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.

          By far the most common deficits we see in the special ed classroom are problems with reading.  The vast majority of our students do not read close to grade level, and this impairs their ability to make progress in the general education curriculum independently. 

           Reading skills have very little to do with intelligence and everything to do with the way the brain perceives the task.  I have had more than one student classified as GATE (Gifted and Talented)  in the fifth or sixth grade, who reads at the first grade level. 

          The problem with reading deficits is not only how they pervade all aspects of the curriculum but that they discourage most kids from doing the work that will improve the skills:  reading.    Most of the kids who don’t read well also don’t read.  At least, not until they get to a demanding classroom.

          And why should they?  It’s exhausting, halting, stuttering, discouraging, boring, and one never ceases to be reminded that one doesn’t do it well. 

          There are a gazillion programs out there which purport to (and often do!) improve students’ ability to read.  There are books and books, articles and more articles about interventions and strategies that work.   I particularly enjoy attending workshops and other professional development opportunities dealing with reading instruction.  I collect as much information and as many ideas as I can, and use them in a myriad of ways to support reading in the classroom. 

Types of reading skill

          Reading skills can be boiled to several types, and it’s important that we address all of them, with rigor, in the demanding classroom.  They are as follows:

1.   Decoding 

         Obviously, phonemic awareness and the understanding of the sounds the letters make and how they become words is important.  Our students need to be aware of the long and short vowel sounds, blends, and other aspects of the decoding process.  It’s the cornerstone of the mechanics of reading, after all.   

           Or is it?  I’m not so sure.  Certainly, it’s an important skill to have.  But how often do good readers decode words, really?  I paid attention to my own reading for a week, and I only decoded once – and it was a latin word.  What I mostly did was…

             …recognize words.  Which brings me to the next type of reading mechanics:

2.   Sight words.

         Turns out that in my reading, I mostly scan over the text and recognize each of the words.  I don’t sound them out, even the big words, because I know them already as soon as I see them.  Most people I know who are good readers do the same thing. 

          It also turns out that our students, the ones with profound reading deficits, don’t recognize most words.  Sometimes it’s because of visual processing slowness, or because of visual memory issues.  Sometimes it’s because they don’t see a lot of words very often.  After all, if you  never read, dreaded reading, you wouldn’t know many words. 

         Whatever the reason for a low bank of sight words in ones brain, this must be addressed, intensively, consistently, and with the student involved in setting measurable goals. 

           This year, each of my 5th and 6th grade students has decided that they want to increase their sight word vocabulary by 15 words a week, which translates to about 60 words per month, or 600 for the whole school year. 

           I get to pick the words.  And I don’t pick easy ones – the one-syllable, simple words that occur most frequently will be picked up automatically as we increase our reading stamina and practice fluency.  I pick the two and three-syllable words that trip kids up.  I’ll post October’s list somewhere in here, I promise. 

           Every child gets sight words flashcards to carry around from home to school and back, and they are assiduous in practicing with each other daily while I’m taking roll or collecting papers.  They got their parents involved by asking them to sign a “reading helper” contract – so now, parents or siblings work with them at home.  This is not as easy as it sounds:  some of my students come from families where English is not spoken in the home or where the parents aren’t literate.  This is where older and younger siblings, cousins, and neighbors help out.  Somehow or another, every one of my students mastered 80 words between September 8 and October 1.  EIGHTY!  

          Confidence increases exponentially when kids can recognize words, especially the hard words that always made them stumble, crash and burn in previous reading projects.  You can bet that the kids are more eager to read independently now.

3.   Reading fluency.

          Fluency is the ability to read quickly and smoothly, with inflection, not stumbling over too many words (we all do when we read out loud, at least occasionally), infusing drama into the voice. 

          Most kids with reading deficits don’t have the voice in their heads telling them the story as they read.  They read like robots, one word at a time, staccato.  There’s no feeling, no expression, and certainly not a lot of attention to what’s going on in the text – the kids are too busy just dealing with the mechanics of reading.

         Until and unless we work with them on reading fluency, they aren’t going to hear that voice in their heads (the healthy kind!).  They aren’t going to enjoy reading, and they aren’t going to have the strength and stamina to figure out much of what is going on in the story.

         My favorite reading fluency program is Read Naturally, which I think has been around forever, or at least a long time.  And no, I don’t get paid to write about it.  Read Naturally is a series of stories on tape and on paper, which kids listen to and read out loud over and over and over again, practicing speed and inflection.  There’s a timed component to it that many teachers use to help kids build their speed of reading, but I never have managed to do much with it, and I don’t actually use the tapes very much either.  It’s the one-page human interest stories that  we focus on.

          Read Naturally text goes from primer to the higher-grade levels of reading, moving up by half-grade levels.   The stories start out with a larger font, shorter text, and move into smaller font, more complex sentences, and longer paragraphs gradually through the levels.  It seems to progress at just the right measure for kids.

          This year, my kids all set a fluency goal as well, which is related to their ability to decode and recognize words, of course.  They aimed high – they all want to be reading at grade level by the end of the year.  This is certainly doable if we are talking about decoding and fluency –if the kids do the work consistently. 

          So far, they’re all on track with their goals to increase by a half-grade level in fluency every six weeks.  I  have advised them that the higher the level, the more difficult each text will be to practice and master fluently, and that we may need to tweak how often we work at it – but I have not said anything about adjusting their goals or expectations.

           This is the first year we have all tackled fluency with such rigor, and it’s because last year, one of my students jumped from a first grade reading level to the fifth grade in a matter of months by using Read Naturally every day at home and school.  This inspired his friends, and now they’re all gung-ho.  They eagerly ask to read to me every morning, and are mastering between two and three stories per week so far.    The amount of work they are putting in at school and at home means they are increasing something else, which leads me to the fourth leg on the stool we call reading technique…

 4.   Reading stamina.

         Reading stamina is the ability to read for long periods of time with focus and purpose.  Avid readers like me can read all day, even taking our books to the bathroom or holding them while we cook dinner.  Students with reading deficits are often lucky to be able to read for five minutes at a time.  Last year, my student David, who has both ADHD and autism, lasted 11 SECONDS at a time with text at the primer level.  I still dream about that.

          I have not, I confess, spent a lot of time working on stamina as an isolated skill.  I get caught up in some of the more engaging aspects of reading instruction – and by that I mean activities in which I get to engage with my students.  Stamina is something that one develops solo.  And I find that it increases exponentially as students develop the technical and cognitive skills to read and understand. 

          These days, David reads for about 12 minutes at a time.   With a third grade text.  He will be moving up to level 3.5 next week.

Turn that rickety stool into an armchair.

          Reading is a skill that we all rely on in life.  For some, it’s an unwieldy and rickety stool that’s missing a leg and whose seat comes unscrewed every few days.  For others, it’s a cushy, comfy armchair in whose depths we can sink and disappear into worlds and characters without limit.  The one thing we all have in common is that we need something to rest our butts on, and legs to hold us up. 

         In a demanding classroom, reading instruction is precisely-customized to individual student needs, and most of the time is devoted to practicing.  In a demanding classroom, students participate in setting goals and measuring progress.