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Classroom Assignments Matter. Here’s Why.

As a former classroom teacher, coach, and literacy specialist, I know the beginning of the school year demands that educators pay attention to a number of competing interests. Let me suggest one thing for teachers to focus on that, above all else, can close the student achievement gap: the rigor and quality of classroom assignments.

Digging into classroom assignments is revealing. It tells a story about curricula, instruction, achievement, and education equity. In the process, it uncovers what teachers believe about their students, what they know and understand about their standards and curricula, and what they are willing to do to advance student learning and achievement. So, when educators critically examine their own assignments (and the work students produce), they have an opportunity to gain powerful insight about teaching and learning — the kind of insight that can move the needle on student achievement. This type of analysis can identify trends across content areas such as English/language arts, science, social studies, and math.

At Ed Trust, we undertook such an analysis of 4,000 classroom assignments and found that students are being given in-school and out-of-school assignments that don’t align with grade-level standards, lack sufficient opportunities and time for writing, and include tasks that require low-level thinking and work production. We’ve seen assignments with little-to-no meaningful discussion and those with teachers over-supporting students, which effectively rob students of the kind of challenging thinking that leads to academic growth. And we’ve seen assignments where the reading looked like stop-and-go traffic, overrun with prescribed note-taking, breaking down students’ ability to build reading flow and deep learning.

These findings served as the basis for our second Equity in Motion convening. For three days this summer, educators from across the country explored the importance of regular and thoughtful assignment analysis. They found that carefully developed assignments have the power to make a curriculum last in students’ minds. They saw how assignments reveal whether students are grasping curricula, and if not, how teachers can adapt instruction. They also saw how assignments give clues into their own beliefs about students, which carry serious equity implications for all students, especially those who have been traditionally under-served. Throughout the convening, educators talked about the implications of their assignments and how assignments can affect overall achievement and address issues of equity. If assignments fall short of what standards demand, students will be ill-equipped to achieve at high levels.

The main take-away from this convening was simple but powerful: Assignments matter!

I encourage all teachers to take that message to heart. This school year, aim to make sure your assignments are more rigorous, standards-aligned, and authentically relevant to your students. Use our Literacy Analysis Assignment Guide to examine your assignments — alone, or better yet, with colleagues — to ensure you’re delivering assignments that propel your students to reach higher and achieve more. Doing this will provide a more complete picture of where your students are in their learning and how you can move them toward skill and concept mastery.

Remember this: Students can do no better than the assignments they receive.

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A Few Ideas for Dealing with Late Work

August 4, 2019

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Most of my 9-week grading periods ended the same way: Me and one or two students, sitting in my quiet, empty classroom together, with me sitting at the computer, the students nearby in desks, methodically working through piles of make-up assignments. They would be focused, more focused than I’d seen them in months, and the speed with which they got through the piles was stunning. 

As they finished each assignment I took it, checked it for accuracy, then entered their scores—taking 50 percent off for being late—into my grading program. With every entry, I’d watch as their class grade went up and up: from a 37 percent to a 41, then to 45, then to 51, and eventually to something in the 60s or even low 70s, a number that constituted passing, at which point the process would end and we’d part ways, full of resolve that next marking period would be different.

And the whole time I thought to myself, This is pointless . They aren’t learning anything at all. But I wasn’t sure what else to do.

For as long as teachers have assigned tasks in exchange for grades, late work has been a problem. What do we do when a student turns in work late? Do we give some kind of consequence or accept assignments at any time with no penalty? Do we set up some kind of system that keeps students motivated while still holding them accountable? Is there a way to manage all of this without driving ourselves crazy?

To find answers, I went to Twitter and asked teachers to share what works for them. What follows is a summary of their responses. I wish I could give individual credit to each person who offered ideas, but that would take way too long, and I really want you to get these suggestions now! If you’ve been unsatisfied with your own approach to late work, you should find some fresh ideas here.

First, a Few Questions About Your Grades

Before we get into the ways teachers manage late work, let’s back up a bit and consider whether your overall program of assignments and grading is in a healthy place. Here are some questions to think about:  

• What do your grades represent? How much of your grades are truly based on academic growth, and how much are based mostly on compliance? If they lean more toward compliance, then what you’re doing when you try to manage late work is basically a lot of administrative paper pushing, rather than teaching your content. Although it’s important for kids to learn how to manage deadlines, do you really want an A in your course to primarily reflect the ability to follow instructions? If your grades are too compliance-based, consider how you might shift things so they more accurately represent learning. (For a deeper discussion of this issue, read How Accurate Are Your Grades? )
• Are you grading too many things? If you spend a lot of time chasing down missing assignments in order to get more scores in your gradebook, it could be that you’re grading too much. Some teachers only enter grades for major, summative tasks, like projects, major writing assignments, or exams. Everything else is considered formative and is either ungraded or given a very low point value for completion, not graded for accuracy; it’s practice . For teachers who are used to collecting lots of grades over a marking period, this will be a big shift, and if you work in a school where you’re expected to enter grades into your system frequently, that shift will be even more difficult. Convincing your students that ungraded practice is worthwhile because it will help their performance on the big things will be another hurdle. With all of that said, reducing the number of scored items will make your grades more meaningful and cut way down on the time you spend grading and managing late work.
• What assumptions do you make when students don’t turn in work? I’m embarrassed to admit that when I first started teaching, I assumed most students with missing work were just unmotivated. Although this might be true for a small portion of students, I no longer see this as the most likely reason. Students may have issues with executive function and could use some help developing systems for managing their time and responsibilities. They may struggle with anxiety. Or they may not have the resources—like time, space, and technology—to consistently complete work at home. More attention has been paid lately to the fact that homework is an equity issue , and our policies around homework should reflect an understanding that all students don’t have access to the same resources once they leave school for the day. Punitive policies that are meant to “motivate” students don’t take any of these other issues into consideration, so if your late work penalties don’t seem to be working, it’s likely that the root cause is something other than a lack of motivation.
• What kind of grading system is realistic for you ? Any system you put in place requires YOU to stay on top of grading. It would be much harder to assign penalties, send home reminders, or track lateness if you are behind on marking papers by a week, two weeks, even a month. So whatever you do, create a plan that you can actually keep up with.

Possible Solutions

1. penalties.

Many teachers give some sort of penalty to students for late work. The thinking behind this is that without some sort of negative consequence, too many students would wait until the end of the marking period to turn work in, or in some cases, not turn it in at all. When work is turned in weeks or even months late, it can lose its value as a learning opportunity because it is no longer aligned with what’s happening in class. On top of that, teachers can end up with massive piles of assignments to grade in the last few days of a marking period. This not only places a heavy burden on teachers, it is far from an ideal condition for giving students the good quality feedback they should be getting on these assignments.

Several types of penalties are most common:

Point Deductions In many cases, teachers simply reduce the grade as a result of the lateness. Some teachers will take off a certain number of points per day until they reach a cutoff date after which the work will no longer be accepted. One teacher who responded said he takes off 10 percent for up to three days late, then 30 percent for work submitted up to a week late; he says most students turn their work in before the first three days are over. Others have a standard amount that comes off for any late work (like 10 percent), regardless of when it is turned in. This policy still rewards students for on-time work without completely de-motivating those who are late, builds in some accountability for lateness, and prevents the teacher from having to do a lot of mathematical juggling with a more complex system. 

Parent Contact Some teachers keep track of late work and contact parents if it is not turned in. This treats the late work as more of a conduct issue; the parent contact may be in addition to or instead of taking points away. 

No Feedback, No Re-Dos The real value of homework and other smaller assignments should be the opportunity for feedback: Students do an assignment, they get timely teacher feedback, and they use that feedback to improve. In many cases, teachers allow students to re-do and resubmit assignments based on that feedback. So a logical consequence of late work could be the loss of that opportunity: Several teachers mentioned that their policy is to accept late work for full credit, but only students who submit work on time will receive feedback or the chance to re-do it for a higher grade. Those who hand in late work must accept whatever score they get the first time around. 

2. A Separate Work Habits Grade

In a lot of schools, especially those that use standards-based grading, a student’s grade on an assignment is a pure representation of their academic mastery; it does not reflect compliance in any way. So in these classrooms, if a student turns in good work, it’s going to get a good grade even if it’s handed in a month late. 

But students still need to learn how to manage their time. For that reason, many schools assign a separate grade for work habits. This might measure factors like adherence to deadlines, neatness, and following non-academic guidelines like font sizes or using the correct heading on a paper. 

• Although most teachers whose schools use this type of system will admit that students and parents don’t take the work habits grade as seriously as the academic grade, they report being satisfied that student grades only reflect mastery of the content.
• One school calls their work habits grade a “behavior” grade, and although it doesn’t impact GPA, students who don’t have a certain behavior grade can’t make honor roll, despite their actual GPA.
• Several teachers mentioned looking for patterns and using the separate grade as a basis for conferences with parents, counselors, or other stakeholders. For most students, there’s probably a strong correlation between work habits and academic achievement, so separating the two could help students see that connection.
• Some learning management systems will flag assignments as late without necessarily taking points off. Although this does not automatically translate to a work habits grade, it indicates the lateness to students and parents without misrepresenting the academic achievement.

3. Homework Passes

Because things happen in real life that can throw anyone off course every now and then, some teachers offer passes students can use to replace a missed assignment.

• Most teachers only offer these passes to replace low-point assignments, not major ones, and they generally only offer 1 to 3 passes per marking period. Homework passes can usually only recover 5 to 10 percent of a student’s overall course grade. 
• Other teachers have a policy of allowing students to drop one or two of their lowest scores in the gradebook. Again, this is typically done for smaller assignments and has the same net effect as a homework pass by allowing everyone to have a bad day or two.
• One teacher gives “Next Class Passes” which allow students one extra day to turn in work. At the end of every marking period she gives extra credit points to students who still have unused passes. She says that since she started doing this, she has had the lowest rate ever of late work. 

4. Extension Requests

Quite a few teachers require students to submit a written request for a deadline extension rather than taking points off. With a system like this, every student turns something in on the due date, whether it’s the assignment itself or an extension request.

• Most extension requests ask students to explain why they were unable to complete the assignment on time. This not only gives the students a chance to reflect on their habits, it also invites the teacher to help students solve larger problems that might be getting in the way of their academic success. 
• Having students submit their requests via Google Forms reduces the need for paper and routes all requests to a single spreadsheet, which makes it easier for teachers to keep track of work that is late or needs to be regraded.  
• Other teachers use a similar system for times when students want to resubmit work for a new grade. 

5. Floating Deadlines

Rather than choosing a single deadline for an assignment, some teachers assign a range of dates for students to submit work. This flexibility allows students to plan their work around other life activities and responsibilities.

• Some teachers offer an incentive to turn in work in the early part of the time frame, such as extra credit or faster feedback, and this helps to spread out the submissions more evenly. 
• Another variation on this approach is to assign a batch of work for a whole week and ask students to get it in by Friday. This way, students get to manage when they get it done. 
• Other names mentioned for this strategy were flexible deadlines , soft deadlines , and due windows .

6. Let Students Submit Work in Progress

Some digital platforms, like Google Classroom, allow students to “submit” assignments while they are still working on them. This allows teachers to see how far the student has gotten and address any problems that might be coming up. If your classroom is mostly paper-based, it’s certainly possible to do this kind of thing with paper as well, letting students turn in partially completed work to demonstrate that an effort has been made and show you where they might be stuck.

7. Give Late Work Full Credit

Some teachers accept all late work with no penalty. Most of them agree that if the work is important, and if we want students to do it, we should let them hand it in whenever they get it done. 

• Some teachers fear this approach will cause more students to stop doing the work or delay submission until the end of a marking period, but teachers who like this approach say they were surprised by how little things changed when they stopped giving penalties: Most students continued to turn work in more or less on time, and the same ones who were late under the old system were still late under the new one. The big difference was that the teacher no longer had to spend time calculating deductions or determining whether students had valid excuses; the work was simply graded for mastery.
• To give students an incentive to actually turn the work in before the marking period is over, some teachers will put a temporary zero in the gradebook as a placeholder until the assignment is turned in, at which point the zero is replaced with a grade.
• Here’s a twist on the “no penalty” option: Some teachers don’t take points off for late work, but they limit the time frame when students can turn it in. Some will not accept late work after they have graded and returned an assignment; at that point it would be too easy for students to copy off of the returned papers. Others will only accept late work up until the assessment for the unit, because the work leading up to that is meant to prepare for that assessment. 

8. Other Preventative Measures

These strategies aren’t necessarily a way to manage late work as much as they are meant to prevent it in the first place.

• Include students in setting deadlines. When it comes to major assignments, have students help you determine due dates. They may have a better idea than you do about other big events that are happening and assignments that have been given in other classes.
• Stop assigning homework. Some teachers have stopped assigning homework entirely, recognizing that disparities at home make it an unfair measurement of academic mastery. Instead, all meaningful work is done in class, where the teacher can monitor progress and give feedback as needed. Long-term projects are done in class as well, so the teacher is aware of which students need more time and why. 
• Make homework optional or self-selected. Not all students need the same amount of practice. You may be able to get your students to assess their own need for additional practice and assign that practice to themselves. Although this may sound far-fetched, in some classes, like this self-paced classroom , it actually works, because students know they will be graded on a final assessment, they get good at determining when they need extra practice.

With so many different approaches to late work, what’s clear is that there are a lot of different schools of thought on grading and assessment, so it’s not a surprise that we don’t always land on the best solution on the first try. Experiment with different systems, talk to your colleagues, and be willing to try something new until you find something that works for you. 

Further Reading

20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half This free e-book is full of ideas that can help with grading in general.

On Your Mark: Challenging the Conventions of Grading and Reporting Thomas R. Guskey This book came highly recommended by a number of teachers.

Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School Starr Sackstein

Come back for more. Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You’ll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half , the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined—come on in.

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Categories: Classroom Management , Instruction , Podcast

Tags: assessment , organization

51 Comments

I teach high school science (mine is a course that does not have an “end of course” test so the stakes are not as high) and I teach mostly juniors and seniors. Last year I decided not to accept any late work whatsoever unless a student is absent the day it is assigned or due (or if they have an accomodation in a 504 or IEP – and I may have had one or two students with real/documented emergencies that I let turn in late.) This makes it so much easier on me because I don’t have to keep up with how many days/points to deduct – that’s a nightmare. It also forces them to be more responsible. They usually have had time to do it in class so there’s no reason for it to be late. Also, I was very frustrated with homework not being completed and I hated having to grade it and keep up with absent work. So I don’t “require” homework (and rarely assign it any more) but if students do ALL (no partial credit) of it they get a 100% (small point value grade), if they are absent or they don’t do it they are exempt. So it ends up being a sort of extra credit grade but it does not really penalize students who don’t do it. When students ask me for extra credit (which I don’t usually give), the first thing I ask is if they’ve done all the homework assigned. That usually shuts down any further discussion. I’ve decided I’m not going to spend tons of time chasing and calculating grades on small point values that do not make a big difference in an overall grade. 🙂

Do I understand correctly….

Homework is not required. If a student fully completes the HW, they will earn full points. If the student is absent or doesn’t do it, they are excused. Students who do complete the HW will benefit a little bit in their overall grade, but students who don’t compete the work will not be penalized. Did I understand it correctly?

Do you stipulate that a student must earn a certain % on the assignment to get the full points? What about a student who completed an assignment but completes the entire thing incorrectly? Still full credit? Or an opportunity to re-do?

Thank you in advance.

From reading this blog post I was thinking the same thing. When not penalizing students for homework do you have students who do turn it in getting extra points in class?

From what I have seen, if there is a benefit for turning in homework and students see this benefit more will try to accomplish what the homework is asking. So avoid penalization is okay, but make sure the ones turning it in are getting rewarded in some way.

The other question regarding what to do with students who may not be completing the assignments correctly, you could use this almost as a formative assessment. You could still give them the credit but use this as a time for you to focus on that student a little more and see where he/she isn’t understanding the content.

Our school has a system called Catch Up Cafe. Students with missing work report to a specific teacher during the first 15 minutes of lunch to work on missing work. Students upgrade to a Wednesday after school time if they have accumulated 4 or more missing assignments on any Monday. They do not have to serve if they can clear ALL missing work by the end of the day Wednesday. Since work is not dragging out for a long period of time, most teachers do not take off points.

How do you manage the logistics of who has missing and how many assignments are needed to be completed-to make sure they are attending the Catch up Cafe or Wednesday after school? How do you manage the communication with parents?

When a student has missing work it can be very difficult to see what he/she is missing. I always keep a running record of all of their assignments that quarter and if they miss that assigement I keep it blank to remind myself there was never a submission. Once I know that this student is missing this assignment I give them their own copy and write at the top late. So once they do turn it in I know that it’s late and makes grading it easier.

There are a lot of different programs that schools use but I’ve always kept a paper copy so I have a back-up.

I find that the worst part of tracking make-up work is keeping tabs on who was absent for a school activity, illness or other excused absence, and who just didn’t turn in the assignment. I obviously have to accept work turned in “late” due to an excused absence, but I can handle the truly late work however I wish. Any advice on simplifying tracking for this?

I tell my students to simply write “Absent (day/s)” at the top of the paper. I remind them of this fairly regularly. That way, if they were absent, it’s their responsibility to notify me, and it’s all together. If you create your own worksheets, etc., you could add a line to the top as an additional reminder.

It might be worth checking out Evernote .

In order to keep track of what type of missing assignments, I put a 0 in as a grade so students and parents know an assignment was never submitted. If a student was here on the due date and day assignment was given then it is a 0 in the grade book. If a student was absent the day the assignment was given or when it was due, I put a 00 in the grade book. This way I know if it was because of an absence or actual no work completed.

This is exactly what I do. Homework can only count 10% in our district. Claims that kids fail due to zeros for homework are specious.

