Homework! I have some thoughts… Part 1

Part 1 - For Parents and Caregivers

Recently, a friend sent me an Instagram post of a reality-star-turned-podcaster talking about her frustrations with her daughter's homework. She shared that not only was the homework graded, but that she was spending homework time teaching her daughter the math content. When she couldn’t remember how to do the math, she was using ChatGPT to solve it for her.

As you can imagine, I had a lot of thoughts—some for parents and some for teachers. These are my own thoughts and beliefs, and you are entitled to your own. This is my perspective after 20 years of experience as a classroom teacher and as an elementary math coach. I recognize that emotions may surface when thinking about homework, often stemming from our own childhood experiences with homework. Take what resonates and feel free to leave the rest.

I have very mixed feelings about whether homework should be given or not. Because homework is likely a part of many students’ and families’ lives, I’m sharing information about how to engage with it.

At my school, the instructional leadership team spent almost a full year collecting data from the school community, thinking about the purpose, effectiveness, and equitable access that homework can provide, and created a very thoughtful homework policy complete with a “no tears” clause—if homework causes stress, anxiety, or other challenging emotions, or if homework is taking longer than expected, please reach out to the child’s teacher so that they may be able to provide support. Homework must be purposeful and intentionally assigned, and must honor students’ and families’ needs.

Purpose of Homework

Homework can have a few purposes. The primary reasons I assigned homework as a classroom teacher and continue to recommend it are that it provides an opportunity for extra practice, serves as a means of communication about what is being learned in school, and provides ALL students with access to these benefits. Another purpose of homework for upper elementary students and beyond is to start building “study skills.”

Extra Practice Homework is an opportunity for students to practice what they are learning in school. Because this practice happens after school, it is a separate experience with the same content, allowing the students an opportunity to recall what was learned previously and practice it. If families are engaging with students during homework sessions, asking kids questions about their strategies and how they solved the tasks can deepen the child’s understanding. I firmly believe that homework should not go home if students cannot do it independently and that it is not the parents’ and caregivers’ responsibility to teach at home, but to support (more information below on how to support your child with their homework).

Communication Homework can be used as a communication tool between schools and families because it allows families to not only see the content and types of tasks that their children are engaging with, but also allows families to see how their children are engaging with the content. They are able to notice when their children need support, their strategies, their stamina and work quality, and even the way that they feel about themselves as students.

Equity and Access When schools and classrooms take a stance on not assigning homework, often some families still provide opportunities for their students to deepen their skills and get additional practice. This may be through tutoring and additional academic programming like Kumon and Russian School of Math, or through playing games and practice provided by the parents. Equity and access play a role here because not all children engage with these additional opportunities for various reasons. Homework provides an opportunity for students to continue engaging with the content at home. Not all students may complete the homework; however, providing the opportunity to engage can help with the Opportunity Gap.

Study Skills I strongly feel that this should NOT be the primary purpose for assigning homework; however, I do think that students learning “study skills” is an incidental benefit from completing homework. These “study skills” can include completing daily assignments, as well as learning to chunk larger assignments like projects and reports into more manageable parts, prioritizing and organizing these parts, and completing them by the due date. Smaller homework assignments allow students to begin taking on more ownership of their learning outside of the school day because, as students move up through the grades, the amount of homework, reports, and projects increases.

Communicating with Your Child’s School

Hopefully, at the beginning of the school year, your child’s school or their teacher will send home information about school/classroom expectations and policies, including homework. If not (or if you can’t remember), here are some questions that will help you to get clarity and understanding of how homework completion will contribute to your child’s overall success:

• What is the purpose of assigning and completing homework?
• How is homework used in the classroom?
• How does homework contribute to my child’s grade?
• How can I support my child’s learning at home?
• How would you like me to help with homework?
• How would you like for me to communicate with you if my child is experiencing challenges?

When I was a classroom teacher, I always asked parents NOT to try to teach the content at home, and instead reminded them that incomplete homework was feedback for me about their child’s progress and current abilities. I would ask for parents and caregivers to write a note at the top of the assignment telling me any information that they could share with me about their child’s attempts to do the assignment. Sometimes this included how long the child attempted to work or questions they asked, and I could usually see some annotations on the page of the student trying to complete the assignment. I would also communicate this with students. I would tell them that I expected to see some “thinking tracks,” aka evidence of their effort on their page, but that if they could not complete the assignment, they should have a parent write a note. (I worked mostly with grade 6 students, but this also worked well with grade 4 students!)

How to Help with Homework—Even When You Don’t Know the Math

Ask questions My favorite two questions to ask when kids are stuck are: “What do you know/notice?” and “What do you need to find out/wonder?” Often, when students answer these two questions, their responses will trigger something in their memory about what they know they can already do and how they can apply it to the problem.

Ask reasoning questions and prompts when students have started but are stuck, have made a mistake, or have completed the task, whether they are correct or not. Here are a few examples: “Tell me how you solved this,” “How did you know what to do?” or “Describe your strategy.” Asking these kinds of questions, even when kids have solved correctly, helps to deepen their understanding.

Help your Child Understand the Task Another way to support your child is to help them understand what the task or problem is asking them to do. Here are a few ways to do this without helping too much:

• Read to your child or have them read (or reread) the task and ask them if there are any words they are unsure of.
• Prompt your child to underline key information and the question and circle the numbers in the problem.
• Ask your child to draw a sketch of what is happening in the task or problem or act it out with materials you have at home (coins, cereal pieces, and dried beans all make great math tools!).

Reflect on Past Learning Sometimes kids just need a thought partner to help them remember what they have been working on at school. Flipping back in a workbook can be a great tool in helping to remind students of what they already know and have been working on. If your child doesn’t have a workbook, you could ask your child to share with you what they worked on in school that day.

Empowering Your Child

Jon Saphier, the founder of Research for Better Teaching, has three statements that I have found powerful in my work with both teachers and students: “This is important. You can do it. I won’t give up on you.” These three statements communicate the value in the work, your belief in the child’s abilities, and the fact that you will be there with them, providing support when they need it.

Regardless of how you communicate it, being your child’s cheerleader goes a long way! Reminding kids of their brilliance and naming it for them allows kids to see themselves as capable doers of mathematics, empowers them to take academic risks, and see their own agency as they develop their mathematical understanding and identity.

Homework should not be painful, stress-provoking, or pointless. It should provide meaningful practice, communicate with you the learning happening in the classroom and your child’s progress, and provide an opportunity for all to extend their learning.

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