Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

What ‘homework’ REALLY MEANS NOW We can’t put the AI genie back in the bottle, so it’s time to redefine what homework is, and what it’s for, suggests Anthony David I sometimes think back to the days when ‘plagiarism’ meant copying a paragraph fromWikipedia and hoping nobody would notice. It feels almost quaint now. With the AI genie now truly out of the bottle, the ground has shifted under our feet. We’ve spent years building clear expectations around academic honesty, original thinking and the value of struggle. Then along comes a tool which, in seconds, can produce an essay, translate a passage, condense a chapter or write a convincing reflection. It’s all become too easy. In this brave newworld, the obvious question to ask is ‘Has homework had its day?’ If students can hand in polished, fluent and technically correct work without actually needing to engage with the learning process, then what’s purpose of setting such tasks in the first place? If the work can be done for them, rather than by them, where does that leave us? It’s tempting to see the landscape currently before us as a kind of lawless wild west – but I don’t think it is. If anything, the past two years have forced us to rethink what really matters when it comes to homework, and pushed many of us to design tasks that can reveal true understanding in a much more reliable way. The limits ofAI A key misconception around AI is that it ‘replaces thinking’. It doesn’t. It imitates, it predicts, it assembles, but it doesn’t know the child, the lesson or the nuances behind how a student reached an idea. Sure, it can write a competent paragraph as part of a GCSE poetry comparison – but it can’t recreate the conversation that took place in your classroom that morning, or pass comment on a misunderstanding you deliberately unpicked with the class. And this is where I think the narrative around AI and plagiarismmust shift to. If a homework task can be completed convincingly by an AI tool, without the student truly understanding the content, then the issue isn’t the child’s dishonesty – it’s that the task is no longer fit for purpose . That’s not a criticismof teachers; more a recognition that the world has changed faster than school systems usually do. At the heart of the matter is this quandary: are we assessing the product, or the learning that led to the product?When AI is used as a shortcut, what’s lost is the process . Our challenge therefore becomes one of designing tasks where the process remains visible at all times. Practical approaches that work There are, however, some strategies that teachers have been trying with surprising success – including the following... 1. Anchor homework to the classroom, not the internet When a task requires students to reference your explanation, your model or their own notes, AI tools will immediately become less helpful to them. A prompt such as ‘Using the method we practised in period four, solve these three equations and explain which step you found hardest and why’ will produce work that reflects a student’s actual thinking. AI can certainly try to invent an explanation, but what it can’t do is replicate a moment from your lesson. 2. Set ‘micro-reflections’ rather than lengthy essays Instead of tasking students with producing polished extended pieces of writing, ask for short, structured responses that demonstrate how they have processed the material. For example: • ‘What was the most surprising thing you learnt today, and why?’ • ‘Rewrite today’s key idea in your own words and give one example that wasn’t in the textbook’ • ‘What mistake did you spot yourself making and how did you fix it?’ AI could generate a set of answers, but students will typically reveal their understanding (or lack of it) through the personal details they include. 3. Ask for evidence of thinking We’ve reintroduced rough workings, annotated pages, mind-maps and voice notes into certain subjects. Asking a student to submit three photographs of their process, or a 30-second audio reflection alongside their work, gives you something that AI can’t easily fake. This is especially effective in subjects like English, science, DT and maths. 4. Set choice-based tasks AI can often struggle with tasks that involve expressing personal preferences, reasoning or lived experience. A history task that asks students to ‘Choose the argument you think is strongest and justify it’ shifts the focus away from producing a ‘perfect’ paragraph to revealing the student’s own thinking. 5. Actually USEAI (as a tool for learning, and not learning avoidance) Students will often turn to AI because they feel stuck, overwhelmed or worried about getting tasks wrong. If we normalise AI as a thinking partner – as something that can “Areweassessing the product,or the learning that led to the product?” 64 teachwire.net/secondary