Teachers' marking workload
5 ways to reduce your marking workload? Yes please!
Over many years, surveys and research, it comes as no surprise that reducing teachers’ workload is one of the biggest goals of union action.
Marking is time-consuming. English teachers know this better than anyone! And no matter how experienced you are, the marking pile never seems to get any smaller, or any less time consuming. It’s the ever-present burden. Like taxes, it never goes away!
The problem with marking is that it is so important. If it were less so, I would cut corners. But I think there is no better way to get to know your students, to support their improvement and to understand how to plan lessons tailored specifically to them. But when you have collected in Year 8 comprehension answers, Year 10 poetry essays, Year 11 persuasive speeches and a set of Year 12 personal writing articles, you know that hours upon hours of marking await you. Whether you do comment only marking, scores, two stars and a wish, therereally is no short-cut that I have found to be effective. It simply takes a loooong time.
Let me give you 5 strategies to help you to save time.
1. Print success criteria onto post-it notes to reduce your marking workload
Effective use of success criteria is a important for many reasons, but one of these is to reduce your marking workload because both you and your students are more focused, with time and effort placed on specific knowledge and skills. Rather than tackling everything in one task, refine your expectations. This also helps students to concentrate their energy onto clear achieveable outcomes.
1. Clarify your success criteria
Either through class discussion, or through pre-determined assessment criteria, decide on what grounds you will assess the task you have collected in. For example, in the picture belowaboveI have focused on accuracy of spelling, punctuation and grammar, use of language devices, developing detail and presentation. This particular task was a big one – an end of unit assessment, so the success criteria are quite far reaching and challenging. You might focus in on one particular skill, such as use of capital letters or use of statistics to support the main idea of the piece, etc etc. You know how to do this!
2. Print a template
My post-it notes are 7cm x 75cm. Yes, I measured them! First, I inserted a text box into Word with these dimensions and then typed in my title and success criteria. Then, I used a bullet point in the shape of a box – this allows me to tick the box if they have met the success criteria. I then copy-pasted the text box five more times – that how many post-it notes I have fit onto one piece of printer paper. My class sizes this year are all in the region of 27-29 students, so 5 pages with 6 boxes is enough for one class.
Save yourself time by downloading my template here:
3. Print onto the post-it (sticky) notes
Stick a post-it note onto each text box. You want to make sure they mostly line up, then put your 6 pages of post-it notes into the printer drawer and don’t panic! The most important thing at this stage is to ensure you know the direction of movement for a page inside your printer. I figured out after a few trials that my department printer passes through the printer in an ‘S’ shape. If I place my post-it pages face down in the printer drawer with the top of the page at the front of the drawer, the printer will scoop the page up from the front of the drawer, turn it over, print as the page passes backwards. Then it turns again to send it out the top. The printed pages are laying face down with my text boxes printed on each post-it.
Question: How long does it take to print the post-it notes?
I know what you are thinking: that all sounds like the opposite of reducing workload! Well yes, the first time through I spend quite a while thinking about how a page moves through a printer! I even asked around. The Head of ICT in my school didn’t know, nor did the Head of Technology and Design. To be fair, this isn’t a reasonable piece of knowledge to expect from anyone. But once I figured that out and made a template, marking sprang into action.
For each class, it takes me two or three minutes to stick my post-its onto the printed pages (I reuse previous templates. You should only ever need one set of templates. For me, that is 6 pages with 6 post-it notes on each – 36 sticky notes is more than enough). This is a quick and easy task for a classroom assistant if you have one. I have a beautiful form class who love to do this job for me in the morning while they are waiting for class to start. From there, it also only takes me two minutes to go to my template, delete my previous criteria and type new ones, then copy and paste for each box and hit print.
Question: How does this reduce marking workload?
With 30 printed sticky notes, I fly through my marking. Of course, the work still needs to be marked. I skim read each piece, underlining lovely elements, circling errors if relevant and making a judgement in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses. Now, rather than writing copious comments on the work, I can tick off each of the success criteria that have been met. I can indicate a target for improvement by writing ‘T’ beside the bullet point, and if I want to, I scribble a personal comment on too.
I find this has dramatically reduced my time spent writing comments. The post-its help me to focus in on the success criteria which is important in giving useful feedback. It is also a very satisfying thing to stick a post-it note on, close the book and move on to the next at pace. Honestly, this method has saved my sanity this term.
Note: this is a hack, not a magic solution! I know that the marking still exists. You still have to read the work! You still have to make a judgement on the quality of the work and how it could be improved. But what this helps with is the time spend writing comments. When I realised I was writing more at the bottom of the task than the student had written, I knew it was time to make a change!
