Homework: what is it good for?

“I’m learning skills I will use for the rest of my life by doing homework…procrastinating and negotiation.” ― Bill Watterson

According to the recent OECD PISA 2015 data, 15-year old pupils spend on average 17 hours per week on activities such as homework, additional instruction and private study. Data from the Eurydice publication on instruction time tells us that the average length of a school week in Europe for the same age group is around 26 hours. The two together add up to a total of 43 hours of formal learning per week – more than a normal full-time job. But is all this time spent on school related work really worth it?

The debate around homework often seems quite binary – you either support it or you oppose it. But what lies underneath these positions?

Those supporting homework naturally claim that it has a positive impact on student achievement, but is there solid evidence for this belief? Research seems to show mixed results on the link between homework and better (school) learning outcomes. The OECD PISA 2015 publication even states that education systems where students spend more hours on homework, additional instruction and private study actually tend to perform less well.

Other research suggests that we need a more nuanced picture. Professor John Hattie points out that, while there may be marginal learning benefits of homework in secondary education, there are no significant benefits at primary level; little homework can be more effective than a lot, while students from low-income households gain less benefit from homework than their better-off peers.

Pro-homework supporters claim that it allows parents to get involved in school life and engage in their children’s’ learning process. But in their book The End of Homework, Etta Kravolec and John Buell, argue that the burden of homework causes significant family stress, including parent-child conflict, reduced family leisure time, and overly tired children. A large field study found out that when they help with homework, parents’ anxiety about maths can have a negative impact on their children’s achievement in the subject.

Another favourite argument is that homework has non-academic benefits such as increasing responsibility, the capacity to manage time, develop study habits and skills, and complete tasks. Some research seems to endorse this argument, although other work casts doubts on such findings. But whatever we may think of research findings, homework is not the only way to develop such skills. For example, children playing together in a group will also develop negotiating and time management skills, and out of school situations generally offer plenty of opportunity for learning.

Arguments for and against homework seem to have a very specific kind of homework in mind – essentially a continuation of content taught in class. An American review of the research on homework confirms this picture, showing that most teachers assign homework to reinforce content presented in class through practice. It is less common that homework focuses on using content in other contexts, applying multiple skills or being creative. It is also based on individual learning rather than team-work.

So shouldn’t we start to think differently about homework? Rather than being for or against it, could we be more sensitive to the contextual elements that influence outcomes, such as age, socio-economic background, or the role of parents? The bulk of research currently available on the impact of homework is based on a model where learning is measured in terms of school achievement, which although a useful starting point, is only part of the educational picture. For our own understanding, shouldn’t we at least try to measure the learning outcomes of non-school related activities? We could then find out if homework had a more or less positive impact than, for example, practising the guitar, or communicating on mobile phones.

Could we also be more innovative with homework, for example using the model of the flipped classroom? Here time at home is spent watching lectures prepared or selected by teachers, while school time is used to practise knowledge, often working in collaborative projects. Lastly, could we also try to think about how to recognise a wider variety of learning? The European funded project GRASS has developed a way to grade soft skills, and homework would certainly have a very different meaning in such a framework.

Finally, however homework evolves, should we not recognise that 17 hours a week is too much given the lack of evidence on its usefulness? Maybe it’s time we trusted our children to do something else for a few hours a week…

