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Doug McClure

Our Future's So . . . BRAVE!

Respect / Responsibility / Resourcefulness

BCMS 20/20 V.I.S.I.O.N.

Shaping Lives Sculpture

T.R.A.I.L. of the Braves

It's a good day for it!

BCMS MVVGB

BCMS Homework Beliefs

Washington D.C.

Make a Mark . . . Leave a Mark

A Dedication Prayer for BCMS

Brownstown Central Middle School holds the following beliefs:

1) Everyone has the capacity to learn.

2) Everyone has the personal responsibility to learn.

3) Education is earned, not given.

4) High expectations for all students lead to greater individual growth at all academic levels.

5) Providing timely and relevant interventions insures student progress.

6) Accountability for excellence is shared . . . students, teachers, parents, and community.

From these organizational core beliefs, the following statements establish our school's position regarding homework:

Homework is an important part of learning.

Homework is directly connected to, and reinforces, classroom instruction.

Homework is engaging and helps motivate students to learn.

Homework builds academic confidence and never “hurts” a student’s learning.

Homework is assigned when teachers are confident that all students have enough knowledge to work on their own with limited to no support from their teacher(s).

One function of homework is to create prior knowledge. This type of homework will either not be graded or only given a completion grade.

Student success on homework has a strong correlation to student success on tests and quizzes.

Grades reflect a student’s learning. It is reasonable to expect that students with differing abilities will need to put in different amounts of effort to achieve mastery of the standards being taught.

Homework never causes a grade to reflect something other than a student’s learning. (Grades reflect effort when the work that students do is worthy of their time.)

Research on Homework

From Cathy Vatterott and Robert Marzano

Ø Homework that is graded has a 28-percentile gain in student achievement second only to homework with teachers’ comments as feedback having a 30-percentile gain. Homework that is assigned but not graded or commented on has an 11-percentile gain.

Ø Mastering a skill requires a fair amount of focused practice.

Ø Students should not have more than 60-80 minutes of homework per day in middle school. (Remember that students have more than one class in a day.)

Ø To implement homework effectively we must:

-Connect homework to
classroom learning and clearly
identify the purpose of each
assignment

-Provide students with
relevant tasks that they can
complete without adult help

-Use what we know about
learning to design homework
appropriate for individual
students.