Remember all the August nights and weekends where we sat in on the floor of our living room, watched rented movies, and cut letters and shapes for my bulletin boards? I don’t remember what was worse: the permanent marker fumes or the blisters you had from cutting construction paper for hours. When we finished, I dragged you up to my classroom so you could staple butcher paper to my walls. You are so much better at it than I am and I’m not just saying that so you’ll do it again next year.

Can you recall my first classroom? You remember the one; it had 30 mismatched desks, boxes of giant paper clips, and ditto masters for a machine the building no longer had? You didn’t complain at all when I blew most of my first pay check on scissors, markers, paper, and glue.

In later years, you watched our baby as I graded papers just before progress report time and didn’t complain much when I spent my winter break and spring break correcting research papers. When my stacks of papers grew too large, you offered to sort them and make sure that I was organized enough to tackle the pile. You brought me endless cups of tea and encouraged me to correct papers at my favorite café to give myself the illusion of having a good time. On Sunday nights, we’d sit next to one another on the couch and watch TV and you never seemed to mind that I brought my grade book, red pen, and essays along for our date.

When my student journalists were on deadline, you drove up to the school and took our food orders. You didn’t mind that I brought our daughter and her friend along to play with their dolls in the stairwell or run up and down the English corridor. You didn’t worry when I brought her to every play practice since she was an infant or that she was making sets since she could hold a paintbrush. In fact, you seemed to enjoy her help as you built the fake walls and backdrops for our productions.

When our union negotiated a pay decrease for the second contract in a row, you didn’t complain much. You cut out job ads for other fields and left them in my lunch bag. You e-mailed me information about higher-paying public sector jobs. But you didn’t push. You told me that we’d make it no matter what I chose to do. Eventually, I took the hint, but I never could get away from what I love: teaching and learning.

So, thank you, Teacher Spouse, for all of the years of support and encouragement. I know it’s not easy when you go to the dentist, the doctor, or even the veterinarian’s office and see my former students. I know that just once you’d like to buy a six-pack without the cashier asking about how the family is doing. You’ve given up privacy, family time, and the dream of a new boat because I became a teacher and not an accountant, attorney, or Avon lady.

But I thank you, Teacher Spouse, for supporting me and my career choice. You are my perfect Valentine.

Do you have Valentine wishes for your home support team? How does your spouse, life partner, child, parent, or other caring individual show they care about you and your teaching career? Please share all of the love in the comments.

Look around your classroom at the students who have habitual behavior problems. Are they engaged? Do they complete assignments? Do you think they look forward to class? Do you have a personal connection with the student?

Let’s face it: it’s hard to form a personal connection with some of these challenging, disengaged students.

If we accept the idea that the teacher-student connection is important to student achievement, what happens when that connection hasn’t been established or is horribly broken? If grades reflect a positive student-teacher relationship, do they also reflect a negative student-teacher relationship? If so, how much of that grade is based on achievement and how much is based on attitude?

That’s the question that Scholastic’s Practical Leadership blogger Suzanne Tingley posed. She wondered if the A on a kid’s report card indicated academic success or compliance. Tingley wrote:

Grades have always been a little bit of a game.  Students can be awarded so many points for homework, for attendance, for class participation, for turning assignments in on time.  On the debit side, students who don’t Honor roll do homework, are tardy or absent, and don’t participate may lose points towards their final grade.  I recall how one high school teacher explained her grading system to me:  “If the paper is late, it’s a zero.  If the student doesn’t hand it in at all, it’s a double zero.”  Too polite to tell her that was crazy talk, I simply told her we weren’t going to do that anymore.

Tingley also makes the observation that an honor roll student doesn’t necessarily perform well on state standardized tests.

I’ve given completion grades for homework. I’ve given participation points, especially when our building principal encouraged everyone to do it. However, I’ve always tried hard to make sure that the grades were something I could observe and measure. The last thing I wanted was for a parent to take me to task for picking on Ashley, who earned a B for participation this grading period. I never wanted my grades to come down to like or love.

