What would it take to make homework
into deliberate practice that helps students
strengthen academic skills and knowledge?
had to identify paintings for an art
history test, he imagined the paintbrush
in his own hand:
I try to place myself in the period. [I ask
myself] “What’s the typical thing I would
see in the Renaissance time?” I’ll see the
lineup of the figures, the little things a
person would know in that period. I start
thinking of paintings I could have done.
Even while learning new skills, stu-
dents realized, they also had to keep
practicing skills they had learned
before. Christina compared meaningful
homework to warm-ups in dance:
Every day, we do the same things at the
barre that we’ve been doing since we were
little. Even when you’re getting better as
a dancer, you still have to keep up that
practice. Otherwise it’s easy to get lazy
about little things, and you can mess up
how the dance looks.
Through out-of-school activities they
cared about, students already had expe-
rience revising their work. If something
wasn’t coming out right in a knitting
or building project, they were used to
going back and trying again. When her
teacher made the class revise an essay,
Christina said, she thought of it in the
same way:
When I write, I tend to throw in every
single little detail that I possibly can. All
my essays have so many run-on sentences
and sentences that don’t even make sense!
So I go back [and tell myself] “Maybe I
can change this up so it’s more relevant to
what I’m supposed to be writing about.”
Toward Homework
Students Want to Do
The teenagers I interviewed understood
the need for sustained practice at the
heart of the homework enterprise. And
they had creative suggestions about
how assignments could be redesigned.
Figure 1 (p. 77) presents six student-
generated ideas for alternatives to tradi-
tional homework.
Copyright © 2010 What Kids Can Do.
Kathleen Cushman is the author of
Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us
About Motivation and Mastery (
Jossey-Bass, 2010); kathleencushman@mac
.com. With support from the MetLife
Foundation, she facilitates a What Kids
Can Do blog about practice at www
. firesinthemind.org.
