Lots of us recall the days when we would sit and toil over a pile of books to ensure we had met the marking schedule. We would mark endless literacy errors, adding comments such as “good job” or “nice!”. I remember sitting with a pile of Year 10 books and writing half a page of feedback to every student about one paragraph that they had written.
Yes, my feedback was longer than many of their answers but, at the time, I believed myself to be doing the right thing by the children: spending all my planning, preparation and assessment time marking their work. To me, and the rest of my colleagues, time spent marking was evidence of our dedication to those students.
How wrong we were. I can’t put a finger on exactly when the epiphany came that writing reams of feedback was a waste of time but I have a feeling it was heavily influenced by the so-called “marking parties” my school would have in the staffroom after hours.
Sitting there, surrounded by colleagues with their heads buried in books - highlighters in one hand and green pens in the other - I heard a voice in my head ask: “Why are we working harder than the children?”
This question is now one that I ask myself, and, in my leadership, advise my team to ask themselves. If it doesn’t help the learner to move forward, it’s not an effective use of time.
So, should we totally ignore our students’ work? Absolutely not. We must use feedback as a tool within a reflective teaching cycle.
How do we do that? Well, although two hours spent laboriously highlighting, correcting and writing extensive comments is not two hours well spent, two hours spent broken down into the following chunks is.
Spend 20 minutes scanning one piece of work that your whole class has done, making notes on a crib sheet about common literacy errors, quick-fix opportunities, common misconceptions and identifying students who need a little more support in one direction or another.
This can be followed by a one-hour lesson spent taking students through the feedback and giving them a chance to apply their understanding of it to a new context.
In an hour and 20 minutes, the books are “marked”, the children understand their strengths and areas for development, and the teacher has 40 minutes left to use the knowledge of the students’ work to inform future planning, ensuring that those gaps and misconceptions are not in place next time.
The profession is slowly waking up to the fact that “doing the right thing by the children” doesn’t necessitate teachers giving up all their free time. Instead, it can mean spending less time on a task but spending that time more wisely.
Habits, however, are hard to break. In order for processes like marking to get easier, we first have to be prepared to step out of our comfort zones and make the effort to embed a new way of doing things.
Kaley Riley is head of English, media and drama, and whole-school literacy lead, at Shirebrook Academy in Derbyshire
This article originally appeared in the 30 July 2021 issue under the headline “Full marks for using your time more wisely”
