1. Two teachers have developed the following routines to collect and hand back students’ work. Compare and contrast their routines. Be sure to consider factors such as efficiency and student privacy.

a. Mrs. Tsai’s students sit in assigned seats each day. She collects students’ homework, quizzes, and tests by rows; students hand papers forward. She is careful to keep the collected homework together in the same rows that they came from.

Her routine for handing back the evaluated work is that she sets each row’s homework in a stack behind their row on a counter at the back of the room. As students come in, they go to the stack behind their rows, and they pick up their papers on their way to their desks.

b. Mrs. White’s students also sit in assigned seats each day.

When her students hand in homework, quizzes, or tests, they pass their papers to the front of the row. Each student is taught to be very careful to make sure that his or her work is placed on top of the stack of papers as it is passed forward.

In this way, the stack that reaches the front of the room has papers in the same order that the students are sitting in the row. Mrs. White collects the papers from left to right, so that the papers are always in the same order for each period.

When handing back the homework, quizzes, or tests, she sometimes sets the papers on students’ desks, face down, before the period begins. This takes only a minute because the papers are all in order, so she can quickly walk down each row and lay each student’s work on his or her desk. On other occasions (when there is not time before the class period starts, or when she doesn’t want to hand work back at the beginning of the period), she sometimes hands each row’s stack of papers to the students so that each student takes his or her paper off the top of the stack and passes the rest of the stack back. If she wants to make sure students don’t see other students’ work (as when handing back an exam), she quickly walks around herself and hands the papers out. Again, because the papers are all in order, it takes just a minute for her to hand back all papers.
Source: Chinn (2012)