Marking will tear us apart (from The Literacy Shed Blog, paraphrasing a Joy Division song line…)
‘What went well, even better if’ and it’s sibling, ‘Two stars and a wish’ are fraught with problems. For this blog, I am assuming they amount to the same thing: teachers communicating with learners about what they have done well, and highlighting an area for improvement, as a result of marking some work.
The biggest issue with marking is the huge amount of teacher time it uses up – this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done, but it does mean that it should be done in the most effective way possible, with a very close eye on the ‘opportunity cost’ of doing it (that is, what else will not be done so that it can be done). Because the opportunity cost is sky-high, any marking done really ought to bring a significant ‘bang for the buck’.
Here’s a made-up example of something a teacher might write on an essay they are marking, in a school that follows a WWWEBI marking and feedback policy:
Grade 5
What went well: 1) I really like how you structured your essay (just as I requested in the essay guidelines) and 2) You used some excellent high-level words (such as ‘sumptuous’ and ‘demure’), that brought maturity to your writing.
Even better if: You made a large number of spelling mistakes, including in simple words (‘wont’, ‘Teusday’) – always check your spelling!
The main purpose of feedback should be to cause thinking – as Dylan Wiliam famously said in his book, ‘Embedded Formative Assessment’, ‘feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor’. When the student in the above example – let’s call him Dave – gets his essay back, he is very likely to focus on the grade he has been given and either ignore the comments or, at best, read them once. Focusing on the grade engages his ego, whereas we know that feedback should engage him with thinking about the task he has done. I can just picture Dave comparing his grade with that of his friends, and those of the other students around him, and ignoring the teacher’s feedback – no work for him, plenty of work for his teacher. Even if Dave reads the comments, what will he do with being told that he has followed the essay guidelines? What will he do with being told that he has made a load of spelling mistakes?
There is no way on Earth that this kind of marking is delivering a significant bang for the buck – it’s a shameful waste of teachers’ precious time. If teachers must mark a piece of work, their feedback has to be designed to move the student’s learning forward – that applies to everything from classwork to homework to formal tests: everything that is marked should be marked formatively, giving students something to do to improve, based on the activity or test they have done. And making sure they do it, of course.
What we could do instead
‘Feed forward’ (things to do now, to improve) is good, and it’s common nowadays – but it’s workload-intensive, too, so there’s a limit to the amount of it that teachers can reasonably do. Which is where ‘live’ marking comes in.
The case for ‘live’ marking
‘Live’ marking has a zero teacher beyond-lessons time cost and it can deliver a big bang for the buck. ‘Live’ marking means providing feedback to the student in the lesson, either orally or in writing. All it requires is a red pen for written marking (we use red in the school I’m in) and students working at least semi-independently on a task so that the teacher can get round the room for a while.
Doing live marking has the following advantages for teachers and students over marking done outside of class time:
- It provides a regular opportunity for one to one dialogue with a student
- It can be oral or written feedback or a combination of the two – oral feedback can be more powerful than written feedback
- It’s ‘just-in-time’, provided while the student is actually working on the task – so it’s entirely task-oriented, rather than ego-oriented
- The teacher can tick and double-tick (and initial) written work to indicate they have seen it and to indicate they are happy (tick) or very happy (double tick) with particular parts of it or all of it
- It saves teacher time outside lessons, that can either be used to do something else that’s important, or – mindful of teacher workload – it can help with valuable switch-off time for the teacher
If the teacher is going around the class anyway, why not take their red pen? So what if they only live-mark three students’ books in a lesson? That’s three more than they would have marked otherwise, and over a couple of weeks, there’s a good chance they will be able to get around to every student.
‘Live’ marking is a sensible, workload-reducing activity, offering a significant bang for the buck. There are probably some things that have to be marked outside class, such as formal tests and extended pieces of writing; but there is much that could and should be marked in class. And that’s what should be happening routinely in schools.
