Mock Marking Targets

A long, long time ago. I shared some simple targets for marking the English Language exam papers. They’ve saved me hours of time and stopped me from writing endless comments on exam papers. I simply write the code at the end. Students copy out the target and act on it. Obviously if there’s something else I need to comment on then I will write it down. The great thing is that I am able to spot patterns and trends across a class.

It was time for me to update the targets and that’s what I have done. This time around I have added a next step task which focuses on precise next steps. This time around I have used some precise sentences for students to use. 

Feel free to steal, borrow and adapt as you see fit. I hope that it saves someone out there some time. 

Link to Paper 1 marking targets. 

Link to Paper 2 marking targets. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris

Just another marking Monday

Over the years, I have seen various approaches to marking. Some good. Some bad. Some as quick as a sneeze. Some as slow as a snail with a limp.

The problem we have with marking has always been how time consuming it is. You do have to read things and there’s no getting away from it. However, the marking tells you if the students have understood what was taught or that they can use a skill. Really it is the measuring stick for all we do. Yet, we have a problem with it. Nobody has it fixed.

I am a big fan of ‘live marking’ as you addressing issues at the point of work. You can make quick fixes and check if things have been understood.

I have issues, personally, with ‘whole class feedback sheets’ for they publicly highlight success and failure. I like them for ease, but I have seen them photocopied for students and they name students and highlight the strengths and sometimes the weaknesses of them. All stuck in an exercise book. 

My school has been working to having more systematic approach to marking and I am finding it interesting and rewarding.

The process is pretty simple. During the learning, students are given a ‘mid-learning’ task to see what input is needed. We call them simply ‘learning check points’. They are little yellow sheets and the student completes the task on it. 

Then, the teacher gives it a tick. Secure. Partial. Limited. Phew. That’s a lot of work. In fact, it doesn’t take long. I can do a set in ten minutes. And they generate quite a bit of information.

From the information, I can target the class in three clear groups. Secure. Partial. Limited. I can then address areas for improvement. These are from a Year 11 lesson on Paper 2 Question 2: 

Secure – you need to explore the symbolism of inference. How does it link to the wider world.

Partial – you need to develop your inference by saying ‘because… so… as…’
Limited – you need to follow the statement / quotation / inference structure

I am able to make quick judgement and then I identify areas for improvement and provide an extension task.

Finally, I feedback the sheets to the class. Give students time to address the problem in their writing and stick the sheet in their books.

As a system, it is quick, effective and incredibly helpful. I don’t have to take in thirty exercise books and search for the right page. I don’t have to read pages and pages of stuff. Simply, I have a paragraph to read and that’s it. From that paragraph, I can see where they are in relation to the learning and then I can adapt my teaching. The paragraph is the perfect unit for checking learning in English.

For me, the judgement element is important. Making a judgement is important for students and teachers. Is it good? How good am I in relation to others? Feedback is great, but we do want to know where we are in relation to others. That’s where the secure, partial and limited come in.

For Key Stage 4, I have found this approach quite effective for addressing exam questions. It has allowed me to be precise in feeding back what the problems are in responding to the question. I have narrowed their focus and then as a result narrowed my focus. If I can't see it in that one paragraph, then I can't give them the mark. Therefore, they have to ensure it is there in that paragraph - and every paragraph in the exam answer- so it narrows their focus. It has really allowed for greater level of precision for teachers and students. 

For Key Stage 3, I think this has opened up the marking and the work. It has allowed us to move away from the assessment questions and allowed us to explore other avenues related to the texts studied. 

