SBG: Early successes

My first success with SGB came minutes after showing my year 9 pupils their new grades. I asked each pupil to do base their homework on improving their score on a topic they are lower on. At the end of class a pupil stayed behind and asked for specific help on the first topic we'd covered in the year. He'd got a low homework score on it then but had left it. Straight away with SBG though, he'd spotted it as a problem that hasn't gone away. We went through it together and he's now as strong on it as anyone in class.

The second success was a little more unexpected. I find myself putting a lot more effort into the homeworks I give, I spend a little bit more time marking, but I don't mind because already I am so much more aware of where my pupils are at. I suppose that before I'd seen homeworks as only marginally helpful and more time consuming for me and them than they are worth. Now I care much more for the work they do, because it feeds straight back into their learning and is constantly changing without actually getting much more complicated. I know its early days, but God I love it!

The homework itself was a bit of a mixed bag and in future I will need to set boundaries to help the pupils. For example, many pupils ended up doing the questions they had already shown they could do. Next time I will advice pupils to look back at their previous work and work on questions that they got wrong or didn't understand the first time around.