To ‘Mark’ or not to ‘Mark? That is the question!

Marking student work is a time honoured teaching tradition. I started my teaching career a long time ago, and my trusty red pen was never far from my side! Many an hour of careful ‘weekly composition’ corrections were made, quiz answers checked and supportive notes written. I nearly drowned in it!

The tricky bit about all that marking though, was that the next day, when books were returned, very little student attention was given to the products of the diligent hours I’d put in the night before.

I’m not sure if I’m having a true memory, it’s not as reliable as it was, but I do seem to remember only being interested in the number ?/20 at the bottom of the page when I was a student. My parents also have memories of schoolwork being marked. It’s been going on for a long time!

Having spent quite a lot of time in classrooms of late, I am really curious about where we are up to with the ‘marking’ story now. I do know that, in many sites, there is a strong parent expectation of work being marked. I do though, wonder how much critical thinking has gone into considering if that is a good use of teacher time and if it has much, or any, impact on student learning.

It all depends … is probably the answer.

Depends on what?

I now think marking is useful if teachers are:

Shifting to high impact, low effort marking.

• Contemporary pedagogy is leading us to have students take more responsibility for their own learning and to have more of a voice in their learning. They should have learning goals and understand the success criteria. A high impact marking strategy would be to mark a specific section of the work that the student has requested feedback on. Better yet, the student could attach a sticky note to a section asking a specific question about their work in relation to goals or criteria they need help with.
• It’s absolutely essential that teachers are utilising self and peer assessment processes before they do mark work. I have a whole new course on how to do this, Assessment Ninja, and I won’t say more here — other than Just Do It!!
• High impact instruction could well be achieved by photographing a range of quality samples and spending some class time analysing what works well and what might be the next step for each example, with students.
• Determining the tasks’ purpose and audience, in advance of marking, will also impact on the decisions made and time spent. A public presentation will require a different level of excellence and attention to detail compared to rehearsal of a skill or notes drafting current thinking about an issue. Deciding this with students and engaging them in the required response from you, will also empower them to think about the feedback they need and what they will do with it.
• A teacher friend told me that her classroom is a ‘no proofreading, no marking’ zone and there has been a dramatic increase in student responsibility for checking work and engaging peers’ support as a result. Not for everyone maybe, but worth considering.

Working to ensure that their marking provokes thinking, and is less work for the teacher and creates more for the students.

• Marking by moving around was always a mantra for teachers (modelled on management by moving around theories!) While students are working independently, teachers should be mobile for at least part of the time; responding to requests for feedback and provoking thinking.
• I’ve seen a great strategy in action, it’s is the idea that the teacher simply puts a question mark, or even just a dot, alongside something that a student needs to rethink. For example, by a sentence in a piece of writing, to indicate a spelling error, grammar need or sentence structure that requires reworking or alongside a mathematics example that needs attention. Some subject specific teachers seem to have great codes for the different error types in their discipline. Colour highlighter pens (pink, yellow and green) can be used like traffic lights to focus student attention. Other teachers simply use plus and minus signs to signal strength and challenges in written tasks. The amount of scaffolding provided can be managed by the sign’s specificity, or lack of, and by the proximity of the mark to the focus point. The range in writing for example, could be a ‘G’ (for grammar) next to a sentence, through to putting one at the top of the page. Similarly a sentence ‘rethink’ might be marked alongside the sentence, the paragraph or at the top of the page, depending on the required degree of responsibility the teacher wants students’ to take in finding and improving the work.
• Another successful marking strategy is to replace comment writing with question asking. ‘What different wording will strengthen your argument?’ or ‘How long are your sentences? Do they achieve the pace you require?’
• I also love the idea of having students critique your marking. At the end of a task, the teacher highlights up to 10 items that need attention. The student’s task is to write a report on what the teacher found and why each needed attention. E.g. ’I changed tenses in the middle of the sentence and I need to be conscious of writing in a consistent tense to help my reader understand when things happened in my narrative.’
• DIRT is an idea that is gathering momentum. Direct Improvement and Reflection Time is a designated time, perhaps a short period within a lesson, or a lesson each week for older students, where everyone pays attention to the feedback they received in their marked work, correcting, analysing, reworking, improving and thinking about what they are learning as a result of the feedback. Questions like: ‘Who got a dot on their page? Did you find it? What did you learn?’ could be part of debriefing after the session.

Developing a Feedback Policy and replacing their Marking Policy (or practices) with it.

• Working collaboratively as a teaching team or whole staff to develop consistent practices with the best interests of learners agreed and understood is essential. Having one teacher using their red pen extensively undermines the changes being made by others, and plays to parent favour rather than student learning.
• Important also, to involve parents in this decision making process, and to ensure good communication of any changes, the reasons and the benefits for learning.

Taking the feedback student work offers them to re-plan, adapt and respond in their teaching approaches and practices.

• There is little benefit to any of this if teachers are not also seriously considering the work they are looking at in terms of the impact their teaching and pedagogical choices had on student learning. Being responsive to this feedback, changing plans, re-teaching, differentiating and opening new challenges, in response to how well students responded, are hallmarks of quality teaching.

So … marking? Yes or no? My vote is on quality feedback processes! Remember to check out my Assessment Ninja course, heaps more on feedback, self and peer assessment, assessment talk and applications for literacy teaching.