More tips from Adam Boxer
Video transcript
final tip of the night adam what is it to make homework more effective integrate it with classwork yeah this intrigues me gone tell me what you mean by this um so i said at the beginning that i that i’m the education director carousel learning which is a home it’s not a homework platform it’s an online quizzing platform um and i’ve been thinking very very hard for uh for about a year and a half now about homework and i think the majority of homework doesn’t work you know i think most schools most departments most teachers are like yeah i said homework but like uh it’s just a nothing and i think that i think there’s there’s a few reasons for that um i think the two main reasons are accountability and value so accountability is you know whether the students are held to account for their homework performance um so and that can range from a kid who doesn’t do their homework do they get a consequence is there a follow-up normally no there’s not um and but it can range up to the quality of their homework as well yeah kid turns up you’ve set them 10 questions at home they’ve done the first two also i didn’t understand yeah yeah the rest yeah i mean what would you need another rest well i just couldn’t i couldn’t do question three number what about question four oh why what do you mean i can do question three what about question right so so that happens a lot there’s accountability there but like also like who’s gonna give attention for that yeah because like they’ve done the homework they’re just gonna they’re just gonna resent you never give attention to a kid who well that’s never never strong words yet but giving it attention to a kid who doesn’t understand what they’ve done is wrong or disagrees with you about whether what they’ve done is wrong it’s it’s good in a sense because the detention sends a signal to everybody else so this behavior is unacceptable right but for that kid it’s clearly not going to do anything it’s just going to breed resentment yeah so if a kid like like genuinely doesn’t get what i just didn’t understand like so what you want from my life yeah i didn’t understand it um not putting them in detention but what that means is that the accountability bar is low yeah there’s no accountability um there’s also value that i think a lot of kids just don’t see the point they think that homework is something that teachers do because it’s part of their job and their parents will complain and there’s a policy and it just needs to get done um and and i think both these things are a big problem uh and one of the ways to kill those two birds with one stone is about integrating the homework with the classwork so for example if you use a do now that’s based off questions from the homework yeah and you’re explicit about the fact that you’re going to do a do now based on the homework you’re explicit about the fact that i’m doing this because the homework’s important and i want you to see if you do the homework properly you do better in class and i’ll be so proud of you because you’ll turn into a brilliant scientist so what you’re doing is you’re showing them the value by feeding it into class right and you then also raise accountability because what you’re saying this is key if you say to if you’re saying to a kid that you’re going to take questions from the homework and put them in the do now if they get to do now wrong it shows whatever they did they didn’t do the homework properly proof’s in the pudding here yeah you say look guys you’re telling me you did the homework sure fine i get it yeah but like you couldn’t do the do now something’s going wrong i’m going to hold you to account for it this is what we’re going to do doesn’t necessarily mean the detention they might say you might say you know we keep kids behind we give them a laptop we say show me how you do your homework let me help let me help yeah i want you to do better in class that’s i give you the homework so that you can do better in class it’s clearly not working let me help let me see what you’re doing and you do all of that through integration and and you know i’ve given you a five minute practice like i could spend hours talking about how to do this you know um we’ve just written a document for carousel called retrieving better which goes into this you know quite deeply we give webinars about this kind of stuff because it’s difficult to get right but when you do you are balling because the kids like get that the homework and the classwork are one and that they kind of mutually enforce each other so a couple of couple of just questions or points on this i think the first one that that kid’s not knowing the purpose of homework is is a massive one i’m a bit obsessed with this even like the do now kids not knowing the why we bother with the doom now you know it’s it’s a big one isn’t it because we kind of assume that they they know or they’ll take it seriously but unless they know the purpose of it it’s it’s it’s really problematic um my question was though does this only work if the kids so imagine you’re you’re a child and you’ve tried your home you’ve genuinely tried your homework and you genuinely got stuck on it there’s got to be kind of a an avenue for them to go down to get some support i assume that that’s the kind of bit of a prerequisite for this to work yeah yeah yeah but but what but i would expect if a kid turns up and they’ve not done a homework because they didn’t understand it and i didn’t get an email i’ll hold them to account right okay okay it’s not it’s not good enough yeah yeah yeah yeah that’s good okay and have you seen results from this the does this seem to work in terms of the kids taking the homework’s more serious participation rate of homework gone up and oh yeah definitely yeah yeah um so we set um one homework where each class gets at least one quiz a week and i get 95 completion and to a good standard it took a long time took a you know months um but no months weeks half a term maybe a bit longer and and if a teacher’s looking to implement this well what are some of the key things that they’ve got to get right is it the messaging to kids i assume is going to be fairly high up the list yeah look it’s it’s difficult and again you know i’m not here to advertise carousel but you’re you’re limited by a platform as well if your homework is just you know do questions online or whatever is is do questions from a book booklet or whatever and you’re not going to be checking them you’re just going to be going over them in class a lot of kids are going to slip through your net it’s inevitable so you know we we built carousel in certain ways so that it would be easier for people to do stuff like this so you can look at every student’s response and mark them all you know you can mark a 15 question quiz from 30 kids in less than five minutes right it then automatically gives you a display that you can use in class as a do now it allows you to identify questions that a lot of students found difficult identify misconceptions you can mark them in front of the kids you can even if a homework’s not you you can use the questions as you do now you put them up on your whiteboard it allows you to generate quiz from them so we built it so that you could do that if you’ve got fire and forget program and and by the way even really good programs yeah which are adaptive and have really good questions and supporting materials and videos and stuff there’s normally there’s no feed through into class other than you’ve done it you’ve done it you’ve not done it yeah yes yeah and that doesn’t you know that that’s that that’s that’s gonna put a limit it’s gonna put a limit on you okay so it’s it’s not just the fact that the kids can get the kind of automated feedback or whatever know whether they’re right or wrong it’s the key is this feed through into class that’s the kind of make or break for this yeah that is my opinion and my experience
