By Jon Nicholls, Thomas Tallis School

After years of setting weekly homework tasks (and failing miserably to manage the process effectively) I've finally decided to stop. I want to escape the dispiriting process of setting homework, only for half the class to complete it properly and leaving me with a decision about whether to turn a blind eye or set a detention. If I set homework related to the lesson activities I would also have to deal with the fact that only half the class was ready to continue with the following week's activities. Whilst I don't have many behaviour issues in class, I don't want to punish (the same) students every week for not completing their homework. For me, homework just doesn't work.

However, given that all teachers have a statutory duty to set homework and the official policy of my school is that homework is a good thing, rather than stop completely, I've decided to shift the emphasis away from tasks related to the lesson activities and towards longer, project-based assignments that are tangential to the classroom curriculum.

To be honest, it's taken me a while to catch on to this in my own teaching. For a while my school has been using Extended Learning Enquiries at Key Stage 3 and I've seen some wonderful examples of projects completed by younger students across a range of subjects. As a father of three who vividly remembers the homework projects set by my kids' primary school (E.g. make a scale model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa), I do sometimes worry about the way complex project based home learning can:
a) cost a lot of money - stationery, equipment, materials etc.
b) involve the parent/carer more than is intended
c) take a lot more time than the teacher imagines
Longer, more complex projects can sometimes require a decent space to work and lots of study support, which not all students can rely on. 

Fairly recently my school has changed its terminology. We now refer to home learning rather than homework. If the purpose of home learning is to provide students with an opportunity to do some deliberate, independent practice then I felt the need to move away from the weekly complete/incomplete paradigm towards something more engaging and including a greater degree of choice for the students. 

One of my colleague's Action Research Report this year was entitled "If I develop a practice of #unhomework with my KS3 Design Technology classes will they become more inquisitive and disciplined?" Characteristically, she submitted her report in the form of a video which featured footage of her students and a presentation she gave at a local TeachMeet. In the 'report' she refers to Mark Creasy's book 'Unhomework'. She quotes the author:

She also refers to Zoe Elder's 'Full on Learning' which presents a case for an intelligent and targeted use of appropriate technologies to bring learning to life for the student. Students' interest in social media and content creation, she argues, is fertile territory for teachers keen to enhance what goes on in the classroom. My colleague decided to experiment with unhomework with her Year 8 Design Technology class and this proved to be a success. She gave the students greater choice in how to represent what they had learned in her lessons. She put the emphasis on the amount of effort the students devoted to their projects, rather than any predetermined notion of completion or quality, in line with our new KS3 assessment policy. Students enjoyed this new approach to home learning and, consequently, the amount of projects undertaken rose significantly. Perhaps more importantly, the quality of the projects increased and the atmosphere in class improved because the teacher was not trapped in a punitive cycle of homework detention setting.

Inspired by this research I decided to get rid of weekly homework tasks for my Year 9 GCSE photography students, replacing these with Extended Learning Enquiries. These would have the following characteristics:

1. They would each last a half term (6-7 weeks on average)
2. They would enhance whatever project was being studied in class but run in parallel with lessons no longer dependent on homework being completed each week
3. They would contain a strong design thinking element with students' photographs being presented in a variety of different formats
4. They would offer students plenty of choice in how they managed the projects
5. Supporting resources would provide enough structure for less confident students but be open enough for those who wished to develop more sophisticated enquiries
6. Be assessed in terms of the effort students dedicate to each project (using our Tallis Habits model) 

I've really enjoyed thinking about, planning and creating the resources for the Year 9 Extended Learning Enquiries for next year. They are now built into our new Programme of Study for GCSE Photography. I'll probably tweak them before September - I can already see some ways to improve them. I'm hoping to continue working in this way with Year 10 and maybe even Year 11, at least up until Unit 2 starts in February. I'm really hoping that they help to develop a greater sense of responsibility and ownership of learning for the students and that they enjoy getting their teeth into some low stakes projects as opposed to high stakes weekly tasks.

I'd be really interested to learn how you approach the design, setting and marking of homework. What do you call it? How do you respond to those who don't do it or do it half-heartedly? How does your approach fit with the whole school policy? What innovations have you attempted? Do you have any great ideas to share with your photography teacher colleagues?

Feel free to leave comments below.

To be honest, I've never been a very big fan of lesson plans. This is a bit ironic given that we decided to call the set of resources on this website Lesson Plans. Of course, they aren't really lesson plans at all but schemes of work or sets of provocations with accompanying resources. I do plan all my lessons but I rarely teach from a set Scheme of Work and, as an incessant tweaker, I enjoy the process of designing lessons from scratch each week (not the most efficient practice I agree). Nevertheless, I base these lessons on an over-arching Programme of Study which enables me to stick to an agreed timetable of structured activities and largely prevents my colleagues tearing their hair out with frustration.

