A New Vision.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/3-new-guidelines-for-healthy-homework/2012/06/25/gJQAFcV30V_blog.html
Link to Article from Washington Post.
Homework
Healthy Homework?
Categories: Homework
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UK Primary Schools on Right Track
Categories: Homework
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Cook Eat and Learn!
Homework. You either love it or you hate it. Most students you talk to hate it.
Avid readers of this blog will already know my views of homework for middle school students. If it is Relevant, Interesting and Personal then there’s a good argument for it. If it’s Boring, Repetitive and Impersonal then it can be painful and probably is not helpful to your child. (Not just my opinion. See Alfie Kohn, Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish and others)
Here’s an activity you can try at home with your child which is Relevant, Interesting and Personal and it’s not homework. It’s called cooking. Yes cooking. Usually the role of the parent is to provide meals for their hungry teenagers, how about encouraging them to take part in the process?
The process of cooking uses some of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and can lead to many of the components encouraged in an inquiry based education programme.
Start with a recipe. Ask your son or daughter to look at the recipe, get the ingredients together and follow a process. This will presumably involve measuring, weighing, and mixing. It may also involve converting. Whilst doing this, you can be talking to him about nutrition and diet etc.
Laying the table and coming together to eat is also an important part of the process.
As your son or daughter becomes more used to the idea of maybe cooking once a week or fortnight, why not then introduce the design cycle into the process?
- investigate
- design
- plan
- create
- evaluate.
Look in your fridge and investigate what you have in terms of ingredients. Design a meal for the family. Plan the process, create the meal and then, very importantly evaluate the meal!
Now what better way to spend a chunk of the evening with your children? Admittedly you might get some resistance to the idea at first, but I bet they’ll end up enjoying being sociable and learning at the same time!
Homework
Homework is a hot topic in the middle school at the moment. I have introduced the idea that we need to think about why we set homework and if students do take learning home, what should it look like. After reading much research, articles and books such as Alfie Kohn’s “The Homework Myth”, Sara Bennet and Nancy Kalish’s “The Case against Homework” and Harris Cooper’s “The Battle over homework”, it is clear to me that we need to re-examine and discuss our current practice. I don’t think there is a huge problem at our school, in fact the excellent teachers we have are very open to ideas and change. They are also doing a great job and really have the student’s well being at heart, but I think that we all just assume that homework should be set and all have very different ways of setting it.
I am not saying that there should be no learning done at home, I am simply saying that the learning should be relevant, interesting and personalized. If a student is really excited about their learning and they want to continue their learning at home, they will!
One point of discussion is to look at the curriculum content of each subject. If a teacher feels that she or he needs to set homework in order to “get through the curriculum content” then I would say we need to look at the curriculum and see if things can be re arranged to enable it to be taught primarily at school.
Another area is the awful practice of saying “Here’s the work for today and if you can’t finish it, you have to do it for homework”. Who does this benefit. The kids who find the work easy don’t have any homework and are not stretched and the kids who are struggling or just simply take longer, end up with homework.
The students at our school, through the student leadership body are also looking at homework through surveys and interviews. It upset me yesterday when I saw a video interview with a 6th grader who said “Home is for fun and school is for work”. When I hear comments like this I feel we have failed this student and need to try to get through to him that learning should and can be fun. This student needs to be excited about learning at school at home.
I visited the Bronx Guild School in New York last year, which is a big picture school. I asked a student there whether he had homework. He said “I don’t get given homework, but I do a lot of my work at home”. If people get excited about something they are doing, they’ll just want to keep doing it.
I read an interesting response to the opinion of some educators that kids can’t always have fun and they need repetitive practice homework in order to teach them discipline and organizational skills. They also sometimes compare this opinion with Musicians and Athletes who have to do a lot of preparation and repetitive exercises to get better. The response simply said “The difference is that the musicians and athletes WANT to do it”.
I’d happily give a student 2 hours of Math practice questions to do at home if they were interested in doing them!
More to follow….!
