Do your students take homework seriously? Are you finding that daily student homework completion is low? What about students who don’t understand their homework and have working parents? How do we ensure they have successful experiences with their homework?
There is a lot of buzz and frustration from parents and students regarding homework. Homework or "practice makes perfect work" should be tasks students deem as valuable to success and practice that students can complete successfully and independently, with support as necessary from the home.
"Fun-work" is an opportunity to independently practice skills learned throughout the day and show mastery.
There are two homework strategies that I have found are both meaningful and fair for all learners. They differentiate the learning task and allow the learner to show mastery, according to interest and learning style.
Strategy 1: Choice Board
Similar to adult learners, students are motivated by choice and options for demonstrating their mastery of content. Students and teachers love choice boards (i.e., tic-tac-toe boards), so an organized menu of choices created around a specific objective.
A choice board can be created to differentiate the task outcome, the task based on readiness of a student, and include various learning styles to engage students.
As a result, students feel empowered and are able to be successful with a homework task based on their level of understanding. As a teacher, you are able to design the choices, and the board can range from six to nine options.
For millions of pre-created menus on a variety of subjects visit https://daretodifferentiate.wikispaces.com.
Strategy 2: Self-Assessment Pyramid
The pyramid approach offers students the choice of looking at the assigned task and self-evaluating their readiness for completion and success.
The bottom row is "three problems I can solve with confidence." The second row asks students to answer "two problems or questions that I am attempting but not quite sure how to answer." The top box is "one problem/question that I need to be shown how to answer."
There are many ways to challenge and support students with this tiered approach.
For example, for students who need the acceleration, I would say "based off of these 10 problems, I want you to focus your choices on the odd numbers." This pyramid is based on the principle "less is more" — students are able to demonstrate mastery in a few problems versus 20 problems.
For students who understand the homework, they devalue the process of 20 problems. For students who struggle, they shut down with 20 problems. The tiered cake allows for everyone to be successful.
This approach also provides the teacher necessary data, i.e. "Which problem should we work out as a class based on consensus of the top box? How many student(s) need re-teaching, how can we heterogeneously pair up for peer based teaching and learning?"
Homework can be meaningful and fair. Just as "one size does not fit all" with classroom instruction, we must also provide respectable instruction as our approach to homework practice and extension.
Students will be more successful with differentiated options, and if done right, homework can be an instrumental source of data to support next-day instruction and remediation. For these templates and more, visit resources tab on my website.
