This is the second in a series about rethinking homework.  Click here to read the first part.

In every content area, teachers are asked to cover far more content and help students develop more skills than ever before.  Add to that mix the need to teach things like digital citizenship, non-subject specific skills like collaboration and critical thinking, and technological proficiency, and you have a Sisyphean task.

The traditional answer to this problem is just assigning extra practice and content as homework.  But that just takes a problem for teachers and passes it on to students and parents.  That isn’t a solution.

The solution is to do less.  It’s not a popular solution, but it IS a practical one.

For each unit, I choose the information that I think is most real-world, helpful and relevant to my students.  Then, I decide what skills would be most appropriate and design the unit around those skills and that content.  The last thing to decide is what the final for the unit will be.  In my class, the final product often includes puppets and a project.

The most important thing is that I make the scope of the unit something I can achieve using ONLY face-to-face class time.  What would traditionally be assigned as homework is just not included.  Period.

Let’s look at a practical example from my own classroom.  ​

Research is something I've never taught well.  At least until this year.

I realised that teaching history the way I want to teach it requires me to help students do research.  I've written before about my project-based approach to teaching history, so I know that's not new.  However, the fundamental structure and success of my project-based classroom rests almost entirely on my students' ability to find good sources, synthesise the information, and use it to create original writing.

Right now, we're doing a final unit on Ancient Greece.  There are two simultaneous threads that we're weaving together for the final project: the Minecraftopolis building and screen-capture, and the Odyssey retelling.

Struggle plays a huge role in my teaching practice because struggle is essential to learning.  

But sometimes, I think I let my students struggle a little too much.  There has to be a balance, and it's a balance I'm still working on after eleven years in the classroom.  It also seems to be the product of experience rather than skill or content knowledge.

As a young teacher, I didn't want to let my students struggle, ever.  I wanted them to be comfortable and interested and engaged because everything was Just So Engaging Because I Said It Was!  I didn't realise that the students needed to be working harder than I was; frankly, I'm not sure anyone could have worked harder than I did that first year.

I grew more experienced, and probably leaned too far in the other direction.  In the name of constructivism, I explained far too little and expected far too much.

There are some things that work best as direct instruction, and there are things that work best as student-centred constructivism.  Again, it's about finding balance between telling them ALL OF THE THINGS and letting them discover ALL OF THE THINGS.

Over Spring Break, I read Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning, which does what it says on the tin: teach you how to learn or teach anything more successfully.

Clearly, that is something really useful to my life.  While there are lots of principles from the book I'll be implementing, I've been focusing on one strategy that they say is very clearly tied to moving information from short to long term memory: retrieval practice.

The concept, in its most basic form, is self-quizzing.  The way most people study is they go over a list of topics, and run through them once or twice. Maybe you make flashcards.  And as soon as you've gotten them right at least once, you figure out know them and move on.

But that's not knowledge.  That's the illusion of mastery.

So how do you know if you really know something?  By simulating testing conditions and forcing yourself to work harder to pull the information from memory.  Practically, that means closing the book or the laptop and going back through the concept and asking yourself questions to test understanding instead of basic recall.

That is such a powerful concept that I decided I was going to implement it immediately with my 6th graders. 

The problem that immediately surfaced is that I run a student-centred PBL constructivist classroom.  There isn't direct instruction.  There isn't lots of factual information. 

Or so I thought.

It's hard to change classroom practice, especially for those of us who have been teaching for 10+ years.  And there are always shiny new "innovative" tools offered up as the Thing That Will Save Education.  Like radio.  And the VCR.  And laserdisk.  And the SMARTboard.  And 1:1 devices.

Behind the drive for having the newest or coolest app or edtech tool is the same instinct that drives most good teachers: How can I do this better for my students?

Honestly, the most innovative thing I do is get out of their way.

My goal?  Total invisibility.  At least from an outside perspective.

Planning is an issue with which a lot of first-time flippers struggle.  Hell, it's something with which every teacher struggles.

It's also one of the biggest objection for teachers new to flipping.

There's no getting around it: creating flipped videos takes a lot of time.

That's why I don't make many videos.

The main reason for that is because I'm no longer the disseminator of knowledge and content in my flipped class.  I have my students do a lot of it.  Does that feel lazy?  Sometimes.  But I fight that (just like the other feelings about how I'm failing at various aspects of my professional life) for a simple reason.

Because the principle behind it is sound: The person who does the work does the learning.

For my most recent Tuesday Newsday, my students read about a school in Florida in which a teacher gives no grades.  She only gives feedback.

I asked them to imagine what that would look like at our school.

Their answers were largely summed up in this sentence: "We would feel less stress without grades, but we wouldn't know how we were doing and no one would care about learning without the stress of the grade."

I was a little shocked that they were SO unable to envision a world without grades, even with an example of how this fantastic teacher gave extensive feedback and the kids in the class talked about learning more in that system.  

It's no secret to them that I don't like grades that much.  I really don't like the hundreds of emails from students asking how to earn back one point on x assignment so they can get an A.

I try and not talk about grades at all.  The question "How will this be graded?" usually gets A Look, followed by my head collapsing into my hands.  They've learned not to ask that.  But that doesn't mean they don't think about it.

Oh, they do.

For the past few years, I've been trying to figure out how to spend less time working.  This has been mostly for my own sanity, but also so that I have time to pursue other projects.

Now I've succeeded, more or less.  I don't work on school stuff on weekends unless I want to.

And I'm not doing it by reducing the rigour or number of essays.

Want to know how?  Read on.

Trimester 3 is about persuasion techniques, so I decided it was time to properly use Newsela. 

Newsela is a web-based program that allows you to change the lexile level of an article and assign it to students.  Some also have writing tasks or quizzes, but the main benefit is the ability to customise for a class, or even for particular students.

It's also kind of fascinating how they take real articles from real news sources and level them down - the changes they make tell you a lot about how textual complexity is measured.

But back to Tuesday Newsday.  Every Tuesday this trimester, I give students an article that covers a controversial issue.  There was whale captivity, class size, getting rid of grades, and this week, whether video games are good or bad for teenagers.

Students read the article in pairs, and come up with the main idea.  Then I have them make a list of pro/cons and each take a side.  Then their puppets debate each other in a short video.

This gives students LOTS of practice finding the main idea and coming up with compelling arguments.  Something I've learned from Jon Corippo is that students need lots of repetitions on skills they find challenging.  Tuesday Newsday gives them that repetition with specific feedback.

And I've found that students actually like it - if you do a good job picking the article, it's fun to create an argument, and obviously puppets are fun.

With a shorter article, you can do this in 30 minutes.  It takes about 45 most days.  The key is to keep it fun so it doesn't become another boring task you have to force them to do.