Making Students Accountable

Candy Cates

As teachers, we use various methods to make our students accountable to us–tests, quizzes, projects, homework, answering class questions.

For a teacher, homework is a means to measure how well our students understand a concept that we have just taught. Or it may be a means to reinforce a concept we covered in class. When we check that homework assignment, we are making our students accountable for information we previously taught. I find great success with homework accountability with my students by having a separate grade book for checking homework. Just as I have separate pages for grades for each class period I teach, I also have separate pages for the homework of each class. If I intend to show to my students that homework is important, then I have to have a means whereby I check it. Whoever said, "Never expect what you don’t inspect" knew what he was talking about. By my having a separate grade book where I put a checkmark indicating, "Yes, Ashton had his work," my students know homework is important–important enough that Mrs. Cates checks it daily. Of course, I have a method to "this madness." Either I walk quickly up and down the aisles of my class, looking back and forth between the two rows, or I "train" my students at the beginning of the year to walk by my desk in alphabetical order with their homework in hand so that I can easily see it. After a couple of trial runs with either of these methods, my students are ready for me to check their work in just a matter of a few minutes. Homework is not graded, but my students always know they will be held accountable for each assignment.

Teachers ask their students questions each day in the classroom. It would be nice if we, as teachers, could make this a more enjoyable task instead of a boring job. One fun method I have used daily works like this: I have all class members stand. I then pose review questions to my students. I may use vocabulary words for which students have to give a definition, parts of speech and an example of that part of speech, or I may use literature review questions over the short story we just studied. Before we start, I establish how many questions a student must answer correctly before he may be seated. The number varies with the activity. Of course, each student wants to be one of the first to be seated. If a student knows the answer to the question, he raises his hand, and I call on him. Sometimes I even have a surprise such as brownies that I have made for the first five students that are seated. This makes reviewing an active process, and I can see just how well my students understand the material we have just studied.

Reprinted from Balance, a publication of the School of Education, Bob Jones University. Used with permission of Bob Jones University. Please write BJU Press, for permission to reproduce this article.