Here's Your Permission to Stop Chasing Missing Student Assignments
Is your exhausting pursuit of student work actually supporting learning?
I still remember the conversation like it was yesterday. A teaching colleague looked me earnestly in the face, her expression a mix of concern and compassion, and said something I’ve never forgotten.
“It really doesn’t make a difference if a student misses one or two spelling quizzes,” she said. “Once you’ve recorded their scores from five quizzes, their average hardly changes after that.”
Of course, this was back at a time in my career when I thought middle school spelling lists, worksheets, and quizzes were great pedagogy. And I recorded numbers in my gradebook. And I calculated averages.
I don’t do any of that anymore.
But my colleague’s point is enduringly true and as impactful in my practice as ever.
Let me explain.
This is how sad things actually were for me
At the time I received this advice, I was giving spelling quizzes to my seventh graders once a week. It looked something like this:
Over the course of a term, this could add up to something like 9–12 quiz results for every student in my gradebook. That’s a lot of numbers. To my colleague’s point, by the time I entered the ninth or tenth score out of 25 in my gradebook, it would be surprising if the average at the end of the row even moved by 1%.
That was both silly and sad, because it meant that no one was being served in any sense. All that time checking Quiz 9 and carefully recording those scores? A complete waste of my time.
It got worse. If a student missed a quiz due to illness or any other reason, my instinct would be to reschedule them. As in: if Melissa missed Quiz 9 on Friday, I might take part of my lunch break the following Monday to make sure that Melissa got that quiz finished.
Heck, half the time it would be the student themselves pushing me on it.
“Can I write my spelling quiz now, Mr. Cavey?”
That’s the sound of a confident speller ready for yet another 25/25.
Are we equating full gradebooks with professional competency?
So here’s the question: why give Quiz 9 to Melissa at all?
Think about it.
But the more data you have in your gradebook, the more fair you are to the student and the more precise the final assessment will be, I might have thought at the time.
If every cell in my gradebook has a number, that’s proof of my professional competency.
Rubbish.
Student submissions can add up quickly for middle and high school teachers
More than 15 years later, I’m reminded of the spelling quizzes principle when I see or hear about teachers who spend inordinate amounts of time pursuing students for unsubmitted assignments.
In a given week, a typical middle or high school teacher might post as many as 20 assignments (I prefer to call them learning activities when I can) with various products required for submission across various classes, subjects, or courses. With class sizes averaging around 25 students, it’s not unreasonable to imagine this teacher on the receiving end of more than 400 products or artifacts of learning.
It’s not the situation in every context, and it may not be the norm for you. Some courses may be entirely in-class while other classes may engage in larger projects that carry over from block to block without specific due dates or required uploads.
Still, the point remains: student submissions can add up quickly in a single week. For a single teacher. Where a lot has been assigned, a lot will come in.
Chasing every single student assignment is a great way to destroy teacher sanity
Then, the reality: not every student has submitted the required products by the due date or deadline. What should the responsible teacher do?
Here’s how some teachers respond:
These teachers mean well. And some of these measures have their place, at least in spirit.
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But it’s also true that this pattern of teacher behavior can become a black hole. All of the tracking and communication I’ve listed here can take huge amounts of time on top of everything else a teacher must do week in and week out.
Chasing students for missing assignments can become a cruel obsession. Unsubmitted work tends to snowball. Days of tracking and chasing can turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months. Problematic trends build over time, and five missing assignments after week one can become 53 by week seven.
By term’s end, these responsible teachers have run themselves ragged. Despair and cynicism threaten to take over as teachers once on fire burn out entirely. In the midst of it all, unsuccessful nagging of offending students has ruined their chances for meaningful relationships.
I think there’s a better way to do things.
Is this really about the student’s learning journey, or has it become an issue of compliance?
Here’s a bold statement. Teachers shouldn’t feel guilty about not chasing every single student assignment that isn’t submitted.
Read that again if you need to.
This is more than just sensible self-preservation. It’s also about brain science and academic research.
Generally speaking, kids learn best and most when they’re in the classroom. They’re observing the modeling done by the teacher. They’re engaged in the learning activity. They’re collaborating with peers. They’re receiving real-time feedback on iterations of work.
Exceptions exist, of course, but students are generally not learning as effectively when they’re working at home in isolation and without real-time teacher support. Add the additional context of work happening two or three weeks after the learning was the focus of in-class activities, and these assignments have trouble meeting the relevance test at all.
