If it’s important, do it in the classroom

The summer before I became a teacher, a friend of mine who had been an English teacher for 15 years gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me throughout my career. Over the last eight years, this simple piece of advice has helped me to build better relationships with my students and to help students grow more in reading and writing. She said that if something is important to your class, you should do it in the classroom.

As a social studies teacher, it is tempting to assign writing or reading as homework, especially among high-achieving students. But I have found that minimizing work outside of class has actually saved a lot of headaches. For example, if you plan to have a discussion in class, but a quarter of the students haven’t read the text, you’re going to end up with a very bad discussion, with many students offering vacuous comments. Or when reading a novel, missing one night of reading might leave a student behind for weeks.

It can also help you develop trust with students. Rather than shaming students who didn’t write an essay at home or who didn’t complete a reading the night before — with the usual excuses that come with it — you can instead ensure that students have enough of their most valuable resource: time. And that allows students and teachers to focus on the actual reading and writing skills that need to be developed. By controlling for time, you can evaluate a student based on the actual quality of their work; too frequently, homework grades are just a measure of the amount of time a student spent on an assignment at home.

This doesn’t mean that you must never give homework — but I think it’s important to prioritize the most important stuff for class time. For me, this has also meant using homework to help students go more in depth — like, for instance, in an AP class. That might mean doing the most important readings in class while assigning supplementary readings as homework, or it might mean taking a page from the flipped classroom model and assigning short lectures as homework —while still ensuring that students can engage in class if they missed the lecture.

This also doesn’t mean that you need to give unlimited time — my policy has generally been to give the amount of time I think will be needed, but if a student doesn’t manage their time well, they may end up having to do work outside of class.

What kind of assignments do you give for homework? Do you have any guiding principles for the kinds of things you assign? Have you shifted away from (or toward) homework — and if so, how did it go?