[00:01] SPEAKER_01:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center and Champion of High Performance Instructional Leadership, Dustin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_02:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the show my friend Matt Miller. Matt is an educator, blogger, and author of several books, including Ditch That Textbook, a book about revolutionizing the classroom with innovative teaching, innovative mindsets, and innovative curriculum. And we're here today to talk about his new book with Alice Keeler, Ditch That Homework.
[00:38] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:40] SPEAKER_02:
Matt, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.
[00:42] SPEAKER_00:
Thank you so much, Justin. Excited to be here.
[00:45] SPEAKER_02:
Well, let's talk about ditching that homework. And I know our listeners may be familiar with your previous thoughts and work on kind of coming up with innovative and often Google Classroom kind of based curriculum. But what's been behind your drive to ditch homework?
[00:59] SPEAKER_00:
Well, it all kind of started in my own high school Spanish classes. And I remember in those first several years of teaching, it was like I was kind of a textbook teacher in that we did a lot of things marching through the textbook. We did our worksheets. We did our workbook pages because that's kind of what was done to me when I was a student. And I just didn't know a whole lot better than that. And I remember I gave homework a lot of times because I thought that's just what we did, what we did as teachers and so many teachers around me in my school.
[01:29]
would give homework also. And it's a really dangerous pattern of thinking to think what we've always done is what we should continue to do. But that's basically what I was doing. And I thought, well, if everybody's doing it and it's so widespread, then I should probably do it too. And so I would assign these homework assignments that were sort of shallow and superficial. And I'd get papers back with like five lines and each one would have one word on them.
[01:54]
It was like the bare minimum that kids could do. And even when I tried to do it better, I started to realize that the kids that were turning it in the homework were the ones that didn't really need the homework. And then the kids that refused to do it were the ones that really did. And so I started to see this divide that the homework was creating where the kids who were struggling got deeper and deeper in the hole and the kids that were doing better were getting elevated higher and higher. And I didn't like that. And so those were just some of the things that started to lead me to assign less and less homework to the point where I just quit doing it.
[02:29]
I know my co-author, Alice Keeler, has a similar situation, but that was sort of the precipice of this whole ditch that homework thing in my own teaching career.
[02:39] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, and you're getting at the idea of the value that's in there. The kids who are doing the homework or maybe the kids who didn't need it and the kids who would not consistently do their homework were the ones who seemingly need the help the most. What do you see as the function of homework? What are we trying to accomplish typically with homework that's behind its ubiquity?
[03:00] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, and I think that that's a really important question. That's something that we bring up in the book too is are we really evaluating why we're doing it? And then if we get to that, I think the follow up question has to be, is it effective in accomplishing those goals, whatever those goals are? And so I know for me and for I think for lots of teachers, too, you know, we think that getting the extra repetitions in is going to be big. And I think the whole repetition idea is a big part of assigning all of that homework. And, you know, I think in reality, whenever kids are trying to skirt by with just getting this mindless, pointless homework assignment done, then they're not really getting any learning out of it in the first place.
[03:46]
And we're also depriving them of the opportunity to spend time with their family. I mean, family time is important and there's a lot of things that we can learn outside of school that are going to benefit our overall lives. In fact, I just saw a really funny post. I think it was in the Huffington post of somebody writing a letter to the school, you know, You get the letters where the teachers will justify, here's why we need to do this homework and here's why it's important. This was a parent saying, we're going to need to cut back on the things that we do because we can't get all of the activities at home done that we need to do. So I'm going to be every day sending a load of laundry with my kids to school Because we're just not able to get it all done at home.
[04:29]
So now we're going to impose that on your time at school. And so anyway, those are some thoughts pertaining to that.
[04:35] SPEAKER_02:
I think the practice and the kind of pushing that we need to do to help our students move forward is also pretty critical. I was... at the gym a couple of months ago, and my trainer was kind of remarking, my trainer is not real good about keeping confidences, so I just kind of have to know what I say. And he's like, oh, this guy over here has been coming in like every single day, five or six days a week for six months, and he just does the exact same workout.
[04:57]
And I'm like, dude, you gotta push yourself a little bit. And I think with homework, it's kind of the same situation that if we just ask kids to do more of what they did in school, And yet with less support, with less ability to check their work, you know, it's like, what, what exactly is that accomplishing? It's kind of like if I work out with a trainer for a while and then I come back the next day and do less exercise with less weight, it's like, you know, how, how is that moving me forward?
