Homework: Question of the Day and Reading Log?

As I looked over the rubrics for high quality tasks provided by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, I wondered if my team should make home include a question of the day plus independent reading.

By focusing on a question of the day, students would have one interdisciplinary notebook in which they would put the question at the top of the page, then for home study, they would reflect on that question with pictures, numbers, and words.

Why is this a good idea?

First, as the rubric describes, a high quality task demands that students explain their thinking, the solution, or process they completed and reflect on their learning/growth as scientists, engineers, and students of the humanities. By asking all fifth graders to reflect on a similar question each evening, we will promote this thinking in a manageable way and a way that prompts collaboration, discussion, and debate by students, family members, and educators.

For example, if we simply started the year with the question, What is the recipe for successful learning? We would create a conversation about successful learning that we could follow-up with the next day. The next question might be, What creates an effective team? These initial questions would help set the stage for a strong learning community, and later the questions would become more specific to a particular discipline such as Which numbers from 0 to 100 has the most factor pairs? What are those numbers, what are their factor pairs, and what did you do to figure this out?

Since math guru Jo Boaler's research points to the fact that if you are going to give homework, make it reflective, and other research points to the challenge with assigning homework that's doable, meaningful, and productive. I believe this kind of homework is doable, meaningful, and productive as it focuses on meaningful content, is open-ended inviting a variety of responses, sets the stage for good debate/discussion, and provides students with a daily opportunity to write. For those who don't like paper/pencil tasks (even though the research points to the worth of this), we could invite them to puzzle out the questions on line and then print/paste their results into the notebook.

On the backside of the page, students could chart their reading by listing the book, the pages they've read, and a sentence or two and/or visual images that connect to their reading.

This may be the kind of manageable, home study we need to support reading, writing, and content knowledge, skill, and concept. What do you think?