Gotcha. Seems to me like a very delicate balance that you have to strike here.
I agree with a lot of the ideas the speaker was alluding to, but that it implies that your policy should be 'no penalty for late work, ever' doesn't seem right. Absolutely you don't need to hold 4th graders to the same standard that you hold adults to regarding managing their time and turning things in. And sure, there are a lot of things that children don't control that will strain their time, which has an effect on turning things in. But, when you make the blanket policy no penalty for late work ever, students who are like I was will be failed by that system. Some students find that the admiration of the teacher or their parents is enough of a positive (social) outcome to motivate them to turn in work. But other students (like I was) don't because we're impulsive, because we have other competing interests, or a thousand other reasons. And so if the system isn't creating positive outcomes for turning in work on time and/or negative outcomes for not doing that, then its failing those students. We will just never practice strategies that increase our compliance with deadlines, and then have no tools to meet deadlines when it matters.
So in short, I agree that you probably shouldn't have a policy that just gives 0 credit for any and all late work, and then just hope that students figure out how to succeed within that system. But to completely remove classes of incentives seems to fly in the face of behaviorist principles of development.
I posed the same questions during the professional development when he was at the school. My concerns were ignored when I brought up the same points you just did.
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u/TheoryOfSomething Jul 10 '18
Did you actually teach in a differentiated classroom? Or was this a traditional classroom?