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I encourage my students to reach out for help whenever they need it. I end F2F classes with this reminder, end emails with this reminder, and lately, end my Twitch streams with it. I absolutely love it when they come for help. I find that 9 times out of 10, just talking to students about an assignment is enough to clarify most questions. Lately though, it seems like I’ve been communicating quite a bit more than usual with my students about their assignments. Seems reasonable, given the switch to remote learning, but the interesting thing has been that the questions are not about assignments for my class, but other assignments students have for other classes, taught by my colleagues.

I don’t mind helping students with work from other classes, but I do worry about instructing them to do something that differs from what my colleague may have told them. I wish students were comfortable with going to the professor who assigned the work, but I’m aware that they aren’t always receiving feedback that they find helpful. I think that’s a topic for another day though, as it isn’t the reason I set out to write this post. Recently, I jotted down a set of instructions I’ve found myself repeating to students as I counsel them through someone else’s assignment. I thought I’d share.

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Today we are going to stick with the formative assessment theme, although by the end of it all we are going to have some summative assessment vibes too.

In this specific instance, I want students to read about the COVID-19 crisis in Italy in order to gain a little insight into what they (we) may experience in the United States as the weeks progress. I started by locating a free article on Newsela.com to anchor my assignment with. I love Newsela because not only does it have a huge library of expository texts, it also provides these texts at different reading levels.

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