What's Homework?

The entire faculty has been involved in a year long debate on our grading policy, especially with regards to how we handle zeros.  The goal is to reach some type of school wide consensus for implementation next fall.  On our hallway, we continually come back to issues of a philosophical nature.  One of those recurring issues deals with homework.

Many questions regarding homework have come out of this discussion:

1. What is the purpose of homework?  Most (all?) treat it as necessary practice.
2. How should it be graded - for accuracy (skill) or merely for completion (process)?
3. Relating to #2 above, when is it appropriate to give a process grade?

As we seek to answer these questions, I think the final arbiter of the discussion needs to be, "What is best for the students?"  With that in mind, how would you answer the above questions?  What questions would you add to the discussion?

6th Period

A lot of conversation has taken place around the subject of the effectiveness of 6th period.  Now that we are five months into this experiment, many of us have come up with some innovative ideas on how to best use them - both as local standards and enrichment.  What are the good things we can say about them?  What are the possibilities that would make them even better?

Parent Involvement

I've been thinking a lot about what we can do to increase parental involvement.  These thoughts have been spurred in part by The Big Picture (see list at the right) but also by conversations with another teacher.  Those conversation centered around how we notify parents of incomplete assignments, the effectiveness of our efforts, and whether it is really impacting the student.  Our conclusion was that most of what we call "parent involvement" is nothing more than trying to gather a signature.

So, if parent involvement is as important as we say it is, what are we currently doing to encourage it?  What can we do to increase parent involvement levels?  What constitutes "parent involvement"?