Meet Me in the Middle - Chapter 6: Acountability for High Standards

This chapter explains how and why setting high standards is important for your students. First of all it explains that if you expect great work then your students need to know what great work looks like, so examples are a great tool for this. Displaying their work is another way to motivate students to do their best. Eliminating extra credit can help students to focus on the work at hand so you will get better quality assignments. The chapter explains you should hold your students accountable for things they may not likely do on their own. In other words you need to push them, I see this pushing as support and guidance. Another important thing the chapter had to offer is that as a teacher we need to show our students we are extending our learning and learning from them, and then they will be more likely to want to extend their learning as well.

Accountability for high standards seems to be all about modeling exactly what you want your results to be. Students are not going to know what you want from them if you cannot create concrete models and examples along with modeling a passion for learning yourself. The one aspect that really caught my attention in this chapter was suggesting not to have extra credit assignments. I really like the way they portrayed extra credit assignments and find it to be too true. Extra credit assignments allow students to slack off on the big assignments because they know they can make it up. I really like the idea of allowing students to edit their work to improve the grade rather than do some extra credit, because in that way they will always be focusing on the most vital parts of the class.