A little help from my friends

In the interest of students becoming more self sufficient, a group of us at work have decided to implement an idea that Barrie Bennett mentioned in passing at a p.d. session we were involved in.  He talked about a homework circle.  I don't know about you, but I get really frustrated taking up questions in physics class for the first 30 minutes of class, especially when it only benefits the couple of students that tried that question.  The other zombies just watch and hope to learn through some miracle.

Barrie Bennett suggested that you have students form homework circles and the instructions to them are that for the first 10 minutes of class, they are responsible within their own circles to catch everybody up on the homework and to make sure everybody within their group understands it.  If a student in the group consistently isn't pulling their weight, the group may impose sanctions and the offending student may be jettisoned from the group for non-contribution.  The decisions are made by the group with regards to their own welfare without teacher intervention.

In the event that multiple circles haven't been able to figure out a particular problem, that problem can be done on the board by the teacher to the benefit of all in the room and perhaps additional instruction in that area is required.

I put out an email to about 15 people, and 7 responded saying that they were eager to try it.  Other than me, the breakdown is 1 science, 1 history, 1 english, 1 music, 1 family studies, 1 business, 1 math.  Interesting eh!?  I intend to do this with my 4U physics, but not my 1D science.  4U is more consistently homework heavy and I think they have the maturity and are responsible enough to handle it.  Others are trying it with all grade groups. 

I informally introduced it to the students on the first day of the semester, and they didn't even bat an eye.  It seemed to them to be the most natural thing, especially when I framed it with acknowledging their collective capabilities and university implications.  Now, this will take some getting used to for them, but I can see it working really well.  Just yesterday, in way of reviewing concepts and mechanics of problem solving that they should have retained from their previous foray in physics, I put some problems on the board and told them to try to work out the solutions, either individually or in groups.  At one point, their was a dispute between two groups regarding the correct answer.  Their first course of action was to ask me to referee and tell them which was the correct response.  Of course my response was to trade solutions with one another and look for the mistake in the other groups' work.  They did it instantly and within moments had determined where the mistakes had been made (in this case, only one group had made an error, but it would work well even if both groups had the wrong answer).  Once they get used to this idea, I can see it really benefiting them in a few ways and clearing up a bunch of time to examine the curriculum a little deeper.

One final note, I learned how to, and subsequently added an RSS feed to my class website for the students.  I was getting tired of constantly reminding them to check the website for updates and hopefully this will encourage them to use it more frequently.  Since mentioning it to them, I've had about 30 hits.  It was at just below 1000 hits and I told them that whoever was the 1000th hit, if they took a screen shot would get a heartfelt congratulations from me  ;)