[This post is an expansion of the section of this article that I wrote for TES because you can't say things like "balls" in the Times Education Supplement.]
For homework to be effective, it has to be linked with what happens in the classroom (Education Endowment Foundation, 2021). Homework that is completely estranged from the classroom loses its value, and I do think homework has value. According to the EEF, we’re potentially looking at five months’ gain in secondary school! The problem is, if you bulk set your homework, it will automatically have to be at least partially estranged from what you’re doing in class.
I find this easiest to articulate with the use of some examples, so picture the scene:
You decide to go down the classic route of homework being a form of consolidation for the classwork. On the first INSET day of term, you look through your scheme of work/booklet/planner and see what you should be teaching when (beginning to see the problem?) You happily go about your business setting and scheduling some good tasks for students that will really help them consolidate their learning. First lesson comes, starter activity done, you crack out the mini whiteboards for some checking of their prerequisite knowledge aaaaaaaaaand they don’t know it. Balls. Okay, no worries, let’s go back to basics, let’s build these foundations so they aren’t building on sand. 50 minutes later, they’ve got the prereq stuff down. Time to move onto what was meant to be the first course of the lesson. Half an hour after that and they are ready to do some independent practice. Not a problem. Only, you’ve set them some homework that relies on them having been introduced to the second course as well. So now you’re going to have to go in and change it and set them something different. Which, let’s be honest, takes just as much time as it did to set in the first place. (Either that, or you completely forget to make the necessary changes, the kids go home and get smacked in the face with something they have very little chance of accessing. Which will reduce your chances of completion going forward. Which means you’re still wasting your time bulk setting the homework, because few of them are actually doing it!)
“But that would never happen to me,” I hear you cry “I set my students retrieval practice from a long time ago.''
First of all, we have to be careful when we start setting homework that it isn’t too tricky - content from ages ago will be much harder for students to retrieve, and again we lose what little motivation they had to work at home. Obviously, as you establish your expectations and students build good habits, then you can start pushing the time-since-taught further back and getting them to try harder. But when you are first establishing those expectations, it’s better to err on the side of easier, otherwise you’re going to be fighting a losing battle.
Okay, say you do set them some retrieval practice that’s appropriately pitched in terms of quantity and time-since-teaching. What do you do then? For a lot of people, it seems the answer is “nothing”. Remember where the EEF said homework that is linked with classwork is more effective than that which is not? If you’re bulk-setting your retrieval homeworks, and then just wiping your hands and saying “job done”, you are doing your students a disservice. For a start, retrieval practice is better when corrective feedback is given (so students actually need to know if they got it right or not) (Roediger III & Butler, 2011). Yes, this can be given directly via the homework platform - there are a whole manner of online quizzing platforms that mark students answers, but that doesn’t establish that homework-classroom link in the same way that using the homework in the classroom does.
Secondly, what do you do if, when you go through their homework, you find that loads of them can’t tell you X? Or some of them are harbouring intense misconceptions about Y? Do you just ignore it? You’ve already set all your homeworks for the term. Do you cover it again in class? But then what do you do with the stuff they are supposed to be learning in that time? If you want retrieval practice to work, you need to do more than just asking some questions and moving on. What if you start a new topic and find that they’ve got just enough prerequisite knowledge for this lesson, but they’re shaky on the stuff they’ll need for the rest of the learning sequence? If you set your homeworks on a week-by-week basis, you can very quickly set them some questions on that prereq content, ready for your upcoming lessons. If it’s all been scheduled already, you have to make edits which, again, takes just as long.
I can understand why people might want to bulk set their homeworks. It does feel like it would be easier, get it “out of the way”, but can you imagine the reaction if someone said the same thing about how they plan their lessons?
Homework gets a bad rap but I think we can go a long way to improving the outcomes by actually setting it appropriately, and thinking about it in the same way as we would any other learning task we set our students. I think the trick is to find a way of setting homework that doesn’t take very long, and then build a routine.
[Personally, I use Carousel which takes well under a minute to set a task, and I have a routine: homework is always set on the last lesson of the week and it’s always due on the first lesson of the week (we have a two-week timetable). I remind them on that last lesson that they have homework, and as soon as they are dismissed, I set the task. (The exception is when I have break duty, when I set it while students are putting their chairs on the desks). The first lesson of the week the Do Now is those questions they struggled with at home, and then we spend a bit of time going through "What I found interesting" - questions where the answers given were those misconceptions or where students gave a one-part answer to a two-part question.]
References
Education Endowment Foundation. (2021). Homework | EEF. Education Endowment Foundation. Retrieved January 6, 2022, from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/homework
Roediger III, H. L., & Butler, A. C. (2011, January). The critical role of retrieval practice in long-term retention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 20-27.