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Middle School Teachers Chatboard

Managing board work

by Jim

Nov 3, 2013

Do you give Daily Warm Ups, or Board Work to start your classes? How do you manage the sheer numbers of papers? I am a Science teacher with about 30 students in 6 classes. That amounts to 180 papers daily to grade. Do you collect them daily? Do you grade them daily, trade and grade daily, self- grade daily, or let them keep their papers all week and do a quiz on the answers on the last day of the week? Do you give a completion score or credit for each correct response? If you let students keep them all week, do you have to deal with students who change their responses or just fill in the responses when the teacher reads the right answers?

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Jo We do a 10 day topic and quiz on day 11. They get a quiz grade and a participation grade on the 10 days. They have to keep, fill in and submit their 10 days at the same time they hand in the quiz. If a day is missing, I deduct 10 points.

On 11/03/13, Jim wrote: > Do you give Daily Warm Ups, or Board Work to start your > classes? How...See More

Nov 3, 2013

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Deb ms/IA I collect this work at the end of the quarter (or three days before) and give one point per item done. I have journals where kids have done 2 DOL sentences and one journaling activity (3 points). I don't grade for perfection of the items just for completion. If they showed evidence of completing the activities they got the points.

In your...See More

Nov 5, 2013

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Sara On 11/03/13, Jim wrote: > Do you give Daily Warm Ups, or Board Work to start your > classes? How do you manage the sheer numbers of papers? I > am a Science teacher with about 30 students in 6 classes. > That amounts to 180 papers daily to grade. Do you collect > them daily? Do you grade them daily, trade and grade daily, > self- ...See More

Nov 5, 2013

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coyoteboy I teach 8th grade math and have about 140 students. We have a warmup sheet that all teachers in our department use; the format is standardized and we all require basically the same elements in the responses, which saves a lot of time getting the kids trained in the beginning of the year. The warmup sheet has spaces for Monday through Friday and I p...See MoreI teach 8th grade math and have about 140 students. We have a warmup sheet that all teachers in our department use; the format is standardized and we all require basically the same elements in the responses, which saves a lot of time getting the kids trained in the beginning of the year. The warmup sheet has spaces for Monday through Friday and I pick them up on Fridays. We discuss the problem together Mondays through Thursdays, and Fridays they are on their own (if we discuss, it's after the warmup sheets have been passed in). They are free, actually they are expected, to correct their work as we discuss, but they have to cross out (rather than erase) the incorrect response so that I can tell which questions they originally got wrong. I don't mind them fixing their answers because I look at the warmup as a practice opportunity rather than an assessment. The Friday problem can be graded right or wrong (again, we agreed on this as a department). I do count off if they turn in papers with incorrect answers to the problems we discussed; there's no reason to turn in a wrong answer after they've heard the discussion and had a chance to fix it.

The first couple weeks of school, I grade the warmups and I'm pretty nitpicky on the details, so that the kids can get that feedback on how I want them done. By the third week of school, they're pretty much trained, and then I check their work much less closely (I don't let them know that!) A quick glance over Monday-Thursday for completion, and a quick right or wrong on Friday's, is all I have to do.

After the second or third week of school, I have the kids turn in warmups every Friday, but I only actually grade them when I need a grade for that week...usually only about every third or fourth week. The rest of the time, they go into the recycling. There's no law that says that every single thing they do has to be graded...it has value as a practice tool (all our warmups are recycled state assessment questions) and as a classroom management tool, and it doesn't have to be graded unless you need that grade. The kids usually don't figure out that not all the warmups are graded. If they do, I remind them that they have no way of knowing whether I'm going to grade this week's warmup or not, so they better do it! This also gives us some slack...if a kid loses his warmup sheet, is absent all week, or something like that, I can swap the lost one (that was supposed to be graded that week) with the one from the previous or following week (that wasn't gonna be graded, but now it's saving the kid from getting a zero). This reduces my grading load and makes the warmup grade work to the students' advantage. I also make the warmup a relatively small part of their average (20%). In a nine week grading period I usually only record three warmup grades.

The warmup is already up there when students enter, they get to work as soon as they come in, and it's great because class starts itself and I am free to take roll, check homework completion, answer questions, etc. instead of giving directions at the start of every class. If the students are not used to it or not very motivated to do it, try using questions that are controversial or will provoke some spirited discussion or even disagreement...they will engage, if only to put their two cents in. It's also a great way to painlessly and sneakily prepare them for quizzes...if the warmup problems bear an uncanny resemblance to the quiz questions, they will notice, especially the good students, and if they don't, you can point it out to them. Once state testing is over, I use math related cartoons, photos from Ripley's Believe It Or Not, newspaper articles that we can crunch numbers with, USA Today graphs, and other stuff.

It's such a valuable strategy that it's worth working out the kinks to make it work for you. Talk to the other teacher in your dept or grade level and see what they are doing. If you can adopt some (or all) of the same procedures, it'll save you a lot of time getting them trained and running smoothly.

Good luck!

Nov 5, 2013

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