This is SUCH a difficult issue and I have tried a few of the suggested ways in years past. My questions is… how do we properly prepare kids for college while still being mindful of the inequities at home? We need to be sure that we are giving kids opportunity, resources, and support, but at the same time if we don’t introduce them to some of the challenges they will be faced with in college (hours of studying and research and writing regardless of the hours you might have to spend working to pay that tuition), are we truly preparing them? I get the idea of mastery of content without penalty for late work and honestly that is typically what I go with, but I constantly struggle with this and now that I will be moving from middle to high school, I worry even more about the right way to handle late work and homework. I don’t want to hold students back in my class by being too much of a stickler about seemingly little things, but I don’t want to send them to college unprepared to experience a slap in the face, either. I don’t want to provide extra hurdles, but how do I best help them learn how to push through the hurdles and rigor if they aren’t held accountable? I always provide extra time after school, at lunch, etc., and have also experienced that end of term box checking of assignments in place of a true learning experience, but how do we teach them the importance of using resources, asking for help, allowing for mistakes while holding them to standards and learning work habits that will be helpful to them when they will be on their own? I just don’t know where the line is between helping students learn the value of good work habits and keeping them from experiencing certain challenges they need to understand in order to truly get ahead.

Thanks for sharing – I can tell how much you care for your students, wanting them to be confident independent learners. What I think I’m hearing is perhaps the struggle between that fine line of enabling and supporting. When supporting kids, whether academically or behaviorally, we’re doing something that assists or facilitates their growth. So, for example, a student that has anxiety or who doesn’t have the resources at home to complete an assignment, we can assist by giving that student extra time or an alternative place to complete the assignment. This doesn’t lower expectations, it just offers support to help them succeed.

Enabling on the other hand, puts systems in place that don’t involve consequences, which in turn allow the behaviors to continue. It involves excuses and solving problems for others. It may be about lowering expectations and letting people get by with patterns of behavior.

Late work is tricky. The article does mention the importance of time management, which is why separating academic grades from work habits is something a lot of schools are doing. Sometimes real life happens and kids need a “pass.” If whatever you’re doing seems to be helping to support a student rather than enabling patterns, then that might help you distinguish between that fine line. Hope this helps!

Thank you again for such a great post. Always high-quality, relevant, and helpful. I so appreciate you and the work you do!

So glad to hear you enjoyed the post, Liz! I’ll make sure Jenn sees this.

I thought that these points brought up about receiving late work were extremely helpful and I hope that every classroom understands how beneficial these strategies could be.

When reading the penalties section under point deductions it brought up the idea of taking points off slowly as time goes by. Currently in my classroom the only point deduction I take off is 30% of the total grade after it is received late. No matter how much time has gone by in that grading period it will have 30% off the total.

I’m curious if changing this technique to something that would increase the percentage off as time goes by will make students turn in their work on time.

My question to everyone is which grading technique would be more beneficial for the students? Do you believe that just taking off 30% for late work would help students more when turning in their work or do you think that as time goes by penalizing their final score will have students turn in their work more?

If anyone has any answers it would be extremely beneficial.

Thank you, Kirby

When I was in school my school did 1/3 of a grade each day it was like. So 1 day late A >A-. Two days late: A->>B+ so on and so forth. This worked really well for me because I knew that I could still receive a good grade if I worked hard on an assignment, even if it was a day or two late.

I dread it when I have missing work or unsubmitted work. I would try to get a last-minute effort to chase those needed pieces of work which could be done from those students housed in dorms on campus. It is better than not failing them for lacking to turn in graded submissions or taking scheduled quizzes. I dread this not for the students, sadly, but for likely call to explain why I did not keep physical evidence of students’ supposed learning. In my part of the globe, we have a yearly “quality assurance” audit by the country’s educational authorities or their representatives.

I am a pre-service teacher and I am in the process of developing my personal philosophies in education, including the topic of late work. I will be certified as a secondary social studies teacher and would like to teach in a high school. Your post brought my attention to some important insights about the subject. For example, before this post I had not thought to use feedback as a way to incentivize homework submission on time. This action coupled with the ability to re-do assignments is a great way to emphasize the importance of turning work in on time. I do have a follow-up question, how do you adequately manage grading re-do’s and feedback on all assignments? What kinds of organizational and time-management strategies do you use as a teacher? Further, how much homework do you assign when providing this as an option?

Additionally, have you administered or seen the no penalty and homework acceptance time limit in practice (for example, all homework must be turned in by the unit test)? I was curious if providing a deadline to accept all homework until the unit test may result in an access of papers I need to grade. From your experience, what practice(s) have you seen work well in the classroom?

My goal is to prepare students for life beyond high school and to support their intellectual, social, and emotional development during their high school learning experience. Similar to a previous commenter (Kate), I am also trying to define a balance between holding students accountable in order to best prepare them for their future lives and providing opportunities to raise their grade if they are willing to do the work.

Hey Jessica, you have some great questions. I’d recommend checking out the following blog posts from Jenn that will help you learn more about keeping track of assessments, differentiation, and other aspects of grading: Kiddom: Standards-based Grading Made Wonderful , Could You Teach Without Grades , Boost Your Assessment Power with GradeCam , and Four Research-Based Strategies Every Teacher Should be Using . I hope this helps you find answers to your questions!

Overall I found this article extremely helpful and it actually reinforced many ideas I already had about homework and deadlines. One of my favorite teachers I had in high school was always asking for our input on when we felt assignments should be due based on what extra curricular activities were taking place in a given time period. We were all extremely grateful for his consideration and worked that much harder on the given assignments.

While it is important to think about our own well-being when grading papers, I think it is just as important (if not more) to be conscious of how much work students might have in other classes or what students schedules are like outside of school. If we really want students to do their best work, we need to give them enough time to do the work. This will in turn, help them care more about the subject matter and help them dive deeper. Obviously there still needs to be deadlines, but it does not hurt to give students some autonomy and say in the classroom.

Thanks for your comment Zach. I appreciate your point about considering students’ involvement in extracurricular activities and other responsibilities they may have outside the school day. It’s definitely an important consideration. The only homework my son seemed to have in 8th grade was for his history class. I agree that there’s a need for teachers to maintain more of a balance across classes when it comes to the amount of homework they give to students.

Thank you for an important, thought-provoking post! As a veteran teacher of 20+ years, I have some strong opinions about this topic. I have always questioned the model of ‘taking points off’ for late work. I do not see how this presents an accurate picture of what the student knows or can do. Shouldn’t he be able to prove his knowledge regardless of WHEN? Why does WHEN he shows you what he knows determine WHAT he knows?

Putting kids up against a common calendar with due dates and timelines, regardless of their ability to learn the material at the same rate is perhaps not fair. There are so many different situations facing our students – some students have challenges and difficulty with deadlines for a plethora of potential reasons, and some have nothing but support, structure, and time. When it comes to deadlines – Some students need more time. Other students may need less time. Shouldn’t all students have a chance to learn at a pace that is right for them? Shouldn’t we measure student success by demonstrations of learning instead of how much time it takes to turn in work? Shouldn’t students feel comfortable when it is time to show me what they’ve learned, and when they can demonstrate they’ve learned it, I want their grade to reflect that.

Of course we want to teach students how to manage their time. I am not advocating for a lax wishy-washy system that allows for students to ‘get to it when they get to it’. I do believe in promoting work-study habits, and using a separate system to assign a grade for responsibility, respect, management, etc is a potential solution. I understand that when introducing this type of system, it may be tough to get buy-in from parents and older students who have traditionally only looked at an academic grade because it is the only piece of the puzzle that impacts GPA. Adopting a separate work-study grading system would involve encouraging the entire school community – starting at the youngest level – to see its value. It would be crucial for the school to promote the importance of high level work-study habits right along side academic grades.

I teach a specials course to inner city middle schoolers at a charter school. All students have to take my class since it is one of the core pillars of the school’s culture and mission. Therefore it is a double edge sword. Some students and parents think it is irrelevant like an art or music class but will get upset to find out it isn’t just an easy A class. Other students and parents love it because they come to our charter school just to be in this class that isn’t offered anywhere else in the state, except at the college level.

As you may have already guessed, I see a lot of students who don’t do the work. So much that I no longer assign homework, which the majority would not be able to do independently anyways or may develop the wrong way of learning the material, due to the nature of the subject. So everything is done in the classroom together as a class. And then we grade together to reinforce the learning. This is why I absolutely do not accept missing work and there is no reason for late work. Absent students make up the work by staying after school upon their return or they can print it off of Google classroom at home and turn in by the end of the day of their return. Late and missing work is a big issue at our school. I’ve had whole classrooms not do the work even as I implemented the new routine. Students will sit there and mark their papers as we do it in the classroom but by the end they are not handing it in because they claim not to have anything to hand in. Or when they do it appears they were doing very little. I’d have to micromanage all 32 students every 5 minutes to make sure they were actually doing the work, which I believe core teachers do. But that sets a very bad precedent because I noticed our students expect to be handheld every minute or they claim they can’t do the work. I know this to be the case since before this class I was teaching a computer class and the students expected me to sit right next to them and give them step-by-step instructions of where to click on the screen. They simply could not follow along as I demonstrated on the Aquos board. So I do think part of the problem is the administrators’ encouraging poor work ethics. They’re too focused on meeting proficient standard to the point they want teachers to handhold students. They also want teachers to accept late and missing work all the way until the end of each quarter. Well that’s easy if you only have a few students but when you have classrooms full of them, that means trying to grade 300+ students multiplied by “x” amount of late/missing work the week before report card rolls out – to which we still have to write comments for C- or below students. Some of us teach all the grade levels 6-8th. And that has actually had negative effects because students no longer hold themselves accountable.

To be honest, I really do think this is why there is such a high turnover rate and teachers who started giving busy work only. In the inner city, administrators only care about putting out the illusion of proficiency while students and parents don’t want any accountability for their performance. As soon as a student fails because they have to actually try to learn (which is a risk for failing), the parent comes in screaming.

Yea, being an Art teacher you lost me at “ irrelevant like an art or music .”

I teach middle school in the inner city where missing and late work is a chronic issue so the suggestions and ideas above do not work. Students and parents have become complacent with failing grades so penalizing work isn’t going to motivate them to do better the next time. The secret to teaching in the inner city is to give them a way out without it becoming massive work for you. Because trust me, if you give them an inch they will always want a mile at your expense. Depending on which subject you teach, it might be easier to just do everything in class. That way it becomes an all or nothing grade. They either did or didn’t do the work. No excuses, no chasing down half the school through number of calls to disconnected phone numbers and out of date emails, no explaining to parents why Johnny has to stay after school to finish assignments when mom needs him home to babysit or because she works second shift and can’t pick him up, etc. Students have no reason for late work or for missing work when they were supposed to do it right there in class. Absent students can catch up with work when they return.

Milton, I agree with all of what you are saying and have experienced. Not to say that that is for all students I have had, but it is a slow progression as to what is happening with students and parents as years go by. I understand that there are areas outside of the classroom we cannot control and some students do not have certain necessities needed to help them but they need to start learning what can they do to help themselves. I make sure the students know they can come and talk to me if needing help or extra time, tutor after school and even a phone number to contact along with email if needing to ask questions or get help. But parents and students do not use these opportunities given until the week before school ends and are now wanting their student to pass and what can be done. It is frustrating and sad. I let students and parents know my expectation up front and if they do not take the opportunity to talk to me then the grade they earned is the result.

I am a special education resource teacher and late work/missing work happens quite a lot. After reading this article, I want to try a few different things to help minimize this issue. However, I am not the one making the grades or putting the grades in. I am just giving the work to the students in small group settings and giving them more access to the resources they need to help them be successful on these assignments based on their current IEP. I use a make-up folder, and usually I will pull these students to work on their work during a different time than when I regularly pull them. That way they do not miss the delivery of instruction they get from me and it does not punish my other students either if there is make-up work that needs to be completed. I try to give my students ample time to complete their work, so there is no excuse for them not to complete it. If they are absent, then I pull them at a time that they can make it up.

I too agree with that there’s a need for teachers to maintain more of a balance across classes when it comes to the amount of homework they give to students.

I had a few teachers who were willing to tolerate lateness in favor of getting it/understanding the material. Lastly, my favorite teacher was the one who gave me many chances to do rewrites of a ‘bad essay’ and gave me as much time as needed (of course still within like the semester or even month but I never took more than two weeks) because he wanted me to do well. I ended up with a 4 in AP exam though so that’s good.

Late work has a whole new meaning with virtual learning. I am drowning in late work (via Google Classroom). I don’t want to penalize students for late work as every home situation is different. I grade and provide feedback timely (to those who submitted on time). However, I am being penalized every weekend and evening as I try to grade and provide feedback during this time. I would love some ideas.

Hi Susan! I’m in the same place–I have students who (after numerous reminders) still haven’t submitted work due days…weeks ago, and I’m either taking time to remind them again or give feedback on “old” work over my nights and weekends. So, while it’s not specific to online learning, Jenn’s A Few Ideas for Dealing with Late Work is a post I’ve been trying to put into practice the last few days. I hope this helps!

Graded assignment flexibility is essential to the process of learning in general but especially in our new world of digital divide

It is difficult to determine who is doing the work at home. Follow up videos on seesaw help to see if the student has gained the knowledge or is being given the answers.

This is some good information. This is a difficult subject.

I love the idea of a catch-up cafe! I think I will try to implement this in my school. It’s in the same place every day, yes? And the teachers take turns monitoring? I’m just trying to get a handle on the logistics – I know those will be the first questions I get.

I really enjoyed this post. I think it provides a lot of perspective on a topic that teachers get way too strict about. I just wonder: wouldn’t it be inevitable for students to become lazy and care less about their understanding if there wasn’t any homework (or even if it was optional)? I know students don’t like it, and it can get redundant if they understand the content, but it truly is good practice.

Hi Shannon,

Glad the post helped! Homework is one of those hot educational topics, but I can’t say I’ve personally come across a situation or found any research where kids become lazy or unmotivated if not assigned homework. In fact, research indicates that homework doesn’t really have much impact on learning until high school. I just think that if homework is going to be assigned, it needs to be intentional and purposeful. (If students have already mastered a skill, I’m not sure how homework would provide them much benefit.) Here’s an article that I think is worth checking out. See what you think.

I like how you brought up how homework needs to be given with the understanding that not all kids have the same resources at home. Some kids don’t have computers or their parents won’t let them use it. There is no way of knowing this so teachers should give homework that requires barely any utensils or technology.

I think having students help determine the due dates for major assignments is a great idea. This works well with online schools too. Remote jobs are the future so helping students learn how to set their own due dates and to get homework done from home will prepare them for the future.

This year I am trying something new. After reading this article, I noticed that I have used a combination of some of these strategies to combat late work and encourage students to turn work in on time. I only record a letter grade in the grade book: A, B, C, D, F. If a student turns in an assignment late, I flag it as late, but it does not affect their “grade”.

If a student wants to redo an assignment, they must turn something in. If they miss the due date, they can still turn it in, but lose the opportunity to redo the assignment. Students will meet with me one last time before they turn it in to get final feedback.

At the end of the grading period, I conference with the student about their final grade, looking at how many times they have handed work in on-time or late. This will determine if the student has earned an A or an A+ .

I really appreciate how your post incorporates a lot of suggestions for the way that teachers can think about and grade homework. Thank you for mentioning how different students have different resources available as well. As teachers, we need to be aware of the different resources our students have and tailor our approach to homework to match. I like the idea of grading homework based on completion and accepting late work for full credit at any time (substituting a zero in the grade book until it is turned in). This is definitely a strategy that I’ll be using!

So glad the article was helpful for you! I will be sure to pass on your comments to Jenn.

I also have been teaching for a long time and I have found that providing an END OF WEEK (Friday at 11:59) due date for assignments allows students to get the work completed by that time. It helps with athletes, and others involved in extra curricular activities. I feel this is fair. I give my tests/quizzes on the days assigned and the supplemental work on Fridays.

I personally, as a special education teach, would allow my SPED students extra time to complete the work they have missed. This is in alignment with their IEP accommodations. I would work with each one independently and have remediation with the content that they are having difficulty. This setting would be in a small group and separate classroom.

I really like the idea of a work habits grade. I struggle with students who turn things in late regularly earning the same grade as those who always turn things in on time. A work habits grade could really motivate some learners.

I’ve been in education for 37 years and in all manner of positions. I share this only to also say that things have changed quite a bit. When I started teaching I only had one, maybe two students in a class of 34 elementary students that would not have homework or classwork finished. Now, I have two classes of about 15 each. One group is often half the class on a regular basis not having homework or not finishing classwork on a regular basis- so far. Additionally parents will pull students out to go to amusement parks, etc and expect all work to be made up and at full credit. I believe that the idea of homework is clearly twofold- to teach accountability and to reengage a learner. Classwork is critical to working with the content and, learning objective. We can all grade various ways; however, at some point, the learner has to step up. Learning is not passive, nor is it all on the teacher. I have been called “mean” because I make students do their work in class, refocusing them, etc. I find that is my duty. Late work should be simply dealt with consistently and with understanding to circumstance IMO. You were out or it was late because mom and dad were upset, ok versus we went to Disney for three days and I was too tired. hmm- used to be easy with excused/unexcused absences, now there is no difference. Late with no absence? That can be a problem and I reach out to home and handle it individually at my level.