Even with clear expectations and measurable objectives, I think that student engagement and behavior plays a role in a student’s grade, no matter how hard I try to be impartial. If a student is often tardy or absent, that behavior will show up in her final grade. If a student texts during biology instead of listening to the final exam review, her exam grade will suffer. If she spends more time in the principal’s office than at her classroom desk, her grades will reflect that, too. On top of it, she’s not engaged when she is in class, so her grades will be lower still.

What’s the solution? I think that the solution is to strengthen the student-teacher relationship. Instead of focusing on how the student needs to improve, focus on what the student is doing right. Make sure to say one positive thing to each student every day. Use the 2 x 10 method to improve student-teacher connections. Provide hope and flexibility to students who have resigned themselves to failure.

What do you think? Do our grades often reflect a student’s compliance rather than her ability? Do you ever grade on participation or completion? Is it good practice to do so? What do you think we can do to make our grades reflect achievement rather than behavior?

Retired superintendent and former teacher Suzanne Tingley is the author of How to Handle Difficult Parents: A Teacher’s Survival Guide (Cottonwood Press 2006). You can read her blog, Practical Leadership, in Scholastic’s Administrator’s section. http://blogs.scholastic.com/practical_leadership/

Research indicates that many of our students are using deceitful methods to complete their school work. A recent poll by commonsensemedia.org found that more than one third of teens admit to cheating with their cell phones and about half admit to using the internet to cheat (http://www.commonsensemedia.org/hi-tech-cheating). Perhaps even more disturbing, about 25% of the students polled do not think that using a cell to get answers for a test is cheating! The results of the 2008 Josephson Institute survey support these statistics. 64% admit to cheating on a test during the previous year and 36% admit to using the internet to plagiarize, yet 93% are satisfied with their personal ethics or character (http://charactercounts.org/programs/reportcard/2008/index.html). 
 
Students are not the only ones with competing priorities. Teachers are asked to prevent and respond to cheating amidst pressures to maintain or raise standardized test scores. As a result, some teachers confess to ignoring cheating—preventing and responding to cheating can not only be a stressful process (think about the wrath of angry, protective parents!) but it may seem antithetical to the main goal of leaving “no child behind.” The trouble is, ignoring the problem does not make it go away and, in fact, might worsen it. 

Here is the good news. Preventing and responding to cheating do not have to be difficult. Years of research and exploration of best practices tell us why and how students cheat as well as the effective classroom and schoolwide strategies for preventing academic dishonesty and creating cultures of integrity. 

Students cheat for a variety of reasons. Although some are not easily addressed by teachers and schools (e.g., pressures from parents to make “good grades”), others can be. For example, students cheat when they: lack of understanding of the assignment or material; have too much work and not enough time to complete it; perceive that teachers don’t care; think that “everyone does it;” receive assignments and tests that are the same as previous years; perceive grading methods to be unfair; and, receive an unreasonable amount of work, particularly “busy work” that has little or no value or purpose.  In their often-desperate attempts to get high grades while minimizing effort, students perceive cheating as a smart solution, especially when the risk of getting caught and the potential penalties are minimal.

So what can classroom teachers do to prevent cheating?  Students need to be engaged in ongoing, open dialog about the importance of honest and ethical behavior and to have these behaviors modeled for them.  Teachers can create meaningful assignments that challenge students to think and synthesize rather than simply regurgitate others’ words and ideas.  Students must be taught why attribution is important and the techniques for citing others (and not just in English class!). 

Also, academic conduct class expectations and specific rules for each assignment need to be articulated.  Are students permitted to work together, to ask parents or tutors for help, or to consult notes or tests from students who took the course in previous terms?  Are they permitted to use online translators for foreign language assignments, or to watch a movie based on a novel being studied? Finally, parents should also be informed and be educated on how they can help with homework without inadvertently helping them to cheat.

Teachers should not stand alone, however. The school must tackle the problem of cheating and to promote a culture of academic integrity.   First, a schoolwide academic integrity policy or honor code can be an effective vehicle (not a quick fix or cure-all) for affirming core values, establishing the responsibilities of all community members, clearly articulating expectations and definitions of unacceptable behaviors, and fostering a shared ethic of integrity. The values underlying a code or policy must be reinforced through ongoing dialog and modeling by teachers, administrators, coaches, and parents. 

