One practice I have found works in my classroom is the use of classroom-wide goals in their writing.
After grading the second set of essays for my class this year I realized that the same mistakes were showing up in most of the papers. Though I had explained what these errors were and warned the students to edit for them, they still were not catching them. I decided to go back to a method of classroom management I learned in graduate school to solve this problem.
Giving the students the control over the rules/penalties greatly increased their performance. I wrote down the most common mistakes in that set of essays, which meant that they showed up in more than 40% of the time.
The next day I wrote them on the board at the beginning of first period. Then I handed over my expo marker and let the students take over. I told them to reorganize them by the severity of the errors. I then asked them to organize them in three groups by percentage that I should take off for the mistakes in each category. The class came up with categories for 10%, 5%, and 2%. (See the picture for the list.) Read The Full Story…
