Homework... What Homework?

In my "Learning To Let Go" post, I described my attempts to "flip" my classroom.  I am by no means an expert on this and am still trying to find a flow that works best for me and my students.  Fortunately, I feel as though I have had some success with this in some classes for some lessons, while other times this "flipped" approach has not worked as well.  As a result, I sat down to try and figure out what might be getting in the way, and the concept of homework surfaced.  More specifically, I think that some students need to be trained to think about homework in a different way.

In math, traditional homework usually takes the form of students going home to practice whatever skill they learned in class that day.  Typically, this means answering questions from a textbook or a worksheet.  This is what students expect for math homework as it is the type of homework they have been receiving for years.  It is a structure with which they are familiar and comfortable.

The homework I assign my class often looks different, some recent examples include:

• Watch a specific "Brainpop" video, take the quiz and email me the results.
• Demonstrate proficiency on a specific Khan Academy concept.
• Watch a video that I have posted on YouTube and complete a companion note-taker.

Some students do a great job of following through on these tasks and I truly believe that they are benefitting from this in a number of different ways.  However, there is also a larger number of students, when compared to previous years, that are not completing these homework assignments.  The thing is that when I talk to these students, most of them agree that they would rather do this type of homework than traditional homework (by the way...we do this traditional work during class time where I can provide more assistance), but at the same time they comment that they thought it was optional.  

Optional??? That word doesn't really exist in my classroom when it comes to homework, but here it is that students are thinking that their homework assignment is optional.  I believe that the main reason for this is that students are not familiar with these types of assignments being considered important and need to be retrained in order to recognize that watching a video etc. also count as valuable homework.