Mid-January, with its cold and its snow, may be too late for yet another New Year’s resolution (given that we’ve likely already backtracked on several we made a few weeks ago). But here’s one more for teachers and parents that might be easier and a lot more fun to stick with.

Starting with one day per week, replace “homework” with something I call “IGLOOS,” an acronym for “Important Great Learning Outside Of School.”

IGLOOS allow K-12 students to decide for themselves what learning goal to work on. Each IGLOOS day, students would practice deciding what to learn, how to learn it and how to show what they’ve learned. Instead of the teacher coming around to “check homework” in the grade-book, students would be inspired to talk about their learning in a positive way.

The trouble with homework is that it is essentially an act of compliance, requiring teachers, students and often parents to enforce something that most kids hate. It makes learning a chore. It invites avoidance, deception, excuses (“My dog ate my
. . .”) and turns the teacher and parent into police, enforcing compliance with an externally imposed demand. It creates the opposite of what true educators have long championed, nurturing a love of learning that can and should last a lifetime.

In early grades, IGLOOS inspire young learners to think about what they want to learn about, to take responsibility for their learning and to act as self-motivated learners. In upper grades, the teacher might phrase the challenge as, “What that we’ve introduced in the past week do you want to know more about? Or practice your skills to be better at? Or go back and try to understand something that you haven’t quite got yet?” If the students’ response is a blank stare, it might just mean that a) there was nothing they thought was important, or b) they are so used to responding to a teacher’s demands that the prospect of setting even a modest learning goal for themselves is intimidating.

It might take a few tries before the idea takes hold. Some students might want to goof on the idea, but that’s not so bad, since they will have to explain their goofball idea to the rest of the class. But a timely reminder from the teacher that “your best teachers in college, and the best 21st-century careers, will require you to be a self-starter, to take responsibility for your learning. So you might as well practice now.”

Teachers might begin this as a four-week experiment, letting students know that “if you find IGLOOS not worthwhile, we can always go back to homework-as-usual. But if it works, if you discover that you are actually learning more from goals you set for yourself, we could expand it to two or more days per week.”

In the elementary grades, teachers could add a second IGLOOS day that would invite students to come up with a learning goal with a parent or older sibling, some skill or knowledge activity that has meaning for the family.

In all cases, the balance of energy and initiative in learning would pass from the teacher to the student, at least in this small arena of school life. Little kids could be given a special box (like a personal pizza box) in which to keep their reports of IGLOOS learning. Older students could have a colorful file folder, housed in a visible shelf in the classroom, for their learning projects. Having students help evaluate the experiment and decide whether to keep it, discard it or expand it brings teacher and students into a useful learning partnership.

If anyone is interested in pursuing IGLOOS as a partial or more substantial substitute for homework, I’d be happy to bring folks together to talk about what works best. You can reach me at rob.fried@gmail.com.

(Robert L. Fried of Concord is the director of the New American Baccalaureate Project.)