No one teaches a toddler how to walk. No one moves his legs for him. We encourage him to stand, applaud his first step, and tell him it's OK when he falls. Yet when it comes to academic learning, writes Cathy Vatterott, we often fail to appreciate children's inborn desire for mastery or to trust their self-knowledge of how to get there. "And so we prescribe one method of learning, assign one task as homework, and simply require students to comply." This traditional approach doesn't encourage persistence or feelings of ownership--and it's not adequate to foster the deep thinking and application of complex knowledge that the Common Core State Standards are now demanding. Vatterott describes how we need to "overhaul" homework practices. The new purposes of homework, she writes, are checking for understanding and practicing the application of complex skills. She provides classroom examples of how teachers build self-assessment into homework and give students ownership of learning.