Rethinking Homework

            In Chapter 7 in their book, Mathematics Tasks for the Thinking Classroom, Grades K-5, Peter Liljedahl and Meagan Giroux say most teachers know that homework isn’t working. One comment: “Students who don’t need to do their homework are the ones who do their homework.” So why do teachers keep assigning it? Some common responses: 

• It’s school policy. 
• Parents expect it.
• Students need practice.
• Grading homework means there are fewer grades assigned to tests.
• This is how it’s always been done. 

But student compliance is typically abysmal. One study found that when students know homework will be graded, 22 percent do it with fidelity; when it’s not graded, that figure rises to 31 percent. 

            When pressed for more-substantive reasons than parental and bureaucratic expectations and past practice, teachers say they want homework to be:

• A safe place where students can make mistakes and learn from them; 
• A chance for students to see if they can do classwork on their own; 
• A way to check their understanding. 

These are good reasons, say Liljedahl and Giroux, but when they asked students why they do homework, none mentioned those three. Instead, kids said:

• It’s for grades.
• My mom makes me.
• My teacher makes me.

“The reason that homework doesn’t work,” say the authors, “is that the gulf between what teachers want to achieve with homework and why students do it is massive. If we want homework to work, we need to narrow this gulf.”

            Fifteen years of Building Thinking Classrooms research led to a different approach: rebranding homework for students as checking your understanding (CYU), with these provisions:

• It’s not practice. 
• It’s not an exercise. 
• It’s not an easy way to get grades. 
• The purpose is to check and improve understanding. 
• It’s not assigned, collected, checked, or graded.
• Instead, students are given an opportunity to do check-your-understanding questions.
• As much as possible, that opportunity is during class. 

            “When this rebranding and these practices were put in place,” say Liljedahl and Giroux, “we saw students doing CYU questions for the right reason – to check that they understood rather than for grades. They would take ownership for their own work while at the same time they made use of the knowledge of the students around them as resources to check their answers and get help when stuck.” Because the check-your-understanding questions were ungraded, there was no incentive to “cheat” or divvy up the work among friends. The process incentivizes learning over compliance and grades, and researchers found that 60-80 percent of students seized the opportunity – much better than typical compliance.

            But what about the 20-40 percent who opted out? They were probably the same students who, with mandatory graded homework, didn’t do it, cheated, or did it purely for grades and not for learning. Liljedahl, Giroux, and their colleagues were not content to let these students make bad decisions that were not in their best interests: “This is the nature of childhood,” they say. “It is the job of the adults in these children’s lives to not only encourage them to make better decisions, but to create situations where they are more likely to make better decisions.”

            Here’s how they modified the check-your-understanding process. Toward the end of a lesson, the teacher writes questions on the board at three levels of difficulty: Mild, Medium, and Spicy. Students are told: 

• These are your CYU questions. 
• You are going to sit down and do some of these. 
• Choose where you want to start. 
• Do your own. 
• Check your work with the students around you. 
• If you need help, get help. And if someone else needs help, give help. 

This structure - working on your own together – helped students feel safe about making mistakes. Telling students to decide where to start, the researchers found, was much more productive than asking students to choose which questions to tackle. When told to choose where to start, students answered more questions, and if they faltered, it was easy for the teacher to prompt them: “Okay, so where are you going next?”

            This structure also promoted a growth (versus a fixed) mindset in students. “Students with a fixed mindset,” say Liljedahl and Giroux, “view evaluation and assessment as a description of who they are, whereas students with a growth mindset view evaluation and assessment as a description of where they are. To promote a growth mindset, then, we need to make sure that activities such as self-assessment help students understand where they are instead of who they are.” Asking a student, “Where are you going next?” nudges them toward a growth mindset.