[05:27] SPEAKER_00:
Exactly. I heard somebody say that, you know, weighing a cow over and over again does not change the any aspect of the cow. And, you know, that kind of touches on that same thing that you're right. If we get into that same rut and we continually do the same thing over and over again, what makes us think that doing it at home is this magical place that's going to make the learning even better? I mean, there's not much to that. And another thing that you sort of alluded to in that is that when kids go home, sometimes they don't have the support system that they have at school too.
[06:00]
And again, it's a tough situation for us to put on parents when we're asking them to be the surrogate teacher whenever they're at home. Because with us, we've been trained in pedagogy and in learning theory and all of these teaching methods and we're experts in our content area. But then whenever we send kids to go do things at home, we're sort of imposing that job on parents who have never had any sort of training like that. And Alice and I claim in the book – this is one of my favorite things that we touch on – is we say that there's real value in students doing work in the presence of their highly skilled, highly qualified teacher. And if we force them to go do that at home, you know how they say it's not practice makes perfect. It's practice makes permanent.
[06:47]
And so if kids go home and they struggle and they do, you know, one through 30 odds on an assignment out of the book and they don't really know what they're doing, they come back and they've created a lot of those those habits that sometimes we have to work to undo. So, yeah, I think I think there's a lot to that.
[07:03] SPEAKER_02:
Let's talk about that landscape of kind of homework assignments that are definitely not productive. What are some things that you see that we definitely need to not be giving as homework?
[07:13] SPEAKER_00:
And you touched on it a little bit. You know, when we do the same kind of question over and over again, I mean, so often it's really easy for teachers to make photocopies and it's really easy for them to send those home. And sometimes they're really easy to grade. And so, of course, that means that we're making life easier on the teacher. And instead of putting that emphasis on the teacher, why don't we put that emphasis on the student? So there's that whole repetition thing over and over and over again.
[07:43]
And we touch on this on the book a little bit too. I've seen some really interesting assignments that teachers do where they don't repeat questions over and over again. you know, math homework comes to mind here where you do, you know, like 20 questions that are all pretty similar, but little differences. But instead of doing that, what if you take one question and you go deep with it and you talk about your thinking as you go through that question? So you walk through the steps of solving that one problem and you talk about, here's why I did that and here's why this works. And We even talk about a teacher, the late Diana Harrington, who was a big mentor in Alice's life.
[08:23]
And Diana would take a question, and that would be their one problem, their one math problem for the entire week. And so they would talk about that math problem, and they would know it inside and out, front and back, like the back of their hand. And that would give kids this depth of understanding the process of And so if they became comfortable with that one problem and they could then focus on the process instead of the uniqueness of every single little problem, then they got a whole different take on it. So I think that's probably one really big thing as far as the homework goes is that we think that repetition, you know, practice makes permanent. But I don't think that's the full picture of getting deep learning.
[09:04] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, I like that idea because sometimes we do want kids to put in some thought or perhaps some research or some writing time, and we want them to have that time outside of class. Again, we might only get that from the kids who don't really need that additional time. I think the only time I've had that type of homework, if I recall, is in college in an engineering physics class that I took where an hour or two-hour homework assignment might have four or five problems. but they would be, you know, a whole page of work each basically, you know, to work out. And often the outcome of that was just being totally stumped, you know, coming back to class the next day and saying, okay, I worked on this for two hours. Here's what I've got.
[09:45]
And I think it's totally wrong, you know, and I will say that struggle was productive. You know, it, I think it was helpful, but I'm not sure that it's the best way, you know, in the secondary or elementary setting to, to get all kids to master the content and skills we want. So I think there's a, There's a lot going on in our classrooms that suggests that we should approach things differently than a lot of the, you know, as you said at the beginning, the kind of typical ways that we think we're supposed to do things. I think I'm supposed to give homework because that's what everybody does, right? And you actually identify a number of things like that in the book that we just kind of assume because they were done to us that we need to do to our students. What are some other aspects of professional practice that maybe need to be ditched?
[10:26] SPEAKER_00:
You know, one of the ones that I'm really excited about right now, and we have a whole chapter on this in the book, has to do with brain research, like cognitive science. And, you know, for many, many years, we've had really well-meaning teachers who have been giving kids advice on how to learn and how to study and all of that.
[10:50]
That's I think that's one area where if we can better acquaint ourselves in how the brain actually learns, sometimes there are little small shifts that we can make that have huge impact. And I kind of think of it like cooking spaghetti. A lot of times people will take that noodle out and we'll throw it against the wall and they'll hope that it sticks, which means that it's done. But instead of doing something to make that sticky learning, they're just hoping that it will happen. And there's one really neat finding in cognitive science that I love, and it's called retrieval. And so it says instead of just reading and reading and reading, or if you're studying and you're rereading your notes, instead of just going and going and going and reading through it, retrieval suggests that you stop every so often and you try to retrieve that new information out of your brain, basically by self-assessing or kind of like asking yourself, okay, let's retell in our own words what it is that we just learned.
