I love her suggestion here of a “pause” and “rewind” button on each page!

Classroom time is hopefully making full use of the ability of the students and teacher to enter into a conversation, ask questions and explore. When done well the teacher can motivate, instruct and remediate in a highly flexible fashion and tailor the lesson to best meet the needs of the unique situation in front of them.

The question is what happens when the students go home? What is the best use of their time when they *don’t* have access to a teacher (and yes there are some steps towards interactive web sites and the like and perhaps these are the answer, but the *teacher*, the one who best understands the unique student, is not available at home regardless). Dan’s WCYDWT problems strike me as excellent uses of class time, but seem problematic at home. I can think of four typical answers to this question of what to do when the student is at home: 1) do nothing (assign no homework) 2) assign textbook reading 3) assign practice problems 4) assign a video lecture.

Of course combinations are possible and I make no claim as to being exhaustive.

Assigning no homework appears to many to be an inefficient potential waste of learning time. With an effective answer to the homework question, students could probably learn more.

Textbook reading is often problematic at the high school level. Students can and do move their eyes over the page, finish the reading just to “get it done”, and retain little. But this works very well for students who learn from books easily.

Video lectures seem like they would have many of the same problems as textbook reading, but since many human beings are good audio learners, perhaps a greater percentage of the students could retain information.

Practice problems have the difficulty that students who already know how to do the problems learn little and students who are stumped also learn little. Leaving a small percentage of students who benefit from a little bit of polish to their skills.

Video lectures do seem like a useful tool to address “home learning time” problem, and I suspect that is where a lot of their feeling of “innovation” is coming from. But the home learning problem remains to me and I would greatly welcome anyone’s suggestion as to how best use a students home learning time.

I blogged about it a year ago:

http://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/live-action-math/

The results were mixed–it worked very well when I did it with a class that opted to be in a section that had that organization, but not so well with a class that had it forced on them.

I tutor college math, and I recommended this to my students all the time. I have gotten only positive feedback.

Free math help for anyone? Thank you Kahn.