Hi Jennifer! I really like your sharing about this topic! Late work is a problem that every teacher encounters. Thank you for your consideration of this issue and the many wise ideas you have provided. Your ideas also remind me to reflect on whether my overall program of assignments and grading is in a healthy place. I was inspired by the preventative measures you listed in this post. I want to try to include my students in setting deadlines, especially for some big projects. Students will feel respected by teachers and will be more willing to complete the assignments before deadlines! As you mentioned, some teachers have made homework optional or self-selected, or even stopped assigning homework. I partially agree with that opinion. I indeed try to reduce the amount of students’ homework or even stop assigning homework sometime, but doing related practice in class instead. I believe that the purpose of homework is to aid pupils in mastering the knowledge; it is not a necessary thing.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Yang. Jenn will be glad to know that you found the post inspiring!

Thanks so much for all your insights on giving assignments or homework. All are very helpful as I prepare to return to work after an extended medical leave. It is good to refresh! Anything we require of our students should be purposeful and meaningful to them, so they will give their best to meet whatever deadlines we set. I also like asking our students when is the best time they can turn work in; this is meeting them halfway. And if one strategy does not work, there are more to try; just read this post. Thanks a bunch!!

Jenn will be glad to know the post was helpful for you, Jo!

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Should Students Get a ‘Do Over’? The Debate on Grading and Re-Doing Assignments Deepens

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A student fails a test. Should the teacher allow a redo?

Based on recent Education Week polling and coverage, it depends on whom you ask.

Somewhat surprisingly, teachers and school leaders are not necessarily in agreement over this.

In a nationally representative poll of teachers this winter by the Edweek Research Center , respondents voted “the chance to redo assignments” 11th out of 24 options offered when asked what they thought was most likely to motivate students. The factor teachers thought would most likely motivate students? That turned out to be “offering more hands-on experiences.”

Incidentally, that same question posed to students ages 13 to 19 drew a much different response. Student respondents chose “a chance to redo assignments if I get a low grade” as the leading factor (out of 24 options) that would motivate them to work harder.

In a separate (but less scientific) poll posed to readers of Education Week’s The Savvy Principal newsletter, readers—who are mainly principals and other K–12 school leaders—were asked: Should students be allowed to redo assignments when they get a failing grade? Among 241 respondents, 83 percent said yes; 17 percent said no.

One school leader, who responded in the affirmative to the poll question, elaborated on her response: “Allowing students to revise and resubmit work fosters student reflection on their work, a growth mindset, and the opportunity to improve skills and deepen knowledge. Students learn it’s not about getting work done, it’s about getting it done well,” said Christine Davis, interim principal at Eric S. Smith Middle School in Ramsey, N.J.

Another school leader had a different take. “When we allow students to redo work,” wrote Robert Stephens, the head of Episcopal Day School in Pensacola, Fla., “we are inadvertently teaching them that there are no consequences for poor performance that results from bad decisions.”

What’s behind these differing opinions on the re-do?

Rick Wormeli, a former classroom teacher, educational consultant, and author of Fair Isn’t Always Equal: Assessment & Grading in the Differentiated Classroom, has given a lot of thought to the re-do, and grading, in general. He has analyzed what grading represents; in what context it can motivate students; and how teachers can use it as part of the learning process.

Wormeli this week shared his insights with Education Week.

Teachers-in-training lack preparation on the how’s and why’s of assessments

Wormeli recalls an exit interview he had as a graduating college senior who had studied education in the 1980s.

“I scolded my professors and dean,” Wormeli recalled. “I said, ‘You guys gave me a stats course, but the real thing that students [studying to be teachers] worry about is: How do I grade my tests and quizzes? How do I know if my tests accurately report what kids learn?’”

Even today, Wormeli said, not many instructors who teach university courses for pre-service teachers have a strong background on ethical, accurate, and equitable grading practices. A proponent of such practices, Wormeli volunteered to serve on the assessing and reporting committee in the Northern Virginia school district where he taught. It allowed him the opportunity to raise questions about the purpose of grading and challenge existing notions and norms.

Challenging traditional notions of grading

“There are a lot of teachers that promote assessment as ‘gotcha accountability’ rather than assessment as instruction,” said Wormeli, who refers to this way of seeing the grading process as “transactional.”

Assigning poor grades to students is akin to acknowledging that you’ve caught them falling short, explained Wormeli. “It’s a hurtful and antiquated notion of assessment,” he said.

A low grade, particularly when there isn’t the opportunity to redo the assignment and raise the grade, breeds resentment, Wormeli said.

Grading as part of the learning process

Wormeli describes grades, when used most effectively, as part of the learning process. And if grades offer feedback as part of that process, they can be perceived as a piece of an evolving continuum.

“When teachers use grades as a way to provide students with feedback, then that feedback should be accompanied by considering how to help kids make it actionable,” Wormeli said.

Improving upon an existing grade by re-doing assignments would be the logical action step. “Redos” happen in the professional world all the time, he pointed out.

“In every single profession, we’ve found that reiteration is how someone becomes competent,” Wormeli said. “How is that achieved? Not by ‘one and done.’”

Wormeli has trained countless teachers; among them were people who entered the teaching profession as their second careers. “What’s really cool is that, in training of second-career teachers—software engineers, military personnel, etcetera—they all say ‘Of course you do re-do’s.’”

Changing teachers’ mindset about the re-do

Wormeli is familiar with the arguments teachers make against re-dos, especially the complaint that it will take too much of their time. He counters: It’s the re-learning that takes the time. And it’s the student who must do the heavy lifting, he said.

“I have to get across to a lot of teachers that it’s in the re-learning where you mature,” he said. “In the plan of re-learning, students have to submit to that plan.”

Denying a re-do gives students an escape from learning whatever was on the original assignment, Wormeli explained. Conversely, allowing students to redo an assignment signifies that what matters is that they learn the material.

“It’s a cultural mindshift,” he said. “It’s amazing how motivated kids are when they own their learning.”

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Teachers are in the role of continually making assessments. They evaluate how the students are performing. They look at how well the material being used is accepted by the students. They are interested in how they’re teaching style works in the classroom. Throughout their day, they are collecting data in the classroom to make assessments.

There are several different ways to collect the information they use. Some techniques will work better for some teachers than others. Some techniques work better in certain classrooms. If one technique does not work quite right, another can be employed fairly quickly

Formative Data

Short quizzes, question and answer drills and a simple show of hands generates a certain kind of data. It may show where the class’ understanding is in that moment so the teacher can decide in which direction to take the class.

Ad hoc evaluation of student knowledge yields different data than examinations requiring study or review.

Observational Data

Teachers learn to watch their students. Observe behaviors while interacting with the student, when they are working on assignments by themselves or on a group assignment. Each situation results in unique information about each student.

How do students react when the teacher is walking around the classroom versus standing in front in one of the “teaching spots”? What is the behavior when students talk with the teacher? Present to the class? How does behavior change when a guest addresses the class?

How are questions answered? When asked a direct question, how does the student respond? How much time do they take to think about the answer and formulate their response?

While a student is answering the teacher or addressing the class, the rest of the room should be scanned to observe the responses of the other students.

Depending on what is going on in the classroom, observational data can be difficult to collect with any consistency. It may be beneficial to have another person spend time observing the students as a class progresses. A teaching assistant who has been trained in observational techniques can watch the class and record what they see. This can be especially useful for a teacher who is very busy during an instruction or in a class that loves to participate.

Standardized Tests, Key Milestone Exams and Project Work

Summative data is collected from the examinations given at the end of unit or the end of year. Large projects that take several weeks also become a source of information. This data is often looked at as a reflection of the group’s learning.

This data is sometimes considered more an indicator of the effectiveness of the teaching of the material or the class’ ability to comprehend that level of information.

Student Files

While not exactly data collected in the classroom, student records provide useful information. Taking the time to review student files and counseling records, the teacher will have some reference points from which to compare the data from within the class.

Student Reported Data

Students can be engaged in various ways to produce a lot of helpful information. By creating fun projects for students to report their own progress, teachers can gain more insight into how the student perceives their own accomplishments and ability.

If teaching the Common Core curriculum, create bar charts that students can color in to indicate their own level of understanding of the material.

Create a chart to post on the wall that students will sign when they feel they have mastered a particular problem. Use this with smaller, discreet assignments so students will see their own accomplishment.

Place a large, lined sheet on the wall to capture student questions about a certain topic. Address the questions at the beginning of each presentation.

Similarly, create a place where students can make comments on the material and topic presented. For K-6, this could be the sheet of paper on the wall or a binder placed in the classroom. For 7-12, this could be an online blog or comment section on a classroom website.

Help students create their own learning goals and track them. Students will also learn about goal setting as they decide their individual targets.

Looking for data in the right places

There is much information that can be gathered in the classroom setting. Some will be captured without the student’s awareness. Look for ways to engage the student’s interest so they can generate their own information.

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Teaching, Learning, & Professional Development Center

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How Do I Create Meaningful and Effective Assignments?

Prepared by allison boye, ph.d. teaching, learning, and professional development center.

Assessment is a necessary part of the teaching and learning process, helping us measure whether our students have really learned what we want them to learn. While exams and quizzes are certainly favorite and useful methods of assessment, out of class assignments (written or otherwise) can offer similar insights into our students' learning.  And just as creating a reliable test takes thoughtfulness and skill, so does creating meaningful and effective assignments. Undoubtedly, many instructors have been on the receiving end of disappointing student work, left wondering what went wrong… and often, those problems can be remedied in the future by some simple fine-tuning of the original assignment.  This paper will take a look at some important elements to consider when developing assignments, and offer some easy approaches to creating a valuable assessment experience for all involved.

First Things First…

Before assigning any major tasks to students, it is imperative that you first define a few things for yourself as the instructor:

• Your goals for the assignment . Why are you assigning this project, and what do you hope your students will gain from completing it? What knowledge, skills, and abilities do you aim to measure with this assignment?  Creating assignments is a major part of overall course design, and every project you assign should clearly align with your goals for the course in general.  For instance, if you want your students to demonstrate critical thinking, perhaps asking them to simply summarize an article is not the best match for that goal; a more appropriate option might be to ask for an analysis of a controversial issue in the discipline. Ultimately, the connection between the assignment and its purpose should be clear to both you and your students to ensure that it is fulfilling the desired goals and doesn't seem like “busy work.” For some ideas about what kinds of assignments match certain learning goals, take a look at this page from DePaul University's Teaching Commons.
• Have they experienced “socialization” in the culture of your discipline (Flaxman, 2005)? Are they familiar with any conventions you might want them to know? In other words, do they know the “language” of your discipline, generally accepted style guidelines, or research protocols?
• Do they know how to conduct research?  Do they know the proper style format, documentation style, acceptable resources, etc.? Do they know how to use the library (Fitzpatrick, 1989) or evaluate resources?
• What kinds of writing or work have they previously engaged in?  For instance, have they completed long, formal writing assignments or research projects before? Have they ever engaged in analysis, reflection, or argumentation? Have they completed group assignments before?  Do they know how to write a literature review or scientific report?

In his book Engaging Ideas (1996), John Bean provides a great list of questions to help instructors focus on their main teaching goals when creating an assignment (p.78):

1. What are the main units/modules in my course?

2. What are my main learning objectives for each module and for the course?

3. What thinking skills am I trying to develop within each unit and throughout the course?

4. What are the most difficult aspects of my course for students?

5. If I could change my students' study habits, what would I most like to change?

6. What difference do I want my course to make in my students' lives?

What your students need to know

Once you have determined your own goals for the assignment and the levels of your students, you can begin creating your assignment.  However, when introducing your assignment to your students, there are several things you will need to clearly outline for them in order to ensure the most successful assignments possible.

• First, you will need to articulate the purpose of the assignment . Even though you know why the assignment is important and what it is meant to accomplish, you cannot assume that your students will intuit that purpose. Your students will appreciate an understanding of how the assignment fits into the larger goals of the course and what they will learn from the process (Hass & Osborn, 2007). Being transparent with your students and explaining why you are asking them to complete a given assignment can ultimately help motivate them to complete the assignment more thoughtfully.
• If you are asking your students to complete a writing assignment, you should define for them the “rhetorical or cognitive mode/s” you want them to employ in their writing (Flaxman, 2005). In other words, use precise verbs that communicate whether you are asking them to analyze, argue, describe, inform, etc.  (Verbs like “explore” or “comment on” can be too vague and cause confusion.) Provide them with a specific task to complete, such as a problem to solve, a question to answer, or an argument to support.  For those who want assignments to lead to top-down, thesis-driven writing, John Bean (1996) suggests presenting a proposition that students must defend or refute, or a problem that demands a thesis answer.
• It is also a good idea to define the audience you want your students to address with their assignment, if possible – especially with writing assignments.  Otherwise, students will address only the instructor, often assuming little requires explanation or development (Hedengren, 2004; MIT, 1999). Further, asking students to address the instructor, who typically knows more about the topic than the student, places the student in an unnatural rhetorical position.  Instead, you might consider asking your students to prepare their assignments for alternative audiences such as other students who missed last week's classes, a group that opposes their position, or people reading a popular magazine or newspaper.  In fact, a study by Bean (1996) indicated the students often appreciate and enjoy assignments that vary elements such as audience or rhetorical context, so don't be afraid to get creative!
• Obviously, you will also need to articulate clearly the logistics or “business aspects” of the assignment . In other words, be explicit with your students about required elements such as the format, length, documentation style, writing style (formal or informal?), and deadlines.  One caveat, however: do not allow the logistics of the paper take precedence over the content in your assignment description; if you spend all of your time describing these things, students might suspect that is all you care about in their execution of the assignment.
• Finally, you should clarify your evaluation criteria for the assignment. What elements of content are most important? Will you grade holistically or weight features separately? How much weight will be given to individual elements, etc?  Another precaution to take when defining requirements for your students is to take care that your instructions and rubric also do not overshadow the content; prescribing too rigidly each element of an assignment can limit students' freedom to explore and discover. According to Beth Finch Hedengren, “A good assignment provides the purpose and guidelines… without dictating exactly what to say” (2004, p. 27).  If you decide to utilize a grading rubric, be sure to provide that to the students along with the assignment description, prior to their completion of the assignment.

A great way to get students engaged with an assignment and build buy-in is to encourage their collaboration on its design and/or on the grading criteria (Hudd, 2003). In his article “Conducting Writing Assignments,” Richard Leahy (2002) offers a few ideas for building in said collaboration:

• Ask the students to develop the grading scale themselves from scratch, starting with choosing the categories.

• Set the grading categories yourself, but ask the students to help write the descriptions.

• Draft the complete grading scale yourself, then give it to your students for review and suggestions.

A Few Do's and Don'ts…

Determining your goals for the assignment and its essential logistics is a good start to creating an effective assignment. However, there are a few more simple factors to consider in your final design. First, here are a few things you should do :

• Do provide detail in your assignment description . Research has shown that students frequently prefer some guiding constraints when completing assignments (Bean, 1996), and that more detail (within reason) can lead to more successful student responses.  One idea is to provide students with physical assignment handouts , in addition to or instead of a simple description in a syllabus.  This can meet the needs of concrete learners and give them something tangible to refer to.  Likewise, it is often beneficial to make explicit for students the process or steps necessary to complete an assignment, given that students – especially younger ones – might need guidance in planning and time management (MIT, 1999).
• Do use open-ended questions.  The most effective and challenging assignments focus on questions that lead students to thinking and explaining, rather than simple yes or no answers, whether explicitly part of the assignment description or in the  brainstorming heuristics (Gardner, 2005).
• Do direct students to appropriate available resources . Giving students pointers about other venues for assistance can help them get started on the right track independently. These kinds of suggestions might include information about campus resources such as the University Writing Center or discipline-specific librarians, suggesting specific journals or books, or even sections of their textbook, or providing them with lists of research ideas or links to acceptable websites.
• Do consider providing models – both successful and unsuccessful models (Miller, 2007). These models could be provided by past students, or models you have created yourself.  You could even ask students to evaluate the models themselves using the determined evaluation criteria, helping them to visualize the final product, think critically about how to complete the assignment, and ideally, recognize success in their own work.
• Do consider including a way for students to make the assignment their own. In their study, Hass and Osborn (2007) confirmed the importance of personal engagement for students when completing an assignment.  Indeed, students will be more engaged in an assignment if it is personally meaningful, practical, or purposeful beyond the classroom.  You might think of ways to encourage students to tap into their own experiences or curiosities, to solve or explore a real problem, or connect to the larger community.  Offering variety in assignment selection can also help students feel more individualized, creative, and in control.
• If your assignment is substantial or long, do consider sequencing it. Far too often, assignments are given as one-shot final products that receive grades at the end of the semester, eternally abandoned by the student.  By sequencing a large assignment, or essentially breaking it down into a systematic approach consisting of interconnected smaller elements (such as a project proposal, an annotated bibliography, or a rough draft, or a series of mini-assignments related to the longer assignment), you can encourage thoughtfulness, complexity, and thoroughness in your students, as well as emphasize process over final product.

Next are a few elements to avoid in your assignments:

• Do not ask too many questions in your assignment.  In an effort to challenge students, instructors often err in the other direction, asking more questions than students can reasonably address in a single assignment without losing focus. Offering an overly specific “checklist” prompt often leads to externally organized papers, in which inexperienced students “slavishly follow the checklist instead of integrating their ideas into more organically-discovered structure” (Flaxman, 2005).
• Do not expect or suggest that there is an “ideal” response to the assignment. A common error for instructors is to dictate content of an assignment too rigidly, or to imply that there is a single correct response or a specific conclusion to reach, either explicitly or implicitly (Flaxman, 2005). Undoubtedly, students do not appreciate feeling as if they must read an instructor's mind to complete an assignment successfully, or that their own ideas have nowhere to go, and can lose motivation as a result. Similarly, avoid assignments that simply ask for regurgitation (Miller, 2007). Again, the best assignments invite students to engage in critical thinking, not just reproduce lectures or readings.
• Do not provide vague or confusing commands . Do students know what you mean when they are asked to “examine” or “discuss” a topic? Return to what you determined about your students' experiences and levels to help you decide what directions will make the most sense to them and what will require more explanation or guidance, and avoid verbiage that might confound them.
• Do not impose impossible time restraints or require the use of insufficient resources for completion of the assignment.  For instance, if you are asking all of your students to use the same resource, ensure that there are enough copies available for all students to access – or at least put one copy on reserve in the library. Likewise, make sure that you are providing your students with ample time to locate resources and effectively complete the assignment (Fitzpatrick, 1989).

