High School Homework: Rethinking the Traditional Philosophy

Talk about fortuitous timing. Right around the same time we sat down to compose this post, California made headlines for passing the Healthy Homework Act, a bill intended to encourage districts to rethink their homework policies in light of student mental health concerns and growing AI use.

Now, there’s plenty to unpack, and even argue about, from this news, but we, too, went through a season of seriously reevaluating our approach to high school homework.

When we first started teaching, assigning high school homework was a requirement. And of course, we didn’t question it. Not only do we remember spending hours each night completing our own high school homework assignments, but we teach English, which means students have to complete reading assignments at home in preparation for class discussion. Right?

But after years of seeing how high school homework completion plays out in practice and teaching through a pandemic, we came to question the necessity of that approach.

The more we talked about it, the more we found practical ways to move toward a “no-homework” (ish—we’ll explain below) policy in our classroom structure, and implementing it gave us confidence that we had moved in the right direction.

Today, we’re sharing the thought process that led us to this point as well as some practical strategies for rethinking your approach to high school homework.

Practical Issues with High School Homework

Homework was never not a problem in our years teaching high school. We learned quickly that no matter how purposeful or well-thought-out we thought our assignment was, most students found high school homework an inconvenient obstacle to overcome in their efforts to enjoy their after-school hours.

And when students don’t complete their homework (or race through it carelessly), the end result is that we have more work to do. Now we have to decide how to grade poorly completed assignments, send emails home, and assign consequences.

Our lesson plans, built on the assumption that students have done their homework, are ruined—there is no draft to revise, no contribution to a group project or jigsaw, no meaningful class discussion of the previous night’s reading. Oddly enough, in-class timed essays are better written than at-home essays (though, if you really think about it, this makes sense—it’s hard to write well when you’re also texting, watching YouTube videos, and arguing with your family).

And then there’s the cheating. It was bad enough when students copied from one another at lunch, worse when students could read SparkNotes instead of the book, a nightmare in the age of Siri and AI. Steph watched a student do her marine biology homework the other day by reading her study guide questions to Siri and then dutifully copying down the answers. It’s to the point where, honestly, we have to expect that high school homework is far more likely to be completed by ChatGPT than by students.

Even if those things weren’t enough for us to rethink our policy, our district forced our hand during the pandemic, as, we’re confident, was the case for many of you: while we weren’t outright banned from assigning homework, it was clear that we were strongly encouraged to avoid it.

By this point, however, we had already started moving in that direction.

The Mental Health Impact of High School Homework

We used to set our Turnitin.com deadlines for 11:59 p.m. Makes sense, right? That’s technically the very end of the day and the default setting when you set up the assignment.

But we started to feel uncomfortable asking students to stay up that late to complete assignments. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, teenagers need 8–10 hours of sleep. If you’ve spent any time with teenagers, you know they’re absolutely not getting that much sleep. And sure, many of them are staying up late to play video games and stream movies, but many students are up until all hours of the night studying.

After all, for many years, the rule of thumb was an hour of homework per class, but in high school, that equates to six hours of homework. Presuming that a student starts after dinner due to after-school commitments and family time, that means they’re working until 11 p.m. or midnight at the earliest and getting up at 6 or 7 a.m. for an 8 a.m. start time. Definitely not 8–10 hours of sleep.

The more we realized this, the more convinced we were that we couldn’t ask students to do something so counter to medical advice. So we moved our deadlines to 9:00 p.m.

In practice, as our students frequently complained, this just meant they had to do our homework first before staying up all night to complete their other assignments, so the strategy was flawed, but it was still a step we felt was important.

As we struggled with our own plummet into burnout, we also became resentful about the fact that we worked a full day and then came home for a quick dinner before getting right back to work in order to keep up with the impossible teacher workload. It felt unfair, and we wondered if it was equally unfair for students to work hard all day at school and then come home and keep working. (Students who didn’t work hard all day? That’s an entirely different story!)

If adults are pushing back against this mindset, even passing legislation to protect employees who don’t respond to their bosses outside work hours, why are we holding our students, whose brains and bodies are still growing, to a different standard?

How the Pandemic Changed Our Mindset About High School Homework

All of these thoughts and changes were prior to COVID-19 pandemic, which had us teaching over Zoom for 13 months.

