The Usual Good Stuff from Coach G on the limits to reviewing homework.
Coach whistles teachers for two main offenses:
Correct, Collect or Act It Out?
How or whether to review homework depends on what the homework is for:
Let It Be
Is there ever a time to just let students review the homework, regardless of whether you know how well they did it? Trying to muster some words of wisdom ... yes. In an immersion language classroom, it's great. Remember that middle-school German teacher who just drilled you to death on grammatical forms? Guess what? You actually weren't learning as much as Ms. Mickeltickel told you you were. Rote drills have a place ... but a limited one.
Turns out that we develop a lot of language skills through "negotiating meaning." All those little phrases like "Repeat, please," "Excuse me," "Did you hear that?" "What's next?" "Can you help me?" "Okay," "Right," "Give me my stapler back!" And so on. In an immersion class, in small groups, students are forced to use a ton of this "small stuff."
Unless you're pretty sure everyone got the homework completely right, in which case there are plenty of other techniques to get 'em talking, taking five minutes to review the homework serves two purposes at once. And since review often occurs early in class, it's a good, low-stakes way for students to get their tongues and brains working in the language.
There's plenty more to say about homework review. Cold-calling. Breaking students into groups to review one section, then share out. Collecting homework for quality control and direct feedback. But the big questions to always remember are, What's it for? and in a language class, Can I use review to get kids talking?
Coach whistles teachers for two main offenses:
- Rotely reviewing and correcting problems: if everyone got a question (or all of them) right, teacher-led rehash is a waste of time and spark for student disruption.
- "Disc jockey" review, where they ask the students what questions to go over. Kids ask to go over questions they actually got right as a ruse to fool around, and the quiet kids never pipe up.
Correct, Collect or Act It Out?
How or whether to review homework depends on what the homework is for:
- Some homework's formative, helping students develop skills on the way to larger objectives, and it's probably a good idea to make sure it's correct. For that I'd heartily recommend Coach G's suggestion that you put answers on the board and let students work through their errors. Or my own ESOL-specific technique--see below.
- Some homework's preparatory. What do I mean? It's not just practice, but a building block for a classroom activity. A key in any language classroom is what's called "information exchange" tasks, where some students have information others need, and they speak in the target language to share that info. Bare-bones example: A homework could be, "Write 5 sentences describing yourself with adjectives." The students bring it in, a volunteer reads the sentences out loud (without saying the author's name), and in teams the students guess who the classmate is. For this sort of activity, I recommend you collect the assignment, help students make corrections over the next couple days, then do the activity. That assures the activity is based on legitimate input, not someone's error-riddled scribbling from the night before.
- Finally, some homework's performative. Students work on a big or small project, and the final homework assignment is to prepare it for presentation. No need to correct here (well, a peek over their shoulders is probably a good idea!). Let them get up (or get in groups) and act it out.
Let It Be
Is there ever a time to just let students review the homework, regardless of whether you know how well they did it? Trying to muster some words of wisdom ... yes. In an immersion language classroom, it's great. Remember that middle-school German teacher who just drilled you to death on grammatical forms? Guess what? You actually weren't learning as much as Ms. Mickeltickel told you you were. Rote drills have a place ... but a limited one.
Turns out that we develop a lot of language skills through "negotiating meaning." All those little phrases like "Repeat, please," "Excuse me," "Did you hear that?" "What's next?" "Can you help me?" "Okay," "Right," "Give me my stapler back!" And so on. In an immersion class, in small groups, students are forced to use a ton of this "small stuff."
Unless you're pretty sure everyone got the homework completely right, in which case there are plenty of other techniques to get 'em talking, taking five minutes to review the homework serves two purposes at once. And since review often occurs early in class, it's a good, low-stakes way for students to get their tongues and brains working in the language.
There's plenty more to say about homework review. Cold-calling. Breaking students into groups to review one section, then share out. Collecting homework for quality control and direct feedback. But the big questions to always remember are, What's it for? and in a language class, Can I use review to get kids talking?
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