The full faculty will meet once per month. Faculty members who are team-teaching will meet once a week. Team members should exchange and grade sample student papers until they are sure that each member of the team takes a similar approach to the grading.
After each day's teaching, the instructor should record a brief note on what was covered that day, and on what topics may need more work. The note should include what assignments were made and collected, as well as what assignments were handed back and the grades for those assignments. The director and academic director will also post notices on the Web site for the instructor to announce in class. All of this information will be recorded on a password-protected part of the IJC Web site. If an instructor has difficulty filing information on the Web site, the report can be sent via e-mail to the director and academic director.
To improve, students must get fast feedback on their work. So ordinary assignments should be marked and given back to students that day or the next day. Not all assignments must be graded – in fact, early in a course, it's a good idea to mark an assignment and hand it back for revisions before grades are assigned. An instructor can also drop the early grades for all students in a course.
The academic director will track these daily progress reports and make sure that the class is progressing as expected and that instructors are grading assignments promptly.
If possible, instructors should give students at least seven days' notice for Friday, evening or weekend assignments. If the notice is shorter than that, the instructor should excuse students with valid and verifiable prior commitments, such as a job that cannot be rescheduled. If an instructor knows that he or she plans that kind of assignment for the first week of a course, that information should be passed along to the instructor of the previous course so the announcement can be made.
At the end of each course, faculty members should hand out course evaluation forms to students. A course evaluation to be used at the end of each course will be posted on the school’s Web site: www.scoaladejurnalism.md.
When the computer lab is open, an employee of the Internet cafe will be around to help with technical problems. For the long lab periods – 8 a.m. until 3 p.m. – instructors should allow students to take a lunch break (and should also take one themselves). If students are working on an assignment – let’s say they are given a writing assignment at 11 that should be turned in by 1 – students can be allowed to choose their own time during that period for lunch. People are allowed to have food and drinks in the computer lab. Instructors may allow, or ban, music in the lab as they choose.
At the end of a course, the instructor or instructors should turn in students’ grades for the course to the director or academic director within five working days.
