Should We Accept Late Work Without Penalty?

Whether a student learns matters much more than when they learn it.

So the thinking goes, it shouldn't matter if students turn in work late and we should just accept late work without penalty.

That's the argument that I saw a principal make on Twitter the other day.

And I have to say, I'm not convinced because the whole idea of giving work, giving assignments for students to do and turn in at a certain time to be graded, to be given back, to get feedback, The whole idea of that is that the work that students do produce the learning that we're designing for them.

And if we allow students to not follow that sequence, to kind of do their work whenever they want, to turn it in at the end of the semester when they realize they're failing, when somebody gets on their case and says, hey, go to your teacher and get all your missing work.

All of that planning that we do, all of that designing of a learning progression that has the best possible chance of actually resulting in learning falls apart, right?

Like I have a master's degree in curriculum and instruction.

You might too.

The whole idea of curriculum and instruction is that you plan what students are going to learn in what order, and then you use the work that students do to help them learn it, but also to help you figure out how to best teach it And if a student is not doing their work at the time that you specify, that whole process falls apart.

I think some people think of teaching as just like a stack of worksheets that you can do in any order and they're not related to one another, so it doesn't really matter when you turn them in.

If you turn them all in at the end of the semester, that's fine.

I think most of us are trying to teach better than that.

And most of the administrators who are saying it's okay to turn in late work anytime would not be happy with that kind of instruction.

And yet they're setting these expectations that assume that kind of instruction.

And I don't know that there's like one best policy on late work as far as whether it's accepted at all, whether there should be a certain amount of points taken off.

I think the best policy is to let each teacher decide and let each teacher decide on an assignment by assignment basis, whether it makes sense for that assignment to be makeupable or to be acceptable late.

Like I was a science teacher and in a lot of cases, my assignments could not be done after the fact.

We would do a lab, there would be planning before the lab, there'd be like vocabulary and teaching of some concepts.

There would be planning for the lab where students prepare their hypothesis and write out their procedure and things like that.

There are things that students do during the lab.

And then there are things that students do after the lab.

They collect data, analyze data, write about it, and so on.

And you can't do any of that out of order, right?

Like if you do nothing during the lab, if you like grab the beaker and dump stuff in another beaker, but don't write anything down, you can't do that written work later.

You just can't because you don't have the data.

You didn't do the pre-work.

And like, there's no substitute for doing the work as planned at the correct time and if somebody were to come to me at the end of the semester and say hey like I need my points I need to to do this lab I would have to say for that type of activity I'm sorry like you didn't do it you were here and you just didn't do it and I can't really help you with that at this point short of having you repeat the entire semester which like ultimately that's probably what that kid needs to do if they haven't been doing anything so we have to really think about the specific assignment, right?

There definitely are assignments that could be made up with some value.

And I think it's the learning value that should really determine that, right?

Like we don't need some sort of blanket policy that says kids can always turn in their late work at any old time because often that late work becomes worthless for learning.

There's, there's just no point learning wise to doing some of those activities where the moment has passed, like your chance to learn from it as a teacher, how to best help that student take their next steps and, has passed.

If you're a math teacher, every lesson is to some extent building on the previous lesson.

And if a kid doesn't do their assignment, they're not going to be ready for that next lesson.

So the reason we have that accountability is because it's what students need to actually learn.

And it's what we need to actually teach.

And when we have people making up these nonsense policies, like turn in anything, whatever you want for full credit, it's fine.

They don't realize they're undermining the learning that you are designing.

Let me know what you think about this and late work policies.