Authors: Peter Birch and David Crosier

The long and winding road back to school

Photo credit: ©Izabela Urbaniak 2016 

‘In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible.’ – Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Let’s imagine that you wanted to organise a summer music festival for teenagers from all over Europe. What would be the best time to maximise attendance? The answer is simple. If you consult the Eurydice publication ‘Organisation of school time in Europe’ you will find out that every child attending a public school in Europe is on holiday in the third week of July. What a perfect date!
However, you should also bear in mind that by this time, the Portuguese will be quite relaxed, not only from celebrating victory in the Euro 2016 tournament, but also from having been on holiday for several weeks, and with many more to come before they run out of the 13 weeks at their disposal. The English, on the other hand, will be excited to be on the first of only 6 weeks holiday, while the Danish will already be organising their school bags as they approach the end of their 8 weeks summer break.
Indeed in the length of holidays as in most things, European countries all display little differences. This does not, however, mean that children in countries where there are long holidays receive less schooling. For example, the Eurydice publication ‘Recommended Annual instruction time in Full-time Compulsory Education in Europe 2015/16’ tells us that at lower secondary level, German children receive a total of 907 hours of schooling and have 6 weeks summer break, while in Italy there are 990 hours of schooling per year despite a summer break of 13 weeks. The issue has more to do with the distribution of holidays: some countries have short and frequent breaks, and others have fewer but longer vacations. But is there any educational reasoning behind these differences, and is there an ideal length for school holidays?
Those who argue in favour of short summer holidays point out that most of us do not have long breaks during our adult lives, and believe that this school tradition is inherited from earlier agrarian societies when children needed to help families in the summer harvest. Moreover, research into the relationship between learning and the biological clock, such as that of the French psychologist François Testu, shows that ideally children would have two weeks holiday after every seven weeks of study.
Research findings also seem to endorse the idea that school breaks produce a dip in reading, writing and maths skills. Of course, this should lead us to ask what else children are experiencing and learning during the summer, and if it is enriching and valuable, rather than assuming that children need more of the same. Indeed many argue that long holidays have positive benefits on children. These come from the change of routines, the opportunities of having time at their disposal and the freedom from school rules. They argue that boredom stimulates the capacity of children to be imaginative, and that a stimuli-rich society is reducing our capacity to be creative. Moreover, long holidays give time to families to reunite, and to share time and experiences.
While long holidays may often sound idyllic, this is not everyone’s reality. Working parents are confronted with challenges to keep children safe and occupied, and that brings costs that are not affordable to all. Indeed, maybe the strongest argument against long school holidays is that they may increase inequality. A child from a well-resourced home environment has very different opportunities to a child from a home with poorer social, cultural and economic capital. Some evidence seems to indicate that youth crime increases in the summer, suggesting that boredom and freedom may lead children along difficult paths. In some countries this has led to proposals to reduce summer holidays and reshape the school calendar. However, might it not be over-optimistic to hope that more school will solve problems of wider societal disadvantage?
As in many education debates, there are valid arguments in favour of opposing visions. Yet between the two opposites could there be space to imagine new solutions? Rather than focusing on the length of holidays should we not think more about what schools can actually offer? How diverse, interesting and driven by real-life experience are they? How autonomous and engaged do children become through going to school? Maybe summer holidays are an opportunity for experimenting with innovative ways of using school buildings and exploring new ideas, allowing children to imagine, create and manage their learning environment. Summer holidays could also be an opportunity to connect more with local communities, to work with NGOs, and to undertake projects for which there is no time during the school year. Doing things differently in the summer could lead to doing things better in general. And rather than teenagers looking around for summer festivals, in the future we could see more students producing their own festivals at school.

Authors: ‘Birch Peter and Cordero Hoyo Elena’

What makes a good teacher?

‘Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth’ – Sir Ken Robinson Ph.D.

Teachers are considered, rightly, the most important element within schools influencing student learning. In other words: it takes a good teacher to make a good learner. But what makes a good teacher? Undoubtedly vocational abilities, personal characteristics, and individual attitudes are part of the picture. However, this is also true for many other professions. Some would argue that it all boils down to knowing what to teach and how to teach it! While this might be true, it still leaves many questions open if we think of the diversity of our classrooms in terms of social, economic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.

A recent Eurydice report (The Teaching Profession in Europe, 2015) shows that in Europe, three components shape lower secondary teachers’ competences during their initial training: knowledge of the subject, pedagogical training, and in-school placements. Although in quite different ways and proportions, almost all education systems provide time and space for these three aspects. In addition, in most countries newly qualified teachers go through an induction phase, and are quite commonly followed by a mentor who supports them when needed.

When asked how prepared they feel to teach, knowledge of their subject rarely seems to be an issue both for new and older teachers. However only 40 % of teachers declare feeling very well prepared in pedagogy, and less than half in the practical aspects of teaching.

Similarly, when asked about their needs in terms of professional development, 75 % of teachers express low or no needs at all in knowledge of the curriculum or their subject field. Conversely, many teachers express needs in areas that would allow them to innovate and tailor their pedagogical approaches such as ICT skills for teaching, approaches to individualised learning, or teaching cross-curricular skills. Other highly ranked topics, such as managing student behaviour, teaching in a multicultural and multilingual setting, and student career guidance and counselling, show that teaching today is a rather complex profession and that the ‘how to teach’ part is multi-faceted. Moreover, it also tells us that teachers see their role as going beyond the simple transmission of specific and subject-based knowledge: they are, or wish to be preparing students for the complexities of contemporary life, with its pressure to be active citizens, respectful of diversity, critical, creative, flexible…

As pointed out by the European Commission in a report on ‘Supporting teacher competence development for better learning outcomes’, ‘the range and complexity of competences required for teaching in the 21st century is so great that any one individual is unlikely to have them all, nor to have developed them all to the same high degree’. This may partly explain the increasing number of networks of teachers that are growing for exchange of practices and professional development, allowing for more peer-based, collaborative, less structured, bottom-up and possibly ICT-enabled forms of mutual support. Interestingly, teachers are more satisfied with their job and consider it better valued by society when they work in an environment that shows a collaborative school culture, shared responsibility, and active participation in school decisions.

All this calls for a different way of looking at our teachers. When thinking about them, most of us would picture an individual, maybe with the face of our favourite or most detested teacher, in front of a classroom more or less respectful, with a blackboard behind, imparting some lecture on some topic. Instead, we might need to ‘break the isolation of the classroom and the “one teacher one classroom” doctrine’ and recognise that ‘effective teaching requires the involvement of teams of professionals rather than individual teachers’ (European Commission, Strengthening Teaching in Europe, 2015).

So, there might not be one single recipe for what makes a good teacher for every single student in our education systems, but stimulating teams of teachers to work out together what is best for their own students, and providing them with the support they need to get there, might be a good starting point… and this is probably what a good teacher would suggest if asked how to improve teaching in the 21st century.