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If You are New
First of all: before working out your most efficient process for marking, you should first establish both the policy and the practice for marking in your school.
You should be aware that these are frequently different. The parents may receive a brochure saying that carefully benchmarked assessments are carried out on each piece of homework. In practice, tick-and-flick may be the norm in your school.
You should be prepared to argue your case if you are asked to mark unrealistically. Use a stopwatch to time how long a single student's work takes to mark, then extrapolate to see how long a full class's work would take. Do not embark on a marking exercise you cannot complete.
This section is looking at the clerical activity of marking. Note: 'marking' not assessment. There are several excellent books published on the topic of assessment and they correctly emphasize that you do not need to mark a heap of books in order to assess effectively. But sometimes you do... and some teachers, it seems, need to do it a lot; it's therefore valuable to be able to do it effectively and efficiently.
1. Keep it portable
You should have a sturdy plastic crate - not a supermarket carrier bag - for each class's marking. This means that the books are always ready to carry to, from and around school.
2. Track absentees
You should routinely use seating plans to id absentees easily. This means marking who is absent when work is handed out and collected in. These sheets go in the crate too.
3. Use
elvesYou should get any pre-work done by elves (your students), and you should organise your work so that this can happen.
The kind of work that elves can do includes things like putting the exercise books into numerical order, and open at the page to be marked, stacked neatly a crate.
Most teachers mark in alphabetical order in order to correspond with their markbooks. This is fine, but many students, especially low ability students, find it difficult to sort quickly in alphabetical order. You should therefore get all your exercise books labelled in numerical order - by elves - at the beginning of term - see example
This kind of preparatory work at start of term - labelling all exercise books with numbers, labelling crates with letters, pre-loading each crate with marking pens, gold stars and see-me notes, will save minutes each time you mark.
4. 24 hours maximum
You should aim to tick-and-flick the books within 24 hours of submission. You are trying to achieve three things here :
you should identify any students who should be sanctioned for lack of work or very poor work, and of course offer rapid reward for obvious good effort - this creates an illusion of 100% rigour.
Identify any students who have missed work through absence.
Achieve a mini-pile of books for formative marking, identifying where marking time is best spent
This tick and flick is known as a first pass. You should be prepared to analyse your first pass ergonomically, seeking to do it with the minimum of effort and minimum of time.
You should certainly aim to complete a 30-student class within three minutes.
5. Aim for next lesson
You should mark a pre-chosen subset of each class for a specific purpose as soon as possible, in all case aiming to complete this by 'next lesson'. Subsets to mark might include:
- high-achievers aiming for higher grades
- students with language and literacy challenges needing English guidance
- students with a specific learning difficulty
- students on grade boundaries requiring specific advice
- improvers who need additional focus or direction
- students following previous specific advice
- students not making the expected progress.
Obviously, you should keep a record (again, using your seating plan) of which students have been marked on each second pass, and change the focus each time so different students receive attention.
Clearly, different teachers, different students and different subjects will result in a different length of time for marking, but as a rule of thumb you could be aiming to apply approximately ten students marking in 30 minutes. This means that each student should have quality formative positive feedback every three sessions.
6. Update grade sheets.
Separately and subsequently, update grades and assess progress - NOT just on the basis of marking. You should actively seek to use elves in this - for example adding up ticks and giving a score out of ten.
If you are unclear of the benefits of this approach, they are explained here.
Peer Marking
Some teachers mark work themselves because they find peer-marking unreliable. This is an example of binary decision making; in reality it is not a choice between peer-marking and teacher marking - combinations are possible. For example, if you set ten questions, then get seven easy questions peer-marked in class. Then mark the other three quickly yourself, to validate the peer-marking. Get elves to add up the ticks and write down a mark out of ten.
7. Develop Short-Form Marking Skills
You should develop ways of marking in shorthand, or - to be accurate - you should develop effective ways of marking in shorthand. Most teachers develop their own abbreviations (VG, Ex, etc) but this is not a time-saving aspect which is easy to get right. More here.
8. And the ultimate aim: Self Marking Assessments
If you have time at Half-Term, why not spend a bit it familiarising yourself with Flubaroo. It's here...
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