            Being able to choose Mild, Medium, and Spicy was also significant. Rubrics and performance scales often use terms like Novice, Master, and Expert, which describe students on their level of expertise – a who fixed mindset. Mild, Medium, and Spicy describe the tasks, not the students, and the colloquial language is non-evaluative and nonjudgmental. A year’s experimentation with this approach in more than 100 math classrooms from K to 12 showed huge impact on students’ desire to do the tasks. Researchers heard comments like: 

• I’m doing one mild, one medium, and then I’m going straight to spicy.
• Can we have another spicy one? 
• I think I’ll start with mild and see where I go from there.
• I got to medium. 

“They were engaged,” say Liljedahl and Giroux. “In fact, we have observed numerous lessons where students wanted to stay and keep working well after the bell to leave has gone.” Why? Three key elements:

• Choice – Students could decide where to start and how far to go.
• Mastery – Success created confidence and momentum to try something harder.
• Challenge – The ladder of difficulty got students into the zone of productive struggle. 

Productive struggle is “a state rather than a trait,” say the authors. “In order to enter this state, students need to have encountered challenge after success. Once this state is entered, however, it begins to feed on itself. With every success comes the desire to take on more challenge. And the greater the challenge, the greater the feeling of success. The students are enjoying feeling successful at things that are challenging and they want to keep it going – they want to go from mild to medium to spicy."

            For the great majority of students, this structure is very successful – but some students are paralyzed by the initial decision of where to start and need a nudge to get going. The teacher saying Why don’t you start with this mild one is usually enough to get them started, and then they pick up momentum. There are also students who were not paying attention during the lesson or whose skills are below the mild level, and they’ll need additional help and their own sub-mild questions (which are still called mild).

            A few students are at the other end of the spectrum – they think they’re ready to go straight to spicy, but they haven’t built confidence and mastery with the easier questions. These kids need to be coached to start with easier questions and stay in a state of productive struggle. And there are students who really are ready for the spicy level and can use an additional challenge. Liljedahl and Giroux advise against creating a fourth level (Extra Spicy, Habanero, Flaming Hot) because this leads other students not to venture past medium. For hard-charging, high-achieving students, they say, keep the three levels and put up additional spicy questions that will challenge them – but use the same label.

            During check-your-understanding time, a lot of the help comes from peers, but teachers still need to circulate, say Liljedahl and Giroux. It’s a great time “to work the room to see where students need the individual support, encouragement, and challenge necessary to complete the learning for the day. Along the way you will gather a ton of informal information about where individual students are in their learning that you can use to either inform your teaching or to inform your grading.”

            If students are allowed to look at each other’s work, won’t they just copy? That will happen, say the authors, if check-your-understanding work is treated like an exit ticket and collected and graded. A critical element of the CYU time is that it’s voluntary and ungraded; if it is, there’s very high participation and “cheating” shouldn’t happen.

            Should the mild/medium/spicy questions be printed out on paper? “No!” say Liljedahl and Giroux. “Doing so creates two major problems.” First, the check-your-understanding process becomes another worksheet, which triggers a predictable response from students: they treat it as something they’re accountable for rather than responsible for. Second, CYU questions need to be the teacher’s on-the-spot reflection of what actually happened during the lesson, not what they wanted to happen. If the CYU questions are put on paper and run off before the lesson begins, the mild/medium/spicy questions might be off target. What’s spicy today might be medium tomorrow.

            It is important, the authors add, that check-your-understanding questions are mostly done in class. Relying on CYU questions being done at home is a “losing proposition,” they say. “Some will do them. Some will not. Regardless, doing them at home means they are away from the guidance and encouragement that you can provide.” The great virtue of a high-involvement check-your-understanding time is that students are taking responsibility for their own learning and achieving mastery in an environment with lots of challenge, choice, and support.

            What if parents want regular homework? Liljedahl and Giroux suggest describing the CYU process to parents and explaining why it is so effective at getting children actually learning. If parents insist on homework, direct them to resources with work students can do for them (not the teacher). “Parents’ desire to have homework,” say the authors, “should not affect your professional judgment of what is best for your students.”

“How to Have Students Do Check-Your-Understanding Questions” by Peter Liljedahl and Meagan Giroux, Chapter 7 in Mathematics Tasks for the Thinking Classroom Grades K-5 (Jossey-Bass 2024); Liljedahl can be reached at liljedahl@sfu.ca. 

