This past Friday I attended the ICTM (Iowa Council of Teachers of Mathematics) Conference in West Des Moines, IA. Overall the experience was great and I got a bunch of ideas for implementing the Iowa Core Standards in my future classroom.
The one main idea that I am interested in exploring was presented by Elizabeth Tapper. She recommended using "Notebook Checks" to replace correcting piles of homework. I have one professor who uses a similar system, and in that class the he only grades a few randomly selected problems out of the assigned homework problems. My one concern is that I never know if he happened to grade two problems that I got correct while in reality I misunderstood the greater bulk of the material. While I'd like to think this is not the case, I really have no way to know if I am completely off base on a number of the topics.
So I attended this session with a bias against a system where only some of the assigned problems are graded. However, I came away from this session ready to think more deeply about how this could work in my classroom. Elizabeth described to us the features of her system that overcome these concerns:
1) All student work, including notes and homework assignments are kept together in one spiral notebook.
2) Students are given the "correct" answers to all assigned homework problems, and then given the opportunity to ask questions or get clarification on missed problems.
3) Students then have the chance to correct or rework incorrect problems.
4) On the back of quiz papers students copy from their notebooks solutions to randomly selected homework problems. (Here is the key: they are only allowed to COPY work that is in their notebook)
Here is how this system addresses my one concern, students are given the opportunity to review their work and pinpoint exactly where they have misunderstood. As a bonus this system encourages students to rework incorrect problems so that they are responsible for their own understanding.
I may decide to tweak this system as I consider how this could work for me as I plan how to organize my future classroom but I think I can certainly find a way to implement Notebook Checks in my classroom.