The assignments we give to students don't simply have to be research papers or reports. There are many options for effective yet creative ways to assess your students' learning! Here are just a few:

Journals, Posters, Portfolios, Letters, Brochures, Management plans, Editorials, Instruction Manuals, Imitations of a text, Case studies, Debates, News release, Dialogues, Videos, Collages, Plays, Power Point presentations

Ultimately, the success of student responses to an assignment often rests on the instructor's deliberate design of the assignment. By being purposeful and thoughtful from the beginning, you can ensure that your assignments will not only serve as effective assessment methods, but also engage and delight your students. If you would like further help in constructing or revising an assignment, the Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center is glad to offer individual consultations. In addition, look into some of the resources provided below.

Online Resources

“Creating Effective Assignments” http://www.unh.edu/teaching-excellence/resources/Assignments.htm This site, from the University of New Hampshire's Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning,  provides a brief overview of effective assignment design, with a focus on determining and communicating goals and expectations.

Gardner, T.  (2005, June 12). Ten Tips for Designing Writing Assignments. Traci's Lists of Ten. http://www.tengrrl.com/tens/034.shtml This is a brief yet useful list of tips for assignment design, prepared by a writing teacher and curriculum developer for the National Council of Teachers of English .  The website will also link you to several other lists of “ten tips” related to literacy pedagogy.

“How to Create Effective Assignments for College Students.”  http:// tilt.colostate.edu/retreat/2011/zimmerman.pdf     This PDF is a simplified bulleted list, prepared by Dr. Toni Zimmerman from Colorado State University, offering some helpful ideas for coming up with creative assignments.

“Learner-Centered Assessment” http://cte.uwaterloo.ca/teaching_resources/tips/learner_centered_assessment.html From the Centre for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo, this is a short list of suggestions for the process of designing an assessment with your students' interests in mind. “Matching Learning Goals to Assignment Types.” http://teachingcommons.depaul.edu/How_to/design_assignments/assignments_learning_goals.html This is a great page from DePaul University's Teaching Commons, providing a chart that helps instructors match assignments with learning goals.

Additional References Bean, J.C. (1996). Engaging ideas: The professor's guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Fitzpatrick, R. (1989). Research and writing assignments that reduce fear lead to better papers and more confident students. Writing Across the Curriculum , 3.2, pp. 15 – 24.

Flaxman, R. (2005). Creating meaningful writing assignments. The Teaching Exchange .  Retrieved Jan. 9, 2008 from http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Sheridan_Center/pubs/teachingExchange/jan2005/01_flaxman.pdf

Hass, M. & Osborn, J. (2007, August 13). An emic view of student writing and the writing process. Across the Disciplines, 4. 

Hedengren, B.F. (2004). A TA's guide to teaching writing in all disciplines . Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.

Hudd, S. S. (2003, April). Syllabus under construction: Involving students in the creation of class assignments.  Teaching Sociology , 31, pp. 195 – 202.

Leahy, R. (2002). Conducting writing assignments. College Teaching , 50.2, pp. 50 – 54.

Miller, H. (2007). Designing effective writing assignments.  Teaching with writing .  University of Minnesota Center for Writing. Retrieved Jan. 9, 2008, from http://writing.umn.edu/tww/assignments/designing.html

MIT Online Writing and Communication Center (1999). Creating Writing Assignments. Retrieved January 9, 2008 from http://web.mit.edu/writing/Faculty/createeffective.html .

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Addressing Work Refusal in the Classroom

As educators grapple with the silent protest of student work refusal, research illuminates the underlying causes—and possible solutions.

In nearly every classroom, especially in middle and high school, there are a handful of students who simply refuse to do the work. They’ll listen to the assignment and maybe even nod their heads, but when the rubber hits the road, they don’t hand anything in—at best, they submit a couple of sentences instead of the essay you asked for.

“Often teachers react defensively to obstinate behavior, creating a situation where teacher and student may become locked in a power struggle or an ineffective pattern of communication,” writes special education teacher Nina Parrish . So how does an educator handle a student who simply refuses to turn in assigned work?

Teachers, it seems, are dying to know what’s behind the issue. When Edutopia asked our audience what topic they’d most want to see the research behind, “work refusal” was the top response—“Not kids who don’t understand or kids who present other behavioral challenges, just kids whose only perceptible issue is refusing to complete work (or hand in completed work),” explained Rebecca, an educator.

The research exploring work refusal, while limited, boils down to a central takeaway: Understand the underlying causes of a student’s failure to complete work, which might involve a desire for more autonomy, a fear of failure or judgment, or a sense that the assigned work is meaningless. There are no simple explanations: What motivates any particular student can be mysterious, and some will inevitably continue to refuse work regardless of your best efforts. But using these targeted, research-backed responses gives you a fighting chance of turning chronic work refusers into more frequent work completers.

LOOKING UNDER THE HOOD

While it can feel tempting to throw up your hands, seeking out root causes can lead to clearer next steps. “Understanding the antecedent of work refusal leads to the development of logical intervention strategies rather than those based on assumptions or trial and error,” writes Texas State University education researcher Glenna Billingsley in a recent review of the research surrounding work refusal.

While every child is different, Billingsley’s research review points to a few key factors that often operate just below the surface of work refusal.

A DESIRE FOR AUTONOMY

Assignments and activities that students consider irrelevant or uninteresting may “trigger misbehavior that enables them to avoid these disengaging conditions,” Billingsley writes in her analysis—but adding “multiple opportunities for responding” that students can choose from, across modalities and at different skill levels, can improve engagement. Because Billingsley’s review found that work refusal was often at its highest when students were asked to “transition from a preferred task to one less enjoyable,” providing students with a range of academic tasks to choose from can help nip work refusal in the bud.

Billingsley’s analysis adds to a growing body of research suggesting that students are more engaged in their learning when given more choice and autonomy. A 2012 study , for example, found that second and third graders who were required to complete mandatory reading logs saw a marked decline in interest toward reading compared with students who voluntarily logged their reading progress. Similarly, eighth graders developed better reading habits when the curriculum allowed them to choose what they read, and in a 2010 article , researchers assert that giving students a say over disciplinary policies can “encourage a sense of well-being and comfort with the way a classroom functions,” while offering choice around assignments can “encourage initial engagement with learning activities.” 

How to address it: There are a number of ways to introduce more curricular choice at all grade levels.

Preschool teacher Oi Ling Hu has students vote for the read-aloud of the day—and even, on occasion, what activities the class will engage in. In later grades, education researcher Robert J. Marzano recommends that teachers allow students to present what they’ve learned “through debates, video reports, demonstrations, or dramatic presentations” (we’d add music, drawing, and coding, too)—not just essays or oral reports. “Choice in the classroom has been linked to increases in student effort, task performance, and subsequent learning,” Marzano writes. To help students feel like you respect their freedom of choice, you can also let students co-create their classroom norms , offer flexible seating options , or give English students a say over what books they’ll read (even at the AP level ).

A FEAR OF FAILURE

Billingsley’s research review lists “expectations and assignments that students perceive as too difficult” as another leading cause of classroom work refusal. “Students with a history of school failure may feel that the current assignment offers only another opportunity to fail,” she summarizes. On the same note, a 2018 study found that academic deficits accounted for a full 20 percent of classroom misbehavior: When students didn’t understand an assignment or found it too difficult, misbehavior was the outlet for their frustration.

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Student concern over grades can exacerbate matters. A 2018 study found that letter grades “enhanced anxiety and avoidance of challenging courses,” while a 2019 research review suggested that students were more motivated by receiving written feedback from their teacher, or even no feedback at all , than by receiving grades.

How to address it: A 2021 study found that grades and on-task behavior were highest in classes with the highest ratio of praise to reprimands—and while it might feel unnatural to track your language so closely, researchers at Vanderbilt University recommend roughly “six praise statements every 15 minutes.” Remember to praise students for specific actions (“This essay was really well-structured!”), not inherent abilities (“You’re so smart!”), to avoid reinforcing the same kind of fixed mindset that can lead students to feel anxious about their skills in the first place. Try to find opportunities to make your praise sincere and focused around ways that students have improved, even if that improvement is just turning in an essay on time.

It’s also worthwhile to foster a more mistake-friendly classroom . Model your own mistakes, and avoid being overly punitive about errors: Consider policies like dropping each student’s lowest grade , allowing students to retake some assessments , or reducing the amount of work you actively grade. One interesting study revealed that withholding grades until several days after handing back your written feedback can boost student performance on future assignments by up to two-thirds of a letter grade.

A NEED FOR PURPOSE AND BELONGING

When a student consistently refuses to do work, “community and connection are usually the issue,” comments educator Emily Tarr on Edutopia’s thread about work refusal, and the research tends to agree.

Belonging at school—”that sense that we are part of a larger whole, that there is a kind of goodness of fit between me and my environment”—is really important socially and academically, according to the social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen . He points to a 2019 study suggesting that feelings of belonging are greater predictors of college completion than academic success.

An adjacent phenomenon—a lack of purpose—can be equally harmful. “Teachers often underestimate the importance of purpose and relevance in building motivation, and overestimate how good a job they are doing at making the purpose clear,” write education researcher Chris Hulleman and science teacher Ian Kelleher in an article for Edutopia . This shortcoming is sometimes at the root of a student’s hesitancy to work.

How to address it: There are a variety of research-backed interventions that can boost purpose and belonging. In one study , Hulleman found that having ninth-grade science students write brief reflections connecting what they learned in class to their personal lives boosted their grades and made them more likely to take science courses again in the future. In class, teachers should “deliberately and regularly state the purpose of assignments and activities,” Hulleman recommends. Teachers can also connect their lessons to the real-world issues that students care about; in math class , for example, dig into issues like personal finance and sports statistics.

Teachers often underestimate the importance of purpose ... and overestimate how good a job they are doing at making the purpose clear. Chris hulleman, phd and ian kelleher, phd

To tap into students’ passions and interests, education instructor Rebecca Alber recommends sending out a survey at the start of the year that asks questions like “What is something or someone you personally would like to know more about?” or “Make a list of all the things that you don’t currently learn in school but wish you could,” then using student responses to inform your lesson planning and assessment options. (Vanderbilt University offers an example survey that teachers can adjust accordingly.) Hanging posters and incorporating learning materials that reflect the diverse interests and identities of your students signals that they’re “valued learners and belong within the classroom, with far-reaching consequences for students’ educational choices and achievement,” a 2014 study found .

THE ROLE OF TRAUMA

Finally, it’s worth considering how trauma might factor into your students’ refusal to do work. “When you feel the weight of the world bearing down on you, or you simply don’t think you can take another step without imploding or breaking down, don’t you just want to get away from it all?” asks elementary school administrator Matthew J. Bowerman . “Imagine what children are feeling after the last several years.”

A 2011 study led by pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris found that traumatic childhood experiences are tied to a host of learning and behavioral problems, including defiant behavior, fight-or-flight responses, difficulty focusing, and impulse-control issues.

How to address it: “It’s unfair to ask teachers to be therapists or doctors,” Harris told Edutopia in 2020 , but teachers can “deliver that daily dose of buffering care that’s so important for healing.”

Many traumatized students blame themselves for their academic shortcomings, Harris says, so teachers can help kids understand “that what’s going on in their bodies is actually a normal response to the abnormal circumstance that they find themselves in.” Then, teaching social and emotional learning skills—like calming oneself through simple breathing exercises, bringing oneself to focus, and bonding with others—can help get kids back on track. At Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville , for example, every classroom has a designated peace corner with a comfortable chair and soothing toys where students can go when they need to self-regulate. Students who need extra social and emotional support are paired off with an adult (who isn’t their teacher) for two-minute check-ins at the start and end of each day, where they can discuss their goals and what they’re struggling with.

WHAT’S YOUR EXPERIENCE?

Do you have any insights about how to deal with work refusers? What have you tried—what worked, and what didn’t? Let readers know in the comments.

Report | Children

The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought : The first report in ‘The Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ series

Report • By Emma García and Elaine Weiss • March 26, 2019

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What this report finds: The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought. When indicators of teacher quality (certification, relevant training, experience, etc.) are taken into account, the shortage is even more acute than currently estimated, with high-poverty schools suffering the most from the shortage of credentialed teachers.

Why it matters: A shortage of teachers harms students, teachers, and the public education system as a whole. Lack of sufficient, qualified teachers and staff instability threaten students’ ability to learn and reduce teachers’ effectiveness, and high teacher turnover consumes economic resources that could be better deployed elsewhere. The teacher shortage makes it more difficult to build a solid reputation for teaching and to professionalize it, which further contributes to perpetuating the shortage. In addition, the fact that the shortage is distributed so unevenly among students of different socioeconomic backgrounds challenges the U.S. education system’s goal of providing a sound education equitably to all children.

What we can do about it: Tackle the working conditions and other factors that are prompting teachers to quit and dissuading people from entering the profession, thus making it harder for school districts to retain and attract highly qualified teachers: low pay, a challenging school environment, and weak professional development support and recognition. In addition to tackling these factors for all schools, we must provide extra supports and funding to high-poverty schools, where teacher shortages are even more of a problem.

Update, October 2019:  The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has announced that weights developed for the teacher data in the 2015–2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) were improperly inflated and that new weights will be released (release date to be determined). According to the NCES, counts produced using the original weights would be overestimates. The application of the final weights, when they are available, is not likely to change the estimates of percentages and averages (such as those we report in our analyses) in a statistically significant way. EPI will update the analyses in the series once the new weights are published but does not expect any data revisions to change the key themes described in the series. Please note that EPI analyses produced with 2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) data, 2012–2013 Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS) data, and 2015–2016 NTPS school-level data are unaffected by NCES’s reexamination.

The teacher shortage is real and has serious consequences

In recent years, education researchers and journalists who cover education have called attention to the growing teacher shortage in the nation’s K–12 schools. They cite a variety of indicators of the shortage, including state-by-state subject area vacancies, personal testimonials and data from state and school district officials, and declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs. 1 These indicators are critical signals. They help analysts detect when there are not enough qualified teachers to fill staffing needs in a labor market that does not operate like other labor markets. School teachers’ wages are not subject to market pressures—they are set by school districts through contracts that take time to negotiate. Therefore, economists can’t use trends in wages—sudden or sustained wage increases—to establish that there is a labor market shortage (as the textbook explanation would indicate). It is also hard to produce direct measurements of the number of teachers needed and available (i.e., “missing”).

To date, the only direct estimate of the size of the teacher shortage nationally comes from the Learning Policy Institute’s seminal 2016 report, A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas 2016). The report noted that many school districts—finally hiring again after years of teacher layoffs during the Great Recession and in its wake—“had serious difficulty finding qualified teachers for their positions.” As the authors noted, school districts were challenged with not only restoring student-to-teacher ratios to pre-crisis levels but also with broadening curriculum offerings and meeting projected increases in student populations. Defining shortages as “the inability to staff vacancies at current wages with individuals qualified to teach in the fields needed,” the authors estimated that, barring any major changes, the annual teacher shortage would reach about 110,000 by the 2017–2018 school year.

Figure A replicates Figure 1 in their report and shows the gap between the supply of teachers available to enter the classroom in a given year and the demand for new hires. As recently as the 2011–2012 school year, the estimated supply of teachers available to be hired exceeded the demand for them—i.e., there was a surplus of teachers in that year’s labor market. But estimated projected demand soon exceeded the estimated supply and the projected gap grew sharply in just a handful of years—from around 20,000 in 2012–2013, to 64,000 teachers in the 2015–16 school year, to over 110,000 in 2017–2018. In other words, the shortage of teachers was projected to more than quadruple in just five years and the gap to remain at those 2017–2018 levels thereafter.

Teacher shortage as estimated by Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas : Projected teacher supply and demand for new teachers, 2003–2004 through 2024–2025 school years

Note: The supply line represents the midpoints of upper- and lower-bound teacher supply estimates. Years on the horizontal axis represent the latter annual year in the school year.

Source:  Recreated with permission from Figure 1 in Leib Sutcher, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Desiree Carver-Thomas, A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. , Learning Policy Institute, September 2016. See the report for full analysis of the shortage and for the methodology.

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The teacher shortage has serious consequences. A lack of sufficient, qualified teachers threatens students’ ability to learn (Darling-Hammond 1999; Ladd and Sorensen 2016). Instability in a school’s teacher workforce (i.e., high turnover and/or high attrition) negatively affects student achievement and diminishes teacher effectiveness and quality (Ronfeldt, Loeb, and Wyckoff 2013; Jackson and Bruegmann 2009; Kraft and Papay 2014; Sorensen and Ladd 2018). And high teacher turnover consumes economic resources (i.e., through costs of recruiting and training new teachers) that could be better deployed elsewhere. Filling a vacancy costs $21,000 on average (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond 2017; Learning Policy Institute 2017) and Carroll (2007) estimated that the total annual cost of turnover was $7.3 billion per year, a cost that would exceed $8 billion at present. 2 The teacher shortage also makes it more difficult to build a solid reputation for teaching and to professionalize it, further perpetuating the shortage.

We argue that, when issues such as teacher quality and the unequal distribution of highly qualified teachers across schools serving different concentrations of low-income students are taken into consideration, the teacher shortage problem is much more severe than previously recognized.

