Our school is examining and revising its grading policies, and I'm wondering what successful practices you employ in your classrooms and/or as teams/departments to hold students accountable for completing homework assignments on time. Thoughts?
Great subject. I, too, am interested in the school-home connection and the cheating/accountability issues re: homework. As an ELA teacher and reading specialist, I advocate assigning independent content area reading for homework. As far as the accountablity issue, last year I devolved all of my homework grading to the parents of my seventh grade ELA students. On back-to-school night I make a deal with parents: I won't assign grammar or essay homework, if you will supervise your child's reading-discussion homework. No parent at the middle school or high school level wants to supervise the former. Parents graded a three-minute discussion of the daily homework reading. Students led the discussion with reading comprehension strategy discussion prompts. I got a high degree of buy-in from parents and students. I flesh out this homework program much more on my blog at http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/how-to-get-students-to...
There are two resources recently from NCTE that really made me rethink this subject. English Journal had a great issue on homework in November 2008. http://www.ncte.org/journals/ej/issues/v98-2
You can also just buy this issue if you aren't a subscriber. The issue really helped me rethink how to make homework more meaningful for students. I liked that it turned the accountability conversation on its head.
MOre recently NCTE offered a web seminar on homework by many of the same authors. They were obviously able to go into more detail and showed quite a few samples. The on demand version of it is available at http://www1.ncte.org/store/130802.htm
Try this incredibly simple but quite useful analogy to reach students who are struggling with issues of audience and style. Soon they’ll be speaking to, and not at, their audience.
Lynette, I've also been to a lecture given by Mrs. Jago and have to agree whole heartedly with your assessment of her work. She is one of several whose message helps keep me renewed as an educator.
As the number of English Language Learners has increased, the politics of English language learning have become more prominent and complicated. Join this group today.