to home learning


The research doesn’t offer a simple solution, either. For every researcher who tells us that homework has little or no impact on achievement, somebody else will counter with the importance of homework to help students develop self-management skills. Some studies allude to the value of homework for certain subject areas and how the value of homework increases for older students. In one study, I’ll read that younger children’s homework should be reading only, while in another the findings will be that burning the midnight oil is a normal part of growing up. One person states that rote learning through isolated activities is the only effective use of time, and another asserts that kids should be provided with stimulating project-based tasks to motivate them to work independently. Such divergent perspectives provide us with an extensive menu of options, when all we want is a simple diet that is both manageable and balanced.


Despite the challenges associated with determining what is best for learning, a universal theme reoccurs in my mind every time homework is put forward for discussion: the importance of the quality of the experience. As parents we can’t do much about the research and we don’t generally have a lot of influence over the type of tasks that sit in backpacks. We do, however, have an influence on the types of interactions we choose to have with our children and the relationships that can be nurtured as a result. As teachers we have little influence over the types of conversations that take place once the students get home or the types of environments that are established to support the completion of tasks, but we can be thoughtful about the expectations we set through the ways that we structure these learning opportunities that happen outside of our classrooms.


By thinking more about what is within our respective capacities to influence positive learning and less about the peripheral factors outside of our control, the greater the likelihood of parents and teachers working in partnership toward a common goal – effective student learning — will increase. When teachers assign projects in class, they are able to observe how students approach a task, how they organize information, how they plan, how they interact and collaborate with peers, how they ask questions, how much time is


taken and how they employ their strengths and weaknesses. For each step of the process teachers can provide meaningful feedback to facilitate improvement and growth. When this is done at home, teachers are only provided with a snapshot of learning without knowing how the final product was reached. The more we rely on homework to determine student progress, the less we actually know about how learning is happening.


By simply changing the focus from work to learning (from home work to home learning) we can change the story of learning. When we think of work, we think of task completion for somebody else, assignments as activities oſten with little connection to longer-term learning; in these contexts, homework is seen as part of the job for students and grades are the pay off. This type of thinking promotes questions around the length of the assignment, the way to get extra credit or whether or not the subject matter is going to be on the test. When we think about learning, we think more in terms of collective endeavours, about uncovering complexities of problems and going deeper in seeking solutions; we see it more as an active process and perceive higher levels of engagement, and we think of open- ended questions to drive learning. When we emphasize learning and de-emphasize work, the types of interactions we have with our children can be completely transformed from questions about whether they have started or finished to conversations about what worked well and what could be improved upon in the future.


Rethinking the purpose of what and why we want students to learn at home provides us with opportunities to rethink how we get there. But just because we call something a different name doesn’t mean that there will be a huge transformation or that everything that we are currently doing is less than optimal practice. Being cognizant of what we want the outcome to be should help make us more aware of the language we use, how we frame questions or how we emphasize the importance of students advocating for themselves. Providing parents with the tools to make this happen becomes the next challenge, but I am convinced that shiſting our thinking away from homework to home learning is a step in the right direction toward improving the quality of the learning experiences we provide for our children.


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