Secrets for Secondary School Teachers (12 page)

•   Was the sequencing appropriate?

•   Did students need additional scaffolding?

•   What other changes would you make in the future? Is there anything you would do differently?

I
NTEGRATING
I
NPUT
F
ROM
T
ESTING

At some point, and hopefully sooner rather than later, you will receive additional information on your students to help you with your planning. As the data from standardized testing become available, the results will be given to you.
Criterion-referenced tests
are designed to measure what students have learned against a set of standards (criteria) such
as the district objectives. They are locally developed. The tests you give at the end of a semester, for example, will likely be criterion-referenced tests. Your district may have course exit exams. This type of test tells you whether or not your students have mastered identified objectives. You receive specific feedback from this kind of evaluation. You will see how well your students did in the past and whether any gaps exist that you will need to address. This information on your students will enable you to identify areas for re-teaching.

The other type of information you will receive is from the
norm-referenced tests
that are receiving much national attention. (They are being used as the basis for school accountability.) These tests measure students against like students, usually across the nation. For example, the achievement of a second-semester, 11th-grade student in your school is compared to all second-semester, 11th-grade students who took the test. You will receive information on how students did on various tasks included in the test; however, information from the task analysis tends to be general rather than specific. Also, these tests are highly dependent on reading ability, which can be a problem. Unfortunately, there is often a lag time of weeks or months between the date the test is submitted for scoring and the date the received results are shared with teachers.

F
INAL
T
HOUGHTS ON
P
LANNING

We encourage you to be as thorough as time permits in writing your initial lesson plans. For some activities, you will want to be very complete, perhaps even scripting what you want to say. For other activities, a brief outline will suffice. You may be able to follow a lesson plan from another source, such as the teacher’s resource kit for your textbook, a plan you received from another teacher, or one you found on the Internet. Sometimes you will be able to attach an already-developed lesson to the form you use; however, most likely you will have to make adjustments for your students. As time goes on, you will become more efficient in developing your plans.

  7  

Managing Time and Paperwork

A
nd you thought teaching was mostly about direct instruction and interactions with students. If only that were so.

Secondary school teachers are besieged with paperwork, and you had better organize yourself from the beginning or you will feel like you will never catch up. There are daily attendance rosters to manage, not to mention reports to various offices, lesson plans to write in which you pretend to know what you might end up doing in the future, homework assignments to read and check off, papers to evaluate, tests to create and grade—the list goes on and on.

We don’t mean to be discouraging, just realistic. Paperwork doesn’t have to get you down if you are well-organized, efficient, and sensible in the ways you operate.

A
TTENDANCE

Your attendance book is a legal document and can be subpoenaed by a court of law. It takes a few minutes each day and must be attended to with care. One teacher we know
videotapes his classes, one student at a time, as they say their names and something brief about themselves. He then studies the tape on his own time, drilling himself to memorize names. Students are thus
very
impressed that he can take attendance after the first few days simply by scanning the room. Teachers with digital cameras can quickly take pictures and print them on seating charts to help them learn their students’ names.

Another unique way to take attendance is with a specially designed board in the front of the room. Each student has an assigned magnet that is kept in a column up on the board. As students enter the room each day, they see a question written on the board with several possible answers. These questions can relate to the subject matter or even be more playful, as the following examples show:

The question: What is your favorite fast food?

The choices: pizza, hamburgers, tacos

The question: Where is the Nile River located?

The choices: Asia, Africa, Antarctica, Australia

Each day, you would make up a different question for students to consider as they enter the room. They would then remove their individual magnets and place them in one of the columns. The names leftover are those who are absent. You can even begin class with a discussion of the question that you asked. Remember, it is your responsibility to check that the magnets accurately reflect who is present in your class.

G
RADES

As a classroom teacher, you will frequently receive requests for students’ grades, whether it is from a counselor, a parent, a dean, or the student. In a formal way, many secondary schools send out progress reports indicating “unsatisfactory progress” midway through a reporting period. Athletic and activity
(spirit leader, band) eligibility checks take place regularly, too. Therefore, it is very important to have the grading up to date. For this purpose, a computer grading program is strongly recommended. Programs such as MicroGrade are easy to use and compute the averages as soon as grades are entered into the computer. You can even e-mail messages or grade reports to an individual student or to everyone in the class.

The computer programs are flexible and allow you to designate your columns based on whatever categories you prefer (participation, class work, homework, projects, quizzes, tests) and whatever weighting system you choose (points, percentages). They will even compute extra-credit work into the average. Furthermore, if you have access to a printer, the programs allow you to immediately print a report of a student’s grades very quickly. It is helpful to have this information for reports on students that you submit to athletic directors or other administrators or parents on request.

Some districts now allow teachers to use printouts of the computer pages as formal records rather than complete traditional grade books by hand. Also, some districts will provide grading programs for you, so check before you buy your own.

Most teachers are still required to turn in a traditional grade book. These books are designed in such a way that very small lines run horizontally, in sets of two or three, across the page. This works fine if all you are doing is keeping attendance, as you can easily use one line for each student.

