Homework and "My Favorite No"

Let's step back in time to 10 years ago. I am teaching high school math. Every day, I diligently teach the class, assign practice questions and then assign homework which I would check the next day for completion. 0 for incomplete. 5 for partially complete. 10 for complete. This mark was not based on understanding. It was based on compliance. What did I notice? My compliant students were completing it. The students who were struggling or who weren't engaged, didn't complete it. Writing a mark in my book changed nothing. Their compliance was affecting their grades since I was following the typically standard "Homework counts for 10% of the grade" designation.

I quickly realized that I was completely and utterly wasting my time. This did nothing to help me understand what my students knew and didn't know.  So I changed. At the end of class, I gave students questions out of the book but told them to do as many as they felt they needed to do in order to demonstrate understanding. I wasn't checking it though. I created videos for each of those questions where I solved them and posted them online for students to view if needed. If they were stuck, they had the video they could look at. I encouraged them to google for help as well. Anything they were still stuck on, they could still come to me for help.

So, if I removed homework checks from my daily routine and deleted it from my gradebook, was there something I added? Absolutely. At the beginning of each class, I handed out a "mini quiz" with one question from the previous day on it. They had about 5 minutes to answer the question. At the end of the class, while students were working, I went through the mini quizzes, calling students up as I marked each one to return it, having a quick conversation or "mini lesson" to fix understanding. If I felt that enough students were struggling, I planned to rework the lesson for the next day.  These mini quizzes were worth 5 marks each. Students could come and rewrite mini quizzes over lunch hour or during their end of class work time if they felt they understood it better. I was writing a lot of new mini quizzes.

One day, I saw a video entitled "My Favorite No". This teacher started out by giving a one question quiz (just like I did) but here's where she differs. She immediately, in front of all those students, went through the quizzes and sorted them into "Yes" (the answer is correct) and "No"  (the answer is incorrect) piles, saying "Yes" or "No" as she went. When she reached the end of the quizzes, she went back through the "No" pile looking for her favorite "No".  She looked for a common misunderstanding / error that students predictably had.  Rewriting the students' work (to protect their identity), she told students she had found her "Favorite No". Yes, there is a mistake but there is good math happening in it as well. Then, she asked students to find all the good in the work. Students shared all the things that this student had done correctly. Then, she asked them to find the error. Once the error was identified, she asked them to help her fix it.  

I love this process. Instead of waiting until the end of the class to go through mini quizzes individually with students, errors and misunderstandings are addressed immediately. Students who made mistakes are seeing it solved correctly...not at the end of class but right away. Students are celebrating mistakes in class, looking for the good work that occurred and looking for errors that need to be fixed.

For me, this was powerful and a game changer. It allows me to immediately address misconceptions. I can refocus my lesson for the day if need be. The time at the end of class became usable for other support. Students weren't spending their lunch hours in my classroom rewriting mini quizzes and I wasn't spending my own time marking them.

Did I enter marks into my grade-book? No. This wasn't about compliance. This wasn't about compiling numbers to show that students had done work. This was about finding and addressing mathematical misunderstandings. Did I spend time looking through each paper to identify students with specific issues that needed to be addressed? Absolutely, but I only really needed to deal with students with major misunderstandings as most errors were dealt with during the classroom discussion.

I love how one little change can make a huge difference in the culture of the classroom. 

Reflection Question for you: What do you do to build a classroom culture that allows for students to respectfully discuss errors that have been made?