Laura Shannon Phillips Blog
The purpose of this blog is for teacher collaboration. It is designed to be a place where teachers can come to share ideas to benefit their classrooms. I am starting this blog as a fulfillment of an educational requirement for EDM 510.
Make-Up Work HELP!!!
I have been teaching at the high school level for a few years now and I love most aspects. However, there is one thing in particular that I struggle with, make-up work. I seem to always have students absent. Because high school teachers have between 80 and 90 students a day, I have a hard time keeping up with who was absent and what they missed. The process of making up work seems to take weeks and does not seem to be fair to the students who were at school. Although not everyone is a high school teacher, we all attended high school and might have learned something from a teacher we had in the past. I am interested in any suggestions. Let me give you a few examples of my struggles:
-How do you know an assignment is a make-up assignment and not just late?
-Late homework. I like to grade homework quickly and get it back to students. If I have already given back corrected homework, did the make-up student complete it on their own or did they copy? What should I do?
-How long do you accept late homework, quizzes, or tests? A week, a month?
-Does anyone have a way to make up missed labs?
Please feel free to elaborate on any practice that you thought was clever or worked particularly well.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteMake-up work can definitely be frustrating. One thing that definitely needs to be done is attendance. If you have access to the schools attendance, use it! If for some reason you do not, keep attendance in each class period. If you keep track of the students, you always know if they have make up work.
Also, you want to have a very clearly stated make up policy. At the school I teach at and at the schools I attended we always had very strict make-up rules and I believe that they were very fair. At the school I am working at, our policy is that make-up work is due the day you return to school. If the student was absent for more than 3 days they have half the amount of time they were absent to turn it in. So if they were absent for 4 days. They must turn in their work within two days of being back at school. At my old high school, we had to turn in make up work by the day after we came back unless the teacher specified otherwise. From my understanding, these policies are common practice. Letting students wait to long to turn things in can hurt them(not focusing on the subject matter at hand) as well as complicate things for the teacher. Also, getting make up assignments and turning in their work on time is the responsibility of the student, not the teacher. In high school, they should be able to handle this responsibility.
For make up tests and quizzes the students should be able to take them the day they come back, but letting some time pass may be necessary for scheduling. However, I wouldn't let more than a week pass. If they wait to long they could mix information or be focusing to much on old material and miss something new.
I hope you have a wonderful year!
In regards to make-up work vs. something being turned in late, I generally try to make it a point to note this on my hard copy grade book so I may reference it when checking grades on my online grade book (through iNow). As far as make-up work goes, I pretty much always accept late work, but points will be deducted after one week. I am a special education teacher, so this rule may not help in a general education classroom. I have some students with an accommodation written on their IEP to be able to turn work in up to a week late, so this is why I keep that general rule. As far as make-up tests go, I generally try to come up with an alternative version of the test, especially when tests have been graded and given back to the other students. Lastly, for labs, I recommend having the students do research on what the lab assignment was and write at least a 2 page paper on their findings.
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