The purpose of homework is to promote learning. That’s it. It’s not a way to earn a grade or something to keep kids busy. It’s also not something that just must be completed in order to stay out of trouble. Homework is a chance to try things independently, make mistakes and explore the nature of those mistakes in order to better learn the material at hand.
If students are not learning from the homework, it is a waste of time and effort. There are a few things that could cause students not to learn from the homework. Even if the assignments are of high quality, without the reflection and correction piece, students will not learn much from homework.
Reflection and correction go together. It’s not about getting right answers, but thinking about what caused mistakes, identifying misconceptions or procedural inefficiencies and replacing those. To reflect a student should NOT erase their incorrect working but instead should write on their homework, in pen, what went wrong and what would have been better.
It is quite possible more can be learned when reviewing homework than any other time. It is certainly a powerful experience.
Textbooks and videos, tutors and peer help offer little appropriate support to help make homework, or practice, meaningful. Textbooks only provide correct answers, YouTube videos usually do similar treatment to topics as textbooks offer.
I wish to help students learn and believe that reviewing work that has been done is too powerful of an opportunity to pass. The trick is, how can I provide reflection and insight when to someone I am not sitting with and talking to? I think I can help provide this reflection piece by doing all of the practice problems myself on a document camera and discussing pitfalls and mistakes, as well as sharing my thinking about the problems as I tackle them. Further, I can share typical mistakes I see from students as they are learning topics.
So as I develop the Algebra 1 content I will be working on adding videos and short written responses to the assignments to help students think about what they’ve done, its appropriateness, correctness and their level of understanding.
