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Homework was the bane of my life when I was a classroom teacher, and as a principal it still pains me.
As a teacher I was incredibly frustrated by it for numerous reasons: for some children, it was obvious that I had put in more effort setting it and grading it than they had completing it. Others didn’t complete it at all. Some clearly had it completed by someone else.
As a school leader, I am happy to give weekly spelling tasks and make it clear we expect children to read at home and practise their tables - but this is not really homework in the traditional sense. It’s the additional work that I have struggled to find a reason to set.
But this is a topic our parents feel very strongly about. They want us to set it, so we feel we should oblige by finding homework that makes sense to us. As such, our school has been through many different types of homework.
We have had traditional paper and pencil homework - a differentiated maths and literacy task that was marked weekly by the teacher. This was unpopular with almost everyone: it took teachers hours to set and mark it and parents complained that their children often did not understand the tasks and neither did they.
A creative approach to homework
We then took a more creative approach and set projects that were based upon what children were learning about in class - for example, represent a penguin in any media (but it must be to scale!) or represent your home town in a shoebox. This was popular with most children and the parents who enjoyed doing homework with their children, but not so popular with parents with little time and those who were not creative.
As a school that actively embraces technology, we then switched to an app that allows teachers to set differentiated work quickly, and children complete it in a game format. This was popular with children, teachers and parents, but at the end of last year children were beginning to complain that they had lost interest.
So we sat down and tried to find a compromise and we believe we have found it.
We now offer optional homework tasks that parents and children pick themselves. Each lasts for half a semester and they come in two guises: online gaming homework or creative projects. So far, the choices have been evenly split, and the feedback has been very positive.
That’s not to say I don’t still struggle with the concept of homework, despite handing over much of the control of it to the students and their parents. But my position was softened rather by the first project set: the task was to single out three significant events in British history in any media. Along with the sculptures and videos and paintings, a large number of the student body opted to get creative with cakes.
There is nothing like some sweet treats to sway a battle-hardened anti-homework advocate to see things from another perspective.
Christina Zanelli Tyler is headteacher at West Cliff Primary School in North Yorkshire, England.
