Sorry for taking so long to reply - I was on holiday! Sue, the idea of the homework journal sounds very interesting. Did you check each stuents wrote the h.w in her journal before leaving the class?

Here is a different take on differentiating Education...
Well-Intentioned ‘Race to the Top’ Leaves Only Undifferentiated Teachers Behind:
Last week’s news read: A national commission says teachers from alternative programs appear no worse—or better—than those from traditional college programs. The reasons for this may easily be summarized as neither program is effective in teacher preparation. Is there a net gain for keeping our teachers bare foot and pregnant?

There are some great teachers, and even some great Teacher Preparation programs, but these are random occurrences where consistency is essential. The reason is simple: Professional Education is missing fundamental standards found in all other professions. There is no standard curriculum, no sincere effort to identify Best Instructional Practices, and truckloads of weak consultants and players with diluted degrees serving up their own brands of Faculty Development. To be called a profession it is imperative that a profession, one way or another, needs to convene a rolling forum to collect and prioritize the core content of principles and practices that every member ought to know. Ironically, Teachers worldwide are being held to standards for annual yearly progress of their students. Meanwhile, Professors, Learned Societies & commercial schools, and some painfully self-serving non-profit foundations and Universities never even address the need for solid pedagogic content. Worse, those that do publish material under titles referencing Best Practices are quite simply hype, if not fraudulent. The current crop of in-charge “Leaders” dangerously resembles the Investment Bankers who remain in charge of the economic systems that they nearly bankrupted. Perhaps the only way to expose and reform this systemic disaster would be a class action by teachers &/or parents & students against all of us who have been complicit in these myriad layers of self-interest actions bordering on malpractice.
Since the likelihood of legal action is a remote it would be wonderfully unprecedented for a leveraged agency, such as the US Department of Education to hold a convention of the nation’s leading educators to consider and ideally endorse a covenant of principles and more importantly prescriptive practices ideally on a website that transparently allows these to be challenged, tweaked and further specified for different age-grade-situational conditions. Additionally, such a rolling convention also could address differentiated staffing based on what schools are expected to do, and with a differentiated set of Best Practices for each function, like doctors and nurses, attorneys and paralegals, etc. Schools are expected to carry-on three essential although overlapping functions: 1. Teach new concepts, content and a positive disposition toward self-directed learning; 2. Provide assessment and supervised practice in these objectives; and, 3. Operate a massive custodial role that keeps students in school for at least seven-nine hours a day for about 200 days a year for about 13 years, and now through at least 2 more years of college. Our labor market and economic system depend on schools to meet these criteria at the very least. The problem is not the expectations, but that staffing, and organization do not reflect these three societal essentials. And, sadly there is no free market in which to buy the best ideas and practices. But, this is another complex issue requiring several additional paragraphs that would not begin and end with vouchers and charter schools.
Meanwhile, please consider joining the websites below offering a potentially startup means of getting the current system moving in the right direction for all who would teach. As an aside, taxpayers would be grateful since increasing classroom effectiveness and adding differentiated staffing could bring about efficiencies that could save billions of dollars with even the smallest degree of adoption. Join the narrative.
http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/main/invitation/new?xg_source=msg_wel_network And…http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/
Please see too our most recent site for THE PROFESSIONAL TEACHER: : http://anthony-manzo.blogspot.com/2010/05/brief-writing-for-thoughtful-righting.html and right here at: http://www.pbs.org/peerconnection/community/network/peer-connection-30-day-trial/group/rating-teaching-methods-galen-project/discuss/

Naomi--Would a homework journal be helpful here? Perhaps the students can keep a journal that lists each homework item, journal their questions, comments, or random thoughts about it, and receive feedback from you if requested. If the students are in charge of their own homework journal, perhaps they can keep it up. If they know they can use their "journal" as a reference or for study, perhaps that would be an incentive for keeping a meaningful journal. I did a form of this with high school students. They essentially had a year-long learning contract with monthly assignments in a variety of categories. It worked well. Most students learned a great deal during the year. Those who struggled a little were those who habitually procrastinate, but even those students did well because of the collaboration around the work. When a student struggled, they always had the option to ask for help from peers, an outside source, or me.

Nancy--You made reference to self-made "how to" screencasts in your post. Are you referring to webcasts here?

Hi Hannah, I tried this out and found that Questia provided access to many articles on subjects I was interested in. Now that I am at a university, my library here provides access to all of these journals without cost--so I no longer use this source. Personally, sometimes I just use Google Scholar and find many things through that source for free---but if you are consistantly accessing articles for research and you are not associated with a university, this is a great way to go.