When I started teaching, I was expected to mark the exercise books of all of my classes once a week. If I sometimes couldn’t manage that, I would be forgiven for once-a-fortnight marking, as long as that was the exception and not the rule …
I had 11 classes; let’s say each class had 25 students: 275 books to try to mark each week. I couldn’t really spend less than around two minutes on each book, and if there was homework in there to mark, each book could take more than three minutes: 3 minutes x 275 per week: = 825 minutes, or almost 14 hours. The problem with marking is that it can wipe you out.
Marking student’s work has some clear advantages: you can see what they appear to have learned; you can see their mistakes and misconceptions, and the extent to which those are shared by others; you can provide feedback designed to move the learning forward; you can sample students’ work and share it, using a visualiser, to show what-a-good-one-looks-like in terms of marks snd grades, to highlight a common mistake that has been made, or to make a different specific point; perhaps most of all, you can use what you see in the books to evaluate the effectiveness of your teaching, and plan accordingly. If marking could magically be done in a time-warp, so it took one second per book, it would definitely be worth it; clear value for almost no time spent. Alas, marking is a time-intensive activity – it can hoover up every spare minute and leave teachers feeling exhausted and fed up (in the DfE’s 2014 Workload Challenge survey, teachers identified marking as the single biggest contributor to unsustainable workload).
I am not a fan of teachers taking sets of exercise books home to mark, as a matter of routine. I think there are far better things to do with hours and hours of teachers’ time each week than checking every word every student sets down on paper, such as planning great lessons, collaborating with colleagues, and switching off. Teachers who feel refreshed each day are very likely to teach better than those who feel stressed and exhausted. So it’s not that marking is a worthless activity; it’s just that there are often far better things to spend time on, and compelling reasons for not spending too much time doing it.
Most schools have moved to ‘Feedback’ policies or ‘Feedback and Marking’ policies, rather than ‘Marking’ policies, because this switch of emphasis highlights the contribution that good feedback can make to students’ learning. The September 2018 Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) report on Feedback describes it as ‘high impact for very low cost, based on moderate evidence’. Feedback can, of course, be verbal, whilst students are working, and all the more powerful for that. But there is a place for written feedback and, bearing in mind the issues with marking described above, the following feels to me like a balanced approach to written marking and feedback:
- Aim to look at students’ written work systematically as part of typical teaching (this is often called ‘live marking’), as an alternative to dragging home piles of exercise books on a regular basis. Alongside the advantages of marking described above, live marking provides students with some one-to-one face-time with the teacher. Clearly, doing this systematically in lessons requires discipline and is a challenge, but it can be done. A collateral advantage of looking at students’ written work is that they are more likely to present their work well if they know their book will be looked at – never looking at students’ workbooks can easily result in them taking little or no care over presentation.
- Decide in advance what work will be marked in some detail each term/half term. This might include, for example, a formal assessment and an extended piece of writing that was done as homework – not all written work is equally important. The EEF comments on selective marking thus: ‘Teachers should consider marking less, but marking better’.
This feels to me like a sensible balance of verbal feedback, ‘live’ marking in lessons, and regular (but not excessive) written feedback, that mitigates the problem with marking.
*This blog is about teacher marking, and doesn’t discuss self-marking and peer-marking. Maybe I will muse on those in another blog!