[11:52]
or jotting it out on a piece of paper or something, but every so often stopping and trying to process it in your brain instead of just plowing through with the reading. And that shows that's one very small shift that shows huge, huge gains. And it's sort of unintuitive. And I think a lot of times people don't know about it, but that's one little study skill that we can pass on to kids that will make that learning stickier. And if we have stickier learning and kids are not forgetting as much, that we teach, if they're able to retain it, we're going to reduce our reliance on homework. And that's really the push of this book and of Alice and I's work is that we want teachers to be able to reduce their reliance on homework little by little by little until eventually they can ditch it.
[12:35] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Matt, thinking at the kind of school level about homework as an expectation and homework as a policy, you know, I think in a lot of schools we're in this position where parents kind of expect us to give homework and we kind of expect that we're supposed to give homework. But if we as educators come to the realization that we can actually get better and more consistent results with students by not giving homework, uh, How does that shake out when it comes to dealing with those parent expectations? You know, if we have parents on the one hand who say, you know, quit giving us so much homework, you know, we're also going to have parents on the other hand who say, why are you not giving my kid homework? How are you getting my kid ready for college if you're not giving homework? So I want homework. You know, how do we kind of manage those expectations with parents and navigate that change?
[13:19] SPEAKER_00:
You know, it's like parents are, and this is just in my own experiences that parents want to see the best for their kids. But they all have different views on how that's supposed to happen. And sometimes it's not based on research or best practice or the things that we know. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not. You know, Alice and I talk about this in the book about how there's going to be resistance when it comes to implementing change. And whether you give lots of homework or you don't give lots of homework, you're probably going to have somebody who disagrees with you.
[13:52]
And so we touch on a handful of suggestions that you can use, we think, to sort of what we call ditch that resistance. Each one of the chapters has the word ditch in it. Surprise, surprise. And this one's called ditch that resistance. So here are some of the things that we suggest if you're talking to parents and you want to help them get on board with this exciting new idea, or if you're a school leader and you're trying to help other teachers or the community get on board with these changes, here's a handful of things that we suggest. One is to help them see your vision.
[14:27]
So if you've got a new policy or a new idea that you want to put into place and you just put it in place, if people don't see the why involved in it, then that's kind of tough. So, you know, we, we all have a vision of where we want to see this thing go. And so if we can communicate that, that's a huge part of it. Another side of that is to share your heart. You know, there's some sort of emotional reason a lot of times that you want to make those changes. And so if people can really see that it's important to you and that you have a lot invested in it, that that can, that can help move the needle.
[15:01]
We also suggest to site supporting research, you know, so if you have some research on your side that shows that this is effective, of course, there's a happy balance here because you don't want to beat people over the head with a ton of research and bore them or make them feel overwhelmed. But I think if we can touch on that a little bit, that's good. Then two other things. One is to point to your own experiences. We talk about how it's important to share what's happened in your own life, you know, in the classroom or in the school that leads you to the decision that you want to make. And then the last one is to give parents or teachers the opportunity to talk.
[15:38]
So if you want to summarize that one, it's the shut up and listen step, because you know, how many times have we gotten into a conversation with someone that we thought was going to be a conversation and it ended up being a big monologue in our direction. And we knew after 30 seconds we had already made up our mind, but they just kept going and going and going. And we found that a lot of times, especially with parents, they just want to talk to somebody. They just want somebody to hear them and hear their concerns and know that it's been voiced to somebody who can make a difference. so that at least they've done their part. And then if they feel like the teacher is on their side and they know that we're all sort of fighting for the same common goal, then it's a much easier battle to become allies instead of becoming adversaries.
[16:25]
So we think that those are some things that we can do to help win other people to our way of thinking.
[16:30] SPEAKER_02:
I'm thinking about kind of the central rationale, at least that stands out in my mind, that when we want students to develop a skill, to get practice at that skill, they do that best under our supervision, as you said, under the guidance of a trained educator. rather than independently at home where the TV might be on and they might be practicing wrong, and practice makes permanent, so if they're practicing wrong, we might as well not have homework practice at all. What do you say to parents who are concerned that eliminating homework is going to eliminate a competitive edge for their children compared to kids in schools who give homework? Because I think there's a good equity rationale for eliminating homework and for just...
