Making marking easy (or easier!)
Marking is a big topic at the moment. There are lots of questions around about effective marking, what we should be writing down and how long it should be taking us.
With this in mind, I wanted to share a few ideas to support you in timely and effective marking.
I think the first thing to mention is that the feedback doesn’t have to be from us as teachers – if you can train your students to give effective feedback to each other, this can impact on your workload in a big way. Where possible, most of my lessons have the answers included within the PowerPoints to enable instant feedback to take place within the lesson. Depending on how much time you have, this can be self-assessment or peer assessment and could even include detailed corrections. When you as the teacher look back at the book, there will be very little left for you to do here! This links in to choosing what to mark. If students have already marked a piece, you probably don’t need to mark it too.
This takes me onto my second point: “Great work!” isn’t going to help any student to improve. It’s a waste of your time to tick or write a superlative on every page of every student’s book. Ask yourself, “What will the impact be on student progress?” If you can’t think of an answer, don’t bother.
You need to ask yourself why you mark students’ books. For me, it’s so I know whether they’re ready to move onto the next topic. As much as I move around the classroom, I know that if I mark the books, I won’t miss any students out.
I also mark so that the students can get a summary of what they have achieved within each topic. Generally I mark roughly at the end of each topic, usually about every two weeks. I ensure my comments are subject-specific: I’ll write two objectives the student has achieved and one area they need to develop.
As confidence in maths is intrinsically linked to success, after telling a student what they need to work on, I think it’s really important we give them a chance to work on it! I’ll stick in a relevant feedforward sticker (found at https://www.piximaths.co.uk/feedforward-stickers) and give them a little scaffolding to help them answer it. Now the student has an outline of their strengths and weaknesses, and also a way in to help them address their weaknesses.
@TeacherToolkit’s Christmas marking video provided me with a few new ideas too – definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it already: http://www.teachertoolkit.me/2016/12/14/5-marking-tips/?utm_content=buffer7cfbd&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
This marking crib sheet from MrThorntonTeach can also massively reduce workload whilst still providing effective feedback to students: https://mrthorntonteach.com/2016/04/08/marking-crib-sheet/
I hope you find a few of these strategies helpful and that they save you a little time. Please comment with any further suggestions to share with our awesome community.
I appreciate the clear framing that marking should show readiness to move on and that confidence in maths links to success; the suggested stickers and scaffolded corrections are concrete steps teachers can use. If you’re creating short video explanations or model answers to support feedforward, a simple video tool could help produce those clips quickly and consistently minimax h3 video generator to share with students as part of follow-up work.
The emphasis on feedforward and giving students tasks to address weaknesses is practical and helps turn marking into actionable learning opportunities. For colleagues managing large marking loads and creating lots of online content, an AI-assisted backlink tool may streamline outreach or resource publication, so it’s something to consider BacInk when scaling sharing of your materials.
Your recommendation to focus marking on work that affects student progress resonates, especially the idea of marking at topic ends with two strengths and one development point. For brief downtime activities that reinforce focus and strategy without heavy prep, simple puzzle games can be useful brain breaks between marking sessions, and I explored a casual option worth a look BlockBlast to use during those short breaks.
The post makes a strong case for targeted marking rather than blanket praise, and I agree that feedback should clearly show what students achieved and what to improve next. If you’re preparing visual materials or photos for classroom activities, tools that analyze images can help ensure resources fit your learning objectives, so consider reviewing one such tool here https://stylelooklab.com/face-shape-detector as part of your prep process.
I like the idea of using student self- and peer-assessment to cut down teacher marking time, and the post’s practice of embedding answers in PowerPoints is practical for instant feedback. For teachers needing quick conversions when preparing resources, this calculator could save time by removing manual unit errors, so it’s worth checking out CaesarCipher before finalizing worksheets or lab materials.