Christine Sauer

Managing Absent Students Work In my first couple years of teaching I felt like I had a step ahead of everyone else knowing that I wanted to have a plan for students to get missing work when they were absent in my class. Over the years with the help of other teachers I have tweaked the concept of “less work for me when a student is gone” and feel pretty confident in how smoothly things run. I have a half sheet of paper that has information on it specific for my class and the routines that we do. When I do attendance at the beginning of each hour I take the extra 30 seconds to write each students’ names on each absent slip that are gone. (I do NOT fill out the absent form at this time). By getting their names down by the end of the day I have a neat pile (sometimes large sometimes small) of the students that need missing work. The next step can be done in two ways. I know as teachers we are always super BUSY during the hour with our students but any spare moments that I ha...

When I was a student in high school and college I dreaded tests, quizzes, final exams, and really anything that "sounded or looked" like a test. As I reflect in my 6 years of teaching I have come to the conclusion that I often dreaded tests because nobody ever taught me how to successfully prepare for and take them. I have seen the students from my first year of teaching to this year overall increase not only their test performances but also not dread and stress over them as much.  4 TRICKS TO HELP STUDENTS SUCCEED ON TESTS 1. Be Organized (sounds like the obvious one but...) There were times as a student that I felt like it was the day or two before a unit exam that the teacher would fill my classmates and I in that we were having a test. All the research and reading I have done on assessments in the classroom encourages people to study over periods of time in small chunks of time as well.  When I start a new unit in my world geography class before I start with any c...