These Absent Students Time Saving Tips Can Help Students Catch Up.

So what can you do?

The first thing to do is to create in advance an absence folder for each of your classes. In it, place some blank lesson summary sheets on which you can fill in:

• the lesson objectives
• reference to the pages in the textbook you used in the lesson
• copies of any worksheets or other resources you used

It's completely unrealistic for anyone to expect you to have every lesson plan written out in full in advance to give to students who have missed the lesson: the information you put in the absence folder will at least allow the student to 'touch base' with the lesson missed.

If you use Powerpoint slides in the lesson it's a good idea to print off the slides in Handout form - this is an option when you select 'Print' - printing the presentation in sets of two or three slides per page as Handouts will give the absent student direct access to the same input the rest of the class got in the lesson, and can study them in detail at home.

A really neat idea is to use a 'review sheet' at the end of every lesson where you give one student responsibility to fill in the details of what you've covered during the lesson. This sheet is filled in while you conduct the class plenary review and handed back to you as a record of the learning, and you can make a copy of it for the absent student upon their return - with all the other stuff in the absence folder.

Finally, you could start the lesson in which the absent student returns with a quick review quiz which gets the whole class to recall information from the pevious lesson. Provide immediate feedback to all the students so that the absent student sees the most important points that were covered in the missed lesson.

This also has the positive effect of reinforcing the learning from the previous lesson for the whole class.

If you follow these absent students time saving tips you've been fair to the absent student and done as much as you reasonably can to help them catch up, without creating an unnecessary amount of extra work for yourself.


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