Let’s put it this way. Making a student finish some worksheet or small-time learning activity that was introduced in class three weeks ago may not be serving anyone well. No one is winning here.
A question worth asking ourselves: Is this really about the student’s learning journey, or has this become an issue of compliance? The other students jumped through this hoop, so you need to, too.
When it’s actually worthwhile to chase students for missing work
Sometimes, it is the right move to pursue students for unsubmitted work. In my mind, this happens when one of the following reasons is present:
If the assignment doesn’t meet one of those two requirements, I don’t chase the student for very long.
What I’m NOT saying
Here’s what I am certainly not saying about unsubmitted student work.
What I AM saying is that sometimes the return on investment doesn’t warrant the time and energy you are pouring into chasing. And when I say return I’m thinking of the return for the student, too.
Pursue missing work when you must AND you’re able
Education is a people business. Learning thrives in contexts of safety, love, and meaningful relationships.
So enjoy your students. Engage with them. Make the most of class times. Offer as much feedback and guidance as you can during learning activities that take place in the classroom or during the school day.
Pursue missing work when you must. Engage kindly and respectfully with the most consistent offenders. Get a sense of which 2–3 students in your classes are the most severe cases of I-try-to-avoid-doing-any-work-at-all and physically sit with them to offer support during class times.
As for those three missing assignments out of the 27 in your Geography class from the learning activity you completed last week? You could try one conversation, one reminder, one inviting comment or offer of support on your LMS.
You could. Depending on what else is going on in the school life, you may not even have the bandwidth to reach out at all. And that’s okay.
Embrace the grace and choose the path of teacher sustainability
Do yourself and your students a big favor.
Don’t chase these students for long. This particular assignment isn’t a critical brick in their learning journey, and it won’t be a foundational piece of evidence when you construct their picture of learning and growth for the term.
So let it go. Move on. Give yourself some professional grace. Admit that you are human, your time is bound by the laws of physics, and the day that all the fun is gone from teaching is the day that you lose your effectiveness.
Here’s your permission: stop chasing those missing assignments.
Executive Visionary | Strategic Planner | Collaborative Leader
3 年Great perspectives. Of course, we need to roll back to why something was assigned. Lots of variables for teachers to consider, but, I agree, sometimes we just need to acknowledge human limitations and that to be effective is different than a "full gradebook." Thanks for sharing, Tim.
Elementary VP, Education YouTuber, Technology Teacher
3 年Hi Brad. It’s great to connect with you again. Thanks for your engagement here. First, some context. BC and other provinces have moved (or are moving) away from numerical grades entirely (for K-9). I haven’t entered a single number into my gradebook in over four years, so in that sense a discussion around zeros is moot. What you’ve articulated here though amounts to a traditional view of assessment as wages or compensation. Students do the work, and we pay them. Students don’t do the work, and they don’t get paid. That sets up assessment as a terrific tool for coercion, which is why teachers in decades past relished zeros or penalties (fines) for any forms of noncompliance (late work, poor attitude, low effort, absenteeism, etc). Unfortunately, assessment wielded in that fashion does a poor job of accurately reflecting learning. What does a child actually know? What can they actually do? In traditional models, we could never know for sure, since their grade had as much to do with their level of compliance as anything else. One more point. Something else that assessment research has taught us is that traditional assessment (compensation) systems motivated a portion of the student population. For many others, it didn’t.
Intergovernmental & Stakeholder Relations
3 年Tim - I'm no pedagogue, but my first reaction to your article is 'why are teachers twisting themselves into pretzels to try and coax students into doing assignments that will affect their grades?' Then I read this line and it all came into focus: "I’m NOT saying that teachers should just give students zeros for those assignments — ever." If that is your bottom line, students will soon figure it out and act accordingly. It sounds like they already have. As a result, teachers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time playing whack-a-mole trying to counter one excuse after another in what becomes a game of cat and mouse that the student will always win because there are 27 of them to 1 of you. I'm not saying that throwing zeroes around needs to be your first course of action, but it need to exist as more than a theoretical possibility. It also seems like you're dodging a teachable moment here. When the kids get into the real world, there are going to be real-world expectations on them. They are going to be given assignments that their bosses are going to expect them to do correctly and on time as a condition of employment (and to get paid). By sending the message in grade school that nothing is ever really "due" and that there aren't really any consequences if they don't do assignments properly or on time, you're not really preparing them for life outside the cocoon.