Second, student involvement is a key school-wide strategy because peer influence is a powerful force in creating a school climate where cheating is “uncool.”  Student leaders can be most effective as peer educators. They can organize and lead academic integrity discussion forums (such as assemblies, brown bag lunches, mock hearings, debates, and focus groups), coordinate guest speakers, and conduct outreach campaigns to proliferate school definitions of cheating as well as acceptable use of technology (cell phones, PDAs, Internet, etc).  Students can also be involved as members of an honor council, a body that would hear and decide on allegations of cheating. Incorporating students into the school-wide academic integrity initiative not only generates student “buy-in” but also develops ethically responsible citizens.

Third, technology should be harnessed for preventing and addressing cheating. Plagiarism detection software tools can save teachers time and frustration, as well as reduce the temptation to plagiarize. Podcasts, online tutorials, videos, blogs, and social networking tools can be used to spread the academic integrity message.

Above all, schools should aim to implement these 4 integrity components:

1. a clear articulation of rules and expectations (in a policy or code); 
2. a manageable system that facilitates consistent reporting and fair enforcement;
3. teacher training in preventing and responding to cheating;
4. resources to help students with writing and research skills, paraphrasing and citation;

There are no quick and easy solutions to the problem of high school cheating. Best practices include a combination of proactive initiatives to create a school integrity climate and preventative strategies to address and avert the causes of cheating. 

 Tricia Bertram Gallant, Ph.D. is the Academic Integrity Coordinator at the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), and is the outgoing Chair for the International Center for Academic Integrity’s (ICAI) Advisory Council. She is the author of Academic Integrity in the Twenty-First Century: A Teaching and Learning Imperative (Wiley’s Jossey-Bass, 2008), co-author (with Stephen Davis & Patrick Drinan) of Cheating in School: What we know and what we can do (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and editor of the forthcoming book Creating the Ethical Academy: A Systems Approach to Understanding Misconduct and Empowering Change (Routledge).

Karen O. Clifford, Ph.D. is currently conducting research on high school programs for promoting academic integrity and preventing and addressing cheating.  Clifford has consulted with high schools and colleges in developing or revitalizing honor systems and has made numerous presentations about promoting academic integrity, including workshops and webinars for high school teachers, administrators and students.  She is co-editor of the monograph, “Academic Integrity Matters.”

As for grading, I looked at three things: 1) complete answers, 2) thoughtful answers, 3) knowledge of the lesson. It’s not a quiz, so I didn’t look for correct answers; I looked for the correct vocabulary and concepts. It’s O.K. for a student not to understand, but my goal was for the student to explain what he didn’t understand using the language from the lesson.

I had four different exit slip sheets and each one was separated into quadrants. Here are the questions from my exit slips:

• What is this learning related to?
• Provide an example of this concept.
• How can I test what I’ve learned?
• How is this concept useful in my life?

• I would like to learn more about…
• The most interesting thing I learned in class was…
• Please explain more about…
• I wish…

• Why is this lesson important?
• List five things you learned today.
• List one thing you’d like to know more about.
• List one surprising thing you learned.

• Why study this?
• What is the most important thing to remember from this class?
• How can I apply this knowledge outside of class?
• What questions do you have about this lesson?

Once I started using exit slips, I was hooked. I didn’t use them for every lesson, but I tried to use them when I introduced a new concept.

Once I’d collected the students’ responses, I wrote down the questions about the new learning they’d had, in their own words, and read them the next class day. We’d answer the questions as a class and then move on to the day’s objectives. The students responded to this activity because their exit slips meant something – their feedback guided our class discussion and they received answers to their questions. No one felt embarrassed about asking a question, either, because I never identified specific students.

Sometimes I took student answers and listed them on the board. As students entered the room, they read what their classmates wrote. It sparked a discussion that led naturally into the day’s lesson.

