Student Accountability For Homework

[Deb Sondall Saetveit]

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?

Thanks, Deb

[Mark Pennington]

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...

[Sharon Roth]

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

[Deb Sondall Saetveit]

These resources are wonderful! Thank you, Deb