Sunday, January 3, 2016

No More Review Days?!?!




Recently, I had a short twitter conversation with a teacher about eliminating formal review days before tests.  I responded that I no longer give traditional unit tests, so I also no longer do traditional review days.

Instead, I give a cumulative quiz once every 4-6 school days.  These quizzes are heavy on recently learned material and light on content that was taught longer ago.  I use a form of standards based grading, so I use my gradebook every week to decide which older topics my kids need extra help with.  Those become the items added to what would otherwise be a traditional quiz.  You can read more about how I implemented standards based grading if you like.

Since I also use hybrid learning, I then work a review of the older topics into my stations.  During small group instruction, I check in with students about new material and we usually practice on individual whiteboards.  I mix in a few of the targeted review content as well.  If you want to know more about hybrid learning, you can read these previous posts.


That’s it!  No more full class periods of review.  It’s almost like gaining 10-12 additional teaching days, which we can all use!

2 comments:

  1. Love it! Not sure if this would suit your system, but I have even stopped testing anything I've taught in the last week. My tests (every other Friday) cover everything we've ever learned up to the previous Friday. I don't need to know if they are good at what they just learned: I have that data from other means. I need to know if they are still good at everything else.

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  2. That makes sense. I do like to switch things up at the new semester,so now would be a good time for me to think about it!

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