Although the lines may be numbered, I (Ellen) ignore the printed numbers. On the top line, I print the student’s name and mark attendance. Then, I use the next two (or three or more depending on how many categories I have) for grades. For example, the second line is used for test and quiz grades. The third line is used for homework and class work. On the fourth line, I keep a running average of each student’s overall grade for the reporting period, and notes to myself to indicate places and people the student visited other than my class (such as a field trip, or the nurse’s or dean’s office). It is too hard to squeeze all the information in on one line, so I try to
be creative in my use of a traditional grade book. The advantage of this system is that when a student is missing a grade, you can quickly see if it was due to negligence or due to an absence. Some schools will require a page for attendance only and subsequent pages for grades. In that case, you may have to adjust your record keeping.

Students can be taught to keep track of their own grades and compute their own averages. You need to explain the weighting system and give examples. Many teachers provide forms for the students to use throughout the card-marking period. You may want to have parents sign to indicate they have seen these forms and are aware of their child’s progress in your class.

P
APERWORK
C
ONSIDERATIONS

One of the major mistakes common to beginning teachers is giving too many written assignments. Remember: You are making as much work for yourself as you are for your students. Each paper or assignment must be read, evaluated, graded, recorded, and then the grade must be averaged. All of this can be very time-consuming, and some of you may wish to have some sort of life outside of school.

There are a number of things you can consider as ways to reduce your workload:

Always consider the merit of the assignment.
Is it really necessary in order to accomplish the larger goals you are after? There is nothing that turns students off more than busy work in which they can’t see how it will help them in some constructive way.

Can the assignment be self-graded or self-evaluated?
Because the purpose of many assignments is to give students systematic practice in new concepts and skills and then to integrate feedback into their future learning, there is no reason
why you have to be the one who does all the evaluating. Post the correct answers on the board, and let students review their own answers. Occasionally, you can spot-check for accuracy, with warnings that if students make too many mistakes in their self-corrections, they will lose all credit.

Can you use a scantron machine to score the assessment?
Using scantrons will be a great time-saver. The forms are available in many sizes, and some have space available for essay questions. Students, especially younger ones, need opportunities to “bubble” their responses as practice for standardized tests.

Can the assignment be completed as a group or paired activity?
This is one way to cut the number of papers you have to grade in half. Students may also benefit from the cooperative effort, assuming they each participate equally.

Does the assignment need to be graded at all?
Sometimes, feedback (such as constructive comments and corrections) is all that is needed. A grade may not be necessary.

It isn’t always necessary to collect homework assignments each day.
Sometimes, a weekly or biweekly homework check may be sufficient, in which case the students are responsible for maintaining their own paperwork.

Control the length of the assignments to fall within reasonable limits.
Do this both for the students’ benefit and to manage your own available time. Students may not need to write an essay, when they can provide an outline or concept map of ideas to show they have mastered an objective.

Vary the type of assignments and evaluation methods you use.
Do this not only to give students a chance to demonstrate different skills, but also to create variety for yourself.

Rather than just requiring written assignments, be creative.
Design performance or project assignments that can show mastery of the material. Students can create dioramas, plays, posters, or videos. This will benefit those whose learning strengths are other than writing and those learning English.

Share the load.
An interdisciplinary approach might have one teacher evaluate an assignment for content (e.g., science, social studies) while another evaluates for technical writing skills (English).

Use aides, if available.
Many schools provide student aides for teachers. Often, you will be able to create assignments that the aides can correct, if not grade. With the use of computer grading programs, aides, if permitted, can be taught to enter grades on the computer for quick averaging.

Use rubrics.
Create your own rubric or have students create rubrics for scoring. This way, students know before they begin an assignment what the criteria will be for evaluation. Rubrics will allow you to quickly assess student work.

Decide on the best time for you to examine student assignments.
Some teachers are able to get most of their work done during preparation periods. Others remain in their rooms after school so they can go home without anything else to worry about. Still others prefer to relax for a while and complete their paperwork at night or early in the morning. Whatever structure you prefer, stick with a consistent program so you are able to keep on top of things.

Be punctual in returning assignments to students.
Remember that you are modeling appropriate work habits. Always do what you say you will do, if you expect your students to do the same.

I (Cary) remember one time how hard I worked for a certain grade in math class. Needing an “A” to achieve a good grade for the quarter, I spent countless hours reviewing the material. After taking the test, I turned it in to the teacher confidently. As my next math class approached, I got really excited waiting to get my test back. I really needed that reward to keep my momentum going because the next lesson was really hard.

I showed up for class the next day and was surprised the teacher said nothing about returning our tests. When I asked him what was going on, he said he’d have them ready the next day. Again I waited not so patiently, and again the same thing happened. A whole week went by, and still we never got the tests back. Finally, I got up the nerve to ask the teacher again; this time, he yelled at me to stop bugging him.

About a week and a half after taking the test, we finally got the test back, and I received my A. But it didn’t seem to matter any more. We were already on to other stuff, and I cut back on my study time because I had no idea how I was doing in the class.