In order to start making positive changes, we must tackle the two faulty assumptions that students will do the homework with fidelity, and then that students will be willing to ask questions in front of their peers to get help. While we can hope for the best, hope is not a plan. Planning for the worst means that we need to assume that students are not going to be doing their homework with fidelity, and that students will be unwilling to ask the questions they should be asking. This is true whether you are working with pre-adolescent middle school students, or a team of adult learners. Some may look at this as having a deficit mindset about students, but I liken it to defensive driving. We should still be encouraging students to practice, and celebrating student success. We also need to build into our assessment practices means of allowing students to see how their efforts at practice are positively impacting their ability to succeed.
Changing our assumptions means the practice of planning to start a new lesson by asking what questions people have over the previous lesson is naturally going to provide less than ideal results. The students who need the most guidance are the least likely to be ready or willing to ask, and the students who are already at the top of the class will be the ones to ask. Either way, we as the teacher have no real idea on where to pick up the lesson.
A better path forward starts with the assigning of homework. This presents an interesting dilemma in itself, but the first key is stop calling it homework and assigning grades to it. Calling it practice or "Check your understanding" and highly suggesting that students do it, but holding little more accountability than that to the actual completion seems counter-intuitive, but habit research shows is more effective. The key is in how this practice is still made to be important.
Rather than now starting the next day with the passive activity of asking for any questions, start with an active process. Split students into small groups (3 ideally), get them working on a vertical surface so you can see their work and they can see others, and give them a problem from the day before that you want to see if they can answer. One person has the writing utensil, the other two are there to help. If this is a discussion based class, do the same but have them talk. Each time one person guides the conversation, the other two have to listen for 30 seconds, and then can only ask clarifying questions. Ask a couple of the groups to share out their thoughts, and move on. You may even want to give each group an option of 3 problems to solve in whichever order they want, and each question gets rotated around the group.
From here as the educator you should have a handle on what comes next, a key point to review, an entirely new reteaching, or ideally the ability to move forward. The spot to move forward to is one level of complexity harder than yesterday, ideally in a place that students can start to use the information from yesterday until they reach a sticking point. Now, you guide them through this phase, only enough to get them past the friction, and then ask them to keep going. Keep scaffolding this way until you feel you have met your objective. Now, keeping Ebbinhaus in mind, it is time for students to touch back on their learning and get ready to check their understanding.
You will want to build in opportunities for students to experience the learning, and to prove to you they have learned the content, so more on that to come. But shift from asking for questions to giving them questions with some autonomy but also clear direction. And stop making "homework" something that you are telling them do, and make it practice they are choosing to complete.
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