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Brian Sztabnik's Song Talks With Teachers

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Brian Sztabnik’s podcast Talks with Teachers, episode 51 “Is Homework Helpful?” is a quick episode for teachers on the go. Taken from an article written on Edutopia, Sztabnik discusses five questions teachers should ask themselves when assigning homework. Sztabnik begins the podcast describing how much time his young nephew spends forty to fifty minutes up to double that amount when distractions and breaks are factored in on assignments. He cites that the National PTA recommends teachers assign 10-20 minutes of homework for first graders and increases that amount by 10 minutes each year. Consequently, by following this recommendation, students will spend at least 137,160 minutes doing homework from 1st to 12th grade. That equals 2,280 hours or 95 straight days of homework. Students in Finland get around a half an hour of homework but still score very high on International tests. …show more content…

Correspondingly, Sztabnik provides teachers with five questions to ask themselves when assigning homework. These five questions are: how long will it take to complete, have all learners been considered, will an assignment encourage future success, will an assignment place material in a context that a classroom cannot, and does the assignment offer support when the teacher is not there? The five questions Brian Sztabnik poses in this podcast heavily relates to culturally responsive teaching. By asking themselves these questions teachers use culturally responsive pedagogy that relates to classroom management. It follows two parts of classroom management from a critical perspective from Culturally Relevant Pedagogy by Gina Oran, specifically, “recognize that we are all cultural beings, with our own beliefs, biases, and assumptions about human behavior”, and

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