The teacher shortage is even larger when teaching credentials are factored in

The current national estimates of the teacher shortage likely understate the magnitude of the problem because the estimates consider the new qualified teachers needed to meet new demand. However, not all current teachers meet the education, experience, and certification requirements associated with being a highly qualified teacher.

We examine the U.S. Department of Education’s National Teacher and Principal Survey data from 2015–2016 to show, in Figure B , for all public noncharter schools, the share of teachers in the 2015–2016 school year who do and who do not hold teaching credentials associated with more effective teaching (see, for example, Darling-Hammond 1999; Kini and Podolsky 2016; Ladd and Sorensen 2016). 3 These credentials include being fully certified (they have a regular standard state certificate or advanced professional certificate), they participated in a traditional certification program (versus an alternative certification program), they have more than five years of experience, and they have educational background in the subject of the main assignment. These credentials also align with the federal definition of a “highly qualified” teacher, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Educator Equity Profiles. 4

Figure C shows how the share of teachers without each of the quality credentials has grown since the 2011–2012 school year (building on the Department of Education’s Schools and Staffing Survey data from 2011–2012). The shares of teachers not holding these credentials are not negligible.

Teacher credentials : Share of teachers with and without various credentials, by credential, 2015–2016

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The data underlying the figure.

Notes:  Data are for teachers in public noncharter schools. According to research and to the U.S. Department of Education, highly qualified teachers have the following four credentials: They are fully certified (with a regular, standard state certificate or advanced professional certificate versus not having completed all the steps); they took a traditional route into teaching (participated in a traditional certification program versus an alternative certification program, the latter of which is defined in the teacher survey questionnaire as “a program that was designed to expedite the transition of nonteachers to a teaching career, for example, a state, district, or university alternative certification program”); they are experienced (have more than 5 years of experience); and they have a background in the subject of main assignment, i.e., they have a bachelor's or master's degree in the main teaching assignment field (general education, special education, or subject-matter specific degree) versus having no educational background in the subject of main assignment.

Source: 2015–2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) microdata from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

Change over time in teacher credentials : Share of teachers without various credentials, by type of credential, 2011–2012 and 2015–2016

Source:  2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS)  and 2015–2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) microdata from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

As Figure B shows, as of 2015–2016, there are significant shares of teachers without the credentials associated with being a highly qualified teacher. For example, 8.8 percent of teachers do not have a standard state certificate or advanced professional certificate (i.e., they are not fully certified), and 17.1 percent have followed an alternative route into teaching. Nearly one in four teachers (22.4 percent) has five or fewer years of experience. And, as shown in Figure C, almost one in ten (9.4 percent) has fewer than two years of experience, i.e., are novices. Moreover, nearly a third of teachers (31.5 percent) do not have an education background in their subject of main assignment.

Moreover, as Figure C shows, the share of teachers without the credentials of highly qualified teachers has roughly stayed the same or increased since the 2011–2012 school year, growing the shortage of highly qualified teachers. While the shares of teachers who aren’t fully certified and who don’t have an educational background in the main subject that they are teaching increased by only 0.4 percentage points, the share of teachers who took an alternative route into teaching and the share of inexperienced teachers increased by between 2 and 3 percentage points.

The teacher shortage is more acute in high-poverty schools

The published estimates of the increasing teacher shortage further understate the magnitude of the problem because the estimates don’t reflect the fact that the shortage of qualified teachers is not spread evenly among all schools but is more acute in high-poverty schools. While we don’t have specific estimates of the shortage in low- and high-poverty schools analogous to the national shortage estimates of Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas (2016), we can infer the greater shortage of highly qualified teachers in high-poverty schools from the following premises and from our own data analyses. 5  First, highly qualified teachers are in higher demand and therefore tend to have more options with respect to where they want to teach. They are more likely to be recruited by higher-income school districts and to join the staffs of schools that provide them with better support and working conditions and more choices of grades and subjects to teach. 6

Second, although teachers with stronger credentials are less likely to quit the profession or move to a different school, 7 the link between strong credentials and retention might be less powerful in high-poverty schools. It would not be surprising to find that the retention power of strong credentials varies across schools, given the research showing that other factors are dependent on school poverty. 8 This weakened retention effect could also apply to new teachers who don’t have experience but who have the other credentials of highly qualified teachers, meaning strong new teachers would be looking at alternatives to the low-income schools where they are more likely to begin their careers.

We examine the same National Teacher and Principal Survey data from 2015–2016 now to show that the share of teachers who are highly qualified is smaller in high-poverty schools than in low-poverty schools. In this analysis, due to available information, we look at the composition of the group of students under the teacher’s instruction (instead of the student body composition of the school, which is the standard metric used to describe school poverty). 9 We consider a teacher to be working in a low-poverty school if less than 25 percent of the students in the teacher’s class are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs. A teacher is in a high-poverty school if 50 percent or more of his or her students are eligible for those programs. We find that low-income children are consistently, albeit modestly, more likely to be taught by lower-credentialed and novice teachers, as shown in the third and fourth columns in Table 1 . In high-poverty schools, the share of teachers who are not fully certified is close to three percentage points higher than it is in low-poverty schools. Also relative to low-poverty schools, the share of inexperienced teachers (teachers with five years or less of experience) is 4.8 percentage points higher in high-poverty schools; the share of teachers who followed an alternative route into teaching is 5.6 percentage points higher in high-poverty schools; and the share of teachers who don’t have educational background in their subject of main assignment is 6.3 percentage points higher in high-poverty schools.

Credentials of teachers in low- and high-poverty schools : Share of teachers with and without various credentials by school type

Notes: Data are for teachers in public noncharter schools. According to research and to the U.S. Department of Education, highly qualified teachers have the following four credentials: They are fully certified (with a regular, standard state certificate or advanced professional certificate versus not having completed all the steps); they took a traditional route into teaching (participated in a traditional certification program versus an alternative certification program, the latter of which is defined in the teacher survey questionnaire as “a program that was designed to expedite the transition of nonteachers to a teaching career, for example, a state, district, or university alternative certification program”); they are experienced (have more than 5 years of experience); and they have a background in the subject of main assignment, i.e., they have a bachelor's or master's degree in the main teaching assignment field (general education, special education, or subject-matter specific degree) versus having no educational background in the subject of main assignment. A teacher is in a low-poverty school if less than 25 percent of the student body in his/her class is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs; a teacher is in a high-poverty school if 50 percent or more of the student body she/he teaches are eligible for those programs.

Source: 2015–2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) microdata from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

When looking across types of schools, two factors further contribute to the shortage of highly qualified teachers in high-poverty schools. First, while the data still confirm that higher credentials deter attrition (in this analysis, shown descriptively), we find that this link between quality and retention is weaker in high-poverty schools, and this leads to a relative leakage of credentials through attrition in high-poverty schools. We present our own analysis of these links in Table 2 . In both high- and low-poverty schools, the credentials of teachers who stay in the school are better than those of teachers who quit teaching altogether. But the differences are narrower for teachers in high-poverty schools (with the exception of the share of teachers who majored in their subject of main assignment).

Credentials of teachers who stay in their school versus who quit teaching : Share of teachers with various credentials and gap between teachers who stay and those who quit, by school type

Notes: Data are for teachers in public noncharter schools. According to research and to the U.S. Department of Education, highly qualified teachers have the following four credentials: They are fully certified (with a regular, standard state certificate or advanced professional certificate versus not having completed all the steps); they took a traditional route into teaching (participated in a traditional certification program versus an alternative certification program, the latter of which is defined in the teacher survey questionnaire as “a program that was designed to expedite the transition of nonteachers to a teaching career, for example, a state, district, or university alternative certification program”); they are experienced (have more than 5 years of experience); and they have a background in the subject of main assignment, i.e., they have a bachelor's or master's degree majoring in the main teaching assignment field (general education, special education, or subject-matter specific degree) versus having no educational background in the subject of main assignment. A teacher is in a low-poverty school if less than 25 percent of the student body in his/her class is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs; a teacher is in a high-poverty school if 50 percent or more of the student body she/he teaches are eligible for those programs. Teaching status is determined by the reported status of teachers in the Teacher Follow-up Survey conducted for the 2012–2013 school year, one year after the Schools and Staffing Survey. Teachers who stay at the same school are teachers whose status the year after is “Teaching in this school.” Teachers who left teaching are those who generated a vacancy in the 2012–2013 school year and are not in the profession (they left teaching, were on long-term leave, or were deceased). Not included in the table are teachers who generated a vacancy in the school year but remained in the profession (i.e., left to teach in another school or were on short-term leave and planned to return to the school).

Source: 2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) microdata and  2012–2013 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) microdata from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)

Whereas Table 2 presents gaps between the share of staying teachers with a given quality credential and the share of quitting teachers with that credential (for both low- and high-poverty schools), Figure D  pulls data from Table 2 on staying teachers to present another type of gap: the gap between shares of staying teachers in high-poverty schools with a given quality credential and the shares of staying teachers in low-poverty schools with a given quality credential. 10 The figure shows that teachers who stay in high-poverty schools are less qualified than teachers who stay in low-poverty schools. It also shows that relative to staying teachers in low-poverty schools, the share of staying teachers in high-poverty schools who are certified is smaller (by a gap of 1.8 percentage points), the share who entered the profession through a traditional certification program is smaller (by 6.3 percentage points), the share who have an educational background in the subject of main assignment is also smaller (by 5.4 percentage points), and the share who have more than five years of experience is also smaller (by 5.2 percentage points).

The shares of credentialed staying teachers are smaller in high-poverty schools : Percentage-point difference between the share of teachers staying in high-poverty schools who have a given credential and the share of teachers staying in low-poverty schools with that credential

Notes:  Data are for teachers in public noncharter schools. According to research and to the U.S. Department of Education, highly qualified teachers have the following four credentials: They are fully certified (with a regular, standard state certificate or advanced professional certificate versus not having completed all the steps); they took a traditional route into teaching (participated in a traditional certification program versus an alternative certification program, the latter of which is defined in the teacher survey questionnaire as “a program that was designed to expedite the transition of nonteachers to a teaching career, for example, a state, district, or university alternative certification program”); they are experienced (have more than 5 years of experience); and they have a background in the subject of main assignment, i.e., they have a bachelor's or master's degree majoring in the main teaching assignment field (general education, special education, or subject-matter specific degree) versus having no educational background in the subject of main assignment. A teacher is in a low-poverty school if less than 25 percent of the student body in his/her class is eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs; a teacher is in a high-poverty school if 50 percent or more of the student body she/he teaches are eligible for those programs. Teaching status is determined by the reported status of teachers in the Teacher Follow-up Survey conducted for the 2012–2013 school year, one year after the Schools and Staffing Survey. Teachers who stay at the same school are teachers whose status the year after is “Teaching in this school.”

Conclusion: We must tackle the working conditions and other factors that contribute to the growing teacher shortage, especially in high-poverty schools

There is no sign that the large shortage of credentialed teachers—overall, and especially in high-poverty schools—will go away. In light of the harms this shortage creates, as well as its size and trends, it is critical to understand the nature of the problem and the complexity of the teacher labor market. Only when we understand the factors that contribute to the growing shortage of high-quality teachers can we design policy interventions—and better guide institutional decisions—to find the “missing” teachers.

As a first step to exploring the teacher shortage, it is important to acknowledge that the teacher shortage is the result of multiple and interdependent drivers, all working simultaneously to cause the imbalance between the number of new teachers needed (demand) and the number of individuals available to be hired (supply). But both supply-side and demand-side drivers of the labor market for teachers are products of existing working conditions, existing policies, and other factors. If these change, this can in turn drive changes in the demand and supply of teachers and affect the size (or existence) of the teacher shortage. 11

We put forth this series of reports to analyze the factors that contribute to shortages of highly qualified teachers, and to the larger shortage of these teachers in high-poverty schools. Though no one condition or factor alone creates or eliminates shortages, each of them plays a role in this established problem, deserves separate attention, and has its own policy implications. Indeed, it is because we rarely provide this attention that we have failed to understand and fix the problems. The reports that we are publishing in this series will focus on these multiple intersecting factors. The second paper shows how a teacher shortage manifests in schools in the form of real struggles schools are having in properly staffing themselves. The three reports that follow dig into some of the reasons why teaching is becoming an unattractive profession. Specifically, four forthcoming reports will show the following:

• Schools struggle to find and retain highly qualified individuals to teach, and this struggle is tougher in high-poverty schools (report #2). A dwindling pool of applicants and excessive teacher attrition make staffing schools difficult. With the number of students completing teacher preparation programs falling dramatically, and with significant rates of attrition and turnover in the profession, it should be no surprise that schools report difficulties in hiring and, in some cases, do not hire anyone to fill vacancies. The difficulties are greater in high-poverty schools. The share of schools that are hiring, the difficulty in filling vacancies, and the share of unfilled vacancies all increased in the past few years.
• Low teacher pay is reducing the attractiveness of teaching jobs, and is an even bigger problem in high-poverty schools (report #3). Teachers have long been underpaid compared with similarly educated workers in other professions, with a pay gap that has grown substantially in the past two decades. In high-poverty schools, teachers face a double disadvantage, as they are further underpaid relative to their peers in low-poverty schools.
• The tough school environment is demoralizing to teachers, especially so in high-poverty schools (report #4). Teachers report that student absenteeism, class-cutting, student apathy, lack of parental involvement, poor student health, poverty, and other factors are a problem. Larger shares of teachers also report high levels of stress and fears for their safety. The school climate is tougher in high-poverty schools. Relative to their peers in low-poverty schools, teachers in high-poverty schools are less likely to say they intend to continue to teach and more likely to say they think about transferring to another school.
• Teachers—especially in high-poverty schools—aren’t getting the training, early career support, and professional development opportunities they need to succeed and this too is keeping them, or driving them, out of the profession (report #5). The lack of supports that are critical to succeeding in the classroom and the unsatisfactory continued training makes teaching less attractive and impedes its professionalization. Teachers in high-poverty schools devote a slightly larger share of their hours to delivering instruction, and fewer of them have scheduled time for professional development.

Together, these factors, their trends, and the lack of proper comprehensive policy attention countering them have created a perfect storm in the teacher labor market, as evident in the spiking shortage of highly qualified teachers, especially in high-poverty schools. The sixth and final report in the series calls for immediate policy steps to address this national crisis.

Data sources used in this series

The analyses presented in this series of reports mainly rely on the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) 2011–2012, the Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) 2012–2013, and the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) 2015–2016. 12 The surveys are representative of teachers, principals, and schools in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. 13 All three surveys were conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the U.S. Department of Education. The survey results are housed in the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

The NTPS is the redesigned SASS, with a focus on “flexibility, timeliness, and integration with other Department of Education data” (NCES 2019). Both the NTPS and SASS include very detailed questionnaires at the teacher level, school level, and principal level, and the SASS also includes very detailed questionnaires at the school district level (NCES 2017). The TFS survey, which is the source of data on teachers who stay or quit, was conducted a year after the SASS survey to collect information on the employment and teaching status, plans, and opinions of teachers in the SASS. Following the first administration of the NTPS, no follow-up study was done, preventing us from conducting an updated analysis of teachers by teaching status the year after. NCES plans to conduct a TFS again in the 2020–2021 school year, following the 2019–2020 NTPS.

The 2015–2016 NTPS includes public and charter schools only, while the SASS and TFS include all schools (public, private, and charter schools). 14 We restrict our analyses to public schools and teachers in public noncharter schools.

About the authors

Emma García is an education economist at the Economic Policy Institute, where she specializes in the economics of education and education policy. Her research focuses on the production of education (cognitive and noncognitive skills); evaluation of educational interventions (early childhood, K–12, and higher education); equity; returns to education; teacher labor markets; and cost-effectiveness and cost–benefit analysis in education. She has held research positions at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education, the Campaign for Educational Equity, the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, and the Community College Research Center; consulted for MDRC, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the National Institute for Early Education Research; and served as an adjunct faculty member at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in Economics and Education from Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Elaine Weiss is the lead policy analyst for income security at the National Academy of Social Insurance, where she spearheads projects on Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation. Prior to her work at the academy, Weiss was the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, a campaign launched by the Economic Policy Institute, from 2011–2017. BBA promoted a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive in school and life. Weiss has coauthored and authored EPI and BBA reports on early achievement gaps and the flaws in market-oriented education reforms. She is co-authoring Broader, Bolder, Better , a book with former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville that will be published by Harvard Education Press in June 2019. Weiss came to BBA from the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she served as project manager for Pew’s Partnership for America’s Economic Success campaign. She has a PhD. in public policy from the George Washington University Trachtenberg School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Lora Engdahl for her extraordinary contributions to structuring the contents of this series of papers, and for her edits to this piece. We are also thankful to John Schmitt for coordination and supervision of this project. A special thank you is noted for Desiree Carver-Thomas, her coauthors Leib Sutcher and Linda Darling-Hammond, and the Learning Policy Institute for granting us access to the data used in Figure 1 in their report  U.S. (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas 2016). We also want to acknowledge Lawrence Mishel for his guidance in earlier stages of the development of this research. We appreciate Julia Wolfe for her help preparing the tables and figures in this report, Kayla Blado for her work disseminating the report and her assistance with the media, and EPI communications director Pedro da Costa and the rest of the communications staff at EPI for their contributions to the different components of this report and the teacher shortage series.

1. See, for examples in the media, Strauss 2015; Rich 2015, Westervelt 2015, Strauss 2017. The Department of Education publishes the “States’ Reports of Teacher Shortage Areas (TSA)” on a yearly basis. These are areas in which the states expect to have vacancies (these are not lists of official job openings. For the historical TSA report, see U.S. Department of Education 2017; 2019. We note the change in the media’s focus over the course of the development of this study, with the media now covering the conditions under which teachers work, and the numerous teacher strikes demonstrating those conditions.

