My homework routine is thoroughly a product of my student body: adults with wildly diverging math preparation/skills, who are motivate by a test/goal with real implications for their lives, but who also lead full adult lives that leave little time for math homework.
I have decided that, in this context, assigning problems x through y, and expecting them all to be done next Thursday is a fool’s errand. (Some adult ed teachers incorporate more traditional homework assignments into their class. But for me/my classes, it just didn’t seem to work.)
We’ve evolved a more choose your own adventure version: I give practice work at the end of each lesson, and we have a lively and well-packed set of milk crates that house materials covering our full curriculum. Students do what they can of what they think they need.
I doubt the choose your own homework system is transferable to many classes (although that’s a shame) What’s more transferable, and where I want to spend more time, is the folder it goes in.
How it works:
Each of my students gets a homework folder. There’s nothing special except a bright color, chosen to cut down on the chance it gets lost in the piles of papers. Inside is a log.
Each week, I collect this folder, and and I ask students to complete their log. Whether they’ve done pages and pages of math, or worked double shifts and done no math beyond tallying their hours, I ask for a note: What did you do? How’d it go? Anything else do you want me to know?
I look at their log, note whether or not math happened, and respond to their comments before returning their folders.
Here’s a version of the no-frills homework log I’ve been using. And the more elaborate log I’m planning to switch to next year.
What I love:
- It allows a private dialogue for the shy ones, or the ones who are struggling, or out of sync with the class.
(I occasionally get profound comments here that I can’t imagine hearing out loud in class, especially the quiet confessions of ‘I think I’m starting get/like/learn math…’)
- Answering what ‘did I do?’ is a nice level of accountability. I am not scolding them about homework, but they are looking in black and white and their own handwriting at the results of the week. Every week.
- But really, I think the crucial element is facing that “how’d it go?” question every time. Even if they give me a one word answer, they’ve had to think back over that work and decide between “good”, “ok” and “hard”. I want to foster this habit of reflection in and out of class, and this is the best means I’ve found so far (it’s also the third leg of the metacognition stool we’re building each week)
The results:
- The good: I usually have a student or two at a time who winds up with a bit of a correspondence course on some math skills they need, but that is separate (and often ahead of) the regular class. They try X, learn most of it, identify a need to learn Y, I give it to them and we repeat.
- The bad: The student who decided to take algebra from the crates way before she was ready and came to class the next time on the edge of tears because she had convinced herself she was hopeless.
- The usual: Some weeks homework happens, some weeks life happens instead. When homework does happen, it’s usually a mix of class topics and review. The comments are short, mostly prosaic, but they’re there. They get consistent encouragement to work at home, and to reflect on their learning.
Adapting
- Perhaps you take the folder and log procedure, and use it to reflect on more traditional assignments. (What did you do to complete the problem set? How did that go?…)
- For my class, there’s no distinction between ‘homework’ and ‘preparing for the test’. I can imagine adapting this to focus on “studying” to encourage good habits; and/or blending the two. (Which might be a great conversation to have with students – ie, that ‘homework’ and ‘studying’ have the same purpose, to promote learning)
- If your homework routine involves more collecting than mine, perhaps it’s not a folder, but something like a wrapper that gets attached to the assignment
