By Sara Finegan

         I’m a big fan of homework, but it has to be meaningful homework, and it has to be customized to fit your learners and their current skill levels.  Here are my thoughts about designing home practice in a demanding classroom:

It must be purposeful.

         Homework for the sake of homework is detrimental to a struggling learner. Kids aren’t stupid, and they know on some level, no matter how old they are, if you are just making work for them because you think that’s what teachers are supposed to do.

         The purpose of homework in a demanding classroom is to:  

• give the child additional practice in a newly-learned concept or skill and
• to provide a structure for a task they should be doing on a regular basis.

         When it comes to additional practice, a demanding classroom teacher designs a set of practice problems or questions that address what was worked on that day in class.  Examples might be: 5-10 addition problems; a set of similar word problems that require the child to set up an equation; comprehension questions that pertain to one or two plot features; practice making inferences based on short pieces of text.

         There are some excellent workbooks available in stores and online that provide practice problems in many content areas.  There are also some awful ones.  I remember a child I worked with in an after-school program who had a reading homework packet that was obviously written in the 1960’s: it was dry, pedantic, and completely uninteresting to me and the student.

A goal should be to establish a sense of competence.

         I do not want my students to have their parents do their homework, spend hours with their child struggling to get it done, or to leave the kitchen table feeling utterly drained and unskilled.

         I want my students to leave the homework table feeling like they get it, or are on the way to getting it. I want them to feel able.  Now this is not going to happen all the time, particularly when we’re learning new skill sets.

But if, over time, the student is confident that in general, he or she is going to be able to master the skills, or retain the information, or do the task fairly well, most kids will be willing to struggle a bit from time to time at home.

A homework routine should create study habits.

         Almost every school urges children to read for 30 minutes or more per day at home.  Thirty minutes is a lot for a child who has little reading stamina, or who struggles mightily with decoding or comprehension. This kind of assignment, without any other components, isn’t going to help a child with learning disabilities as much as it could with a few modifications.

         If a child is not able to read for 30 minutes in class without losing focus or melting down, do not require it at home.  Build stamina slowly.  A student who can only read for three minutes should be given a 3-5 minute reading assignment for home, followed by a book on tape or a story a parent is willing to read out loud. (Reading homework is not always just about reading skill, but also about our relationship to text and how we think about stories – books on CD, tape or read aloud can do just fine.)

         At a certain age and stage, kids can be taught how to write a reading response.  This is an extremely important skill and needs to be built in layers, slowly, with lots of practice.  The practice can be done at home, provided that you give the child examples to follow or a formula to use in the initial practice stages.  In early grades, a reading response can be an illustration with two or three sentences about a character or your opinion about the book.

          My fifth and sixth graders are currently, in the fall of the year, writing three-paragraph responses: a summary of what they read; a description of a character or the problem; a connection that they are making to the story or to a character.  By the end of the year I hope they will be doing deeper thinking and writing, but we are taking it one step at a time. Right now, their daily reading homework includes writing the response (yes, daily, though at least one child dictates to his grandmother because the act of writing is driving him crazy) because I want it to become an automatic habit for them in preparation for middle school.

As much as possible, coordinate, communicate, and negotiate with your partners: the parents.

         We don’t want parents doing the homework, but we want them to support it.  Nobody knows a child better than his or her parents, and we need to be responsive to them with regard to the work we send home.

          Right now, I have a couple of students who have major difficulties with attention.  One of them has autism and ADHD; the other has ADHD.  Both of them have parents who are excellent about notifying me when homework is just too much.  In these kinds of cases, we need to make accommodations and reduce the amount of homework in one or more ways.

• We might limit the number of problems to solve on a math set, or require less reading.
• We might change the type of work to be done.  Multiple choice or short-answer, fill-in-the-blank homework works better for these kids than other kinds of comprehension or social studies assignments.
•  We might change the way the homework needs to be done.  Both of my students are allowed to dictate their reading responses to a parent or grandparent, because getting them to sit down and write after school, when meds are wearing off and the brain is tired is not going to be a pleasant experience.
• We might give choices.  One of my students, who has moderately-functioning autism, fought homework at home for a long time.  When he came to my classroom, I provided three to four tasks to be done at home – and instructed him to pick two.  This gives him the power over the work, not me over him, and has made him voluntarily do his homework, without difficulty, when he gets home.

A goal should be to build internal drive and the self-discipline to get the practice done.

         I don’t want my students’ parents to spend hours fighting with their kids to get work done.  I also don’t want students neglecting their home practice.  Home practice needs to become a routine, a habit.

          In a demanding classroom, this is done with incentives as well as consequences.

          An immediate, automatic, small reward needs to be given to kids with learning disabilities when they turn in their homework.  As homework is checked in, kids can receive a sticker, a punch on “daily work index card”, a raffle ticket (dollar store prizes at a drawing once a week or every two weeks) or some other desired privilege.  It should be automatic and not served with effusive praise unless the child has a history of not turning in homework, in which case positive comments are a good re-enforcement.

         If you have other students check in homework, kids will be far more invested in getting it done. It’s hard to face a teacher or aide and explain why homework was not done, but for some reason it’s even harder to face your peers when all of them have been working hard.  This can be especially true if there’s a class-wide reward for 100% homework turned in, a ploy I use every now and then ($5 pizzas from Little Caesars work every time).  In general, the incentives should be small and cheap.

         Consequences are more complicated.The traditional “you miss recess” consequence is not a good idea in most special education classrooms, where kids need to get outside and move around as a kinesthetic break from the intellectual activity you’re piling on.

