Marking. It’s one of the less appealing aspects of teaching.

Although sometimes I find it almost meditative, I would rather not do more than is necessary - especially now we are doing so much of it on electronic devices: things load slowly, writing feedback is more difficult, leaving notes in specific spots can be problematic, returning the work can be a cumbersome process and so on.

However, there are ways that we unburden ourselves from marking and still set useful, interesting and impactful learning tasks for students.

1. Project-based learning

This usually involves putting students in groups, setting a real-world problem and then the students working together to come up with a solution and present their work as a cohort.

There can be some teacher input along the way but it’s usually to facilitate learning, not giving endless feedback and marking.

Online, this requires some modification - mostly to set individual project-based learning, although you can still get students to work together by putting them in groups and getting them to either produce individual pieces of work based on collaboration or to allocate roles. 

One project I recently set was from our “land, sea and sky” module in Grade 2. I tasked the students with creating an environmentally friendly vehicle that could theoretically travel on all three.

From a marking point of view there is very little to do: you can comment on their efforts and offer feedback and then a final mark at the end. Easy. 

2. Increased use of self-graded work

Self-graded work is potentially my favourite thing in the whole world. A recent meta-analysis showed that “students who engaged in self-grading performed better on subsequent tests than did students who did not”. This is reason enough to use self-grading in your lessons.

But the other benefit is that it means way less grading for you. OK, you have to review their grading and make sure it was done correctly - but time is saved and students get to reflect: win-win. 

Some typical ways I do this are with simple student-level rubrics and gap fills. Student-level rubrics are good but can sometimes be a bit challenging for students to use. Gap fills, however, are extremely easy and simple to use. A student-level rubric is one that uses language the students will understand, instead of saying: “The student researched and discovered five to 10 facts from the fact file and presented them on their poster in an organised and aesthetic manner.” It could be phrased like this: “I can find between five and 10 facts from the fact file. I can put them on my poster beautifully and neatly.”

We give weekly spellings at my school and there is, in my opinion, no typical circumstance that students cannot check their own spelling work.

Yes, sometimes they rush it and miss the mistakes, but this is where I would just give an incentive: if you mark your work correctly, you get a sticker (or whatever treat your students get). 

3. Group presentations

These can definitely be done via distance learning. They work well and, as long as students are given roles and rules that they must contribute, they usually mean everyone produces their fair share (almost).

They can be hosted easily on platforms such as Microsoft Teams - although the teacher may need to change the slides for the students depending on their age. 

It’s important to leave some flexibility in the rubric, otherwise you will have five or 10 sets of identical presentations, which can be boring.

So, instead of setting something like “make three slides that describe what global warming does to the ice caps”, offer them more breadth with a headline like “make three slides about bad things global warming does”.

The benefit of this is that you can mark it as it happens, saving your precious time. You can also give instant feedback and if your class is up to the job, peer assessing is a good addition. You can also elicit feedback from the students with simple questions like: “What do you think went well?” and “What do you think could have gone better?”

Cutting down the time I had to spend marking did a lot of things; I felt more passionate about planning and delivering, I had more of a life, my marking improved and my students seemed to care more about it too. Try it out and see how it goes for you.

Gregory Adam is a primary teacher at Nord Anglia Chinese International School in Shanghai. He released his first book last year: Teaching EFL, ESL & EAL: a practitioner’s guide