For the start of the new school year, I am writing a blog series on all of the systems I have in place in my A-Level Economics classroom. They definitely aren’t perfect, but when I started teaching A-Level in a brand new Sixth Form, I scoured the web for articles on how to manage the practicalities of an A-Level class. I really benefitted from the wisdom of Matt Smith, Adam Boxer, and Ruth Walker, and over the last few years I have tweaked and built on these ideas to create systems from which I think (hope?!) I think my students benefit from.
I want to take a brief departure from my posts on homework and take a moment of two to look at Teams. Often, the homework tasks I set are made much easier using Teams.I’ll start this with the same disclosure I have used in the others: this probably isn’t the best way of doing everything, but it’s good enough that it could help someone else, which for me is the threshold for ‘worth sharing’.
Microsoft Teams has helped me with one of my biggest professional weaknesses – lack of follow up. I always intended to chase the late work and hold students accountable, but I really struggled to keep track of everything in order to do this.
I set absolutely everything I want students to do outside of lessons on Teams. This includes admin tasks (like labelling dividers or signing up to FT for Schools) as well as tasks that I don’t necessarily want to take in to mark (like reading or finishing off classwork). I try to maintain the expectation that if it’s not officially handed in on Teams, I am assuming students haven’t done it and will act accordingly. However, I’m usually a little more lenient with tasks set as reminders than I am with stuff I want to check or mark.
I include ‘Assignments’ for anything I might want a record of later. For example, I was always terrible at keeping track of who had returned textbooks or reading books at the end of the year. Now, I set an assignment and give students a receipt of some kind when they hand it in. This can be a piece of paper with ‘Stevie returned his book’ scrawled in my handwriting or a coloured post it or whatever. Students submit a photo of their receipt so that I can later return the assignment to them, leaving me with a list of those who haven’t returned their book.
With the exception of tests or exam papers, I don’t really take in any physical work at all. This is because I work quite odd hours, teaching part time alongside a residential role in a boarding house. This means I don’t have a base to keep physical work organised. Instead, students insert photos of their work into a OneNote page. I prefer them to do this rather than upload photos, because it gives me much more flexibility when it comes to marking – I can copy and paste an explanation, underline, highlight, add a link to a video or website or, as I find especially helpful, leave a voice recording. (A separate blog post is coming on marking. Maybe. If I have time). It also makes it much easier to flick through multiple assignments.
I find it’s important to teach this expectation, even to Sixth Form students. I go through explicitly what is and isn’t acceptable using these photos. One of the first assignments I set each year is then called ‘I can hand in assignments’. I give students a piece of paper and ask them to write a joke or draw what they had for breakfast or whatever, and then insert it into OneNote to submit. I have found that being strict on this assignment saves a lot of faff throughout the year – if a student turns in something I’m not happy with, I return it for revision.
The ‘Return for Revision’ feature is probably the one that has helped me the most in managing the follow-up process of homework. If students hand in incomplete or subpar work, it allows me to ping the work back to them with a new deadline. It is also really useful where students would benefit from editing their work. For example, for the first essay that students do for me in September of Year 12 covers specialisation. To allow me to guide them as they get used to the Economics essay style, students submit a first draft that I can give feedback on before they hand in their final draft, so here everyone’s work gets returned for revision. In other cases, I might only return one or two students’ work, for example if they have misread the questions or have a fundamental misconception in the topic. This is all stuff I always intended to do pre-Teams, but struggled to actually implement with any consistency.
I set an individual assignment for each task, rather than a long assignment containing multiple tasks. This helps me to keep track of who owes what. Whilst some students get a little anxious at a long list of tasks, it also means they get that little dopamine hit by checking each one off. I have learned to label assignments by week and letter, eg assignments in the first week of term are labelled 01a, 01b, 01c etc. This makes it easy for me to chase or refer to assignments. The two-digit numbering system (ie 01d instead of 1d) allows me to sort assignments more easily in the Gradebook.
This year, I have made a ‘Dummy’ class with all of the assignments I have set over the last couple of years. Essentially, I just set up a class with no students and copy over the assignments into different modules. This makes it easy to find and re-use assignments. I work in a department of one, but this can be especially useful if you are co-ordinating a bigger department: last year, I wrote a study skills course that was taught by other teachers. The pre-written assignments made it really easy for teachers to just add their own dates and set work for students, lightening their load and encouraging consistency. Teachers can add to or adapt the assignments, but most of the legwork hard already been done for them.
I generally set my standing tasks on the same day each week. Quite often, I’ll get ahead with these when I have little pockets of time, and will schedule them ahead of time. Tasks are usually due the same day too. After the deadline, I go through the ‘Past Due’ tab and deal with any students who haven’t submitted work. If it’s a first offence, or a task that doesn’t require anything to be submitted (and therefore easier to forget to turn in), I click the ‘send reminder’ feature, which sends a push notification to students and usually results in a second influx of assignments. For other assignments, I go through and message students, sanctioning as normal. Previously, my follow through after this stage wasn’t great. I would speak with a students about their late homework and would set a detention or whatever for them, with the expectation that they would get the work done. However, I often didn’t track whether it actually got done and I imagine that some students worked out that doing the detention was more time efficient than actually doing the work. I like that I can set a new deadline and that all ‘Past Due’ work is together, so I can easily follow up if students have actually completed work after the sanction.
I also like that teachers can issue extensions to individual students. As a school we encourage communication, so it is not unusual for students to ask for extensions. Previously, when reviewing overdue work, I had to cross-reference messages from students or try to recall conversations I had had with them in order to work out which students to follow up with. Now, I log the extension on Teams the spot by extending the deadline for an individual student, so those students are clearly distinguishable from those who are late without a valid excuse.
When it comes to marking work, I work my way through the ‘Ready to Grade’ tab. If it’s an admin task or reading, I’ll often just return it to all students who have submitted it without checking. If it’s something I’m just checking for completion rather than marking, (a note-taking task, for example), I’ll usually just glance through them, giving feedback or returning for revision to the occasional student who clearly hasn’t done what they were supposed to, but returning the rest without comment. For work I want to actually mark, I might write a comment in the feedback box, complete a rubric, record a voice message to the student or write in their OneNote.
I will try to write about my marking process some other time. Next up, however will be how I use the grading features in Teams.