If you’ve never used an exit slip, I encourage you to try them. Students who are nervous about failing a quiz will respond to exit slips because they’re not being graded on right or wrong answers. It gives you a good idea about how much learning happened during class, too, and what you might need to reteach. Students who might otherwise have daydreamed during my class engaged more in the lessons when I used exit slips, too. They knew they might be held accountable for what they learned in class that day, but since the assessment method wasn’t a high-stakes one, they took to it pretty well.

You can tailor the exit slip’s questions to your day’s lesson or you can use general questions like I did. Once my students became comfortable with the exit slip, many of them crossed out the question on the day’s slip and replaced it with one from other slips I’d used. As long as the students were giving me feedback about their learning, I was satisfied.

Do you have a question for the editor? Would you like to suggest an idea for a blog post? Are you interested in writing a guest post? E-mail editor Diane.Trim@magnapubs.com

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of audi_insperation on Flickr.com Creative Commons: Exit Legoland, Exit Green, Exit

But, grading class participation can be tedious. It’s also tough to make it fair. What makes good class participation and what is just merely warming a desk?

The Seating Chart Method. When I taught foreign language, our department kept track of participation points using a seating chart and clipboard. Each week, I’d have a seating chart grid with each student’s name and five spots to record participation. Students who were present earned one point (tardy students earned zero). Students who answered a question earned another point. Students who answered more than one question earned three points, which was the maximum point value for the day. Absent students could make up points with a short, memorized dialogue to be given in the hallway before or after class. Students with unexcused absences could not make up points.

The Exit Slip Method. Before students leave class for the day, they must complete a short exit slip. This could be two math problems or short answers to review questions from the lesson. I never used daily exit slips, but I occasionally gave them to my classes. My generic slip was a half sheet of paper, which I’d divided into quarters. One quadrant asked: Why is this lesson important?, another asked: What did you learn today?, the third asked: How will you use this information?, and the fourth asked: What further questions do you have?

The important part of the exit slip is to record the class’s responses. Students, like everyone else, want to know that their thoughts are important. I gave the slips a completion grade (four points – one for each question) and then compiled the interesting answers onto a transparency to display as students entered the classroom the next day. If I missed this sharing step, the students groused. If I missed this step, their answers on the next exit slip tended to be lousy.

To be fair to students with an excused absence, I averaged out the exit slip grades over the number of slips students turned in, not the number of possible exit slips and used the grade as a quiz grade in my grade book.

The question is: how do you evaluate class participation in a fair manner? Do you just give a point for showing up in class every day? Do you average out the points so grades for those students with an extended illness don’t plummet? Do you offer make-up points for this grade? Do you think that participation points can ever be fair? I’d love to hear about your methods and support/criticism of participation points in the comments.

Photo credits:
Untitled [rescue basket]: uscglantareapa / USCGLantAreaPA on Flickr.com Creative Commons
USACE employee helps students move into next phase of ‘Tin Can-Construction’ project: USACE Europe District / USACE Europe District on Flickr.com Creative Commons
eCybermission students visit Army laboratory: RDECOM / Research Development and Engineering Command on Flicr.com Creative Commons 

Kevin didn’t stick around after school long enough to see the lights on at 8 p.m. in his teachers’ classrooms, didn’t watch as the teachers left the buildings with their briefcases full of papers to grade, and didn’t come to school on the weekends when teachers set up labs or planned lessons. Kevin was a smart kid, but he had an inaccurate picture of what a teacher’s workday looks like (and paycheck, too).

I don’t have to tell you that the hours between the bells aren’t the only hours you spend on the job. According to a study by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, teachers in public schools report working 52 hours a week, 27 of those as teaching hours. In private schools, teachers report a 48-hour work week and 26 hours of teaching.

So how can I live up to Kevin’s golf fantasy when I have a briefcase full of papers? I can’t, but I can take steps to try to manage my paper load.

Create online quizzes and tests. In my world, this still isn’t possible because I don’t have easy access to a class set of laptops every day. If you do, though, a quick online quiz is the way to go. No papers to handle; just record the scores.

Don’t correct everything. Give yourself permission to not check every homework problem you assign. Some teachers circulate during the sponge activity in the beginning of class and record student homework as complete or incomplete. If you feel you need to check the homework more closely, you might collect the homework and correct just question number three. With essays, you can grade just paragraph three, too (especially useful when grading for grammar, spelling, and usage).

