Assignments, Grading, and a Life...OH MY!

So...this is my first blog post in quite awhile.  I didn't think that it served any purpose until now.  I made this a part of my teaching goal for the year to be more reflective on my teaching.  Legally, I feel I need to put this in my first post: these posts are my opinion only: not that of the school, dept, other teachers, etc.  So...here we go!

Lately, our US History team has been having some problems being aligned in our assessment of material.  We took a look at our gradebooks and found that some of us were giving way more writing assignments, some were giving more tests, and some hadn't given many homework assignments at all.  We are currently taking steps to address this, but it got me wondering what other teachers do.  I will describe my structure below.

I give out a set of "learning targets" (basically objectives) at the beginning of each chapter over what a student should know in each particular chapter.  We accomplish these in class in addition to maps, analyzing primary sources, and short video clips (2 - 10 min) to elaborate on topics, but never to completely explain something.  Homework is a set of key terms and students must complete an "Identification" over each of them (5 per section).  At the end of the chapter, there is a quiz over the Identification terms and a test over the learning targets.

This system gives me a lot of structure, but it also results in a lot of assignments (which results in a lot of grading).  I was much higher on the amount of assignments given than my fellow department members were.  So I am looking for suggestions to implement in second semester.  I want to switch it up.

What is your classroom like?  Do you have any structure?  What sorts of activities do you do?  How do you incorporate "higher-level" thinking activities such as analysis into your class?  Please leave some advice in the comments section below.

New Direction

From now on, this blog will be my place to improve my teaching.  I am so glad that it has a purpose now, because before, I wasn't really comfortable with what I was doing.  I will post once per week reflecting on my classroom and things I am doing.  Hopefully I will be able to solicit advice from readers/fellow teachers, and maybe even convince you to be more reflective of your teaching as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!