Chapter 11 page 236
Problem 11.2 Evaluating Teaching: Routines
Two high school mathematics teachers have developed the following routines to collect and hand back
students’ work. Evaluate each of these routines.
Teacher #1. Miriam Tsai’s students sit in assigned seats each day. Miriam collects students’
homework, quizzes, and tests by rows; students hand papers forward. She is careful to keep the
collected homework together in the same rows that they came from. Her routine for handing back the
evaluated work is that she sets each row’s homework in a stack behind their row on a counter at the
back of the room. As students come in, they go to the stack behind their rows, and they pick up their
papers on their way to their desks.
Teacher #2. Sonia White’s students also sit in assigned seats each day. When Sonia’s students
hand in homework, quizzes, or tests, they pass their papers to the front of the row. Each student is
taught to be very careful to make sure that his or her work is placed on top of the stack of papers as it is
passed forward. In this way, the stack that reaches the front of the room has papers in the same order
that the students are sitting in the row. Sonia collects the papers from left to right, so that the papers
are always in the same order from each period.
When handing back the homework, quizzes, or tests, Sonia sometimes sets the papers on
students desks, face down, before the period begins. This takes only a minute because the papers are all
in order, so she can quickly walk down each row and lay each student’s work on his/her desk. On other
occasions (when there is not time before the class period starts, or when she doesn’t want to hand work
back at the beginning of the period), she sometimes hands each row’s stack of papers to them so that
each student tasks his/her paper off the top of the stack and passes the rest of the stack back. If she
wants to make sure students don’t see other students’ work (as when handing back an exam), she
quickly walks around herself and hands the papers out. Again, because the papers are all in order, it
takes just a minute for her to hand back all papers.
Response: One crucial goal of routines is to minimize time not spent learning. Both teachers have
developed systems that can accomplish this goal. Both teachers have fairly efficient routines for having
students hand papers in. They vary mainly in their procedures for handing papers back.
Miriam does not lose any class time handing back papers, because students pick up their papers
before the bell to start class even rings. However, a possible problem with Miriam’s system is that
teachers are often busy addressing students’ concerns and getting instructional materials ready for the
next class during the short period between classes. Miriam may often find that she lacks the time to get
the papers stacked in the counter before the first student comes in for the next class. She might need a
way to place papers from all periods at the back counter at the beginning of the day. But a problem with
Miriam’s system is that it violates a principle we learned in Chapter 10—the principle that evaluation
should be kept private whenever possible. Miriam’s system allows students to leaf through the papers to
see the grades and comments that other students received.
Sonia’s system is not quite as efficient in avoiding lost learning time, as she sometimes uses a
minute of class time to hand papers back. However, her system allows her to keep her evaluations of
students’ work private whenever she needs to, as when she is handing exams back. By having students
keep all their papers in order, she can even hand back papers herself very quickly.