Scott Benedict

Many people have been asking about my participation system over the last few weeks. It's been a while since I wrote about my ¡Págame! system and a lot has changed since then.

In 2010, I finally learned what Susie Gross had been telling us all along. She had been saying to us that you need to love every child, even if you don't. I had heard the words for years, but it didn't really sink in until fall of 2010, but the story begins a year earlier.

This is the time of year that all teachers think about that first day and how they are going to start the year off right. I'm no different.

I have really given even more thought to what do grades really mean? Are they an indicator of work given vs work completed? Are they an indicator of correct answers vs incorrect answers? Are they just a number on a scale of 0 to 100? Or do they—or more accurately—should they mean something more?

Having presented for hundreds of people and dozens of school districts, there's nothing that seems to get people riled up more than the concept of the minimum F.

We all know how important comprehension checks are as we are teaching. Without them, we lose guidance on how our lesson is going. Are we going to fast? Are we going too slow? Which students are with us? And which students are lost?