If you give this a try, please come back and let me know how you got on. You might have ways to refine the process and make it better. I would love to hear your hacks. Leave me a comment below or contact me here.
2. Guided Peer Assessment can reduce your marking workload
Peer assessment is nothing new, but I think many teachers see it as a lesser option. But take a step back and remind yourself of the reasons for peer assessment. If your students know what the ‘correct’ answers are, how to improve to make their partner’s answer better and can provide strengths and targets for improvement, well … what more is there to teach them?! A student who can do peer assessment well is an excellent learner.
How to teach good peer assessment
It’s important to agree success criteria in advance of completing the task. Students should be part of the learning process from the start.
When you begin to teach a class to peer assess, it’s a good idea to give them some sample answers. Get them to rank them highest mark to lowest, giving two stars and a wish, or strengths of the task and targets for improvement. This is especially important in a subject like English or English Literature, where there isn’t necessarily one right answer which is easy to mark. You are trying to promote students’ understanding of the skills on display – this requires a more structured approach to success.
When students score their friends, give them a description of each grade category or level or band. For example, you might give them a copy of the KS3 Levels of Progression (available here if you would like to take a closer look). Students can try to match the answer they are marking to the description in the mark scheme before they then allocate a score and give written feedback.
Another idea is to give a comment bank of positives and targets. This helps students to know how to express their response to the task. It also helps avoid comments such as ‘handwriting’ which is rarely, if ever, the focus of the task. Feedback should be directly related to the success criteria for it to be meaningful.
Is peer feedback as valuable as teacher feedback?
Well, there isn’t necessarily a yes or no answer here. Good peer assessment is just as good as good teacher feedback, especially if you have provided a comment bank for students to use in their feedback. Secondly, I would say that feedback is only useful if it is read, understood and put into practice. How many students pay no attention to what is written on their work? If this happens, it could be the greatest feedback in the world but it won’t matter if no-one pays any attention to it!
3. In-lesson feedback reduces the time you spend marking after class
I don’t know why, but at some point over the years, I stopped doing this. Perhaps I didn’t want to interrupt the students, or perhaps I got distracted by the endless admin so I sat at the computer while the children worked. But honestly, a few years ago, I went back to basics: I walk the room while the students write, and I help them with their writing, making comments, circling and suggesting on their books. This is surely a fundamental and I’m embarrassed to admit that I had ever stopped.
What was the impact? Well, student wrote better quality work at they had instant feedback. And I had few books to take away after the lesson. Obviously in a literacy based subject and with full classes, I won’t be able to mark all the books within the lesson, but if I can even read and comment on eight or ten, well I’ve reduced my workload outside of that class by a third. I know that I am still doing the same amount of marking, but doing it within the lesson is certainly a time saver.
Note: this allows you to differentiate on the ground, in meaningful ways. In fact, there are countless benefits. The main disadvantage that I can see is that students can become quite dependent learners – they might be reluctant to write a second paragraph until you have checked their first. This is certainly not what you want.
4. Self-assessment based on discussion and oral feedback
This is nothing new, but worth a reminder. Students can, and should, increase their skill in self-assessment. As with peer assessment, students who can self-assess well, can improve their work for themselves. What better learner is there? In fact, proof reading and self-assessing in an exam can be the different of several grades for the students who can self-assess well.
Why not guide students with whole class discussion of the success criteria before setting them on an individual task of self-assessing their work, giving it a score and some written feedback. Again, as with the peer assessment, you could provide a comment bank to start with, but as students become more confident in peer and self-assessment, encourage them to write comments for themselves.
5. Use a visualiser to show best work to help you reduce your marking workload
A visualiser is a bit like an old-fashioned overhead projector. Remember the acetate paper and pens … or maybe you’re not the same generation as me! Well, as visualiser is a great addition to your teacher tool-box. It connects to your PC via a USB. It’s a cross between a camera and a magnifying glass, so when you direct its lens onto a student’s work, it projects it onto your whiteboard. No need for acetate paper!
The reason visualisers are so good is that feedback becomes live and visual: students can read exactly what someone else has written and giv feedback.
You could pick a few samples of work to critique as a class verbally, then return the book to its owner and ask them to write their own feedback down, based on the class comments. The more often you do this, the less stigma there is in having your work shown to the class. In fact, you could use your knowledge of the students to help you to make careful choices about which student to start the process with.
If you have other hacks, suggestions or ideas as to how teachers, especially English teachers, can reduce their marking workload, I’d love to hear from you. Comment below, or send me an email using the info in the ‘Contact’ section.
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