Post date: Jul 23, 2018 2:16:21 PM

5. Who’s Doing the Work Here? More-Effective Grading Practices

(Originally titled “Teaching Smarter”)

In this Educational Leadershiparticle, Glen Pearsall says a major blind spot in educational research and school improvements initiatives is the burnout-producing amount of work teachers are doing – especially grading student work. The sad thing is that all too often, when students get their work back, they glance at the grade and file it away. With the teachers he coaches, Pearsall tries to short-circuit this dynamic by asking:

- Would establishing a clear learning objective up front focus students’ efforts and cut down on correcting errors and misconceptions later on?

- Could you ask questions during each lesson that get you feedback without students putting pen to paper?

- Could on-the-spot assessment techniques display learning problems and allow you to nip them in the bud?

- Could you make the correcting workload quicker for you and more effective for students?

- Could students take a more active role in catching and understanding their errors?

On the last item, Pearsall has some specific suggestions:

• Minimalist marking– The teacher addresses selected issues or sections of students’ work and has them take responsibility for others:

- A dot or dash in the margin tells the student there’s an error in that line that has to be located and corrected.

- Students get a subtotal mark on each segment of a piece of work and are responsible for improving low-marked sections.

- The teacher annotates a paper as usual and the student summarizes the advice.

- The teacher corrects and closely annotates a representative portion of the student’s work, then the student improves the rest of the work based on that feedback.

• Student-referenced grades– Instead of giving letter or percent grades, the teacher marks students’ work with three symbols:

= means the work is on par with the student’s previous work on the topic;

> means the work is better than previous work on the topic;

< means the work is less proficient than previous work on the topic.

This focuses students on improving their own work versus comparing themselves to peers.

• Students annotating feedback– When Pearsall circulated around his class giving verbal feedback, he would stamp a message on the sections of students’ work he’d addressed and students had to write a summary of the feedback he had given. This reinforced the advice he’d given and increased students’ ownership and follow-up.

• Identifying error patterns– Students get their corrected work back and use a chart of common errors to analyze the types of problems they’re having. For example, students might look at a math paper to see whether errors were computational or conceptual. “In my experience,” says Pearsall, “this makes students much more likely to recognize error types themselves and to work harder on addressing these gaps in their understanding. It also reduces the total time spent marking up student work.”

“Teaching Smarter” by Glen Pearsall in Educational Leadership, June 2018 (Vol. 75, #9),

https://bit.ly/2IDjPYs; Pearsall can be reached at pearsallglen@gmail.com.