[17:08]
you know, controlling what we can control and making sure that the essential learning activities are taking place in the classroom where we can make sure that they take place for all kids. What's your advice to parents and what's your advice to teachers communicating with parents who are really more concerned about the additional practice that their kid absolutely would get and that they would support them in and that sense of kind of loss of that competitive advantage?
[17:29] SPEAKER_00:
Right. Yeah. I don't remember who to attribute this quote to. It's jumbling in my brain between Abe Lincoln and Steve Covey or, you know, it's one of them that says that if I had two hours to cut down a tree, I would spend the first hour sharpening the saw or something like that. And to me, when we send kids home to do more of what they did at school, we're basically trying to cut a tree down with a dull saw. And I've tried to do that, and it is less than efficient.
[18:03]
I mean, like actually cutting trees. It's a lot of work, and it's not a whole lot of gain. And eventually that tree comes down, but by the time you're done, you're exhausted, and you can't cut any more trees down. And so I really, really feel like whenever we heat more homework on top of kids, and if we're talking about the competitive side edge that it gives them, I think that that competitive edge is kind of a dream that a lot of us have in our brains that isn't really reality. Because whenever kids come home and they continue to do that same stuff, we're not giving them the opportunity to recharge and be the best versions of themselves. But what we're also doing is we're also assuming that what we do in school is is the most important part of their lives.
[18:49]
So much so that when they come home that they have to continue doing it. When in reality, and I know this with my own kids, that a lot of the things that we do at home have such a huge impact on the kind of person that I want each of my kids to become. And if we don't have the opportunity to do all of that at home to let them do the extracurriculars or to be able to help dad out in the garage or help mom plant in the garden and the little lessons that come along with that and the conversations that come along with that, a lot of that is the stuff that I as a parent am depending on to help shape my kids into the kids that we want them to become. And so for me, That competitive edge of maybe they're better at some of the academic stuff in school, but in the long run, my own kids, I know at home, my own kids are much bigger than the academic side of them.
[19:44]
And we know that going forward into this world that is going to require more and more interpersonal skills and communication and teamwork and creativity and problem solving and all of those things. I think more repetitive work is going to give us less of a competitive edge. And whenever we can help them to develop those things, which is much more effective when we do it at home with our own kids, I think personally, to me, that's going to give my kids much more of a competitive edge than I think doing homework would.
[20:17] SPEAKER_02:
So the book is Ditch That Homework. And Matt, if people want to find out more about the book, where can they go online?
[20:24] SPEAKER_00:
Well, a couple of places. I know we have a website set up, ditchthathomework.com, so that'll make it really easy to get connected with Alice and I. Alice has her own blog at alicekeeler.com, and mine is at ditchthattextbook.com.
[20:40]
So any combination of all of that is probably the quickest way to find our work and to get in touch with us.
[20:47] SPEAKER_02:
Well, Matt, it has been a pleasure to speak with you again, and thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.
[20:52] SPEAKER_00:
Thanks, Justin.
[20:54] SPEAKER_01:
And now, Justin Bader on high performance instructional leadership.
[20:58] SPEAKER_02:
So high performance instructional leaders, what did you take away from my conversation with Matt Miller about ditching that homework? I think one of the main jobs that we have as leaders is communicating with our school community, with our teachers, with our parents, with our students about our priorities within the school and about our rationale and theory of action for what we're doing. and if we have just always accepted that homework is supposed to be something that we do and it's supposed to be some additional practice that students do independently and get help maybe from their parents with you know if we just accept that rationale and don't add to it or critique it or modify it then there is going to be resistance to getting rid of homework but i think as leaders we can play a bigger role. We can play a role in helping our school community articulate a better way of doing things.
[21:50]
And I think a lot of the challenges with making homework valuable that Matt articulates in his book, Ditch That Homework, are really challenges that we can address in other ways beyond homework. If we want kids to get more effective practice, one of the things that I've seen to be very effective with my own kids is electronic practice. There are incredible apps out there for reading and for math, many of which are purchased not through just an app store, but through the school and provided by the school. I think there are tremendous opportunities out there to help our kids get the practice they need, but not with paper and pencil homework that's the same for every kid, that's not needed for some kids, that's above where other kids are working at, and that's not going to be as helpful as we think. So I want to encourage you to look for technology as part of the solution, and I want to encourage you to look for classroom-based, guaranteed, and viable options for achieving those same goals of homework.
[22:45]
And I want to encourage you to check out Matt's book at ditchthathomework.com.
[22:50] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