Because all of us were working from home, we got to see more directly into our students’ home lives, and we saw that many of them were working to help support their families or spending the day helping younger siblings with online learning before getting to their own assignments. Sure, homework might be a more valuable way to spend time than playing video games, but these family concerns and responsibilities were far more important than any homework assignment we could create.

As we modified our approach for remote teaching, moving toward a flipped classroom model, we also came to see how much value there was in taking more of a “coaching” approach to classroom instruction. When our direct instruction and step-by-step instructions for completing assignments were moved to screencasts, we were freed up to interact one-on-one with students.

This gave us freedom to differentiate for individual students, provide higher quality feedback on assignments, work individually with struggling students, and check in with everyone about their individual progress or things like thesis statements. Students who understood their work and completed it quickly didn’t have to waste time waiting on others, and when everyone knew what to do, we had time to contact parents, grade, and plan.

Additionally, we were armed with more information when we met with administrators, parents, and counselors. Because we’d given students so much time to work, it was difficult for them to argue that they couldn’t complete assignments. And because we’d spent a lot of time meeting with students individually, we could provide more detailed information about a student’s progress and areas of struggle.

Using an Assignment Calendar to Help Students Plan

For years, we gave our AP Literature students an assignment calendar at the beginning of every six-week grading period. Because we planned our instruction so far ahead, we could give our students a list of due dates (much like they would see on a college syllabus).

When we started using Canvas during the pandemic, we created a weekly assignment page where we posted all of the due dates and links for an entire week of instruction for both standard level and AP/honors level courses.

These approaches had enormous benefits for us and our students:

Students could plan around their busy schedules and personal lives. If students knew they had basketball practice or had to work on Thursday night, they could work ahead to complete assignments due on Friday.
Students could no longer claim they “didn’t know” they had an assignment, and we didn’t have to keep track of who needed an extension after being absent. All students had access to the same due dates at the same time, so even if a student was absent, they could come to class prepared. Of course, we still gave them the extension that is required when they are absent, but we didn’t need to keep track of this information, and students who were out of class because of things like ASB or sports could stay on track.
Students knew what to expect. We’re both planners who find comfort in knowing what our day, week, month, year is going to look like. Many of our students are the same.
Students who finish early can start on the next assignment. We’ve all had the painful experience of managing a classroom of 40 students working at different paces. You’ve got three students who are done (and thus acting up out of boredom) while you’re trying to keep the rest of the class moving and also catch up the four students who have fallen behind. But when students know what needs to be done, they can just start on what’s next once they’ve finished.
Students have something to do at other down times during their day. We had numerous students who worked through their bellringer menu throughout the school day. If they finished math early, they’d just pick up where they left off on their English assignments.

Practical Strategies for Reducing High School Homework

Okay, you’re thinking. I get it. There’s a case to be made for moving away from homework. But how on earth do we do it?

We’ll start by saying that our “no homework” policy didn’t always mean students never had to complete any work outside of the 50 minutes they were in our classroom each day. We do have a lot of content to get through, and we’ve all had days where we’re just struggling to focus or don’t quite finish what needs to be done in the time we’ve carved out for it.

And that’s okay. Our approach wasn’t necessarily to eliminate homework entirely but to create a more fair situation: students who worked hard at school shouldn’t have to come home and keep working. So we strove to assign work that could be completed in class but, because it wasn’t due at the end of the class period, gave students more time to finish if they needed it. It was up to students to manage how much work they would need to do when they left our classroom doors.

Our classroom started to look more like a workshop: we provided students with all the materials they would need to complete an assignment, and then we gave them time to work while we were there to provide assistance, feedback, and encouragement as needed.

Coffeehouse vibes digital daily agenda slides.

We assigned weekly bellringers for participation credit: students had a full week to complete a menu of assignments and 10–15 minutes each day to work through them in whatever order they chose. (We recommended certain activities each day for students who needed a plan to follow, but students weren’t required to follow our sequence.) If students finished other assignments early, they could go back to working on these assignments. If students still had a little bit to do on Thursday, they finished at home. This was a great way to handle the many miscellaneous things we’re tasked with as English teachers—vocabulary, grammar, even typing practice.

