The Great British Homework Debate 2020 - Third Space Learning.
The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington, is an inspirational movie about a specific debate team overcoming racism in the segregated South. It is based off of the debate team of Wiley College, a small religious black school in East Texas, during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Under the guidance of their coach Melvin.
A second-grade teacher in Texas recently rekindled the annual debate over whether kids spend too much time on homework. The teacher said she did not plan to assign homework this school year.
Now what I mean by being a responsible student is that the teacher doesn't have to tell you what you should do. You should know what you have to do, and so homework perhaps should not be something so important to you as a responsible student. Todd: So, you are saying that students should study on their own. Fred: They should.
Last week, I was able to attend a great professional development through the Institute for Excellence in Education, in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. The focus of the conference was homework and standards based grading in the middle level. We began our session with a writing prompt that guided us to write about our belief about homework.
Homework also provides opportunities for reinforcement of work learned during school time and for children to develop their research skills. Children will need to seek information for themselves from reference materials such as encyclopedias, books, CD Roms and by doing so, are helped along the path to becoming independent learners.
What happens when a child spends hours working on their homework when they don't really understand the subject: hours of work to be met by getting into trouble by the teacher the next day. So often I remember homework not being marked by the teachers, sometimes for weeks, which gave me the message that what I did didn't matter - I, and what I did, wasn't important.
All you need to have a great classroom debate is an interesting topic -- such as the ones above -- to engage students. Well, perhaps that point could be debated -- but theres no debating the fact that this weeks Lesson Planning article provides all the resources you need for great classroom debates.