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Saturday, January 30, 2016

The questions they've always needed to ask




I promise I'll get to questioning in my classroom, but please bear with me for some brief* self-questioning first!

This past summer I had the privilege of attending Alan November's Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference where I stuffed my brain past capacity for three full days thinking about teaching, learning, equity, improving all student outcomes, and how to use technology effectively to improve the collaboration and the scope of the work we do in classrooms. I left with about 15 pages of notes, a list of roughly 100 education folks I wanted to start following on Twitter, and so many ideas that I spent a good part of last August prepping new tasks and ideas to incorporate into my classes.

One of the ideas that really stuck with me from the conference was hardly a new one - homework - but my thinking about it changed significantly. As I heard teacher after teacher talking about how homework has been shown to serve those who will succeed no matter what the circumstances are while it may harm those who struggle, I really began to question my own thoughts on assigning homework most nights. My particular student population is overwhelmingly biased on the "those who struggle" side of learners, and I've spent most days of my first five years teaching lamenting how few complete homework assignments were turned in. Particularly as the curriculum grows harder in my 11th and 12th grade classes, fewer and fewer kids do their homework and I see huge gaps start to form in understanding core content between my (admittedly few) students based on their homework decisions. So, throwing caution to the wind, I decided to go all in on a homework-free pilot of my polynomials unit with my juniors this year. The unit goes as follows:

determining end behavior from standard form of polynomials --> graphing polynomials in factored form --> factoring and solving (factor-able) polynomials --> long and synthetic division of polynomials --> rational roots theorem --> Fundamental Theorem of Algebra --> combining everything we know about polynomials to solve any polynomial

Anybody who has taught this material before can understand why kids could fall very behind if they weren't completing homework! In past years by the time we got to the rational roots theorem I usually spent the 20-25 minutes of independent working time at the end of class running around answering questions for kids varying from "What specific error did I make here?" to "What's a root, again?" And when at the end of class I told students to go home and do more similar problems for homework to independently practice, I knew that my strugglers had little chance of completing the assignment alone and that they would more likely never bother to start rather than face the frustration. Hoping to help all of my kids learn this material better, I made a deal with them. For the entirety of our polynomials unit, they won't have any homework in exchange for us working productively together through every minute of class. When class ends, we stop where we are. We pick back up the next day, and kids work at their own pace with peers as they want when we get to independent practice times after collaborative instruction.

*sorry that was in no way brief.

OK, so questioning. Since every day in class we work together through structured notes/exploration/independent practice with the material, there is ample room for kids to ask questions about the content. We've had some really great moments. They asked terrific questions as we learned about standard form, like "do we really need to bother fully expanding a polynomial in factored form if we can just find the first term?" They also made great connections to multiplicity patterns of roots, like "Hey! The shape the graph makes at the root is like the shape of the parent graph for that exponent! If it's squared, it looks like a parabola!" One student has made it a habit every day of asking students who ask questions and receive answers from myself or peers to repeat what they just asked and learned, explaining that she "learns the most when she hears what connections or questions other students have."

We've also had some not great moments, where students ask basic algebra questions that initially make me concerned for their previously learned skills. When determining the degree, students asked often about how to combine exponents: "do we add them or multiply them?" When factoring polynomials, "Can you remind me how we know which method to use?" Or a rather concerning one, "What's a perfect square?"

I'm standing firm so far that while these questions give me doubt to students' past conceptual understanding, they would have these questions anyway. Since we are learning together in class, these questions come out naturally and everybody can benefit from a miniature review. Previously, when those questions would come up on a homework assignment at 10 p.m. when my students were alone, they proved to be the perfect excuse to give up before really digging into current material and simply pronouncing the next day in class that they "didn't get" the homework. My most struggling student, who has had a very spotty math skills background for the past few years due to major emerging mental illness and a handful of different housing situations, has asked more questions in the three weeks we've spent learning about polynomials so far than he has asked in two years. And learning from those answers, coupled with knowing that homework assignments where he'll feel completely, hopelessly lost and lose credit for them in class are off the table, means that he recently earned one of the highest scores on the Polynomials section of my midterm exam.

While we have spent more time on the first part of our Polynomials unit than I have yet in my teaching career since there are no homework assignments, average student understanding is vastly improved. I'll keep with my no-homework pilot for this unit (which at this point might well take us until March, but damnit they'll be Polynomials masters) and continue to evaluate student understanding. From all of the great learning I've seen in this short pilot so far, homework may well be on its way out in my classroom...

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing! I wrestle with this homework/no homework idea often.

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  2. I also wrestle with homework. Sounds like I have a similar student population to yours with a fair number of struggling learners who don't have homework support at home. In some ways I think homework is really important because for that group of students that does it and does it well, they're solidifying and gaining understanding. So it's maybe like a form of differentiated instruction. The issue, though, is that I don't then have an alternative for those other struggling kids who aren't getting anything from homework. It sounds like you are giving them time in class which allows for more equitable access but at the expense of pacing. I guess there are always wins and drawbacks to any plan.

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  3. Brief is relative. For me, that was pretty brief, and the context was helpful. As to the homework itself, it's great that your students seem to be on board with it! Particularly the struggling one! Some might be more inclined to take advantage of the offer, so I'd say you have a good relationship with them. I'm a bit curious as to whether any particularly keen students have wanted to do extra work outside of the class voluntarily?

    I agree that they would probably have had those questions anyway. In the same vein, remember that (and maybe I'm being a cynic here) some students will forget things by the end of a course no matter how well you go through it. The mind is a curious place. All the best with your continued efforts!

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  4. Since students don't seem to want to do the homework at home, have you ever heard of, or considered, a flipped classroom? Where the lecture is done at home, and then the classroom time is used for homework?

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