- Timing your marking carefully. For example: Will students have an opportunity to reflect on your feedback? Does your marking coincide with moving onto a new unit? (In which case, feedback may be ignored.) Do you have enough time available to pay sufficient attention to the pieces of work which really matter?
- Mid-unit marking. If you mark work half-way through a unit, you are then in a position to give feedback students can use in the rest of the unit. This is really helpful. Instead of making the same mistakes throughout, learners have the chance to improve matters half-way through.
- In-lesson marking. If students are creating work in lesson, identify a handful that will benefit most from your intervention. Call these students up to the front and go through their work with them. Mark it, not as if it is complete, but knowing that the information you provide will help students to improve what they are doing.
- Marking followed by implementation time. Having marked student work, make sure the subsequent lesson has time in which students can implement any targets you set. Without this time, you cannot be certain your feedback will bear fruit. With this time, you can be confident everyone in the class has had the opportunity to act on the guidance you’ve provided.
- Repeated marking of similar work. Set a piece of work, mark this, provide feedback and then set a similar piece of work in which students have to implement their targets. Collect this in and repeat the process. Here, we are helping students to concentrate their efforts over an extended period of time, using our feedback to help them develop.
How to Use Marking To Accelerate Progress
One of the often forgotten benefits of marking is that we can use it to accelerate student progress. This can be achieved in a number of ways.