Research and Practice Summary

This reading will help you understand some of the theory behind this week’s topic. We will start by introducing some of the key concepts (these are in bold). You will also see some suggestions of how to put these concepts into practice. When using these concepts in your own practice you will need to take account of your pupils’ characteristics, the context of your classroom and the nature of the material that you are teaching.

Case study: part 1

Reducing the opportunity cost of marking

Sara stretched her stiff neck and arms and put down her pen. Finally, she had finished marking her pupils’ books.

After hours of carefully annotating each piece of work, she was fed up with highlighting common errors and writing the same comments again and again. It was clear to Sara where she needed to focus her teaching in the next lesson to address pupils’ learning needs, but she was just too tired to get started on planning this now. The lesson would have to wait.

What could Sara have done differently in this situation?

How could she make more efficient use of her time to assess pupils’ work, respond to this in her teaching and give pupils feedback?

Efficiency can be thought of as ‘the reduction of waste’. The most common resource wasted in teaching is time, leading to an overall increase in teachers’ workloads and negatively impacting learning. Reducing wasted time is a key priority for teachers and school leaders.

It can be helpful to think of efficiency as the relationship between time taken and quality of outcome (i.e. ‘value for money’), because it doesn’t always follow that reducing time spent on an activity is a good thing per se. Teaching is intellectual labour, and some parts of a teacher’s work legitimately take time because they are hard to do well. For example, when planning to introduce a new, foundational concept, rushing the planning of a lesson may mean that pupils do not learn that concept securely, affecting many future lessons.

Schools and multi-academy trusts develop their own policies and practices around assessment, marking and feedback. They are encouraged to be mindful of the impact on teacher workload of assessment practices, especially around written marking on individual pieces of work, which can be onerous. You need to be aware of your school’s expectations of marking; you should also seek ways of minimising the potentially negative impacts of marking to excess. Time invested in marking and giving feedback must be used efficiently in order to make the most of the limited resource that you have. Self-assessment and peer-assessment both have pedagogical benefits and can help reduce marking workload for teachers, too.

To help you save time without significantly impacting the quality of outcomes, you could make marking manageable and effective by:

• recording data only when it is useful for improving pupil outcomes
• working with colleagues to identify efficient approaches to marking and alternative approaches to providing feedback (e.g. using whole class feedback or well supported peer- and self-assessment)
• using verbal feedback during lessons in place of written feedback after lessons, where possible
• understanding that written marking is only one form of feedback (other forms include verbal feedback, peer- and self-assessment)
• reducing the opportunity cost of marking (e.g. by using abbreviations and codes in written feedback)

An important strategy for maximising efficiency when marking is to prioritise the highlighting of errors related to misunderstandings, rather than careless mistakes.

Mistakes are usually accidental – the pupil could identify and self-correct the mistake if prompted to. Errors can be more serious for learning because they arise from a lack of knowledge or misunderstanding. Although it can be tempting to point out to pupils the full range of mistakes across a task, this has two potentially negative consequences - the time it takes you to mark and the chance of overwhelming pupils with comments across their work. Aim to focus feedback on errors relating to the core concepts of the lesson. To reinforce the importance of good literacy across all subjects, you might correct the first three mistakes of general spelling, punctuation and grammar in a piece of work, then focus only on errors related to misunderstandings in the rest of the task. A general prompt to proof-read work carefully might be useful if careless mistakes are a common occurrence, but the focus of your feedback time can then be dedicated to securing and deepening pupils’ understanding of the concepts most central to their learning.

Case study: part 2

Using codes to improve Sara’s approach to marking

What could Sara do differently in the situation described above?

Rather than spend time repeatedly writing individual comments in pupils’ books, Sara could note the common comments across her pupils’ work and capture these as a set of codes.

In the same way that ‘SPaG’ is often used as a code to indicate the need to address spelling, punctuation or grammar, other codes can be used to represent common subject- or phase-specific comments. Marking each piece of work then becomes a case of noting the codes on each pupil’s work, saving the teacher many minutes or hours. This time can then be used to plan lesson activities that support pupils to understand and act on what the codes in their work mean.

Using codes in your teaching:

• what comments do you often find yourself making on your pupils’ work?
• can you group these comments into categories that are helpful for making sense of the type of feedback being given? For example, presentation (e.g. underlining titles, writing clearly), subject-specific assessment criteria (e.g. English AO2 – effect on reader), conventions of the subject (e.g. describing scientific experiments, drawing graphs, safe use of equipment)
• what codes would usefully capture these comments for your pupils in your context, relevant to your specialism?