Settling into a decent routine

So, as the second semester dawns, I'm making some pretty significant changes in my regular classroom routines, which is worth documenting.

Last semester, I did a lousy job of staying on top of grades, mostly I think because I was buried in it: I tried to grade everything the students ever did, and it was just way, way too much.

Recently, I was reviewing the teachers guide to the unit we're doing now (Key Curriculum's Interactive Mathematics Program, which is a wildly different curriculum than the traditional math textbook), and I noticed that, right up there in front, it says "Because you will not be able to read thoroughly every assignment that students turn in, you will need to select certain assignments to read carefully and base grades on. Here are some suggestions:" This is followed by FIVE assignments, in a unit that is paced for 29 classroom days-- like, SIX WEEKS of class, FIVE assignments to grade carefully.

And I thought, "Yeah. One a week, I could do". So that became a basis for my new plan. There were some great in-class conversations, with students giving me some great ideas. Here's what we settled on:

Homework continues to be assigned on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday only (no homework on Friday)-- but everything gets turned in on Friday. POWs (taken from NCTM) still exist, but are not optional for extra credit. I'll be adding mandatory POWs from the IMP curriculum, about two per unit. The first day of each week starts with a review of the Big Picture from the past week, and an overview of the objectives for the new week. Each Friday begins with a 10-minute ungraded quiz (we're calling it a "check-up"), where students take on the week's Big Picture goals. During that 10 minutes, I walk through the room, marking up
the homework, just to see who's done it. We then go over the check-up answers, and the class gives me "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", to indicate if they understand that goal and are ready to move on, of if we need to continue with that idea next week.

After that, I drop the homework answers, so that students can tell, again, if they got it right or not. They mark one assignment of the four to be graded carefully, and if there's any time left in the Friday, we can either go over the stuff they didn't get yet, or move into some extensions on the Big Picture from the week now ending.

So far, I think we're all excited about this. From my perspective, I love the use of formative assessment and metacognition. Pacing might be hard (four days a week of new material), but by consolidating all the homework check-up and such to the end of the week, it frees up more class time on Mon-Thurs, which should pay dividends in terms of getting stuff done on those days. And, it makes it much easier for me to stay on top of grades: the administrative overhead is much smaller (I enter one grade for homework each week into my grade book), and I'm recruiting the students to keep pressure on me to stay up with it-- they're under orders to bug me mercilessly if I don't return their work on Monday...