         I’ve been experimenting with a form letter that goes home, filled out by the student, for parents to read and sign.  It’s on bright orange paper, and can’t be missed by anyone coming even close to a backpack, and it requires the student to acknowledge work that wasn’t done and ask for help creating a plan to do it.  I keep all of them in my students’ portfolio folders, and it’s a great visual – neon orange is eye-catching.

         Restriction of free time until the homework is made up is a pretty good consequence, though again, many students, particularly those with autism or who have sensory issues need to have some minutes of free time between tasks in order to keep their minds working well.

         I’m inclined to use restriction from weekly class-wide fun activities as a consequence for not doing homework.  If the last ½ hour of class on Friday is reserved for cupcakes or a great game, kids who didn’t do homework during the week can sit in another classroom or in the office to make up their work.

         The combination of incentives and meaningful but not devastating consequences in a demanding classroom helps students learn good work habits at home and in school.

accommodations, ADHD, assignments, attention deficits, autism, consequences, demanding classroom, high expectations, home practice, homework, incentives, learning disabled, modifications, parents, purpose, reading response, reading stamina, restrictions, rewards, rigor, rigorous instruction, special education, standards Hide

By Sara Finegan 

         My colleague, Laurie Vierra, is a Special Education Intern this year with a special day class of third and fourth graders, having taken advantage of our district’s offer to pay for general education teachers to move into and obtain a Masters in Special Ed.  

         A background in the general education standards, pacing, and instructional methods are great assets in the special ed classroom.  Laurie knows what her students need to be able to do in order to function at grade level, and she’s interested in lifting them up to that level.  She has no sense of comfort with student dependence or any belief that a learning deficit is a static thing that can never be repaired. 

         She certainly isn’t under the impression that a learning disability prevents anyone from doing grade-level work.

         This was, at first, a little bit disconcerting to the students in her class and some of their parents, who are used to the program of the teacher she is replacing: 

• Gone are the days when the teacher and the teacher aide (para-educator) will go into student backpacks to retrieve homework:  she will not accept assignments turned in by anyone other than the student.   
• Nowhere in her classroom does the aide sit with students and follow a written script for instruction and support. 
• Students don’t get candy for behaving or finishing their work.   
• Students in Laurie’s class have homework every day, including weekends.  And parents can’t do it for their kids.
• Kids have to get their own pencils and paper; the aide is no longer running across the room to bring the students supplies.
• The work the kids do at home and in class is meaningful; there’s no such thing as “sponge work,” and every lesson and assignment is directed toward a reachable educational goal.  

         I’m interested to see what will happen as the year progresses, and Laurie alters her students’ IEP goals to better reflect state standards.   Almost all of the kids in her class had identical goals during the past couple of years, regardless of what their needs and strengths were.  

         I have a feeling that Laurie is already redesigning and reworking the expectations for each child; I know for a fact that she’s got a clear idea of what each child needs to learn in order to reach higher objectives.  If I know Laurie, she will be custom-creating goals that will actually move her students toward grade-level work.

         That class is moving, kicking and screaming perhaps at first, but more and more confidently into demanding, high-quality work.  I’m delighted, because it means that when the kids come my room for fifth and sixth grade, I won’t spend a year working to develop independent learners.

It was not always this way… 

         A few years ago, I opened my classroom to five new fourth graders, three of whom were GATE (gifted and talented) certified and all of whom, the teacher told me, were proficient in math, reading, and writing. 

         They’d scored high on the state’s standardized tests the previous spring and were just wonderful kids.  She advised that they should all be mainstreamed for math, and that four of them could attend a general education social studies or science class. 

She was right that they were wonderful kids.  I adore them.  But they were not wonderful students, not yet.

• During the first week, one of them spent six hours in the classroom crying because she wanted the lower-grades special day class (SDC) aide to come and sit with her. 
• During the first week, all of them failed the beginning of the year math inventory which reflected what they had learned the previous year.  Only one of them demonstrated anything close to mastery of some of the math modules for the previous year.
• During the first month, I discovered that they had no idea how to talk or think about what they were reading:  their idea of reading comprehension was to parrot back what the text said. 
• When I administered an On-Demand writing assessment that asked them to describe their favorite experience the previous summer, none of them wrote more than three sentences. 
• Three of them lasted less than two weeks in a general education math class because they weren’t able to follow the lessons.   
• None of them were able to participate in science or social studies, because they couldn’t get accustomed to the concept of active, engaged learning.  They sat passively through instruction, and waited during independent work time for someone to tell them what to do instead of reading the directions.
• I discovered on their first benchmark test that they were used to having all assessments read to them, even though four of them read at the third grade level or higher.  When they did in-class assignments, they expected me or our aide to sit with them and tell them what to do next.

The children were shorthchanged…

         Their previous teacher did them a grave disservice.  She sent me five very intelligent kids who hadn’t a clue how to learn.  It wasn’t their fault; they’d never been taught how to think or had thinking skills modeled for them. 

         My former colleague never worked in general education, never entered a general education classroom, and felt safe only in her cocooned Special Day Classroom, where she could nurture her students and coddle them.

         Laurie’s work is already showing results, and it’s just the beginning of November.  She’s participating in a fourth-grade team with two other general education teachers:  she took on social studies, and has a reverse-mainstreaming thing going on in her classroom; she teaches a rigorous math class to her students and some of the lower-scoring kids in general ed (and three of my students, fifth and sixth graders who are still needing support with basic math skills in a very small group situation). 

         When you walk into her classroom, it’s student work you see, not artwork done by her or her aide. 

         Laurie and I can finish each others’ sentences when we discuss rigor and independent learning.  This shorthand is based on a mutual understanding of what special education is:  a service designed to bridge the gap between ability and capacity, not an educational system to protect kids with special needs.

         When we smother kids with support and don’t teach them how to think for themselves, even the brightest of them will atrophy as learners.

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