TORONTO – While September means new teachers, old friends, and strapping on a backpack for students, it also means spending nights on homework instead of summer hobbies.
But not for everyone.
It’s been about two years since an American elementary school nixed traditional homework in favour of half an hour of reading time each night.
Gaithersburg Elementary School Principal Stephanie Brant explained that her leadership team in Maryland evaluated the homework assignments for grades kindergarten to eight, and found they didn’t connect with the work students were doing in the classroom. That’s where the idea to replace take-home worksheets with reading time came from.
“I’d love that,” said Grade 8 student Pavle Suka in Toronto. “Just 30 minutes of my day and then I could go out and play.”
Toronto high school student Nikoletta Corel said getting rid of homework might be good for younger kids, but that Grade 11 or 12 students need to get their “mind working for university or their jobs.”
“I feel like without homework people wouldn’t really be going anywhere,” said Corel. “You need to get your education right.”
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Despite conflicting opinions, Brant said she was seeing two problematic situations when students were given homework.
One was when parents of kids who were struggling with traditional homework sheets thought something was wrong instructionally.
“And really it’s just because the worksheets weren’t engaging for them, they weren’t being able to solve problems in a variety of ways and talk about it, and they weren’t able to use those critical thinking skills that we use here each day,” said Brant.
The other situation was that kids who breezed through the take-home rote memorization work had parents who thought it was too easy, and Brant’s response was that it wasn’t reflective of what students were doing in the classroom.
Dr. Ben Levin works at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and he says student work must be matched to where the students skills are.
“You have to balance the work in a way that students don’t feel like there’s an endless amount of stuff to do and they’re depressed just thinking about it,” says Levin.
So the disconnect between the work that was getting sent home and the way kids learned in class was how the reading time replacement came about at Brant’s school in Maryland.
“We know our students need more background knowledge, we know everyone will do better with vocabulary, we know reading builds stamina. There’s so many great things about reading,” said Brant.
She says a “culture” has now been created at her school where kids are bringing their books to recess, recommending titles to each other and blogging about their favourite stories.
“More of our students are reading on or above grade level than they have in the past,” said Brant, admitting they only have a couple of years of data.
Levin says he would be surprised if the reading replacement was the only explanation to improved outcomes, but says it will definitely benefit student skills, even in other subjects.
“It turns out that a lot of what we ask kids to do in mathematics involves reading skills,” says Levin. “So really every subject involves reading skills.”
He adds that evidence indicates lots of homework does not help achievement, but still thinks there will always be work for Canadian students outside of school hours.
“Reading, for example, thinking about issues, talking about them, doing some research,” says Levin. “I think that’s a reasonable thing. But we don’t want it to turn into a chore for the sake of doing a chore. We always want students to be able to see how this work is actually related to their skills.”
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