Practice, Practice, Practice (Or: Homework, Homework, Homework?)

Hang onto your hats, folks. If you’re mired in the homework/no homework debate, read on for some very interesting commentary from Dr. Marzano in Chapter 3 of The Art & Science of Teaching.

Summary:

It is essential for students to not merely be exposed to new knowledge, but actively and authentically work with the knowledge. Not every kind of work fits every kind of knowledge, however.

When teaching procedural skills (how to accomplish something step by step), you also need to allow students to practice those skills. This practice should be frequent and simple at first, giving way to more complex activities. Importantly, students should reflect consistently on their own use of the procedures and come to an understanding that works for them individually: changing, adding, or deleting steps as necessary.

When teaching declarative knowledge (concepts or ideas), you need to create activities that allow students to review and revise. By making active corrections, connections, and reflections, students incorporate their knowledge into their long-term memories, like pressing pieces of pottery into a mosaic. There are seven pages at the end of this chapter that give some solid practical tools for working with declarative knowledge in class.

Stuck in My Head:

By far the most interesting writing in this chapter to me is Marzano’s position on—you guessed it—homework. And serendipity strikes! As I write, commenters are raging over this Inservice post on "The Homework Lady," Cathy Vatterott.(Full disclosure: I attended Homework Lady’s workshop at ASCD's 2008 Annual Conference and loved it.)

For those of you out there spurning Homework Lady's seemingly anti-homework policies, it's worth mentioning here that Marzano's own homework recommendations echo Vatterott’s nearly point for point. See below for a list.

Playing It Out:

My own homework policies have varied wildly over time. In the eight years that I was an ESL teacher, working with impoverished families who often didn't know where to buy pencils, homework was a ticking time bomb. It was a sure thing that thoughtless, "spillover" homework on my part ("Just finish the chapter at home, OK?") would result in nothing but shamefaced students and a line of zeroes at the end of the quarter. I began to assign homework extremely sparingly and applied what I started to call the Second Shift Principle. If an ESL kid couldn't do the homework easily around a parent's absence due to a second job (or the student's own "second shift," often a load of culturally dictated housework and child care), then the homework wasn't worth doing.

I transferred this philosophy to my new mainstream English classroom two years ago, working from the idea that I had no clue what the conditions were for homework for any of my students, much less my ESL crew. But as some mainstream parents started to question the work their kids were doing in my class ("I'm not seeing much come home . . . is my child being challenged enough?"), I realized I had unwittingly put myself smack in the middle of in a clash of homework cultures. It worried me. Were they right? Was I encouraging kids to slack off?

As Marzano indicates in this chapter (comfortingly), attitudes towards homework in America are historically cyclical. It's very likely that my students' parents grew up in a different cycle than the one in which I find myself. I'm also comforted by the basic alignment of my homegrown philosophy with Marzano's homework recommendations.

There's always room for improvement, though—especially since another educator hero of mine, Nancie Atwell, regularly assigns her kids hours of reading and writing to do at home. Yikes. What's a teacher to do?

There has to be a happy balance somewhere, and I'm trying to find it this quarter by both trusting Marzano and lifting Atwell's weekly reading journal assignment out of her book, In The Middle (more here). It passes the homework test, not only because it's purposeful, kid-driven, and moderate (once a week minimum), but also because it is easily completed in class without sacrificing instruction. I'm hoping that kids who have less-than-conducive academic situations at home will benefit from the flexibility of Atwell's approach. I'll keep you posted.

Take Away This:

Want Marzano's checklist for effective homework? Print this out and tape it to your desk.

• Homework needs to be completed in order to produce the highest achievement gains. Design it with ease of completion in mind.
• A large amount of homework does not result in better learning.
• Homework should be academically purposeful, not a punishment or a symbol of the seriousness of study.
• Homework should be explicitly tied to the current learning goals of the class.
• Homework should be able to be completed without adult assistance.
• Parents or guardians should not be expected to act as content experts.
• Parents should, however, be provided with clear homework guidelines.
• Assignments that involve using the parents' expertise or personal experiences (such as interviews) are often successful.

Anyone got a problem with these? For example, my colleague Kim (who is sitting here proofreading this post) asks, "Designing homework? Are you kidding? I barely have time to design my classes." So let us hear it, and tell us why. And if you put these recommendations in place (or already have them in place), let us know that too.

Dina Strasser is a middle school English/Language Arts teacher in upstate New York and blogs at The Line. Read her Chapter 2 post in this chapter-by-chapter series on Marzano's Art & Science of Teaching.