Marking
Whether you are a primary or secondary school teacher,
marking is going to become a key part of your job. It will take up a lot of your time and it is
important that this time is used for the maximum benefit of the students.
Most schools now have a marking policy which you must
follow. Consistency in feedback for
students across subjects is hugely under rated in my opinion. However, many marking policies are on purposefully
vague to allow teachers to use their professional judgement. Indeed in some schools you will still not
find a marking policy.
So, what should you mark?
Firstly, you will never be able to mark every piece of work
a student completes. You might be able
to keep it up for a few weeks but you will be working to midnight every night
and will eventually go off sick for a few weeks with exhaustion. You are no use to your students when you are
off sick so I hope we all agree you can’t mark everything.
Secondly, the marking needs to be purposeful. The days of “tick and flick” are long behind
us, thankfully so! Students need to
understand the marking which must inform them how they can move forward with
this piece of work.
Finally, it must be done by the teacher. I am all for peer marking and self-marking
but there comes a time when a teacher needs to give formal feedback. When you have work to mark I advise you to
hide away at school and get it done. I
speak from experience that if I take home 45 mins of marking I am able to make
it last 2 or 3 hours. Additionally, I
can easily socialise away an hour at school with other teachers when I could
have got my marking done. When you have
marking to do, hide yourself away and get your head down and get it done!
Here is what I do.
My school has a vague marking policy. So, at the start of September I explain to my
students how and when their work will be marked. I do this and encourage them to hold me to
account to this as I hold them to account with their homework etc.
Our students have maths for 4 hours a week and I typically
teach 4 groups, although I used the same idea when I was an NQT teaching 22
hours a week.
I mark on a 2 week cycle.
For us this is 8 lessons.
I explain to the students that in lessons 1, 2 and 3 they
will learn about a new objective or two.
For simplicity sake let’s say this is working out how to do long
division and long multiplication. The
three lessons will have a range of tasks, peer marking, self assessment
etc. At the end of lesson 3 they will
get a homework that is due in on lesson 5.
(The hope being the can ask for a bit of help in lesson 4 if they got
stuck).
I always offer additional homework online (e.g. www.mymaths.co.uk) but always provide a
worksheet for homework. This worksheet is also emailed to the student's school email account so they can print a spare out if they have lost the original.
In lesson 5 I collect the homework in and give each question
a simple tick or cross. I normally give
a score e.g. 8 / 10.
In lesson 6 the
students are challenged to figure out where they went wrong whilst working with
a partner. If they scored 10 / 10 I have
extension work available. In some of
these lessons I have to re-teach some aspects of the objective again. Often, in lesson 6, I spend a lot of time
extending the topic.
In lesson 7 they have a formal 30 minute assessment that I
have written. It is a bit of work in the
first year but once you have the tests they will always be useful! Ideally, the whole department would join in
and help you write them. We have 60 min
lessons and I would spend the first 30 mins revising. This gives the students some experience at
how to revise which becomes so important for their A Levels.
After lesson 7 this piece of work is formally marked. I have found that the more able students
prefer to do this assessment in a separate book and the lower ability students
prefer doing it on the sheet.
My formal marking gives them a score or percentage. I am not comfortable giving them a GCSE grade
or KS3 Band at this point but will let them know what grade the objective
examines.
When the student gets their assessment back I have done the
following.
1. They get
a mark / percentage.
2. They get
an effort number for the past 7 lessons (1 is rubbish, 5 is excellent. You can't get a 5 without good, on time, homework).
3. I pick
out something they have done well either on the test or in the previous 2
weeks. (E.g. you have asked some very
probing questions recently)
4. I highlight what they need to do next to get
better at this topic (E.g. your long multiplication is great but you need to
now practise multiplying with decimals).
Lesson 8 is my key lesson as each student will have a
different target (number 4 above).
However, I have found that because I fortnightly assess, the class will
only have 2 or 3 different targets between them. Lesson 8 is spent giving the students the
opportunity to reflect on their test and give them the opportunity to go back
over some learning and demonstrate they can do the objectives they got wrong.
Lesson 8 can be quite difficult to plan but www.mymaths.co.uk can be very useful here
as you can set different students different work which allows you to give attention
to smaller groups as and when they need it.
For the last 20 minutes of the lesson students are to re-do the test
questions they got wrong (in silence). I
project the answers at the end for them to self-mark or copy down. By the end of lesson 8 every student has a
copy of the correct answers for the test.
Those who still find it a complete mystery are encouraged to come and
see me after school to sort out the issues.
I will also phone a couple of parents whose youngsters have impressed me
during the past 2 weeks at this time.
Obviously, I stagger it at the start of term so that my
classes don’t all get to lesson 7 on the same day as this would be a lot of
marking and planning in one evening!
My marking system isn’t perfect but I think it works quite
well for the students and I feel it is a good use of my marking time.
Let me know what you intend to do and whether it works!
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