Efficient Marking - My Quest to making marking efficient and effective

by Moshina Kantharia,
Teacher of Science

“Why am I doing this? Is there any point to this madness?”
These are the question I used to find myself asking when half way through marking a class set of books. I started asking myself how could I significantly reduce the time spent marking while improving the quality of feedback students receive?

 

My pursuit for finding a more efficient alternative to marking has a few reasons. Firstly, it takes a huge amount of time and energy which could be put to better use planning lessons that develop students learning. Secondly, marking at home merges work and home life and impacts work life balance.  Thirdly, marking at home takes away the opportunity of making meaningful dialogue with the students and takes away responsibility from the student to proof read and edit work.

 

So to work more efficiently, I started trying a few different things to see what works for me. Below are a few thing that work for me.

 

Plan and warn students

Pre- plan which books you want to mark and when. Create a rota or jot down in your planner to give yourself plenty of notice to ensure it does not come on the evening after a parents evening or where you have another commitment.

I find it extremely helpful to also tell the students in the lesson that I will be collecting their books in to mark at the start. My classes have got into a routine of pre-checking their books for SPAG, underlining dates and titles and even swapping books and correcting each other work. This puts the responsibility back onto the student to ensure their work is ready to mark.

 

The Five-Minute Flick

It involves picking up five or six books (take a cross section of abilities) to assess how students have performed in the previous lesson. If students have completed an extended writing question, answered a multi-step question, we begin the next lesson by showing examples on the visualiser and marking it together. This guides the students through the marking process, addresses common misconceptions and models how to improve an answer. Students can then self-assess or peer assess with this example in mind.

 

Live Marking

This is my favourite time saving marking techniques.  I find this technique works best if the class is undertaking an extended written piece or completing an independent task. This way I can see a whole class over two/ three lessons and can differentiate the timing of my feedback, as some students need to be left to work independently for longer and others need to be steered on track much earlier. We discuss their work and l feedback both verbally and I provide a written targeted NSA for students to complete during DIRT time. The strategy can be manipulated in a variety of ways depending on the subject and task.