Clear the desk. Set a goal for yourself that you won’t leave the building on Friday until you’ve finished grading papers for the week. Allow yourself to lesson plan at home, but don’t lug around a stack of papers on the weekend. You’ll feel better if you have a break.

Use a rubric. It almost goes without saying, but not only is grading with a rubric good teaching practice, but also it makes grading a lot easier. With a clear rubric, you won’t spend half an hour trying to figure out how to grade student work that looks nothing like what you had envisioned. For example, you assign students to write a poem about nature and a student hands you a recording of his band singing lyrics you’re not sure are from a known language. How do you grade that? A rubric will help spell out your expectations on the front end, reduce the number of unpredictable student responses, and speed up your grading with a checklist.

Plan your grading time. We all know that we need to plan our lesson time, but it’s a smart idea to plan your work time as well. Expand your weekly lesson plans to include your prep time, too. If you’ve planned for a quiz for your sophomores, block off time that same day or the next to correct it. I know it’s tough, but try to stagger due dates among your classes so you don’t have 80 freshman essays on the same day you have 40 junior poetry projects to grade.

Have a small bag for correcting papers. Take it from me and my back: you do not want to carry a heavy bag with every student paper and every book you’ll ever need everywhere you go. Instead, buy a small bag that has just enough room for one set of papers to grade. Include a set of pens and a calculator. Discipline yourself to grade just that one set of papers at home, but no more than that. Having a huge bag in your backseat is overwhelming and you might not even take the bag out of the car. But you can spare 30 minutes to grade one set of papers and you can probably do it while your child is at swimming lessons or karate. Done.

Develop a routine. Just as you’d brush your teeth before you go to bed, make correcting one set of papers part of your nightly routine. If you make a regular time to correct just one set of quizzes, you’ll work your way through the stack and sleep better, knowing that you don’t have a huge pile of papers waiting for you in the morning.

Do you have any suggestions for managing your papers to grade and working in a round of golf? Do you have any humorous misconceptions about teaching that people have shared with you over the years? Please share in the comments.

Photo credits:
Grading essays, 365-120 (April 30): nooccar on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Grading Papers [in a café]: juliecinci on Flickr.com Creative Commons
Dining room [with papers to grade]: MNicoleM on Flickr.com Creative Commons

I’ll be honest. I don’t handle extra credit well. In fact, I’m so lousy at it, I offered just two projects each year. If you’ve ever tried offering extra credit, you know the problems it can cause:

• Students might focus all their energy on the extra credit project and neglect their everyday work.
• Students will ask for extra credit projects the night before grades are due.
• Too much extra credit can skew a student’s grade to the point where you’re not sure if she mastered the material or just knew how to play the game.
• You get slammed with extra credit projects in addition to your end-of-quarter grading and have no time to sleep.

Since I taught high school English, my two extra credit projects had an English theme. I announced the projects at the beginning of the semester and explained to students that they would have either the week of Thanksgiving break or Spring break to complete the projects. Neither project interfered with class time and both were due the day students returned from break. Of course, some students worked on the projects before the break, but the idea was that it wouldn’t add to their nightly workload.

My projects were dioramas of famous literary works. The student had to choose a famous literary work (no film adaptations), identify the scene on a plot diagram, identify the main characters, summarize the action, and explain why the scene was important to the story. The diorama was made with Halloween candy (fall semester) or Easter candy (spring semester) – a Peanut Gallery for the fall (circus peanuts were the main players) or a Peep Show for the spring (marshmallow peeps as the main players).

The project was fun, a good use of excess candy, and done completely outside of class. I had a rubric and celebrity judges (principal, coaches) to award prizes for the top three entries. It was a popular activity among students and I promoted it to their parents at open house and parent-teacher conferences.

The problem? How much weight to give the extra credit assignment? I gave away fabulous prizes (cheap plastic trophies from the local party shop) and some of the dioramas were elaborate. I could tell that many hours went into gluing jelly beans and Pez to a shoe box for the honor of a plastic trophy, some points, and a place atop my bookshelf – the Diorama Hall of Fame.

