Episode 4: Why We Stopped Assigning Homework
While assigning homework has long been a part of the middle and high school English class experience, sometimes it’s time for a change. While “Well, I did it, and I survived” is a tempting (and oft-used) dismissal, we all know that doesn’t make it right. The more we started to resent spending hour after hour outside of the school day working on our own “school work,” the more we started to think our students were probably feeling the same. When we began to embrace the flipped classroom model, we saw it as a good opportunity to break up with nightly homework.
Now, we’re not going to lie and say that the increasing number of students who regularly did not do homework didn’t play any part in our decision to stop assigning homework, of course it did. When the traditional lesson plan model, especially for secondary English requires students to complete work (or at the very least “do the reading”) at home, there are only so many times you can have your day’s plan completely blown before you start saying, “Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?”

And while we definitely shifted to the “less homework” model pre-pandemic, we truly embraced the “no homework” model as a result of the pandemic. Seeing the effects of too much work on students, the expectations many too-busy parents have placed upon students to take care of things on the homefront, the amount of time coaches and instructors expect students to be able to spend engaged in practice, and (for Kate) being a parent of a child who sometimes spent way too much time on homework, we knew we really needed to reexamine our unhealthy reliance on assigning homework to address the demands of our curriculum.
Before you start thinking we’re model “no homework” practitioners, we do need to clarify a few things. This doesn’t mean our students never, ever have homework. No. Sometimes needs must. This doesn’t mean our students who mess around in class, spend time on their phones, or work on other assignments, aren’t going to need to complete the work they missed as homework. But assigning homework 5-6 nights a week just because we think we’re supposed to? No more. In this episode of the podcast, we share how and why we made the change.
Learn More: We found that by giving students the opportunity to work on assignments in class, we were better able to engage one-on-one with all our students.