How do you encourage students to ensure their books are kept with a high level of pride, when it has been publicly acknowledged that they won't be marked?
This week the leadership team were asked this great question as a way of ensuring high standards are continued into the covid-restricted classroom.
Most of the ideas discussed were around getting buy-in from students as to why it’s important to lay their work in their books properly: it shows progress, it shows the high expectations of themselves in terms of pride in their learning.
Teachers can show examples of books with a logical, easy-to-follow layout and discuss what they’ve done to make their notes clearly tangible. This is an opportunity to showcase examples where students have less “neat” handwriting, so that we can emphasise this isn’t a question of pure aesthetics but making books a useful tool for organising learning.
If students can buy-in to the idea of their books being a clear and well organised revision resource that they can use for day-to-day recall or bigger summative exams they will start to maintain their own high expectations of their books.
If you would like to still show students you are still looking at their books, an idea posed by one leader was to ask students to hold their books up in a lesson and do a scan of them from the front - it’ll be easy to tell whose book is looking a little scruffy!
A great idea posed by another leader would be to involve showing the books to parents at Progress Review Day meetings and/or parents and using the time to get parental buy-in too.
If you have any other ideas we’ve missed in the discussion please do comment with it below; we’d love to hear from you and what you’re trying in the classroom!
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