Homework Completion - Meeting with Michiko Bozic

PLC’ers,
I was finally able to meet with Michiko Bozic, an LHS Japanese teacher, about strategies to improve homework completion. If you don’t remember I was supposed to speak with her at the recommendation of Stacy Geyer. I thought I would share some of the ideas I took out of the meeting.
She recommended giving up to 70% credit for late work. (I currently only give 60%.) Michiko said that she feels the students (and parents) respond better if the student has a chance at a passing grade.
She splits up her class in half each day between the students that completed the homework and the students that didn’t complete the homework. That way she can have the students that didn’t complete the homework work on that work while the other students get a chance to work on other work during work time in-class. In addition to this she allows the students that completed the homework on time to earn extra credit (she made it a point that it is only minimal) if they help another student complete their homework.
Michiko said that it is essential that she praises the students, both one-on-one and in front of the class, that are setting the high standards in the class. She has actually tried praising the good students in one class and using more critical comments in another class of the same of the same prep. She said that the difference was huge between the two classes as time went on.
Another recommendation that Michiko made was pairing her students into groups of 2 students. She does this because she likes the group work interaction but has found that 3 or more students lead to more talking amongst the members. She said that she tries to pair one high achieving student with one low achieving student. She has found that in this one-on-one setting that the interaction has been productive for both students.

I am pretty excited to try some of this out. I will probably give my students up to 70% credit for late work next semester and will try to keep praising my students as much as possible. I know the praise thing is far from a secret, but I have found it hard to stay positive in my IMP 2 classes due to the low achievement and I need to try to stay aware of my demeanor

I personally have not seen any added benefit between having groups of 3 or 4 students. If there is something to be gained from groups of 2, I would be willing to give it a shot. The other strategy, dividing the class into homework completers and non-completers sounds good…I just don’t know that I have had a lot of extra “class work time” for my students. Most of the class work time is material that is intended to be worked on for the discussion that is to follow the work time. I would be interested in hearing everyone’s input on how they think these strategies might work within the IMP classroom.

-Jason