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1109 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Recommended Graphic Novels About History

            In Social Studies and the Young Learner, Jennifer Smith (Texas Christian University) and Marla Robertson (Utah State University) recommend using historical graphic novels (fiction and nonfiction) to supplement social studies content. They suggest drawing students’ attention to the front and back matter and the way authors use textual and visual features, including color, typography, images, thought balloons, sidebars, graphs, and charts. Smith and Robertson list these examples of graphic novels on historical topics: 

The American Revolution: 

• One Dead Spy by Nathan Hale, grade 3-8 
• Lafayette! by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8

The Civil War:

• Big Bad Ironclad! by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8
• The Underground Abductor by Nathan Hale, grade 3-8 

Exploration and Westward Expansion:

• Donner Dinner Party by Nathan Hale, grade 3-8
• Major Impossible: A Grand Canyon Tale by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8 

The Spanish Flu/The Flu of 1918:

• Fever Year: The Killer Flu of 1918 by Don Brown, grade 5-12
• Gemma and the Great Flu: A 1918 Flu Pandemic Graphic Novel by Juliet Gilbert, illustrated by Dan Freitas, grade 3-6 

World War I:

• Above the Trenches: A World War I Flying Ace Tale by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8
• Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood: A World War I Tale by Nathan Hale, grade 5-8 

World War II:

• Raid of No Return: A World War II Tale of the Doolittle Raid by Nathan Hale, gr. 5-8
• Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler by John Hendrix, gr. 5-12 

The Holocaust:

• Hidden: A Child’s Story of the Holocaust by Loic Dauvillier, illustrated by Marc Lizano, grade 1-6
• Run and Hide: How Jewish Youth Escaped the Holocaust by Don Brown, grade 7-12 

U.S. Disasters/Tragedies:

• Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans by Don Brown, grade 5-12
• In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers: The Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, and Years After the 9/11 Attacks by Don Brown, grade 7-12 

Immigration and Refugees:

• The Unwanted Stories of Syrian Refugees by Don Brown, grade 9-12
• When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, grade 3-12 

“Historical Graphic Novels: Three Concepts to Highlight for Comprehension of Historical Information” by Jennifer Smith and Marla Robertson in Social Studies and the Young Learner, September/October 2025 (Vol. 38, #1, pp. 21-27); the authors can be reached at jennifer.m.smith@tcu.edu and marla.robertson@usu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1107 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey on Getting the Science of Reading Right

            In this Reading League Journal article, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (San Diego State University and Health Sciences High and Middle College) say the recent science of reading movement is in danger of being implemented in ways that produce “a cascade of errors, from policy decisions to curriculum design to ineffective classroom practices.” They quote George Bernard Shaw – Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance – and describe four factors they believe are undermining effective, evidence-based reading instruction: 

            • Over-emphasis on decoding – While phonological awareness and phonics are essential to early reading instruction, there’s the risk of neglecting “equally essential components, such as language comprehension, background knowledge, and verbal reasoning,” say Fisher and Frey. “Narrowing instruction to phonics and decoding at the expense of comprehension risks producing technically proficient word callers who struggle to construct meaning.” Once students have cracked the code, there are diminishing returns from phonics. 

            For older students who haven’t yet mastered decoding, those skills need to be backfilled, but it’s also essential that kids get instruction in “academic language, syntax, and discourse-level comprehension,” say Fisher and Frey. “We are deeply concerned about the misconception that the science of reading is confined to a narrow range of foundational skills… Rather, it should be understood as a comprehensive framework for fostering deep transferable reading abilities that are responsive to the diverse needs of learners.” 

            • Seeing knowledge-building as a replacement for reading instruction – Background knowledge is an essential component of skilled reading, say Fisher and Frey, helping students “make inferences, resolve ambiguities, and construct coherent mental models of texts.” But knowledge needs to be used in tandem with reading skills: decoding, making complex texts coherent, and understanding the words and phrases that make texts cohesive. Some students pick up these skills incidentally, but many others – including those who come to school with disadvantages – need explicit instruction. 