Then, instead of guiding students through reading as a class, we used Actively Learn to assign reading with audio and embedded questions. Students had 2–3 days to work through the text at their own pace, asking questions when they needed help. To make this manageable, we shifted toward asking primarily multiple choice questions with 1–2 short answer questions students we would provide feedback on.

After providing feedback, we would record “revision help screencasts,” in which we discussed common errors and misunderstandings to help students revise their work before resubmitting for an improved grade.

Our writing assignments also became highly structured. Because our students were often resistant to completing prewriting and a rough draft, we started combining the two into a structured outline that essentially walked students through the process of drafting an essay. There was space for planning at the top, and then we provided room to write each sentence, providing detailed instructions and sometimes sentence starters.

To free ourselves up to help students who needed it, we recorded screencasts walking students through the writing assignment, directing them to pause and complete a task before continuing on, as if we were guiding the full class through the assignment. Students could progress through the lesson at their pace.

To reinforce the “workshop” feel, we started implementing what we called “Starbucks mode.” (We didn’t invent this, but we did figure out how to make it work for us.) We would play calming instrumental “cafe” music and project an image of a coffee shop at the front of the room, and we gave students the following guidelines:

Headphones/earbuds in if you want your own tunes.
You can sit wherever you’d like, but your bum must be in a seat (be reasonable—not at my desk, not somewhere dangerous).
It’s Starbucks, so we’re all strangers. Don’t be the weirdo who talks too much to people who obviously aren’t interested.
Remember: Quiet, Zen, Coffee Shop Vibes. We’re a nice Starbucks.

Starbucks Mode graphic. Same text as bullet points above.

Of course, students who weren’t working got moved or lost the privilege of listening to their own tunes, but this created a low-stress work atmosphere that encouraged students to use their time productively.

In our honors classes, we still sometimes had our traditional discussions, but we also had students complete structured reading assignments or work together on online discussion boards and group essays that allowed them to take responsibility for their work and their discussion while we were free to, again, help those who needed it most.

Challenges of Rethinking Your High School Homework Policy

This isn’t to say that our process of moving away from assigning nightly high school homework was obstacle-free. We have limited time to cover a lot of content, and there’s a reason teachers have assigned homework for so many years.

Switching to a flipped classroom model means we’re reliant on students to ask questions when they need help. But this is hard for some students, particular when we’re back to in-person learning. Students need encouragement and practice asking for help when they need it.

It also means that one of our primary ways of communicating with students is through feedback on the work they’re completing independently, which means we need time to provide more feedback. It took us a while to find the right balance, but it is something you have to make room in your day for.

And what about classes where it’s impossible not to assign homework? The sheer volume of content we need to cover, particularly in AP and honors classes, necessitates reading outside of school. Sure, there are some texts we can read in class (and we can probably do a lot more with shorter texts than we realize), but if we’re assigning Pride and Prejudice, we can’t devote six months to reading the novel in class.

In these cases, we became far more thoughtful about why we were assigning homework, what we were assigning, and how much we were assigning. We reduced the number of questions on guided reading assignments. We built independent reading days into our weekly schedule. We eliminated assignments that weren’t absolutely necessary.

This approach also works when teaching hybrid classes. Steph teaches AP Seminar and AP Research online, so students attend a weekly Zoom session but have to complete asynchronous work as well. Homework is unavoidable in this situation: there’s absolutely no way to get through everything without it. But what she’s done is very carefully plan assignments and pacing so that students have only three hours of homework each week, bringing the total class time to five hours a week—equivalent to a full week of in-class instruction at most schools. Students know the expectation when they sign up for the course, and Steph does her best to fulfill that commitment to her students.

So, high school homework. There’s no single answer to the question of whether it serves value and how much is too much. But it’s important for us to consider that, just maybe, we don’t need to assign nightly homework because that’s how it’s always been done. If we resent having to work outside our work day, citing the damage it does to our mental health, perhaps it’s worth considering whether or not it’s fair to ask our students to do the same.

What are your thoughts on high school homework? This is a tricky topic, and we’d love to hear how you’re managing it (or how you’re struggling to manage it) in your classroom. You can reach us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. If you’re interested in hearing more, you can listen to our podcast episode or watch our YouTube video on this topic.

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