This year, with the various changes to subject specifications, we at Tallis were asked  to revisit our Programmes of Study at KS4 and 5 ensuring that they were fit for purpose. In an earlier post, I described why we made the decision in the visual arts to go linear. We no longer offer the AS qualification in photography or art. This summer has felt quite different with only the A2 students being moderated. This meant that we needed a Programme of Study that would sustain students for two years, support those who arrived in Year 12 with little experience of the subject but also stretch and challenge those who had done GCSE photography and needed to move on quickly.

The structure we were given by senior leaders for our new Programmes of Study was as follows:

Regular readers and NSEAD members will know about the thinking we've done this year here at PhotoPedagogy Towers about Threshold Concepts for Photography, a version of which has appeared in AD magazine. We think Threshold Concepts are important because they identify the big ideas in our subjects. We think it's important for colleagues to debate and determine these big ideas, separate from Assessment Objectives and the whims of the incumbent Secretary of State. In short, Threshold Concepts are what we (as professional teachers) agree are the foundational ideas in our various disciplines. "Powerful Knowledge" is Professor Michael Young's phrase and describes an order of knowledge that is different to the everyday wisdom brought to schools by young people. It is a controversial term, in some respects, since it contains an implicit criticism of what has been termed "progressive" approaches to education. However, my Head co-authored the book 'Knowledge and the Future School' with Professor Young so it's no surprise that "Powerful Knowledge" appears in our new Programmes of Study document! Whilst I'm not convinced about the term itself, (what is powerless knowledge?) I support the notion that disciplinary knowledge (the kind we get when we are taught subjects) is an important element in education and students can benefit from being explicitly taught stuff and thinking hard about it. There is then a direct link with threshold concepts - those troublesome nuggets of complex knowledge that take a while to assimilate and 'master'. We might call this the Content of the curriculum, although in a subject like photography or art this is often quite a complex issue. Finally, we have "Fundamental Skills". If "Powerful Knowledge" is the Knowing What, "Fundamental Skills" are the Knowing How. For us, this includes not only procedural issues (processes/techniques) such 'How to make a cyanotype' but also connects with intellectual skills like 'How to conduct strategic research' and our Habits of Mind (e.g. 'How to stick with difficulty').

We've been hard at work for the last couple of years testing a variety of mini projects with Year 12 students. Many of these have been shared in the Lesson Plans section of this website. In the last couple of weeks we have begun to shape our new Programme of Study. As always we've written it in Googledocs so we can keep it as a live document, editing, tweaking, adjusting collaboratively as we go. We are happy to share the document with other colleagues outside school, knowing how valuable it is to connect with professionals in other contexts and with different experiences and expertise to our own. This is what the first half term looks like:

Here's a link to the whole document. It's very much a work in progress so please forgive any typos and don't be surprised if it continues to change over the coming weeks. Our plan is to have something that we are pleased with by the end of term.

Hopefully, you can see how the three elements knit together: Powerful Knowledge, Threshold Concepts and Key Skills. In terms of the two year programme it breaks down like this:

Autumn 1 - An introduction: What is photography? Mini projects begin.
Autumn 2 - Mini projects continue, each dealing with a specific historical/contextual issue and giving students opportunities to develop their own work in response. Objective vs Subjective approaches to photography.
Spring 1 - Photo Exchange and the beginning of the extended Photobook project.
Spring 2 - Photobook project continues, the launchpad for the Personal Investigation.
Summer 1 - Personal Investigation continues, supplemented by occasional provocations E.g. Inside /Outside, Mirrors or Windows? etc.
Summer 2  - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 1 - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 2 - Personal Investigation continues. Students begin finalising their responses and pulling together their accompanying essays.
Spring 1 - Personal Investigation concludes. Component 2 The Externally Set Task begins (1st Feb)
Spring 2 - The Externally Set Task continues
Summer 1 - The Externally Set Task concludes (shortly after Easter)

The first two terms of Year 12 give us an opportunity to tackle the notion of photography in terms of relative objectivity and subjectivity. Alongside an introduction to the chemical darkroom as a kind of experimental space, where the magic of light can be observed and captured, we attempt to juxtapose the Modernist tradition (straight, objective, documentary) of photography with approaches that celebrate photography's ability to represent subjective experience. We also attempt to tackle issues surrounding the ethics of photography and an awareness of the difference between photography as art and all the many forms of photography that belong to other domains - the law, medicine, surveillance, war etc. We hope that an awareness of the history and theory of photography (still hotly contested) will help students see their own work in context.

We are live testing this type of structure with our current Year 12 students and making tweaks to the Programme based on what we have learned with them. So far, the basic structure seems to have worked well, giving students a good grounding in the subject (without the distraction of the AS exam) and allowing them to develop their own practice and interests. We are particularly pleased with the Photobook project. It has been a great platform on which students can build a sense of themselves as photographers and thus confidently begin the fully assessed Personal Investigation. It also means that each student is responsible for defining the nature of their own investigation through an authentic process of research and practice.

Here are just a few examples of selected pages from Year 12 photobooks: