Learning Goals

Finding an alternative to nightly homework can be a frustrating process. While teaching the most recent unit, on percents and their applications, I assigned students a set of learning goals which they were require to prove that they had mastered. There was no required homework. Students could post their evidence on Edmodo, or they could write out their evidence and turn it in to me. (Initially, I told students that they could go over the learning goals verbally with me in class, but that turned out to be all that I had time to do each class period. I needed time to meet with students about questions, and so, after two days, I stopped allowing students to deliver their evidence to me verbally.) I looked at the learning goals nightly, and wrote comments back to students. If I felt a student had proven that she met a goal, I would initial it, and check it off on a master list. I thought this was a good plan because students would get quick feedback, and I would have a good idea of how each student was doing.

However, there were problems. First, I created too many learning goals. There were fourteen for the unit. Going over the learning goals was taking over my life. The second problem was that students were not looking at the textbook materials at all, since there was no homework assigned. There wasn't any variety in the problems that they wrote to prove they had met a goal, since they just wrote problems identical to the ones I had done in class. Another problem was that same students who didn't do their homework before, also didn't submit their learning goals, so they still weren't getting feedback, and I still didn't know what their level of comprehension was. Finally, students didn't do any better on the percent test than they had on any other test this year. So learning goals are not the magic bullet, but I am not giving up. For the next unit, I have created slightly fewer (11) learning goals. I am assigning a few problems out of the textbook, but no more than ten, and usually fewer than that. If nothing else, the students have a better idea of what they are supposed to be learning, and are more focused on concepts instead of lesson numbers than they were before.

The Homework Dilemma

I am starting this blog because after six years of teaching 7th grade math, I find homework to be a constant frustration. I know that kids don't enjoy it, and I want to make sure that, if I am assigning it, it has a purpose. I have tried so many different options, and still haven't settled on the best, most effective way to use homework. Should it be no homework, a flipped classroom, drill-and-kill (okay, not drill-and-kill), a few problems that involve more writing and problems solving, a lot of problems with a right or wrong answer, review problems but not new content, new content but no review? The homework dilemma has not been solved. Research does not point a clear path, so let's put our heads together, do some action research, and figure out what works.