My homework philosophy has evolved over the years. My beliefis that traditional homework assignments only meet the needs of a small number of students- those who understand learned concepts and need additional, unsupervised practice to reinforce these concepts. The other students, who either do not need any extra practice or who need supervised, assisted practice, are left out.
My goal this year is to use homework to practice number fluency: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Specifically, I would like students to work towards automaticity of basic math facts. It would take you ages to write a paper if you had to look up the spelling of every word you want to write: in the same way, knowing the basic math facts fluently helps students to quickly and effortlessly work through more difficult math processes, freeing up working memory to focus on the more difficult skills.
Below are a few articles that have helped my homework philosophy evolve over the years.