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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 2: First half-term: deepening assessment, feedback and questioning
    • Summer week 5

    Mentor materials

    Make marking manageable - efficiency

    Intended outcomes

    The intended outcomes of this session are for Early Career Teachers to:

    Learn how to make marking manageable and effective, by:

    • Using verbal feedback during lessons in place of written feedback after lessons where possible
    • Understanding that written marking is only one form of feedback
    • Prioritising the highlighting of errors related to misunderstandings, rather than careless mistakes when marking.

    Activities

    Reflecting on learning (10 minutes)

    Ask the ECT to reflect on the previous session.<

    • Have you implemented any of the ideas for efficient approaches to marking and alternative approaches to providing feedback that you learned about from our colleague?
    • How has it gone?
    • Is there anything you haven’t tried yet that you’d like to?

    Written marking is just one form of feedback (25 minutes)

    Read the following to the ECT:

    A set of marked books is traditionally seen as an effective proxy for good teaching, but there is a lot of evidence to say that this might not be the case. Certainly, students need to know if they are showing misconceptions or making spelling or grammatical errors and marking often provides a useful diagnostic for teachers to inform what they will teach next. However, the written comments at the end of a piece of work are often the most time-consuming and also the most ineffective.

    For example, taking the following typical comments on a GCSE English essay:

    • Try to phrase your analysis of language using more sophisticated vocabulary and phrasing.
    • Try to expand on your points with more complex analysis of Macbeth’s character.

    What is more useful to the student here: receiving feedback like that or actually seeing sophisticated vocabulary, phrasing and analysis in action? It’s very difficult to be excellent if you don’t know what excellent looks like. Instead of spending large amounts of time writing comments like these (over and over again), it may well be a better use of time to get students to evaluate the best three pieces of work produced by their peers and to critically evaluate the specifics of that successful writing, comparing it to their own practice accordingly.

    Wiliam and Christadoulou (2017)

    Look through the marked assessments and identify:

    • How long did marking this work take the ECT?
    • What sort of comments is the ECT writing on pupil work?
    • How have pupils responded to these?
    • Have they acted on the feedback they have been given?
    • Was this an effective use of time?

    Together, select the top three pieces of work and script questions the ECT could ask pupils to help them evaluate what good looks like.

    Errors related to misunderstandings are errors that stem from insecure knowledge or things pupils have misunderstood. For example, a pupil has mixed up the definition of simile and metaphor.

    Careless mistakes are those that a pupil makes by accident but could correct themselves. Such mistakes could happen for a number of reasons, including not concentrating fully, but are reasonably inconsequential to the overall success of the piece of work. For example, they forget to include an apostrophe, even though they understand how and when to use them.

    Agree with the ECT what the difference is between errors related to misunderstandings and careless mistakes.

    Suggested dialogue for mentors:

    It is important that when you are making you prioritise what you pick out for pupils. This is because a) you have limited time to mark and b) pupils need very specific actions to act on. Too many mistakes can appear overwhelming and they will not know where to begin. It is important to prioritise the highlighting of errors relating to misunderstandings, rather than careless errors. In a piece of work either marked or unmarked that they have brought to the session, can they identify errors related to misunderstanding and careless mistakes.

    Pick out two of the misunderstandings and together come up with questions the ECT could write to help correct the misunderstanding. Each one should require effort from the pupil. The ECT should now work through another piece of work on their own and then explain their decisions to the mentor.

    Planning for action

    Thank the colleague for attending the session. Ask the ECT:

    • What have you learned from this session?
    • What are you going to do differently in your practice?