My point-giving scheme was that any A-level project could move a test or quiz grade up three increments. So, a student could move a C- test up to a B-. A B-level project could move up two increments, so a C- to a C+. A C-level could move up one increment, from a C- to a C.

It wasn’t a bad scheme, but it took a ton of time to record the scores and give credit. I wrote a note in the grade book alongside that test or quiz, too. I tried to drop the project one year, but kids protested.

So, readers, I’m looking for ideas from you. How do you handle extra credit? Do you limit your offerings to one or two that you plan in advance or do you give many extra credit opportunities? How do you cope with the extra points and extra work load? Have you ever offered extra credit if a student attends an event like a school play or concert? Let’s start a great discussion in the comments. I can’t wait to learn from you.

It’s an interesting discussion and probably something you and your teaching colleagues have discussed before: do rubrics guide both teacher and student or do they limit student creativity and independent thinking?

I love rubrics. My first year teaching English taught me more than I taught my students. I learned very early that if I didn’t provide students with a rubric, the essays I would receive would be so diverse as to make grading impossible. Without a rubric, it’s tough to justify to students and parents why Justin’s three-page tongue-in-cheek career profile of a U.F.O. tracker received an A (incredible voice) and Aaron’s poorly proofread and generic career profile on the same subject received a C .

Assigning without a rubric means that as a teacher, you really don’t have a clear vision of the product you want and how you will assess it. In the real world, if I asked a designer to craft a logo for me, I would choose options like color, size, and digital reproducibility. It’s a rare thing in the world of work for a boss to give a project to a worker and say, “Do what feels right. Be creative.” In that sense, I think that rubrics mirror real-world expectations.

Those expectations are important to students who are struggling to finish the project at 8 p.m. the night before it’s due. The expectations are even more important to the parent who is trying to assist the student. Furthermore, when it’s 8 p.m. on a Sunday night and I’m wading through my stack of papers, I don’t have to spend time wondering what to do with Matt’s essay on crop circles, which contains more illustrations than words.

The rubric helps me at 9 p.m. Sunday night when I’m drafting my week’s lesson plans, too. The state standards drive my lesson’s objectives and my assessments had better measure students’ understanding of those objectives. If students don’t know what product they should turn in and I don’t know how to grade the random essays I receive, how can I assess whether or not a student understood the material?

Rubrics have their limitations. It’s true, though, that a song about a songwriter would be a fitting way to meet the project’s objectives. However, the song doesn’t fit into my rubric. It’s not an essay, it’s a song. Now what do I do?

Maybe I have the wrong rubric. The kid who writes the song meets the research expectation, but the content’s not in the format I expected. The mistake teachers sometimes make in using rubrics is that they don’t include the class on the conversation.

The compromise between conformity and creativity. To make sure everyone understands the project’s expectations, it’s a great idea to have a two-pronged approach to the rubric. Make your own rubric while you’re planning the unit. Figure out what students need to demonstrate to master the objectives.
In class, explain the project. Place students in think-pair-share groups to discuss what criteria they would use to judge the project. Ask for a volunteer to take notes for the class on the whiteboard and take criteria suggestions from the crowd. Circle those items that have more than one vote. Underline those that you have in your own rubric. Talk about the products and how each criterion will be evaluated. Show the class your rubric and add suggestions from the class’s discussion.

By having this pre-work discussion, students can show their creativity on the front end of the project. They have a say in what distinguishes a successful project from one that doesn’t meet expectations. The students have ownership and have begun the thought process that will lead to the project development. This isn’t a waste of class time; it’s think time.

Best of all, when you receive the students’ projects, you’ll have a rubric to guide you. You won’t be surprised with a clay sculpture when you expected a lab write up. And you’ll be assured that your lesson’s objectives, the students’ work, and everyone’s expectations all line up.

The Parent Phone Call

Carlson tries to limit the parent phone calls to just a few minutes each. Here’s what she says:
Hi there. This is Mrs. Carlson, and I wanted to let you know Johnny did not do the first homework assignment of the year. He will have this assignment due every Friday. I didn’t want him to get behind already. Please check next Thurs. to make sure he has the assignment.

