Down in the Deep South it seems that innovative ways of schooling go beyond Ohm signs and praising Gaia.

Sun Valley Primary’s headmaster, Gavin Keller, scrapped homework back in July in an effort to allow children more time to play. Instead, he replaced it with a mandatory reading time of 20 minutes a day. This has made the library a very popular place.

This wasn’t just a decision made on a whim. Rather, Mr Keller studied research papers and books and travelled to the States to attend a conference that highlighted helping children with “problem-solving, facilitating change and being innovative” through play.

Teachers’ roles then adapt slightly by being more focused while assignments are undertaken during class so as to deal with issues immediately. Mr Keller explained:

We took the age of the child, that’s key. Your focus period if you’re in Grade 1 is only 7 minutes, only 10 minutes in Grade 7, and 17 minutes if you’re in matric. Our goal is to never exceed that focus period for important tasks we assign. We tell the children, ‘now you are going to do this task’, and they have until the allotted time or until the end of the period to finish the task. Once the time’s up, they rule off and they hand in, and we assess them time-on-task. Can they do the work in the allotted time?

As children’s focus in class is notoriously short, the day is interrupted for bursts of physical activities.

When News24 took the proposal to do away with homework to its readers, 88.4% of them felt that schools should do away with homework completely. Parents are overwhelmed with the amount of homework their children bring home each day and instead of concentrating on making dinner or talking about they day, parents generally have to constantly ask whether their homework is complete.

Only 9.7% stated that the allotted homework was adequate, and 9.6% stating they did not have children. 7.5% of respondents felt homework was ‘very important’ to their child’s development.

Gavin Keller had this to say about the feedback:

I think the results shout that for the whole homework concept, teachers go into ‘default teaching mode’. We have a tendency to be so pressurised by curriculum overload. When we don’t finish the work in class, we default to this idea of, ‘finish this for homework’. When we unpacked this idea at our school, what it really meant was that our planning wasn’t good. We hadn’t got our macro-planning sorted, learning to cram all this material into 200 school days. Teachers need those days to embed these particular ideas and values.

Is shifting the focus of learning from mandatory duties to the enjoyment of reading the way forward? I wish I didn’t have to do homework.

[source: parent24&timeslive]