How to manage a rigorous curriculum (some tricks of the trade)

Hello everyone,

I know that, from the point of view of an English teacher at least, the idea of rigor includes the idea that students will actually do more reading and writing, which means that the teacher will do more reading and correcting. For English teachers, working to make adequate writers out of poor writers requires a lot of extra work, and this can be daunting.

I must assume that what is true for English teachers is true for teachers in other disciplines as well. If literacy is taught across the curriculum, there will be reading and writing across the curriculum, and that means correcting essays across the curriculum, which is difficult and time consuming.

Rigor also means that tests will be more demanding and harder to cheat on; it means that students will be doing more group presentations that require them to have a better grasp of the material; it means that there will be careful analysis of just where the mistakes are happening in students' calculations; it means that students will be required to memorize material and then demonstrate that they can synthesize what they have memorized.

If you are starting to sweat or feel anxiety or rebel at the increased workload, then you are normal.

So, if you are going to demand more out of your students, you must find practical ways of dealing with it so that you are not having to use more time than you have, burden yourselves more than you are actually burdened, or sacrifice your own children on the altar of someone else's children. I want to suggest a few tricks of the trade that might help you push your students without killing yourself. Feel free to use them or not, to adapt them or not, and to make them your own.

1. Don't grade everything. Always grade major projects; always grade tests; always give sufficient attention to something that has cost your students significant time. Routine assignments don't require the same amount of attention.

2. Have the students grade everything that can be graded by students. Make sure that no cheating happens: have the students write their names on papers ("corrected by . . ."), then hold them accountable for any changes to answers; do not always allow them to choose whose paper they will grade; have them grade assignments that don't require accuracy in the grading; have them grade their own assignments when cheating doesn't matter. Let the grading serve multiple purposes: do this grading quickly; use the grading time as review time.

3. Never grade more than one draft of an essay. You might check that the outline and early drafts are done, but you don't need to seriously grade more than the final draft.

4. Read essays out loud and grade them in front of the students. Keep them anonymous; read them exactly as written; liberally praise what is good and condemn what is lazily done. You'll find that it saves some time in grading essays, and it teaches the kids to find their voices.

5. Collect everything, but don't put everything in the rollbook. You must have at least one assignment per week; you should have two; all major or significant assignments must be given attention and credit, but routine assignments could be grouped together as "participation" or "classwork."

6. Assign students as assistants. Have equipment monitors, lab assistants, peer tutors. Offer extra credit. The more the students do, the more they learn, and the more you are freed to handle the very difficult things that a rigorous curriculum demands.

7. Practice "holistic" grading when appropriate. I always graded essay tests or "quickwrites" in this way. This is the way AP, CAHSEE, and CST essays are graded. You rapidly read the essay, then assign it to a pass/fail standard based on a rubric you've made out for the students. After that, you assign how high a pass or fail the essay gets based on your rubric. You might use numbers or letter grades. Numbers could correspond to letter grades or actual raw point values. For example, I may grade an essay test with two essays worth 50 points each. I read the essay quickly, and determine if it's a pass (above 30 points) or a fail (below 29 points). If it's a pass, I can easily judge the thoroughness of the answers, the depth of the analysis, the organization, and the relative lack of mechanical errors. I don't have to judge every single possible correct answer or inclusion of a large number of specific facts. (Practice makes this a very useful technique.)

Don't resist a rigorous curriculum because it is more difficult for the teacher. Manage your time and resources intelligently, and you will be able to lift the students without bringing yourself down.

Jeff Combe