Parents respond well to Carlson’s initial phone call and thank her for the contact. “In all the years I’ve done this, I have never had a negative comment from a parent about a call,” Carlson said.

Students have a different reaction. The day after the parent phone call students are often amazed that Carlson called home about missing work. They insist they’ll do their work to avoid the scene that happened with their parents the night before.

“I always remind them I want them to succeed and will call anytime work is not done,” Carlson said.

Mailing Zero Papers Home

Before the end of the grading period, Carlson gathers up the Zero Papers and mails them home with a cover letter. The cover letter explains to parents how many points the student missed and how that affects the student’s grade.

When parents receive the packet, they often call Carlson to ask how they can help. After the Zero Papers go home, students don’t miss assignments for weeks.

Managing the Phone Call Load

Once students know that Carlson is serious about calling home about missing work, they do the work and the Zero Papers and phone calls home decrease.

“If daily homework is required, I’d choose one period a day to call home on,” Carlson said. “If a particular period was really remiss in getting work in, I’d concentrate on that period.”

Fewer Grade Disputes

Under Carlson’s Zero Papers system, students have few arguments about lost papers or incorrect grading.
“When a student says, ‘I turned that in,’ I pull out the alphabetized zero papers and we check,” Carlson said. “They are sometimes truly surprised when they see [the Zero Paper] in their own handwriting.”
Parents understand when their child has missing work. No parents wonder why their student is not doing well or suspect that the teacher is losing homework.

“This does not stop all the missing work,” Carlson said. “But it makes a huge dent in the work missing.”

Some nights Mom spot-checks Lexi’s assignment notebook against the homework the teacher posted online. It helps prevent missing assignments, Mom said.

The ’Net is a great educational tool, not just for classrooms, but for classroom communication as well. Teachers who host a classroom web page provide parents a resource for finding out about tests, projects, and assignments.

In the year since Texas high school teacher Susan Byrd has been posting homework online, she has received very few parent phone calls or e-mails about assignments.

Byrd recommends that teachers upload documents in user-friendly formats. “Not everyone has access to Publisher [and other programs], so you want to use generic programs,” Byrd said. “Also, you want to make sure that the file size isn’t huge because if a kid has dial-up at home, [downloading] is torture.”

While it’s convenient for students and parents to check the daily homework assignments online, some worry that posting assignments doesn’t encourage students to be responsible.

Suzanne Tingley, a former superintendent and author of Dealing with Difficult Parents, said it’s wise to post major assignments, mid-term exams, and research papers, but not daily work. She’s concerned that posting all assignments won’t encourage students to develop good study habits.

“When students go to college, no one will post assignments online for parents. The students are old enough in high school for that responsibility and posting homework online really teaches kids nothing,” Tingley said.

Posting assignments online also adds another layer of responsibility for the teacher, Tingley said.

Deb, a middle school social studies teacher in Wis., has been teaching for 19 years and posting student homework online for five years. Like Tingley, Deb worried about posting homework online because viewing assignments online doesn’t teach students to take good notes.

“I felt that it was taking away the students’ responsibility to write assignments in their assignment notebooks,” Deb said. “I have seen value in doing this and changed my mind. It not only helps students double check what they have recorded, but it also allows parents access to the information.”

Deb sees posting homework online as a reminder of work that needs to be done, but it’s not a substitute for assignment notebooks. She posts enough information online to remind students what they need to complete, but she doesn’t include every detail of instruction.

“Students know that with this resource there is little room for the excuse that they didn’t know what the assignment was or they forgot their assignment notebook at school,” Deb said.

Since she began posting homework online, Byrd has found that students turn in homework more consistently. Her classroom is 100 percent paperless, so students expect to visit the classroom site for daily work and grade updates.

“The kids see their current average right when they log on,” Byrd said. “It’s been enormously powerful.”

As a parent, Byrd relies on the system her daughter’s school uses to keep on top of assignments and tests. She checks the system twice a week and can see when big tests or projects are coming up.

“She’s more responsible because she knows I know what’s happening, too!” Byrd said.