2. See Strauss 2017 for a blog post written by Linda Darling-Hammond, Leib Sutcher, and Desiree Carver-Thomas. The authors noted that a cost of over $7 billion in the 2007 study would translate to over $8 billion today. Note that this is an estimate of the cost of turnover/attrition, not an estimate of the cost of the shortage.

3. Regarding alternative certification—certification via programs designed to expedite the transition of nonteachers to a teaching career and offered both by institutions of higher education but also many other entities—Fraser and Lefty (2018) explain, “University faculty have written research-based studies, most of which seem to conclude that the university is the proper home for teacher preparation and that the rise of alternative routes is a mostly negative development. On the other hand, advocates of alternative approaches claim that education schools are hopelessly stuck and unlikely to reform, and that alternative routes represent the optimal way to prepare new teachers for twenty-first-century classrooms.” Research on the effectiveness of teachers who entered teaching through alternative pathways finds these teachers are, in general, not more effective than teachers who entered through traditional programs (Whitford, Zhang, and Katsiyannis 2017; Clark et al. 2017; Kane, Rockoff, and Staiger 2008), and that teachers who entered through alternative pathways are more likely to quit (Redding and Smith 2016). For a recent review on how credentials matter for teacher effectiveness, see Coenen et al. (2017).

4. Section 9101(23) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), which was last reauthorized in 2015 (and renamed the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA), defines the term “highly qualified.” The definition can be found on the U.S. Department of Education’s “Laws & Guidance” page for Title IX at http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg107.html#sec9101 . The states’ equity profiles can be found on the U.S. Department of Education’s “Laws & Guidance” page for Equitable Access to Excellent Educators at https://www2.ed.gov/programs/titleiparta/resources.html.

5. The research evidence clearly shows that school poverty influences turnover and attrition of teachers—two drivers of shortages. But, to date, researchers have not produced any estimate of the gap between the number of highly qualified teachers needed and the number available to be hired in high-poverty schools. For evidence of the influence of school poverty on turnover and attrition, see, among others, Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, and Carver-Thomas 2016; Podolsky et al. 2016; Loeb, Darling-Hammond, and Luczak 2005; Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey 2014; Darling-Hammond 2010; and Simon and Johnson 2015.

6. See Adamson and Darling-Hammond 2012; Clotfelter et al. 2006; Darling-Hammond 2004; Isenberg et al. 2013; García and Mishel 2016; Baker 2018, chapter 3.

7. For some of these quality credentials, the relationship is not linear, but curvilinear or U-shaped. Borman and Dowling (2008) find greater odds of attrition “among those who have no graduate degree, have regular certifications, have more years of experience, and score relatively lower on some standardized tests,” though they acknowledge that these factors can change across a teacher’s life span and career path. Both early career teachers and teachers close to retirement are more likely to quit (Allensworth, Ponisciak, and Mazzeo, 2009; Guarino, Santibáñez, and Daley, 2006; Ingersoll 2001), which creates a U-shaped curve describing the relationship between attrition and age or experience. For other credentials, some also find that higher rates of turnover are associated with both the strongest and weakest education credentials (Marinell and Coca 2013, for New York City). Our research does not consider having specialized degrees in math and science a high-quality credential, but an attribute of teachers. These teachers may be more likely to leave a school or quit teaching for reasons that have to do with the wider availability of STEM-related opportunities outside of teaching in our economy.

8. Loeb, Darling-Hammond, and Luczak (2005), for example, find that the measured influence of school characteristics on turnover is sensitive to the introduction of variables measuring working conditions (such as salaries, class sizes, facilities problems, lack of textbooks, etc.) in the specification, which indicates the link between conditions and school poverty. The authors do not conduct separate analyses (nor use interaction terms), but in their sequence of models, the credential variables’ coefficients are sensitive in size and statistical significance to the introduction of a control for school poverty and also the variables measuring working conditions. See also references in Endnote 7.

9. Although in this series we use share of low-income students to examine (in)equities in the teacher shortage across schools, we could alternatively employ other indicators of disadvantage—such as share of minority students, students with disabilities, or students who are English Language Learners—which could also enlighten us about other sets of inequities. Generically, schools with high concentrations of these subgroups are sometimes referred to as “high-needs” schools.

10. The lower credentials of staying teachers in high-poverty schools relative to low-poverty schools are the result of the patterns shown in Tables 1 and 2: one, that the credentials of teachers in high-poverty schools are lower than in high-poverty schools; and two, that the link between attrition and credentials is weaker in high-poverty schools, allowing for highly qualified teachers to move or quit the profession at different rates for similar credentials across the two types of schools.

11. Technically, these drivers can be broken down into supply-side drivers (such as the number of people interested in and training to be teachers and the attachment existing teachers feel to the profession) and demand-side drivers (such as the number of teachers needed for a given number of students with a given set of needs, or the size of school budgets). Rising student enrollment and the trend toward smaller classes clearly increase demand (shift demand curve out to the right), while worsening work conditions (decreased autonomy, teaching to the test, and increasing behavioral problems) reduce supply (shift the supply curve to the left). Other drivers, however, are muddier, since labor markets, especially public-sector labor markets, operate with a lag (the number of students in teaching pipelines reflects past, not current, conditions) and are not textbook competitive markets. High turnover, for example, might be driving “supply” (if keeping all other drivers constant), but turnover might also be driven by teachers who are leaving teaching or moving to other districts due to other issues driving “demand” or affecting “matching.” In the teacher labor market literature, terms such as “recruitment and retention” are used, but these are technically about “matching” rather than the “supply side.”

12. We use other data from the NCES and DOE, which will be cited appropriately in later studies.

13. The 2015–2016 NTPS does not produce state-representative estimates. The forthcoming 2017–2018 NTPS will support state-level estimates.

14. The forthcoming 2017–2018 NTPS additionally includes the private sector.

Adamson, Frank, and Linda Darling-Hammond. 2012. “Funding Disparities and the Inequitable Distribution of Teachers: Evaluating Sources and Solutions .” Education Policy Analysis Archives 20, no. 37.

Allensworth, Ellen, Stephen Ponisciak, and Christopher Mazzeo. 2009. The Schools Teachers Leave: Teacher Mobility in Chicago Public Schools . Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute, June 2009.

Baker, Bruce D. 2018. Educational Inequality and School Finance. Why Money Matters for America’s Students . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Education Press.

Borman, Geoffrey D., and N. Maritza Dowling. 2008. “Teacher Attrition and Retention: A Meta-Analytic and Narrative Review of the Research.” Review of Educational Research 78, no. 3: 367–409. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308321455.

Carroll, T.G. 2007. Policy Brief: The High Cost of Teacher Turnover . National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

Carver-Thomas, Desiree, and Linda Darling-Hammond. 2017. Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It . Learning Policy Institute, August 2017.

Clark, Melissa A., Eric Isenberg, Albert Y. Liu, Libby Makowsky, and Marykate Zukiewicz. 2017. Impacts of the Teach for America Investing in Innovations Scale-Up . Mathematica Policy Research, February 2017.

Clotfelter, Charles, Helen F. Ladd, Jacob Vigdor, and Justin Wheeler. 2006. “High-Poverty Schools and the Distribution of Teachers and Principals.”  North Carolina Law Review 85: 1345–1379.

Coenen, Johan, Ilja Cornelisz, Wim Groot, Henriette Maassen van den Brink, and Chris Van Klaveren. 2017. “Teacher Characteristics and Their Effects on Student Test Scores: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Economic Surveys 32, no. 3: 848–877. https://doi.org/10.1111/joes.12210 .

Darling-Hammond, Linda. 1999.  Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of State Policy Evidence .  Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington, December 1999.

Darling-Hammond, Linda. 2004. “Inequality and the Right to Learn: Access to Qualified Teachers in California’s Public Schools.”  Teachers College Record 106, no. 10: 1936–1966.

Darling-Hammond, Linda. 2010. The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future . New York: Teachers College Press.

Fraser, James W., and Lauren Lefty. 2018. Three Turbulent Decades in the Preparation of American Teachers: Two Historians Examine Reforms in Education Schools and the Emergence of Alternative Routes to Teaching . Johns Hopkins School of Education, Institute for Education Policy, September 2018.

García, Emma, and Lawrence Mishel. 2016. Unions and the Allocation of Teacher Quality in Public Schools. Economic Policy Institute, April 2016.

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Ingersoll, Richard M. 2001. “Teacher Turnover and Teacher Shortages: An Organizational Analysis.” American Educational Research Journal 38, no. 3: 499–534. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312038003499.

Ingersoll, Richard M., Lisa Merrill, and Daniel Stuckey. 2014. Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force . Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Pennsylvania, CPRE Report no. RR-80, updated April 2014.

Isenberg, Eric, Jeffrey Max, Philip Gleason, Liz Potamites, Robert Santillano, Heinrich Hock, and Michael Hansen. 2013.  Access to Effective Teaching for Disadvantaged Students . National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, November 2013.

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Loeb, Susanna, Linda Darling-Hammond, and John Luczak. 2005. “How Teaching Conditions Predict Teacher Turnover in California Schools.”  Peabody Journal of Education 80, no. 3: 44–70.

Marinell, William H., and Vanessa M. Coca. 2013. Who Stays and Who Leaves? Findings from a Three-Part Study of Teacher Turnover in NYC Middle Schools . Research Alliance for New York City Schools, March 2013.

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Can Teachers Force Students to Do Something?

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Teachers and parents often ask this question: “Can I force my student to do something?” The answer is probably not. In the past, teachers have been able to use physical coercion, such as corporal punishment, in order to get students to comply with their instructions. However, spanking has been banned in many states in the US and countries because it is seen as a form of child abuse.

However, even if you could find some way of forcing your student to obey your instructions without hurting him or her physically-which would be illegal anyway-you still couldn’t force him or her into understanding the material that you’re teaching. So, while you can’t force a student into compliance with your instructions on a purely practical level, there are other ways of getting the student to do what you want.

You can motivate a student through positive incentives-such as giving them candy or praise when they accomplish something. You can also try to make the task less difficult for them by creating a fun, learning environment that makes it easier for them to learn and absorb information.

I think the answer to the question is largely dependent on the definition of “force” in the question. I think our laws, irrespective of our countries, still provide instances where a student can or cannot be forced to do something. That is, they can be forced in some situations but cannot be in others.

This post explores the question in detail and provides both of the instances under which students can or can’t be forced to do something.

Ethical Demands for Teachers

Every day, teachers make ethical decisions regarding teaching. Some of these decisions are easy to make, like whether or not to pass a student who hasn’t done the work. Others are more difficult, like whether or not to give a student an “F” when their performance is clearly failing but they show tremendous effort and academic promise. There are ethical decisions specific to teaching, and there are ethical demands across all professions.

Teachers must consider the following 20 ethical choices for teachers:

1) Give students a chance to learn from their mistakes.

2) Make sure the grading system is fair.

3) Co-operate with administrators.

4) Make ethical decisions when teaching controversial material.

5) Follow the school district’s dress code.

6) Be Always respectful of students and parents/guardians, even if they are disrespectful to you.

7) Be honest about your qualifications.

8) Make an effort to know your students.

9) Be accountable for whatever you do, in or outside of school.

10) Use good judgment when dealing with student behavior.

11) Follow all safety guidelines when using tools and equipment.

12) Be Always on time.

13) Complete your work, such as lesson plans and grading.

14) Be ready to teach whatever is in your class plan.

15) Maintain professional relationships with students.

16) Use time effectively.

17) Be respectful of colleagues.

18) Maintain confidentiality.

19) Encourage student self-expression.

20) Make the classroom a safe place for students to express their ideas and opinions freely, even if they are opposing yours.

These decisions must be made daily by teachers. It is important to note that ethics are constantly evolving, and new ethical demands are placed on the shoulders of educators each year. An ethical dilemma can occur at any time, but it is also possible for teachers to make an unethical decision without even knowing it. For that reason, teachers should have a list of ethical issues in teaching readily available for reference.

Can A Teacher Force A Student to Do Something?

It’s a generic question, so it doesn’t have a clear answer. It can depend on the specific situation of what you mean by “force” and the consequences of that course of action.

There are some cases where teachers have been known to force students to do things, such as homework or cleaning up after themselves, but there are times when that’s not ethical.

Reasons Why A Teacher Can Force A Student to Do Something:

1. It benefits the student because they’re forced to do something they don’t want to do.  For example, if a teacher makes a student stay after class to finish homework that they didn’t try to complete earlier in the day, it can be a good thing because it means the student won’t have to stay up late at night to complete the assignment.

2. It benefits the teacher by making their job easier. If students are allowed to do whatever they want, there’s no telling how much work they will actually complete and turn in. When teachers tell them, what is expected of them and they don’t do it, teachers should use force.

3. Some students don’t care about school and only take the minimum effort they can get away with. These students make it harder for other students to learn because their grades bring down the curve for everyone else in the class. In these cases, a teacher might need to force a student to complete an assignment.

4. Teachers are the authority in the classroom, which means they get to make decisions for what happens on their campus. Sometimes this involves forcing students to do things.

5. A teacher might be able to force a student to do something because it can benefit someone ultimately. For example, if a student had strep throat that is contagious, but the teacher let the student come to class anyway, they would spread the illness and make other students sick. So, the teacher or school is allowed to force the student to stay home until they’re certain the student can’t infect anyone else.

6. It’s possible for a student to ask a teacher for something and be denied, but the student could also skip asking and just do it without permission. In these cases, teachers should use force to get the students to follow the rules they set in their class.

7. A teacher has more information about what is going on in a student’s life than they might be able to share during office hours or after-school conversations. They can see signs of depression or abuse when they talk with a student, but it might be overstepping their boundaries to force the student to talk about it. However, they can use force in order to get students to do something that will help themselves or someone else, like getting help for depression or reporting abuse.

8. Some students don’t have any choice but to obey their teachers’ demands because it’s either they do what the teacher says or fail the class. This is related to having information about their students’ lives, but it’s more focused on helping struggling students out. Sometimes parents send their children to a school where they can get a good education, but don’t provide enough support at home to help them succeed in school. In these cases, teachers have a responsibility to use force in order to help the student do better.

9. Teachers can’t always rely on parents to teach their children how to be respectful and responsible, so they need to take the time to teach them themselves. This is especially necessary for schools where there are lots of disrespectful students who don’t pay attention in class or care about their grades. In these cases, a teacher might need to force a student to stay after school as a warning or to give them detention if they don’t listen in class.

10. Sometimes teachers have students who come to class with items that are injurious to themselves and others. If a teacher doesn’t use force to stop them from bringing those items, it will cause injury to someone one day. Meanwhile, teachers must assure the safety of their classrooms for everyone.

11. Sometimes teachers have students who have very limited knowledge about certain concepts. A teacher might need to take it upon themselves to teach these students everything they should know, even if that means using force to get them to stay after school or organizing extra lessons for the students.

12. Some students might think they know better than their teachers and it can be hard for teachers to convince them otherwise when they disagree on a subject. In these cases, some teachers may have to use force in order to keep the classroom running smoothly and give all of their students the education they deserve.

13. In some cases, a teacher might see a student’s potential but know their current behavior is holding them back from achieving it. In these situations, teachers have both a responsibility and a right to use force in order to get the students to do what they need them to.

14. Teachers are responsible for their students’ safety, which is why they need to take action whenever a student’s behavior becomes dangerous. This is also related to using force when students refuse to follow the rules set by the teacher in charge of their class.

15. Every teacher has to make sacrifices in order for their students to learn, which means using force when necessary. Sometimes this can mean that the class becomes less enjoyable because of the behavioral rules, but it’s all for a good cause.

Check out our article on Canters’ Assertive Discipline here.

Ten Circumstances Under Which A Teacher Cannot Force A Student to Do Something:

1. Teachers are not allowed to force students to do anything except attend class when they are in elementary school.

2. Teachers cannot force students to take medication without the written permission of parents.

3. Schools are not allowed to make a student do anything that would violate their religious beliefs or practices, even if it is against the school’s rules or policies.

4. Teachers may not force students to work during school hours or at any time without paying them for their time.

5. Students cannot be made to do something against their own will, even if it’s the school’s policy.

6. Teachers are not allowed to force a disabled student into doing anything that damages or negatively impacts their education.

7. Students cannot be made to do anything that would violate their religious beliefs or practices, even if it is against the school’s rules or policies.

8. Teachers may not force students to pay for things in order to talk bad about other students.

9. Schools cannot force a student to take medication without written permission from their parents and only if it is medically necessary.

10. Teachers cannot force students to do against their will, even if it’s the school’s policy, except at elementary school when they are required to attend classes.

Positive Discipline might serve as an inspiration for you to get a taste of alternative classroom management approaches.

Final Thoughts

You cannot force a student to do anything that would violate their religious beliefs or practices. You may not make them do something against their will, even if it’s the school’s policy. Teachers are responsible for students’ safety and sometimes they need to take action when students refuse to follow the rules set by the teacher in charge of their class. Every teacher has to make sacrifices in order for their students to learn, which means using force when necessary; however, at elementary school teachers are required only to attend classes with no other obligations outside of teaching them what is needed during this time period while more experienced teachers have multiple responsibilities like maintaining classroom discipline and correcting homework mistakes on top of teaching lessons according-to-plan. Visit our blog page for more inspirational articles.

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How to Make On-Demand Writing Assessments Work for Both You and Your Students

When it comes to testing, many teachers rightfully have strong opinions. Some of these include:

• There’s too much of it
• The preparation takes up too much class time
• The tests dictate instruction
• Tests are based content or standards teachers don’t agree with

These concerns are real and valid, especially within particular locations or teaching contexts. The reality, though, is that testing is a large part of the public education system, and it is not likely to go away or radically change any time soon.

