mine the web or watch the news. Watch a movie or TV show and reflect on it critically. Play a sport or just stretch your body because you like it and you learned it is good for you. If what we do in school is disconnected with their lives, then we do them a disservice stealing more time from them.
[…] If I had to name one educational author who sets educators off, it would be Alfie Kohn. The Educator’s PLN. http://edupln.ning.com. was fortunate enough to convince Alfie Kohn to talk with well over 250 educators about his views in a live Chat. Alfie is outspoken on a number of educational topics not the least of which is his stance on homework. No matter how Kohn positions it, and irrespective of the research used to support his position, all that some educators ever hear is that teachers should not give homework because it doesn’t improve or in any way positively affect learning. This flies in the face of a traditional tenet of education, “Thou shalt Give Homework”. via tomwhitby.wordpress.com […]
I love the line, “After all, I am not an administrator.” I understand both sides of the issue. I think that if homework is going to be assigned, it needs to be short and meaningful. Sometimes reading is necessary in English or a skill needs to be reinforced in math, but if a student gets 3 hours of homework a night regularly, then aren’t we just setting that student up for failure?
I don’t know the answer to the homework issue, and I don’t know how typical my experience is but I estimate that at least 90% of what I learned in my secondary school years was learned at home or while skipping or ignoring classes rather than in class, and I’m confident that very little of what I learned was the result of assigned homework. I love math, history, language, and science, and apply their lessons all the time in my work and daily life, but I honestly can’t credit very much of it to secondary schooling, except for some critical infrequent interactions with teachers and exposure to books and topics.
Once I had enough background to know good questions to ask, and make sure I didn’t start off on the wrong path, I frequently began skipping classes … in order to study more effectively and fill in the gaps that weren’t being provided in the class. If the classes themselves are a distraction from the natural learning process, how can we hope to improve on things with assigned homework?
I think homework usually distracted me from studying effectively because it put an artificial schedule on my natural learning process, just like the class itself usually did. I don’t blame teachers for this, they probably don’t have much choice. They have to try to achieve particular objectives in a particular timeframe with a diversity of students with different prior understandings and learning skills.
I’m amazed that there are some incredible teachers who actually accomplish this fairly routinely. But I don’t think they do it by forcing drills or artificially scheduled reading assignments every night. I think they inspire some motivated subset of students to use their own time and schedules at home to accomplish learning objectives. And the best also manage to expand on that motivated subset.
I realize my experience may not be typical, there may be people who would never learn anything if it not forced to sit in a class and listen to lectures and be embarrased into answering memorized answers in front of a class and dutifully read and write and memorize by rote every night. Lots of kids would probably play video games all day and night if they weren’t in school and coerced to do homework, and almost everyone at least goes through periods where they need to be forced to work. I don’t think this is really our “natural” state however until our curiosity has been hammered out of us during our school years.
I suspect that the real issue around homework for the subset of motivated learners is that we don’t want to do it because it really isn’t of much value, at least any that we can perceive, and we’d rather be led to find something interesting about the subject and explore it on our own in our own way, and have someone answer our questions and inspire new ones in our mind. Is it that this model just doesn’t fit with the practicalities of a broad educational system?
[…] some reading (Alfie Kohn, Dan Meyer, Tom Whitby) I felt justified in my doubts. In fact, I became inspired enough to apply to speak about this at a […]