When getting started with HealthCenter21, you may not know which parts of the curriculum are best assigned as homework.

Your subscription offers many options for you to assign for both classwork and homework. Making the choices of what will work best as homework for your classes can be overwhelming.

In this article, you’ll gain ideas on which assignments within HealthCenter21 are best suited for your students to complete as homework.

As a CTE teacher, you can't spend forever "recreating the wheel" when it comes to homework assignments. But with so many options and ideas out there, how do you choose what’s best for your students?

Watch the video to discover:

Note: Depending on the kind of class you’re teaching and what module you’re using, these recommendations will either be more relevant or less relevant.

Often, teachers derive a lot of benefit from assigning the curriculum’s eLearning lessons and worksheets as homework.

Having your students complete these eLearning lessons and worksheets at home frees up more time during class for you to focus on group discussion or hands-on skills work. In other words, this could be a great way to flip your classroom.

However, whether using the eLearning lessons and worksheets this way will work for you depends on the module you’re teaching.

The lessons in some modules may be better off taught at home, while others are best completed in the classroom.

For example, the Infection Control module requires students to complete skills demonstrations in conjunction with the eLearning lessons. Because this module revolves heavily around physical demonstration, its lessons are best completed in the classroom.

Another solid homework assignment is to create virtual student journals using questions from the Reflect phase of the four-phase framework.

After all, many of the questions in the Reflect phase are specifically designed to get students to think critically about the course material, and assigning these questions as homework gives your students the breathing room they need to think deeply about their answers.

Having students use these questions as prompts for journal entries will allow them to look back on their own development and observe how far they’ve come on their health science journey.

If your students don’t mind talking about their entries, you can even use these journals as a way to start conversations about the topics at hand.

For example, if a student writes a truly thoughtful answer to one of the Reflect questions, with their permission, you could take their response and use it to generate valuable in-class discussions about why the points they made matter.

It is important to remember, though, that this method of assigning homework will only work if the module you’re using has Reflect phase questions within it.

Most modules have each of the four phases present, but not all of them do. This could interfere with your plans if you wanted to use a Reflect phase question for homework, only for your module to lack that phase.

Many teachers find success assigning projects from the Reinforce phase as homework.

One of the primary reasons teachers do this is to save themselves class time. After all, these projects are often substantive and time-consuming. If they’re assigned as classwork, you might quickly find yourself losing valuable class time that could be spent elsewhere.

Another reason teachers do this is that Reinforce phase projects are often student-led, pushing students to work on their own and apply critical thought to create something new. This makes them effective homework assignments, since students can complete them independently.

These projects can take many forms, like the Diseases and Disorders module’s research project, where students conduct research on a disease or disorder and create a presentation that they can give to the class.

Another project is the Emergency Care module’s Current Event activity, where students research a topic within the module and try to find an online article that relates to the topic they’ve chosen.

Keep in mind, however, that some projects may be better completed in class than at home. Group projects, for instance, usually benefit from having each student close to their groupmates.

Skills-based projects, as well, are better completed in class, since you may want students to complete them under supervision.

Use your best judgment to determine which projects you’d be comfortable assigning for homework.

After reading this article, you should have a better idea of the creative methods teachers use to assign homework for HealthCenter21.

However, these are only some of the most common ways teachers assign homework in HealthCenter21.

If you’re looking for other ideas on what to assign as homework, join the AES Educator Community group to collaborate with other teachers like you. Their ideas and experience will give you additional insight into the best ways to use the resources that AES offers.