Teachers work hard. In fact, it is a profession where you can never truly say that there isn’t more you could be doing. However, for your own sanity and well being, you sometimes need to say, ‘that is all I’m doing today’.
This can be hard, especially when you genuinely care about the students you teach. The reality is that you only have 24 hours in a day and that you cannot do everything in that time.
One task that takes a great deal of teachers’ time is marking their students work. English teacher, Andrew Tharby, spends about eight hours per week on marking. As he states himself, that’s a full day’s work for most professionals.
Why do we do it? Part of the answer is tradition, and the mindset that everything must be marked. I know one substitute teacher who holds this mantra so dear, she doesn’t leave a school until everything she has done that day is marked.
Is it really worth it?
Certainly, there are times when you must rigorously mark how well each student has done on a task. This is the case when you are going to use the task for formal assessment, or when you want to provide individual feedback to each of your students.
There is also a place for formative marking of practice tasks. Such marking allows you to give valuable feedback, which in turn enables students to learn how improve their performance while there is still time for such learning to occur. Research confirms that this type of formative feedback is one of the most potent ways you can improve how well your students do in school.
The challenge is to find ways to provide your students with this formative insight, without spending ridiculous amounts of time marking.
Giving group feedback is one way you can meet this challenge.
Group feedback involves taking 2-3 examples of student work, such as sample draft paragraphs from a persuasive essay, and telling the whole class what you think about them.
As with individual feedback, you should:
- Comment on the work itself, not on the student who produced it.
- Point out things that could help your students improve. This could include things you like about the sample of work, as well as suggestions for making it even better.
- Provide concrete examples of what your suggestions would look like if adopted.
- Focus your feedback on 2-3 key things, so that the students can easily transfer some of your comments to their own writing.
- Identify and correct misconceptions wherever possible.
Given you are giving feedback to a whole group you should also:
- Show the sample of work to the whole class. You could scan or photograph it, then project so everyone can see. Alternatively, you could simply photocopy it and hand it out.
- Critique the work in front of the class, offering a range of suggestions (over 2-3 samples) that include actionable tips for students at working at different levels.
- Support your more able students by getting them involved in critiquing the samples of work and offering their own suggestions for improvement.
This type of group feedback is easy to provide on a regular basis as it only involves marking a small sampling of student work at any one time. However, every time you do it, you provide potent insight to every one of your students – insights that help each of them to lift their performance to a higher level.