Students are required to take standardized, timed tests throughout their entire educational careers. And these tests continually ask students to compose writing samples and essays within a set time limit. Both the SAT and the ACT, for example, feature full-length essays. As you’re aware I’m sure, these tests are still often the basis by which colleges and universities decide whether or not to accept a student.

I know administrators may ask you to do on-demand writing as part of test prep for state summatives. Your district may mandate specific, timed “benchmark” assessments featuring on-demand essays. Either way, teachers can use these mandated tasks to further students’ writing progress for the better.

Instead of lamenting about what we wish wasn’t so, we can turn on-demand writing into a chance for growth. If you’re struggling to figure out how I’ve found some good methods and tools (like Writable ) to incorporate – check them out below.

Teach students to break down a prompt

In Teaching Adolescent Writers , Kelly Gallagher advocates from the “ABCD” approach to helping students succeed at timed writing:

Re-written outside of the acronym, these steps are:

• Rewrite the prompt in your own, simpler language
• Create a basic outline for your answer
• Determine the structure and organization of your essay (and write it)
• Re-read your response to make any necessary corrections

There is no need to practice this with many prompts at once. Kelly advocates for reviewing the process before on-demand writing practice throughout the year. By using a gradual release model, he begins with teacher modeling, then guided practice, and finally independent practice. His approach happens throughout a unit or school year.

Use on-demand writing as a reading quiz

This is a topic that I’ve changed my mind about. I used to be against reading quizzes, which I viewed as “gotcha” style assessments. But this was before I heard Todd Finley mention the benefits of frequent low-stakes quizzes . Recalling information actually helps students to solidify their understanding of the information, and I’ve been able to see this now in my own classroom.

Consider a commonly-taught text like George Orwell’s Animal Farm . Below, you can see examples of on-demand prompts scaffolded to several levels:

Outline the gradual ways that the pigs have separated themselves from the other animals and seized power.

Identify the significant syntax and diction in Old Major’s speech. Explain how these individual choices make the speech effective.

Analyze the ways in which Animal Farm serves as an allegory based on the Russian Revolution.

These scaffolded prompts could be used with different students at different levels, or at different points throughout the study of the novel. You might even choose to “stack” several prompts like this together for a more developed response.

Encourage students to write faster

The main idea here is simple: teach students how to work within time limits. I realize there is taboo around encouraging students to work fast, and this is especially true when discussing students with IEPs who receive extra time accommodations. I’m of course not encouraging you to ignore students’ accommodations (this would be both immoral and illegal). However, you can teach all students useful strategies for maintaining momentum in their writing. This ultimately will help them to complete tasks faster, which is an essential test-taking skill. The on-demand writing prompt is the perfect place to practice this.

How can we encourage students to maintain momentum and write faster?

• Use “quick writes” that ask students to write as much as possible within a set time (one minute, for example).
• Ask students to maintain the physical act of writing, even if their ideas run out.

What does this look like? Ask students to keep moving the pen or keys. What they write doesn’t matter (right now). Ask them to repeat the last line they wrote. Give them a silly phrase like “I have nothing to write” and have them repeat it. The idea is to encourage the building and maintenance of writing momentum.

Writable is a great tool for this type of practice, since they have hundreds of pre-built assignments and prompts you can choose from (or customize), and students don’t feel as much testing pressure when writing inside an app.

Make on-demand writing part of a process

When teachers plan an editing or revising lesson, students will forget their essays. As you know, this is simply a law of the teacher universe.

On-demand writing is as a solution to this challenge. The task requires all students to complete a draft within a set time, so teachers can have students complete the on-demand writing task and then use it in a few different ways:

• Decide to grade the initial draft, then eventually “throw out” that grade
• Not grade the initial draft and just move into the other stages of the writing process
• Have students write a few pieces in the same genre and revise one of them (the on-demand piece being one of the pieces)

There are other options for infusing an on-demand writing piece into the writing process, and these are three that I’ve tried with much success.

It’s about a shift in mindset

Sometimes teachers have to put their foot down and speak out about their passions – to better education for their students, and for themselves.. And for some teachers, reducing or eliminating testing is a valid and important passion. However, for me, testing is such a part of the educational landscape, that it’s not the battle I want to fight – I would rather learn to compromise.

This ultimately points to a larger issue for teachers: here is much outside of our control within the educational system. And sometimes this does impede our ability to teach students at our best. However, I believe that with the right mindset, we can re-frame some of these frustrating issues into opportunities for both student and teacher learning.

Are you new to Writable and curious to learn more?  Create a free account ,  request a quote , or  schedule a quick demo.

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Training and recruitment.

Teacher Prep , Licensure , Student Teaching

Hiring and Assignment , Supply and Demand , Teacher Diversity , Work Day

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• Introduction

Do states collect and publish teacher supply data?

Do states collect and publish teacher demand data, do states disaggregate supply and demand data sufficiently, do states report on teacher shortages by connecting disaggregated supply and demand data.

• States to learn from

Do states publish teacher retention and mobility data?

Do states make school-level aggregate teacher performance data publicly available.

• Guidance to drive state investments in their teacher supply and data systems
• What information should states ideally provide?
• Acknowledgments

State of the States 2021

State reporting of teacher supply and demand data.

DECEMBER 2021

• State Teacher Policy Database
• Create a Custom State Data Report

Saenz-Armstrong, P. (2021). State of the States 2021: Teacher Supply and Demand . Washington, D.C.: National Council on Teacher Quality.

• teacher preparation programs can be aware of the actual need of future teachers,
• districts can be aware of the available talent in order to be competitive and support their hiring strategies; and,
• state, district, and school administrators can all forge better policies to ensure an adequate—but not excessive—supply of new teachers. [supply]

Here is some guidance to drive state investments in their teacher supply and data systems:

• Publish on the state education agency's website the data already collected in order to comply with federal Title II reporting , addressing the new teacher supply, by institution and at the certification level. Currently 18 states Alaska, Arizona, District of Columbia, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia  do not do so.
• Report not only on the current teacher workforce, but also on vacancies at the district level, as well as certification area. Currently only 16 states California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington  do both. A strong state example of this is Illinois' Educator Supply and Demand dashboard , which provides district-level information annually on returning teachers, unfilled positions by subject area, and teacher attrition and mobility.
• Connect new teacher supply data with vacancy data in order to identify the gaps between supply and demand and publish this data in a format that is accessible and actionable to decision makers. This is the data necessary for informing both shortages and surpluses, and currently only two states do so (Colorado and Illinois). A model to emulate is Colorado's mapping tool that links together district level shortages and educator preparation program completion.
• Consider a unified human resources system that can pull both statewide supply and demand information from each institution preparing new teachers as a service to job seekers and hiring managers. Currently no state does so but a localized version of this system has been successfully implemented for school principals by a group of Georgia school districts in partnership with a local university as a part of a grant from the Wallace Foundation . The project benefits from a unified information system by leveraging information both from school districts and their higher education partner to identify candidates for educational leadership training, train them, and fill administrative vacancies with the right candidates.
• Collect and publish information on teacher turnover, differentiating between mobility and attrition. The more disaggregated the data, the more specific district administrators can be with their retention policies. Currently seven states Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, and Oklahoma  report on both mobility and attrition. Delaware is a leader in this area by providing mobility data at the state, district, and school-level for early career, experienced, and all teachers; as well as categorizing this data by school retention rate, and transfer rates both within and between districts.
• Not only report on the size of the current teacher workforce, but also collect and publish data on other teacher characteristics by school , such as percentage of teachers not fully credentialed, teacher race and gender, teachers teaching out of field, years of experience, and most importantly levels of effectiveness. Currently 13 states Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington  do so. Arkansas is a leader in this area, reporting not only on teacher effectiveness, but also on other characteristics such as teachers teaching out of field, provisional licenses and licensure exceptions, experience, as well as percentage of effective teachers serving economically disadvantaged students.  [idealdatatool]

How many of the six key best practices for teacher supply and demand does each state follow?

Hover over answers to see state detail. click column headers to sort..

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Smart Classroom Management

How To Handle Students Who Don’t Do Any Work

You can encourage them. You can empathize with them. You can coax and cajole them.

You can gently ask if there is anything bothering them or keeping them from trying.

You can lighten their load, bribe them with incentives, or offer choices, accommodations, and a buddy to sit with.

You can work with them one on one and whisper assurances or gently convey the threat of consequences.

And you may get them going for a time.

You may prod them through an extra sentence or paragraph or persuade them to give half an effort.

But in doing so, you make a deal with the devil and do them more harm than good.

You see, by spending extra time with reluctant students, by coddling, appeasing, and buying into any of an unlimited number of justifications for their inaction, you create even more resistance.

You enable their behavior and make them weaker and less motivated .

You hide from them the realities of life and at the same time crush the development of a true work ethic—which is the only way to empower future success, no matter their circumstances.

So they sit there, subjected to the same doomed and disheartening strategies year after year.

Many have teams of professionals meeting about them, designing intervention plans for them, and assigning labels to them they don’t understand.

Meanwhile, these same students who are assumed to be too attentive-averse or ill-equipped to succeed rush home at the end of another wasted day and play the same video game for three hours without a break.

It’s all a bunch of hooey.

Yet, this failed approach, that merely acts as cover for students as well as those whose job it is to educate them, is promoted and recommended time and again by educational leaders and school districts across the country.

It’s baffling. But nothing changes. The same strategies will be trotted out again this year.

So what’s the solution? Well, providing the students are able to do the work—which, except in the rare circumstance of total misplacement, should be every student in your class—the best thing you can do for them is expect hard work.

Note: Within education, the word expect has been tremendously watered-down. For our purposes, it’s true meaning is to foresee, presuppose, and believe in strongly.

What follows are three steps to get reluctant students to start producing real work and making real improvement.

1. Teach great lessons.

This is your number one job and the very essence of being a teacher. Somehow, it’s been lost in a sea of less important or completely unimportant responsibilities.

You must produce clear, compelling lessons that students want to pay attention to.

Your classroom management skills must be strong enough to have the opportunity to capture their attention, and then you must be able to do so through your passion, your humor, your creativity, and most important your content knowledge.

You must be able to draw them in, absorb them in the moment, and maintain their state of flow— where time slows, mind-energy focuses, and concerns and worries of the past and future fade away.

You must set your students up for success by checking thoroughly for understanding. In this way, before you send them off to work independently they know exactly what to do and how to do it.

Being exceptional in whole-class instruction covers a multitude of potential learning and motivational problems, most notably those that cause students to struggle getting down to work.

Note: For more on how to teach compelling lessons, see The Happy Teacher Habits .

2. Let them be.

Once you’ve done your job, once you’ve provided your students everything they need to succeed, you now must shift responsibility to actually do the work over to them.

They need to know, and be reminded of each day, that it’s all up to them—every last bit of it—that you’re not going to turn around and reteach what you just taught minutes before.

This sends the message more than anything else you can do or say that they really can do it and that you believe in them and expect them to succeed.

Therefore, if after giving your signal to get started they just sit there, then let them sit.

Let them face the hard choice right now, in this moment, rather than when they’re 19 years old and it’s too late, to try and succeed or to do nothing and fail.

When you kneel down next to them to help, excuse, or placate, you let them off the hook. You allow them to avoid and delay this critical choice—to the point where they no longer believe in themselves or their abilities.

Forcing their hand is the change-agent they desperately need to upend their downward trajectory. When the decision to either succeed or fail comes so directly and honestly every day, the pressure to make the right one builds and grows stronger and harder to avoid.

It weighs heavily on their shoulders, especially combined with the intrinsic carrot of pride in success dangling just in front of them. Until, overwhelmed, the dam breaks.

You look over one day and find them immersed in their work. And when you do, you must seize it.

3. Praise the work, not the student.

Instead of rushing over with a huge smile and telling the student how wonderful they are because they completed a few sentences—which very effectively lowers the bar of expectation—point out their good work.

Focus on the content of their production, wherein lies the key to an untapped yet very powerful sense of pride. Just be sure that it’s true, quick, and subtle .

Avoid making a big deal. It’s embarrassing for the student—and not a little condescending—and just tells them they’re less capable than their classmates. Instead, point to something in particular in their work and tell them the truth.

“That’s a good sentence.”

“Smart word choice.”

“I like the direction you’re going.”

Tell them like it is, the straight dope, and then be on your way. Don’t wait for them to respond. Don’t stand there and enjoy their reaction or make them feel obligated to show their appreciation.

Let them enjoy the feeling of receiving pure acknowledgement of their authentic work, untainted by you and unconnected from who they are or were, what they’ve done in the past, or how much or little confidence they may or may not have.

Simply acknowledge their good work and allow the natural pride in a job well done, which they’ve rarely had a chance to experience, propel them to greater accomplishments.

The three steps above add up to the expectation that as a class they will succeed. They will improve. They will achieve and become better students than they ever thought possible.

And that’s just the way it’s gonna be.

But what if one or more continue to sit and do nothing? Then let them be. Let the pressure to want to work and try continue to build.

In the meantime, they’re a living and breathing reminder for you to be better. To learn the skills available right here at SCM to be an expert in classroom management and present better, stronger lessons.

Make success through your high-level instruction a foregone conclusion. Then dare your students to try. Challenge them. Believe in them.

And they will succeed, and be forever changed.

If you haven’t done so already, please join us. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.

What to read next:

• How To Handle A Student Who Does Zero Work
• Why Allowing Students To Turn In Work Anytime Is A Bad Idea
• Should You Allow Your Students To Talk During…
• 5 Reasons Why Your Students Don't Like You
• How To Connect With Students Who Don't Want To Connect

56 thoughts on “How To Handle Students Who Don’t Do Any Work”

Great ideas! But I have done ALL of the good and the bad you talk about. I had 2-3 students last year who fit this to a Tee. The only way they would work and participate is on computer games. I did create Nearpods and assign computer work, they would play the ‘games’ but that was all. It was also very time consuming and not something I could make and do every night for every assignment. I did just let them sit and earn their F’s on their report cards, conferenced with parents. Nothing worked. Then they passed the state assessment with flying colors, I dont get it 🤷🏻‍♀️

It means they were learning, or already knew the material, but refused to give you the satisfaction of them obeying you. They were proving that you were not their boss and laughing at your futile attempts. They were being mean to you, resisting your authority, and the school’s and the world’s authority. Passing the state assessment perhaps as a twist ending to show they were playing you the whole time. We need smart people who do not obey authority but do the right thing anyway, but they can be little jerks while growing up.

Thank you for this article. This is a big area for me to improve on and as always you explain the way in a clear and practical manner.

You frequently mention checking for understanding as an important tool. Sometimes it’s easy to do this. For example if you are teaching how to add fractions, have the students do practice problems on whiteboards. How would you quickly check for understanding in a lesson on writing a strong conclusion to an essay or a lesson on understanding the theme of a short story, when it’s not as straightforward? Thank you for any advice!

Good question. I wish I had the time to answer it now, but I’ll be sure to cover it in a future article.

It is a big question, so I appreciate it being added to the list. Keep up the great work!

Excellent advise! I feel so guilty when I let them be and then I feel guilty for threatening and bribing. Thank you for sharing this. I am going to stick to this method for my scholars’ sake.

You’re welcome, Janine.

I do love your approach overall but was appalled to read ‘except in the rare circumstance of total misplacement, should be every student in your class’ because the majority of my classes every year in California at several different grade levels are always unable to do the work due to lack or basic skills. For the first time you seem very out of touch!

Hi Jennifer,

The article is about not doing any work (i.e., because of low motivation, confidence, apathy, poor listening, etc.). Being at grade level isn’t a prerequisite, but does point to the critical need for improved teaching. When you get a chance, please read the article again. The idea and common acceptance that more than the rarest, misplaced student can’t do any work on their own, or even quality work, is a major reason why schools are failing and so many students fall through the cracks.

Hi Michael,

Can I safely assume then that you aren’t referring to students with special needs in this article?

I couldn’t agree more with what you say with regards to regular students, and even, commensurate with their ability, with regards to certain students with special needs.

This is covered in the article.

In a future article, can you give an example of a really great lesson great?

Our middle school places students who had failed 7th grade math into 8th grade math along with students who did pass. Suggestions? Do most districts do this?

in my experience, yes. Social Promotion…..

I need this reminder! I overdo the help to find some success, but it is always up to them.

Thank you, this is very timely for me. I am curious though, does this mean to leave the student when assessment is being completed as well? I have one student who did this perfectly and will not complete assessment. My other question is due to an expectation in my school that consequences are issued for not working (usually detention to get the work done). What is your opinion on this? I seem to have a big pile of work that still isn’t being done and losing lunch breaks.

Do you grade the work that they don’t do? Are parents told about it?

I am responsible for students’ scores ultimately. It all gets printed out on a spreadsheet and I am evaluated on it

If scores are low, what then? Administrators don’t care to know about student responsibility; the idea is if if grades are poor, it is the teacher’s fault.

Also, if students do no work, do I assign study hall as a consequence- or just let them have full privileges no matter what?

Remember that different level students need scaffolding (such as ESL students) If your lesson includes scaffolding to support them (starting at whatever level is needed to reach the student(s), then your scaffolding can be removed bit by bit in subsequent lessons until they are able to accomplish the task on their own, without support. (ergo, the word “scaffolding”) There are so many things we teachers are expected to do well. It is overwhelming. It is a long process to become skilled in every single thing we are expected to do perfectly. Don’t give up. If you’re teaching because you LOVE students and are willing to do whatever it takes to reach all students, then you are in the right profession!

I’ve been following this plan for two years now and have seen tremendous improvement in behavior in my class. This year I have very young K students who have just turned 5 and so are basically acting like 4 year olds who have never apparently experienced school or consequences. Any additional suggestions for K kids who don’t listen? I’ve been giving the one warning then the timeout, and the letter home but after two weeks they are still not following our simple class plan.

