Sunday, August 16, 2009

strategies for presenting material they've already had (repeaters)

1. Learning Style Inventory
2. Begin review the first day. I do startups daily (quiz grade once a month) so I will use the state test problems as the daily starter.
3. Tutoring before school, during school, after school, Saturdays - whatever you can get the kids to attend and can fund. The person suggesting this had grants to pay for during school and Saturdays.
4. Pre-tests, differentiation, teacher collaboration. (I am collaborating by blogging and emailing).
5, Intensive review for the state test the 2 weeks before the test.
6. Teaching students how to take a test.
7. Using a different approach. I intend to use Discovering Algebra and focusing on what I consider to be the 2 main concepts: solving equations and graphing.
8. Teaching for mastery - either continuing to offer them retests as long as they redo the work or offering to bump the grade to a 90, 95, or 100 if they can earn an 85 (keeping them from settling for the just-passing score, which dooms them when they fail something. I don't know how to approach the brass with this but I can see that it might work.

OK - other suggestions?

3 comments:

Pissedoffteacher said...

Don't burn yourself out. It seems like you are a bit too ambitious.

The problem with testing and then restesting and then retesting again is that it is too much work for the teacher.

When I have a class like that I give an exam every Friday. I retest some of the old material with the new. (Most of the test is old material.)

I hate to sound like a pessimist, but most of these kids don't care about 90's. Look at their records. They just want to get through.

Good luck.

Ricochet said...

This is the plan. I know I cannot do it all but these were the suggestions I was given.

Part of it depends on the kids.

Pissedoffteacher said...

All that tutoring is too much to expect you to do. Besides, this is not the population that will avail themselves of it.