Above is the data acquired from a test in science lesson. The student certainly needs assistance in securing this knowledge. However, because the task was designed to isolate specific aspects of the learning, this teacher is able to easily decide how to design the supported study session.
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Homework doesn't necessarily mean working at home. It is better defined as work done in-between lessons. It could be any stage during the day, inside the school even. This is becoming a much more common place scenario with the increased awareness of applying intervention to students who are struggling with a specific topic. This is extremely prevalent in the GCSE years. Such lessons may be called supported study, directed study, or any other named session representing a learning intervention. In the case of the set work being considered homework, it is assumed that the ordinary teacher is not present, and the student is being assisted by a teaching assistant.
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Students being eligible for extended study or supported study sessions are essentially students seeking an individual learning plan. I am reluctant to call it a personalised learning plan, as these tend to be characterised by having greater student input into their design. For the benefit of students attending supported study sessions to fill in gaps, a more directed approach would suit. The sequence of learning would ideally be created by the teacher who has the best knowledge of the student and the gaps needing to be filled. Of course, this creates a furthering of the already extended workload that we face as teachers, but in order for such intervention to be of any use, the lessons must be individualised. To offer a mediation, the number of students would not be likely to exceed 4 or 5, otherwise you would teach the gaps in normal class. Once again, the salient consideration here is that the homework needs to be characterised by quality tasks. Regardless of the individualised approach, the tasks should be: short and progressive, precise, and practised tasks that zone in specifically to gaps in a curriculum.
A note on each. Short tasks would be approximately 20-25 mins in duration, with a modelled example leading a progressively building difficulty. Precise tasks include explicit instructions that require no assistance to decipher and begin the task. Precision here is also defined by the specific knowledge the student needs. The gaps are of course quantified by the teacher via observation in formative assessment as well as data produced in summative form. The notion of practice is imperative in such contexts. The tasks should include plenty of opportunity to practice and consolidate the learning. This would allow approximately 2 such tasks in a standard session, providing opportunity for some interleaving of tasks, a technique that helps students to strengthen the knowledge in the long term memory. This again may seem overwhelming in terms of preparation, but it is actually the same as having to prepare for a whole lesson. Instead of doing grammar for a whole lesson and then a lesson on spelling, combine both in 1 and spread them over 2 sessions. Below is an example taken from The HOMEWORK DEGRUMBLER.
Homework involving retrieval practice rarely needs to be differentiated, as well designed tasks are usually progressive in nature, and thereby offer an inbuilt differentiation. However, some forms of independent type tasks, for example tasks that ask for extensions of secure knowledge, tend to be more successful when they offer students choice. This is based on the research suggesting that experts (those with secure knowledge) benefit from great challenge to their cognitive loads, as opposed to novices in a topic, who are unable to push past any cognitive overloading - see here. Consequently, there is a lot of interest in the design of tasks that offer multiple access points for students, usually characterised by degree of difficulty, and often corresponding to levels of engagement associated with a taxonomy such as Blooms. Teacher Toolkit presents such options as seen in the image right by by @ItsNads88 and @OAI_technology. These types of choices encourage exploration of a topic, and ultimately aim to excite students to pursue their own paths in the exploration, by either thinking creatively about new ways to present the knowledge, or to push towards mastery.
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However, such open tasks easily attract issues discussed in the Independent homework section. If the work gets outsourced because the instructions aren't clear, or if the background knowledge isn't sufficient, then its validity as a task is void. There are also significant concerns about the time it would take to design so many variations of the task, which may seem ok if creating them well in advance, but then this raises the issue of the responsiveness and thus relevance of the task, as the setting in advance reduces the certainty of secured background knowledge significantly.
DIFFERENTIATION
The new differentiation: supported study
The most efficient way to manage these extended learning sessions, is through a homework manager. In today's time, technology is the most efficient way to do this. A platform that is able to isolate tasks so that students and their subsequent supported study teachers can view them, as well as preventing any loss of information by having access to soft copies, is the most efficient solution. The assistant and student need to be able to quickly access the work without any confusion or potential disagreement about what is required. This is the prologue to another essential part of quality homework design: the student being able to access the task and complete it independently.
In other words, instructions need to be clear and precise. Ideally the teacher or assistant handling supported study wants to be able to guide the students into its completion without even having to be expert in the specific subject. This is actually a key consideration in designing ALL homework tasks: anybody should be able to help somebody complete the task. ‘Students should leave the classroom with a clear sense of what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to do it (Protheroe, 2009). To eliminate one of the strongest criticisms of homework, being that if a student needs to outsource the task it renders the validity of the task void, teachers need to set tasks vigilantly. The validity of the task becoming void through the outsourcing of the task is a serious one, because with this, the enormous issue of inequity in the learning opportunity becomes apparent; if the student doesn't have access to resources, and probably most significantly, a parent who can aid in the completion of the work, then the chance of progress in the learning is greatly diminished, often to the point of zero. Those with access to materials, including cultural capital owned by the parents, are likely to be able to complete the work, and hence perpetuate the vicious correlation of greater educational gain with greater financial advantage. This is known as The Matthew Effect.
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The advantage of technology managing such tasks is even more apparent as it provides the teacher with a means of recording and keeping track of the extra work, and monitoring progress, then iterating on the results to decide if further intervention is required.
Often, you will be content with students simply working on the assigned homework for the whole class in supported study times, knowing that students who are in supported study sessions will likely need more time to complete the work than what they could spend on it at home. The bonus then is that these students get to regularly experience a sense of completion of work, undoubtedly a foreign notion for many such students, but a notion that becomes the ultimate motivator: In addition, homework should be structured in a way that the students can accomplish it with relatively high success rates (Protheroe, 2009).
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The type of task set may be determined to some extent by its marking requirements. The prospect of extra marking is nothing short of a death knell for teachers, so supported study tasks are possibly best set as self-marking assignments. This could be in the form of online quizzes, or work that is accompanied by answers that an assistant could check against work, and then add the result to the report section inside the homework manager.
Such methods facilitate the opportunity for students to become better at self-regulation. Students are able to note what questions they got wrong, and check them against the advice presented by the teacher, kind of like a whole class making approach. If tasks are set in a progressive fashion, then a student should be able to see which particular skill needs addressing. At other times, more explicit feedback may be required, and this is explored in the feedback section.
USING TECHNOLOGY TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
