One thing that became apparent to be almost immediately is that it is essential to keep good records of a large variety of data about students in . your classes. Professor Gleason shared several documents with me that she uses to manage these logistical tasks.
Attendance Roster
Description: This has a header with the phrase attendance roster, the class name, and the instructor name. It has a blank spot to insert the date. Then it has an alphabetical list of students with blank spaces next to their names so they can sign in.
Response: I think that this is much more effective than a blank sign in sheet. It allows you to quickly see who is not in class. I also like keeping physical copies of a sign in sheet so you can refer back to them with a student if there is ever a discrepancy in when the student believes they were absent and when the instructor believes they are absent.
Ideas/Next Steps: I think it's a good idea to always have several blank rosters available for note taking. It's a good way to take notes on who is participating in class discussions or keep notes for conferences you might have with students during in class writing times.
Attendance Record
Description: This document has an alphabetical list of student names and columns with each date that class will be held. It is oriented horizontally to make it easier to fit the 30 class dates. Professor Gleason only notes absences with A in the boxes.
Response: I liked that Professor Gleason only noted the absences on the record. It makes it very easy to see which students have been absent and makes it very obvious when students are accumulating too many absences.
Ideas/Next Steps: It is important to update this record at least weekly. I will have to make sure I schedule time for record keeping. I also think I need to schedule time to alert students if they have accumulated too many absences. This will need to be integrated into my weekly routine. I also really want to explore the attendance keeping capacities of Blackboard. Though I really like that Professor Gleason's record is easy to read and one page, I wonder if Blackboard might be able to alert me when students are accumulating too many absences. It's just something I'm curious about. One question I have is how to make sure I'm tracking student lateness. I want to make sure I have that documented rather than using my impressions of when I believe a student has been late to determine their participation grade.
Assignment Record
Description: This document has an alphabetical list of student names in the left hand column with columns to the left for each assignment. In each box, Professor Gleason has noted how many points each student has gotten.
Response: To me, keeping track of student assignment submissions seems a little complicated. In a class with 30 sessions there are a lot of assignments; honestly there should be because there should be enough low-stakes assignments to make students feel prepared for their high-stakes writing assignments and because class credit motivates students to feel invested. Very quickly tracking who did (and more importantly did not) submit assignments can lead to very cluttered and long documents.
Ideas/Next Steps: I think I really want to either purchase a grade book or use Blackboard for grading. It's just so much information to track and I would like to be able to observe trends of students not handing in assignments across the semester or across units. I think I'll do some more research on how people track their assignments.
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