            • Marginalizing fluency and sight words – “While decoding and phonemic awareness have rightfully received substantial attention in recent reading reforms,” say Fisher and Frey, “fluency is sometimes treated as a secondary concern, or mistakenly conflated with mere reading speed.” But fluency – reading that is accurate, automatic, and expressive – “is a crucial bridge between decoding and comprehension,” they say, “and, for older students, is associated with college readiness. When students read fluently, they are more likely to allocate cognitive resources to meaning making rather than word recognition.” 

            Just getting students to read aloud to one another – a common classroom practice – is not enough. The teacher needs to be there to guide, correct errors, and diagnose, say Fisher and Frey. For older students, they recommend a 10-minute-a-day, 5-day routine with one passage, with the teacher modeling fluent reading, students marking up the text, practicing chorally, and then being assessed individually.

            As for sight words, it’s a misconception that recognizing words by sight negates phonics instruction, say Fisher and Frey. Unknown words become sight words “not through visual memorization but through repeated decoding that bonds the spelling, pronunciation, and meaning in memory. In other words, sight word recognition is the result of successful phonics instruction and repeated exposure.” If students are plodding along with limited sight words and poor fluency, they “will remain in a state of cognitive overload that hinders comprehension.”

            There’s also an equity dimension: “Neglecting fluency instruction, including the development of a robust sight word vocabulary, disproportionately affects struggling readers,” say Fisher and Frey. “Instruction must therefore include structured, research-based fluency practices, including repeated readings and modeled oral reading, while embracing the importance of sight word acquisition as a natural and necessary outcome of skilled decoding.”

            • Overlooking motivation and engagement – These two “are central to how learners interact with texts and persist in the face of difficulty,” say Fisher and Frey. “When students are motivated, they read more frequently, which in turn leads to greater exposure to vocabulary and syntactic structures that are crucial to comprehension development.” Students’ sense of agency is an essential ingredient, and it develops when teachers honor student voice and decision-making, foster authentic reading experiences, include choice, and respect the cultural and linguistic backgrounds that students bring to the classroom.

            The quality of curriculum materials plays a big part, add Fisher and Frey: “Programs that narrowly script instruction or constrain teacher decision-making risk alienating both educators and learners. The marginalization of motivation within reading science discourse is not a neutral omission; it is a threat to the comprehensive development of reading competence.”

            Many consultants and curriculum publishers label everything they do as “science of reading,” say Fisher and Frey. Front-line educators need to be critical consumers, “familiar with the research and willing to pose questions. Further, as a field, we must engage in public scholarship that corrects misconceptions. Only by honoring the full complexity of reading at the cognitive, linguistic, social, and motivational levels can the science of reading fulfill its promise for all learners.” 

“Is the Science of Reading Under Threat?” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in The Reading League Journal, September/October 2025 (Vol. 6, #3, pp. 57-63); the authors can be reached at dfisher@sdsu.edu and nfrey@sdsu.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1107 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Important Public Education Survey for All VT Residents

 This survey is being jointly distributed by: 

• the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont; and 
• the Vermont School Redistricting Task Force.

Please complete the survey and encourage colleagues and neighbors across the state to do so also.

Please share widely

Link to the survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdCF831rVyoJLv0n-1-wLy6Vf6cfknsBEbbL5oWYmly3651yg/viewform 

Picture Books About Climate Change

            In Language Arts, Ysaaca Axelrod, Jenny Brownson, Candance Doer-Stevens, and Denise Ives suggest these children’s picturebooks to explain the impact of climate change and possible courses of action: 

    - Wild Berries by Julie Flett - Our Green City by Tanya Lloyd Kyi 

    - The Last Polar Bear by Jean Craighead George, illustrated by Wendell Minor 

    - The Boy and the Whale by Mordicai Gerstein - The First Blade of Sweetgrass by Suzanne Greenlaw and Gabriel Grey, illustrated by Nancy Baker 