The most difficult aspect to master of Michael’s classroom-management plan is the leverage he talks about as being key to an effective plan, i.e, creating a classroom that students want to be a part of (through good rapport and engaging lessons) and that they therefore care about not participating in. Is there something there you might tweak?

For timeouts, is there a fun game or activity that you could promise to do with students who remain out of timeout after a lesson segment or period so that, as Michael says, those in timeout will feel the weight of missing out?

But you say you’ve been implementing Michael’s plan for two years, so perhaps you’re well aware of these points. In that case, could your students benefit from stories about how a school and classroom work and what the expectations are for students, what teachers are and how to interact with them, etc.? Short videos can be effective as illustrations of these social skills (YouTube, etc.). You might also have fun with this by having your students help a puppet learn how to behave in school.

I would love to hear your response to some of the other posts, not just the one that was critical. There are some excellent questions there. I’m especially interested in your response to Nic’s question about checking for understanding. I completely agree with you that we need to build the lesson so the students can be successful when they work independently.

I noticed you are highly skilled at pointing out several common classroom management issues teachers struggle with. In fact, it’s scary how dead-on accurate you are. But I must ask if you currently struggle with these issues, or are they issues you observe in other teachers’ classes? Is it really possible to make it through an entire year with zero classroom management issues if a teacher follows all of your advice? I notice a lot of teachers posting that they do follow your advice, but are still struggling. Can you shed some light on this situation when you get a moment? I ask that you please do not omit this comment, because I am asking for a lot of teachers out there who are probably wondering the same thing and want answers. Thanks!!

I wonder this as well Pete. I have come to the conclusion (in my 3rd year of 5th grade/and of being a classroom teacher) 1. These are different times for a lot of kids. Regardless of demographic. Social media/fortnite/little parental support are key factors for a lot of the issues. 2. If a school is not consistent across the board (k-5 etc) with teachers and classroom management I could see that being a factor in our success. 3. Growing class sizes contribute a lot to the issues of student success as well as behaviors.

Though it is doable I haven’t cracked the code yet either. I am also still learning how to be an effective educator while keeping kids on track and not having chaos in the classroom. I just take all of the advice and input I have received and try my best each day. See what works and don’t give up. It’s never going to be ideal 100% of the time. Kids are humans and we have to accept that.

I am also wondering if consequences fit into a student not completing work.

I work with exceptional education students who have learning disabilities, severe ADHD, Autism, Language Impaired, or Developmentally Delayed. They are in the regular education classroom in an inclusion setting for the majority of the day. Many of the kids are hard workers, but a few get very frustrated by not being able to keep up. What are some suggestions of strategies that have worked for you? I work with students K – 3rd. Thank you!

Would you also give consequences for students who don’t produce any work?

Hi Sam and Tim,

As mentioned in the article, not in a traditional sense. But there are certainly consequences that I’ll point out more specifically in a future article.

I think this is your best article. I’m a special education teacher for students with emotional and behavioral disorders and I see this almost daily. It resonates when you mention how they can play a video game for three straight hours but not be attentive to a lesson for 3 minutes. I always let a child sit and do nothing and use my “point system” as a natural consequence. It is when they become disruptive by talking to others while also not doing any work when it gets frustrating. I remove the student in these cases. To play devils advocate on one of your points, though: not every lesson will be amazing nor needs to be. Isn’t that also a fact of life? Isn’t work ethic expected when the work itself isn’t always pleasant? Your relationship with the student should be compelling, but honestly not all my lessons will be, and I’m still extremely confident in my teaching practice.

You’re right, in that the lessons themselves don’t have to be amazing. This isn’t the same, however, as the act of teaching and preparing students for independent work, which does need to be top notch.

Philosophically, I agree with you – except that when I’ve done this, often other kids stop participating as well. They see that kids sit there with no consequence – natural or otherwise – and wonder why they have to work so hard.

This article made me remember last year when I received an email asking me to sign my child up for a “Mood App,” where ultimately it let the educators know when students were in mood/mind set to engage in learning. They would use this app in the morning and afternoon (time is precious, a lesson could have been taught during this time frame.)

It saddened me, as like you stated, it is setting students up for failure by giving them this choice. In the work place ( or life in general), we are not greeted with a mood app, nor given the opportunity to dwell on our emotional state. It is expected that we do our best and work hard, no matter the situation or what the day has brought. I did not feel that this was a beneficial approach.

I asked that my daughter did not participate and that she read a book instead.

Michael, I love your work and have purchased several of your books. Please do respond to the many good questions that have been brought up. I am willing to let the child “fail” if she/he absolutely refuses to produce any work or show any effort, but problems arise with parents and admin who want to see teachers exhaust themselves trying to get these few students to do work, otherwise they say you’re not a good teacher. Please comment. Juliet

A mood app? What school system is using this? I hope we never get this.

Following. Great questions asked, and I want to see the answers.

This is an excellent article with even broader applications (i.e. parenting lol). I also appreciate that you letting us all “sit” in the tension it has created. Y’all, we’ve got this! Just like the kids. To those of you asking questions, listen to yourselves and re-read the article.

I too would like to hear whether consequences for not working are appropriate. Bottom line is the work needs to be done!

Some children who are very capable need to be told firmly to get busy. Reasonable consequences work well, too.

A retired teacher.

In my sixth grade self-contained class, like many other teacher’s classes, I have 32+ students whose reading and math levels range from 2nd to twelfth grade. I appreciated this article very much, because it reinforces what I have been aiming to do for several years with great success. It has worked so well that my principal and some parents of low-performing students have been astounded that work is suddenly being completed. I have not had to defend myself for letting kids sit with this responsibility. I teach the lesson, provide intervention in small groups if skills are truly missing, and I allow some tools to be used regularly as perv504 Plans and IEPs: homemade dictionaries, word banks, multiplication charts, and copies of notes/PowerPoints. Clear directions, grading checklists and rubrics help so that kids know what they neeed to do. While circulating around the room I do not linger at any one kid for long. If they ask for help or they are just sitting doing nothing. I praise the work they’ve done so far, I prompt them to tell me what they need to do next, and then I leave. If they don’t know what comes next I direct them where to look on a hand-out or chart and ask them to read it or tell it to me. Then I give a thumbs up and walk away. (If they have not started I say something like, “I see you’ve got your book open to page ——. That’s a good place to start.” And I leave. Last year I had 19 special education students. No, they were not all at grade level by the end of the year, but most had shown at least 2 years of growth.

Impressive. Sounds like you’re doing an amazing job!

I teach at a charter school. My classroom has three grade levels, K, 1, & 2. It is also full inclusion where we provide services mostly within the classroom. This means accommodations must be provided within the classroom as well as some students receiving that one on one assistance. I have a particular student re-doing kindergarten with an IEP who is very immature. He frequently refuses to participate even when lessons are going very well and all the other kids are enjoying their learning time. He just doesn’t buy in. I’ve been doing the time outs and sent a couple letters. Parents seem to want to help from home but I am at a loss. I did have a breakthrough using this method with another student who really struggled last year to even start to work on their own. I often keep my students for the whole 3 years. Any advice on my immature little one? He crawls under tables, throws tantrums, etc. HELP! Thanks!

What about when they have a 504 that says shortened assignments but they do nothing? Recommendations?

Hi Michael, On point as always! As your regular reader of your blog and a purchaser of all of your books, I I have a great deal of respect for SCM am hoping to get your opinion; It seems that restorative justice is gaining momentum in education. I was going to look at learning more about restorative justice but I thought I’d ask your thoughts on the topic ? (It’ll probably be something you’ll write about later).

Thanks Greg! Good to hear from you. Yes, it is something I’ll have to cover in the future. In the meantime, there are some things I like about it while others are incompatible with SCM.

“Praise the work, not the student”. IMHO the secret to great teaching in a nutshell.

Hi Michael, Thank you again for this article! I read it a few times and feel that I understand your points, however, isn’t there a conflict between leaving the student alone for an indeterminate amount of time (however long they don’t complete the work) and upholding my promise to follow my CMP to a tee? I think that if a student is not doing their work, then they’re clearly breaking rule #1: Listen and Follow Directions. I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this and of course Michael’s too. Thanks again!

Your classroom management plan is for misbehavior/disruption only. I’ll cover this topic again in the future.

Thank you, Michael!

What would one do with a student that I feel might have a disability, but has not been tested for one. I have a student that will just sit for the whole class and doesn’t do anything. He’s not a distraction and I am genuinely concerned. I also can’t get a bold of the parents.

Great article again! I always try to remember when I’m teaching to try to teach great lessons, like it says in this article and and in “Happy Teacher Habits” and “Dream Class.” A lot of times the boredom in my class is simply because MY lesson is not that great on that day. It puts the power back on me to teach great lessons.

The way it works in my classroom (3rd and 4th grade) is: whatever independent work they don’t finish in school goes home for homework. My question is, does this eliminate the “pressure to want to work and try” since they know they will be taking it home, and there they can possibly get Mom to help them do the assignment? Would it be better to take it away at the end of the period and give the grade for what was actually done? The difficulty with that method is that sometimes the child is working diligently but just needs a little more time than the amount allotted in class. Then again, I definitely have seen, and have this year, students who sit and do nothing. I don’t want to treat them differently than the rest of the class, but I also don’t want to be giving them a loophole to get out of that pressure which would lead them to improve and succeed. What is the best solution? Thank you for all your help and excellent articles. They really make a difference!

Hi Sister Mary,

This is a topic I hope to cover soon. However, the key is exactly what you said. If the child is working diligently, then it’s perfectly okay to let them finish at home.

As a 3rd grade teacher I inherited a student who in 2nd grade had been allowed to remain unengaged without working and then have an aide assist them with ALL of their work every afternoon!!! That came to an abrupt halt when she arrived in my classroom. She was a very capable A-B student who just wanted to lounge at her desk and play with her pencil and daydream once left to herself. She would participate in the lessons and even at the board, but chose not to work independently. Would you believe this girl chose to do this even throughtout the course of the year after she missed much of her recess, had notes home and took work home at times, had discussions with the principal, and had consequences at home? I kept trying to figure out the “positive reinforcement” she must somehow be receiving from it. Finally I tried after-school detention and that’s when she would work so she could go home. She was made to complete ALL work but the struggle was real.

What if 80% of your class does not do any work?

As usual, these articles seem like they are reading my mind and are tailored directly to me – thank you!

My biggest uncertainty is how to teach compelling maths lessons, given that there is such a wide spread of levels among the class. Maths is just so interconnected that I find it frivolous to try and teach a higher level of the curriculum if a basic concept isn’t yet mastered. This makes it hard to teach a lesson that is compelling for all students. For instance, I might be needing to teach my students how to factorise algebraic equations, but some can’t even work with times table facts, let alone understand algebraic terms. Others might listen politely to such a lesson but really need to be challenged more. This is all possible with differentiating of course, but it’s hard to actually teach in a compelling way in these circumstances.

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Law of demand lesson plan.

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• nhinguyen299323 - 19:26:41 17/05/2023

The teacher ____the students to do the assignment efficiently A.instructions B.instructive. C.instructed. D.instructor Giải thích giùm e vs ạ

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Hãy luôn nhớ cảm ơn và vote 5* nếu câu trả lời hữu ích nhé!

• ThunderSadBoiz

Đáp án : C

- S + instruct(chia) + O + to V + O ... : Ai đó hướng dẫn ai đó làm gì ...

- Hành động quá khứ → Chia thì quá khứ đơn .

⇒ Thêm ''ed'' sau động từ .

- Dịch : Giáo viên đã hướng dẫn những học sinh cách để làm bài tập về nhà một cách có hiệu quả .

Hãy giúp mọi người biết câu trả lời này thế nào?

t đi nấu cơm ăn tối r

thôi ạ, mk đi nấu ăn tốit r

tự nhiên thấy mình có lỗi :(

tự nhiên thấy mình có lỗi :( `->` it's not your fault :>

but I felt feel guilty myself :(

tutu quê quá xóa 1 từ ''feel'' đi -.-

• 33phamngocminhthu79

Đáp án: C

Giải thích các bước giải: chọn c vì the teacher là N, instructed là V (N+V). Không chọn A vì instructions là hiện tại đơn, mà trong câu này k có dấu hiệu của hiện tại đơn ạ

Chúc bạn học tốt<3

vào nhóm mk ko bạn

Bổ sung từ chuyên gia

=> C instructed (hướng dẫn) S V2/ed

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College protesters want ‘amnesty.’ At stake: Tuition, legal charges, grades and graduation

Police in riot gear cleared an encampment on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston as several dozen students shouted and booed at them from a distance.

Georgia State Patrol officers detain a demonstrator on the campus of Emory University during a pro-Palestinian demonstration, Thursday, April 25, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

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Northeastern University Police remove and arrest protesters one by one at the tent encampment on campus in Boston on Saturday, April 27, 2024. Dozens of NU students and other protesters who set up tents with them on the NU campus were arrested by state, Boston and NU police. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via AP)

A protester is arrested by University of Texas police at a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas, Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in Austin, Texas. (Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman via AP)

Columbia University professors rally in solidarity with their students rights to protest free from arrest at the Columbia University campus in New York on Monday April 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah)

Pro-Palestinian demonstration encampment is seen at the Columbia University, Friday, April 26, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Protesters are cuffed after being detained on the campus of Emory University during a pro-Palestinian demonstration Thursday, April 25, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

New York City Police Department officers arrest pro-Palestinian protesters outside a student-led encampment at New York University on Monday, April 22, 2024, in New York. The protest and encampment was set up to demand the university divest from weapons manufacturers and the Israeli government. The NYPD said 133 protesters were taken into custody on Monday, and all have been released with summonses to appear in court on disorderly conduct charges. (AP Photo/Noreen Nasir)

Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours.

But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment ,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty demanding their amnesty. At issue is whether universities and law enforcement will clear the charges and withhold other consequences, or whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students into their adult lives.

Terms of the suspensions vary from campus to campus. At Columbia and its affiliated Barnard College for women, Alwan and dozens more were arrested April 18 and promptly barred from campus and classes, unable to attend in-person or virtually, and banned from dining halls.

Questions about their academic futures remain. Will they be allowed to take final exams? What about financial aid? Graduation? Columbia says outcomes will be decided at disciplinary hearings, but Alwan says she has not been given a date.

“This feels very dystopian,” said Alwan, a comparative literature and society major.

What started at Columbia has turned into a nationwide showdown between students and administrators over anti-war protests and the limits of free speech. In the past 10 days, hundreds of students have been arrested, suspended, put on probation and, in rare cases, expelled from colleges including Yale University, the University of Southern California, Vanderbilt University and the University of Minnesota.

Barnard, a women’s liberal arts college at Columbia, suspended more than 50 students who were arrested April 18 and evicted them from campus housing, according to interviews with students and reporting from the Columbia Spectator campus newspaper, which obtained internal campus documents.

On Friday, Barnard announced it had reached agreements restoring campus access to “nearly all” of them. A statement from the college did not specify the number but said all students who had their suspensions lifted have agreed to follow college rules and, in some cases, were put on probation.

On the night of the arrests, however, Barnard student Maryam Iqbal posted a screenshot on the social media platform X of a dean’s email telling her she could briefly return to her room with campus security before getting kicked out.

“You will have 15 minutes to gather what you might need,” the email read.

More than 100 Barnard and Columbia faculty staged a “Rally to Support Our Students” last week condemning the student arrests and demanding suspensions be lifted.

Columbia is still pushing to remove the tent encampment on the campus main lawn where graduation is set to be hosted May 15. The students have demanded the school cuts ties with Israel-linked companies and ensure amnesty for students and faculty arrested or disciplined in connection with the protests.

Talks with the student protesters are continuing, said Ben Chang, a Columbia spokesperson. “We have our demands; they have theirs,” he said.

For international students facing suspension, there is the added fear of losing their visas, said Radhika Sainath, an attorney with Palestine Legal, which helped a group of Columbia students file a federal civil rights complaint against the school Thursday. It accuses Columbia of not doing enough to address discrimination against Palestinian students.

“The level of punishment is not even just draconian, it feels like over-the-top callousness,” Sainath said.

Northeastern University Police remove and arrest protesters one by one at the tent encampment on campus in Boston on Saturday, April 27, 2024. (John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via AP)

More than 40 students were arrested at a Yale demonstration last week, including senior Craig Birckhead-Morton. He is due to graduate May 20 but says the university has not yet told him if his case will be submitted to a disciplinary panel. He worries about whether he will receive a diploma and if his acceptance to Columbia graduate school could be at risk.

“The school has done its best to ignore us and not tell us what happens next,” said Birckhead-Morton, a history major.

Across the country, college administrators have struggled to balance free speech and inclusivity . Some demonstrations have included hate speech, antisemitic threats or support for Hamas, the group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, sparking a war in Gaza that has left more than 34,000 dead.

May commencement ceremonies add pressure to clear demonstrations. University officials say arrests and suspensions are a last resort, and that they give ample warnings beforehand to clear protest areas.

Vanderbilt University in Tennessee has issued what are believed to be the only student expulsions related to protesting the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding. More than two dozen students occupied the university chancellor’s office for several hours on March 26, prompting the university to summon police and arrest several protesters. Vanderbilt then issued three expulsions, one suspension and put 22 protesters on probation.

In an open letter to Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, more than 150 Vanderbilt professors criticized the university’s crackdown as “excessive and punitive.”

Freshman Jack Petocz, 19, one of those expelled, is being allowed to attend classes while he appeals. He has been evicted from his dorm and is living off campus.

Petocz said protesting in high school was what helped get him into Vanderbilt and secure a merit scholarship for activists and organizers. His college essay was about organizing walkouts in rural Florida to oppose Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-LGBTQ policies.

“Vanderbilt seemed to love that,” Petocz said. “Unfortunately, the buck stops when you start advocating for Palestinian liberation.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .