Dear colleague,
Years ago, I started a series of articles called “Better, Saner Homework Tips.” In Part 1, I wrote on how we might make homework better and saner for ourselves. And in Part 2, I wrote about how we might make homework experiences better for our students. Today, I'd like to end this talk of homework by thinking about the final corner of the Triple Responsibility triangle: the parents/guardians of our students. (And yes, I understand that the homework landscape has shifted since I began this series in 2018. If you're a no-homeworker, all good. If you're a die-on-the-hill homework assigner who thinks of homework as practice, all good. If you're like me, more a situational homework assigner, all good. This article is just meant to help us help parents in the situations where we believe that homework can be instrumental in advancing the mastery and/or long-term flourishing of students.)
(Note: I've written at length on how to work better with parents here and here.)
First of all, parents/guardians are busy. Do you know how you feel like you don't have enough time to do all the things you need and want to do in life? That's how all of our students' parents/guardians feel. It's in everyone's best interest to make lives easier by streamlining our homework expectations and communicating them clearly.
For me, as a parent, I've got four children in school: a tenth grader, an eighth grader, a sixth grader, and a third grader. I live in a state of constant confusion about who has homework when. It is a perpetual fog of war. My best days are the ones where I at least check in with each of my children on whether or not they have homework and provide a few tips or structure changes to enable them to focus on the work they have.
Second, just about all parent/guardians I've ever met do care. You know how teaching sometimes makes you feel like the entire weight of your students' long-term flourishing is on your shoulders alone? That's how parents/guardians feel, except there's no off switch for them, including when the school year ends. Think of how much you love your current students, but multiply that by knowing them since before they were born, watching them first walk and talk, listening to them tell made-up stories, falling in love with their giggle, hearing their dreams for the future take shape and change, watching as their bodies and minds and hearts transform from child to adolescent.
When we think of parents, it needs to be from a humble place — even when we disagree with some of the methods or comments we hear. We have to remind ourselves: they love their child more than I do; they are hugely responsible for the things in their child that I love; they are more frustrated by their child's misbehaviors than I am.
So, they're busy, they're stressed, they're fraught with worry and love for their child. This will help us think more wisely about homework.
Third, they should never have to teach our material. In many cases at the secondary level, they won't be able to. When we send homework home that requires instructional help, it's not fair to students or parents/guardians. As I wrote in Parts 1 and 2, it's my job to explicitly teach my students to do everything I want them to do at home.
This is why we ought to be judicious in choosing just a handful of homework assignment “types” — that way we don't need to spend as much time teaching how to do them.
Fourth, what parent/guardians can do is give their child a distraction-free work environment. Not all of them can, but whenever a parent asks me what they can do to help, I always bring this up. We talk about smartphones turned off and away, setting specific times per day for studying, and things like that.
Fifth and finally, the other thing parents can do is listen to and encourage their students. Ask them how things are going. Encourage them for effort wisely applied, for demonstrations of agency and work ethic and focus. Coach them toward seeking help from their teachers. Remind them that their worth isn't in how well they perform in school but rather in who they are.
(There's an old Mr. Rogers line I riff on often with both my children and my students: “It's you that I like.” This holds a lot of meaning. It's not your performance, not your grades — it's you that I like.)
At any rate, these are the things I think about when working with parents/guardians on the matter of homework.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
P.S. If your team is wrestling with student motivation this semester, my Teacher Credibility Mini-Course gives you 10 strategies in under two hours of video. $99 for individuals, or group licenses for your whole faculty start at $499. Learn more here.
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