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.