

There are six hours between 3.00pm and 9.00pm which is more time than that spent at school in lessons. If a sensible regime for homework is established at home early on in your time at Hyde, this helps to ensure that homework does not undermine family life or prevent you participating in the vital extra-curricular activities that happen outside of normal school hours. At Hyde we subscribe to a number of excellent resources, including GCSEPod and Mathswatch, which enable you to work at their own pace and identify topics in which you need extra support. The development of the internet has provided a wealth of educational resources, including many short video clips, which can be very effective in ensuring the firm foundations of learning are set for you. Surely one of the most important abilities for life? Homework helps you to develop the skills in learning to learn anything, anytime. Homework breeds independence in learning. Feedback to you can be given in different ways: sometimes a discussion in the lesson is a good approach sometimes allowing you to offer feedback on someone’s work can be immensely powerful for both you and the student receiving your feedback. This assists the teacher greatly in identifying what needs to be done in future lessons: push on, consolidate or try a different approach. Having completed the task away from the supportive environment of the lesson, where a teacher might give hints and explanations, teachers receive useful feedback on the true learning you have achieved.

A well thought out homework task gives you the confidence that you have understood the topic or technique or have mastered a skill. Homework can provide feedback about learning.

This would apply to practicing problems in Science or Mathematics, writing an essay in English, producing creative ideas or sketches in Art, Music or DT etc. You work at your own pace and homework sometimes gives you the chance to finish a task off at home rather than being rushed in class. To be successful the homework task does need to be well crafted, link clearly to the work in the lesson and be genuinely interesting for you. report on strategies that boost progress. The research evidence for this is quite strong as shown in the E.E.F.
