The intention behind the repetitive nature of school is to prepare students for routine in their adult life. This results in, for most of their school career, students are subconsciously developing an expectation for their lives inside and outside the classroom. These expectations also include homework, how it is assigned to them, and how they complete it.
However, one teacher subverts these expectations by taking a unique approach to assigning homework, one that has yielded generally positive results in regard to both student grades and student learning.
“Historically, homework has always been part of the American education system,” said Mr. John Collier, North Penn’s Advanced Placement Environmental Science (APES) teacher. “Despite [this], if I give homework, I want it to make it valuable to the student. I want it to be something that is going to help them engage with the content.”
This homework policy consists of posting a week’s worth of homework on Canvas on Monday morning and setting it due on Sunday night. This approach gives students the opportunity to complete their work at their own pace and allows students more flexibility with when and how they approach their homework.
The differences between APES and other courses allows for this unique policy, but Collier acknowledges that this approach cannot be translated into every class with the same effectiveness. This is especially true in the case of courses that require traditional homework for the comprehension of topics.
“I don’t use the exact same policy in my chemistry class, where [students] are doing problems that are relevant to what they are going to learn the next day, so they have to practice it that night,” said Collier.
Subjects like math and most science courses would most likely struggle to adopt similar policies and yield similar results, but more general comprehension subjects, like English, history, or world languages, might find some success. However, despite the accomplishments of this homework policy, many factors went into its development that other courses might find hard to replicate.
APES was only brought to North Penn in 2020, and, as a result, this policy has only existed for a little over four years. While this has given the policy enough time to be tested to an extent, that doesn’t take away from the need for it to be constantly changing and adapting to each new group of students.
“Once I started teaching the course and seeing the kind of students who took it, [I saw] a lot of the students [were] very busy…this was the first course where I felt I like I could provide them greater flexibility in the homework timing,” said Collier.
Despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback, Collier’s APES homework policy does have two undeniable negative aspects: procrastination and cheating. Both of these are unfortunately more prevalent with this policy, and, as a result, diminish student learning in favor of cutting corners.
“One downside to the policy is that it allows for procrastination…[There is] also the sharing of answers between students and [trying to] get out of the work,” said Collier. “There are two sides to this coin, [but] sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.”
For many teachers, the thought of changing such a staple and traditional way of handing out homework is too risky to try. However, for Collier, such a risk has proven beneficial for his students, the AP Environmental Science course, and his method of teaching. Should other school subjects and teachers start to look for new and more student-friendly ways to assign homework, Mr. John Collier’s course provides an undeniable story of success for others to look towards.