Homework.... Again

This summer, I posted a time or two about my Homework plan, based on the book Grading Smarter, Not Harder.  Now that school is in session and I've had some time to process my posts, I wanted to revisit this topic as a Blaugust post. Sadly, I missed the August deadline by a few days, but yesterday, I saw a tweet about homework and it reminded me...

Back this summer, as I was reading Grading Smarter, I mentioned the fact that I felt many students were not doing their homework because of a lack of accountability.  They didn't think I was looking at it, so therefore, it didn't matter if they did it or not.  I knew I wanted to develop a procedure that would add in the accountability that I was currently missing  without adding in a huge amount of work for me or my students.  

Part of my homework plan was to be very intentional in the problems I chose.  As a result, I decided that homework would never be more than 10 questions lost and preferably, at least 3 of those would be from previous knowledge.  In the image above, the half-sheet at the right is their HW / Exit Ticket sheet that stays in their table folders throughout the week.  As we grade our HW, the students code it using the codes on the left, based on a post from @pamjwilson.

After we have gone over the HW, students do a short reflection.  Here are some examples from the previous couple of weeks:

Overall, I really love this new way to communicate daily with my students, identify their struggles, and be able to see which problems we need to go over further before an assessment.  Students that in the past would have been too embarrassed or shy to ask a question are willing to ask it in the written form and that alone makes it worth it to me!

#GradeSmarter - Unit Plans

This month, I'm participating in a blog challenge called Blaugust.  To see the list of participating blogs, click on the logo above. I would encourage to you please cheer on our participants with either a tweet or a comment on their blog during this month. It can be hard to blog on a daily (or even regular) schedule! :)  If you would like to join the blogging challenge, you can still sign-up anytime!

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Happy Friday and welcome to Day 3 of Blaugust!

I've already written a couple of posts based on this book, specifically geared toward homework, but Ch 3 was another one that hit me pretty hard.

In the introductory paragraph of Ch 3 comes this gem:
"Maybe it's just human nature - we crave some element of predictability and find comfort in knowing a little about the future."

As I pondered this quote, I realized how true it is.  I *hate* surprises and I like having a plan in place, so why shouldn't kids be the same?  I have kids that are very busy - jobs, athletics, multiple AP classes, etc, so why shouldn't I do all that I can do to help them know where we are going so they can maximize their schedule?

Years ago, I provided my students a monthly calendar that listed everything - lessons, homework, assessments, etc.  Over the years, I got away from that and started posting the weekly calendar in the classroom as well as on Canvas, our Learning Management System, but in general, kids still seemed shocked when assessment time came around... "Wait - what??? We have a Quiz today??" 

So this chapter on Unit Plans seemed like perfect timing.  We are switching to new books and as a result, I have spent part of my summer looking at the various structures I had in place and how to make them better and one that I definitely wanted to work on was the Chapter Info Sheet.

Here's the old info sheet:

The info sheet was the chapter divider for each chapter and it listed the learning targets, the vocabulary, and was supposed to act as a reading guide for the chapter.  Except that my students really didn't read the book that much and I can't really blame them - even though our textbook was extremely readable, there wasn't much of a need to read given our in-class activities and the INB.  As a result, this info sheet ended up as something we put in every chapter, but it wasn't really used to help move learning forward.

And then I read "Grading Smarter"...

I already knew I wanted to change the Info Sheet, but now I wanted it to be useful, I wanted it to have a roadmap of where we were going.  So, here's the result:

The new info sheet template:

This new info sheet will have the daily calendar on the front, which is somewhat tentative, but I try to stick pretty close to my pacing guide.  Assessment dates will be provided as will daily assignments. That way, if a student is absent, they know where to find out what we did and hopefully if they are going to be absent on an assessment, can make plans to take care of that early!  On the inside will be the learning targets for each section and a vocabulary rating chart.  One thing I think I will like is that this info sheet will literally be a guide to us throughout the chapter.  As we finish a section, they will flip here to do their self-assessment of the learning targets, a quick reflection question (like maybe 3 new things you learned, etc), and a vocab rating.  At the end of the chapter, we will do the same thing with the Chapter Summary on the front (like a 3-2-1 or some other summarization strategy).

I'm really excited that I finally have this template in place because it's been bugging me for weeks that I wanted something else but just didn't know what to do!

So what do you think?  Poke holes in my plan... Can you break it and help me make it better?

More Thoughts on HW

Y'all - I know I posted last week about Grading Smarter, Not Harder, but to be honest, you can expect several more posts before it's all said and done!  This book might just end up on my Top 10 favorites list because every chapter so far has produced some really deep thoughts for me about grading and assessment.

I've had this book sitting on my Kindle for a while now but just hadn't gotten around to reading it.  I've read so many books on assessment and grading and didn't know that one more would make a difference.

But, this book is different.  It's not about Standards Based Grading so much as it is about what do you believe a grade means and how can we communicate that to our students?  It's about opening up lines of communication between the stakeholders (teachers, students, and parents) and being very transparent by letting our students know what they know.  It's about documentation of learning and helping students make the connections between the day to day classroom activities and the resultant assessment scores.  All in all, it's what I really needed to read this year to help me figure out some of the difficulties I've had in really helping my students self-analyze where they are, where they are going, and how to bridge that gap.

In last week's blog post, I was brainstorming a homework check sheet and here was my thought at the time:

Today, I finally sat down to start trying to piece this together and here's what I've come up with so far:

It's a half-sheet horizontal and because I see my students 4 times a week, it has 2 days on front and 2 days on back, split into the HW/Reflection and Exit Ticket areas.  The Exit Ticket should be self-explanatory, so here's what I'm thinking on the top part...

First off, I had already planned to limit my homework to no more than 10 practice problems per night, with at least 2 or 3 of those being from previous knowledge.  At the beginning of class, students will mark which problems they fully attempted and as we "grade" the HW, they will code the boxes (see Pam's blog post here) to indicate which problems they got correct, incorrect, struggled on, etc.  In the space below, I can either ask a reflection question over the HW or this can be the space for students to ask me private questions regarding the HW.  This is also the space that I can use to "stamp" the HW if needed.  Since these forms stay in their table folders, I'll be able to look at them and monitor them for any potential issues.

If you want a copy of the file or want to play around with it, you can download it here.
Fonts used:  KG Love Somebody and KG Second Chance Solid

So help me, MTBoS.... what needs to be changed?  How can I make it better?  What are your thoughts?