The reading this week highlighted the other various ways in which homework could and should be utilized by a general education population. It provided me with new insight and skills should I begin working with general education students on a regular basis.
With a brief time spent in a general education classroom almost all of my teaching has been with students in Special Education classroom settings. The use of homework with these students is primarily for the additional practice and helping students get into the habit of having to do additional work each day when they get home from school. Their daily homework is also used to reinforce a lesson that was taught earlier during the school day.
One of the ideas mentioned in the Classroom Instruction that Works, was the idea of using homework before a new topic has begun to access prior knowledge about a subject (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler & Stone, 2012). As a Special Education teacher this isn’t something that I have previously done. It would be interesting to see how to incorporate this into material for next year.
Often the majority of the homework being sent home each day is in the area of math. It is used to provide students with some reinforcement about their skills and helps encourage their self-confidence. For this reason, in my Special Education class, math homework was routinely given out that was highly modified to promote student’s self-confidence. For example students were given fewer items to complete than the handout required (only having to complete the ‘odd’ or ‘even’) or a new homework page would be created to focus only on the skills that the student felt confident in already.
My own experience with the use of homework is for a very particular part of the student population. I think the way Special Education teachers modify homework is effective because as Dean et al. (2012) state it is “directly tied to the skills needed for achieving mastering of learning objectives” (Dean et al., 2012, p. 104). I worked to ensure that
Reference:
Pitler, H. & Stone, B., (2012). A handbook for classroom instruction that works (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Dean, C. B., Hubble, E. R., Pitler, H., & Stone, B. (2012). Classroom Instruction That Works (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Lewis is learning 