Homework as the job of childhood

Theory Into Practice, Summer, 2004 by Lyn Corno, Jianzhong Xu

But children also engage in a variety of productive activities of their own choosing outside of school. Some activities are organized as part of an after-school youth program or private lessons, but others are chosen by children themselves. To return to our metaphor, another way to address the question of readiness would be for teachers to design homework around the range of productive activities, jobs, or tasks students enjoy engaging in outside of school. Here we make a distinction between homework assignments made around productive activities in children's lives (e.g., practicing with a basketball, babysitting, troubleshooting computers, or drawing pictures for a sick friend) versus those that attempt to use their content interests (in animals, television stars, cars and trucks, etc.). We believe there is value to be gained if teachers design homework assignments that address children's activity interests in addition to or, in some cases, instead of content interests.

Analogous to the employee's immersion in productive work, there is an intrinsic appeal to a homework assignment that is part of productive everyday activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). Although this type of activity is not play, many of the activities young children engage in everyday--from baking to gardening to feeding pets--provide opportunities for the introduction of elements of play (e.g., licking the spoon, getting sprayed with a garden hose, or doing tricks with the dog). These elements of play help to sustain engagement. The appeal also capitalizes on the child's positive attitude for the familiar while allowing the bar to be ever so gradually raised. These positive personal experiences can be brought back into school with great profit, thus capitalizing on the likelihood that class members share at least some of their activity interests.

At the same time that academic skills get refined in the context of everyday activities (e.g., taking precise measurements when baking, calculating the projected distance of a pitched ball), children who engage in this kind of homework also hone their understanding of the need to plan ahead. This is because productive activities--those that have a desired purpose or outcome--require the development of self-regulatory habits and the internalization of work-related values. Students learn how to follow through and begin to meet externally imposed deadlines similar to those they will someday face as employees and coworkers.

Supervision can aid or abet the quality of the experience

Another issue that comes out of our research is that homework could be better supervised than it often is. We discovered that homework is most often supervised either loosely or too authoritatively by adults, and these adults are not well-informed about how to help children with homework. In some homes, children receive little assistance from adults; in others, parents not only offer to help, they actually do much of the work for the child. And yet, our evidence emphasizes the importance of good homework supervision. Indeed, our studies suggest that not just elementary school, but also middle school and even some high school students benefit when supervision (a) clarifies the teacher's expectations, (b) models and encourages effective work habits, and (c) responds promptly and pointedly when the child needs help (Corno, 1996, 2000; Xu & Corno, 1998, 2003).