    - Luna and Me: The True Story of a Girl Who Lived in a Tree to Save a Forest by Jenny Su Kostecki Shaw 

    - We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom, illustrated by Michaela Goade 

    - Autumn Peltier, Water Warrior by Carole Lindstrom, illustrated by Bridget George 

    - Amara and the Bats by Emma Reynolds 

    - The Water Walkers by Carol Ann Trembath, illustrated by David Craig 

“Representations of Hope for Climate Action: An Analysis of Environmental Narratives in Children’s Picturebooks” by Ysaaca Axelrod, Jenny Brownson, Candance Doer-Stevens, and Denise Ives in Language Arts, March 2025 (Vol. 102, #4, p. 245-254)

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1106 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Not Throwing Students in the Deep End with Project-Based Learning

            In this Cult of Pedagogy article, John Spencer says project-based learning is “often structured in ways that exclude students who might need a different approach to thrive. Too often, PBL becomes a space where accommodations and differentiation fall by the wayside.” He suggests these steps to ensure that every student can benefit while doing projects: 

    • Manage the extraneous cognitive load. Without structure and clarity, some kids spend the first three days goofing off. Spencer suggests cutting down on unnecessary complexity, breaking the project into subtasks, analyzing the skills that will be used, and providing students with a roadmap and a to-do list.

    • Use gradual release of responsibility. “Sometimes the issue isn’t academic so much as choice paralysis,” says Spencer. Start with small steps and have students take on more control as they proceed.

    • Provide optional scaffolds. Use the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to make supports available to all students that are especially helpful to some.

    • Be strategic with grouping and establish group norms. One approach is to sort students into three tiers based on skill and create mixed groups within those tiers – the aim being to prevent one student from doing all the work.

    • Provide additional processing time. “PBL has a reputation for being loud and chaotic,” says Spencer, which can be overwhelming for some students. Building in processing pauses can help students who need to slow down and think things through. 

            Will this amount of structure rob project-based learning of its adventurous essence? “Real-world relevance doesn’t come from chaos but from intentionality,” says Spencer. “Authenticity comes from connecting the project to real-world challenges, providing context, and allowing students to engage in meaningful, sustained problem-solving.” 

“Making Project-Based Learning Accessible for Everyone” by John Spencer in Cult of Pedagogy, September 14, 2025

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1105 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.

Jennifer Gonzalez on Answering Student Questions with a Question

            “One of our main goals as teachers should be to build students’ independence,” says Jennifer Gonzalez in this Cult of Pedagogy article/podcast. “The more we do for our students and the less they do for themselves, the more we perpetuate a cycle where they become helpless and dependent on us.”          

            Gonzalez kicks herself for answering too many student questions when she was a teacher. “I used to think of them as baby birds in a nest, with all of their beaks open, waiting for the mother bird to feed them,” she says. “I remember feeling like I was constantly racing around trying to meet everyone’s needs.” It’s quicker to answer the question than to push students to do more of the work, but “that short-term efficiency comes at a long-term cost,” she says. “It keeps us working harder than we need to and prevents students from developing the habits that will make them more independent.”

            Gonzalez’s suggestion to her former haggard self and many other overextended teachers: when students ask a certain kind of question, pause and answer them with questions that build self-sufficiency. And pose your questions with the right tone of voice and a smile, not in a way that embarrasses kids. Some examples:

• Where might you find that information?
• Where on the handout could you look for that?
• What resource could help you answer that question?
• What is our task completion routine? (when students ask what to do when they’re finished). 

The last question-and-answer exchange points to an important facet of classroom organization: an established routine and resources that will engage students when they finish early. For many other student questions, a redirecting question assumes clear instructions and readily available resources.

 “EduTip 33: Answer More Questions with Questions” by Jennifer Gonzalez in Cult of Pedagogy, September 7, 2025; Gonzalez can be reached at gonzjenn@cultofpedagogy.com.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1103 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.