Embedded Files
Establishing a system through which students are accountable for managing and organizing their materials saves teachers time, space, and energy. Many organizational systems also make it easier for teachers to give students completion grades for classwork assignments. The overarching goal of developing students’ organizational skills is to foster academic self-management which promotes equity and access in the classroom. A student with stronger organizational skills is going to be able to better access complete rigorous tasks in the classroom. Organization is learned like all skills and should be explicitly and strategically taught.
GUIDING QUESTIONS:
Where do the papers and documents I give students live?
What organizational skills do I want students to leave with at the end of my class? How will I teach, reinforce, and model those skills?
What structures can I put in place to support students with organizational deficits due to disability?
BINDERS:
I've linked a few binder systems below. The general benefits of binders are that students can have all of their past work available as a reference during assignments and that teachers are not responsible for overseeing hundreds of pieces of paper after they give them out. Including a table of contents or a stamp sheet in your binder can make it easy to grade students' work and/or provide them with constructive feedback on their levels of engagement during class.
STAMPSHEETS
Stamp sheets are a great way to hold students accountable for their work in real-time. Stamp sheets can include space for students to answer warm-up or do-now questions as well as indicators of any other work you want students to be doing during class. It also serves as a way to grade students on a frequent basis (either for completion or accuracy) while eliminating paperflow. Students respond well to it as it is a mode of immediate positive reinforcement. Here are some examples:
Stamp Sheet 1: This stamp sheet gives students points for their warmups and a daily classwork assignment.
Stamp Sheet 2: This stamp sheet helps students track the extent to which they are using their phones responsibly, completing their classwork, and contributing to a respectful learning environment.
Self-inking stamps are the best and easiest. You can get one like this and buy ink to refill when it dries out. You can also get a custom one with something personal or connected to your content area.
ONLINE ORGANIZATION
Digital organization is just as important. Here are some options to help your students:
Bookmark: Require students to bookmark your google classroom and any other very frequently visited pages. Work with them to clean up old bookmarks. Make taking a screenshot of their bookmarks an assignment to hold them accountable.
Use google docs, sites, or slides: Create a calendar, website, live agenda, or running document with links to all your class materials. This can be used to link slideshows and be used by students who miss class. Depending on your content, it can be more navigable than google classroom. It's also helpful for your own planning from year to year as it is easy to copy and paste. You have to teach students how to use these. They work best if students access them multiple times a week.
Google drive: Teach students how to organize google drive.
Have students create a folder for your class and reinforce and model them putting assignments into those folders. share the folder with you so you don’t have problems accessing their files within that folder.
Teach them how to color code their folders.
Spend a day each semester cleaning up google drives (deleting and renaming “untitled” files, sorting files, and removing copies).
Remind them to move past years work into a designated folder.
Page updated
Report abuse