I think it is important that we talk and share different marking methods and approaches. Each school is a different context and needs a different approach. We do need to keep the marking dialogue going. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris  

‘Post-mortem Marking’ vs ‘Live Marking’

Again, I am writing about marking. Anybody, would think I have some deep-seated psychological issue with marking books. I don’t, honestly. But, I do have some concerns over how marking is presented to teachers, parents and students. Not too long ago, teachers were viewing the verbal feedback stamp as an alternative to marking books. Now, I am seeing several schools approach marking in terms of no-written feedback, which is fine for them, if they like that sort of thing; however, that is just one approach that a school is using for their specific context. Their school is different to mine. Each school is unique. Just because it works in one specific context, it doesn’t mean it works everywhere. Twitter and the Internet are great for teaching ideas, but they are not the elixir of ‘outstanding teaching’.  Do this and every Ofsted report will smell of roses and be tinted with a lovely lavender perfume. It is what you do with the ideas that is probably the most important thing. Recently, there have been a few ideas that I have thought quite detrimental to the education to children in the classroom.  So, using ‘comparative judgement’, I read something else and forgot about the other crazy, barmy, stick-twigs-up-your-nose idea.  

I am not rejecting their approach, or am I saying it is barmy, but I am taking from my perspective and exploring how it will not work for my school, or my subject. I applaud schools for trying it out, but I also applaud schools who have thought it is not for them.

Issue 1 – self-awareness
I have watched endless episodes of reality television such as ‘X-Factor’ to know that the human being is capable of deluding itself beyond reality. I want to be the next Madonna says a wannabe hopeful. They then manage to sing every note that has been absent from all Madonna’s catalogue of songs.  

Marking is Simon Cowell. It is the dose of reality some people need. It isn’t public or humiliating, but marking is directing the student to see the errors of their way. I have seen endless students write what they think is a brilliant description of something, and the reality is far different. A person’s perspective can blurred, misshapen and vague and they miss out the obvious. Marking is another perspective. A perspective of someone in the know.

Issue 2 – the purpose of the marking
Who do we mark for? Seriously, I need to ask that question again and again. The sole purpose of marking is to improve the child. Then, why is the teacher always at the centre of the marking? Looking at all the marking practices we have adopted over the years, all I can see is that marking has changed because of the teacher’s needs. Verbal feedback and highlighter marking were invented to reduce the marking load of teachers. They were not invented to make the student’s experience of learning better. They were invented to stop a teacher having a nervous breakdown, because an SLT had a ludicrous expectation of what should be in an exercise book.

Giving students no written feedback is about reducing the workload of teachers. It is not about the experience of learning. In some contexts, it might work, but for me it will not. I see the impact of my comments. For me, marking has always been in layers. Layer one: what the student needs to do to improve. Layer two: what everybody in the class needs to do to improve. Layer three: what certain groups of people in the class need to do to improve. Some approaches focus on one layer only and that for me is a problem. Surely, the student with very little self-awareness will think the feedback doesn’t relate to them and so it will not be effective.

Issue 3 – what will you be judged on
Our exercise books are the most important things in the classroom for judging the quality of learning. Now, that Ofsted and SLTs no longer grade teachers, they need something to quantify or check quality. The books are the new measuring stick for learning. Your interaction with a student is evident in the books. Oh, hang on. You did mark their books, didn’t you? What? You did, what? You told the whole class feedback. But, surely, you mark something.

An exercise book shows what the student has done, what the teacher has done, what the student has learnt and what the teacher has taught. Remove the teacher and you put all the emphasis on the results. You will be judged on results and results alone.

Issue 4 – the rewards     
I like that tie. Have you done something with your hair? Have you lost weight? It is amazing the interactions I remember and the interactions I don’t remember. The right comment at the right moment lifts the soul. I know me writing ‘WOW!’ next to a great piece of work has had an impact I can’t measure. The time I have spent writing a comment praising a student has been time well spent as it has secured and developed the teacher / student relationship.

Marking is an individual process. It is between the student and me. It is an interaction. Remove it and you better speak to the student. Even the quiet introvert one or the mute one.

Issue 5 – subjects

Each subject needs a different kind of marking. When there is a clear right and wrong answer to a task, feedback is easy to administer as a whole class. In English, there are so many ways to respond to the one, single question. Presenting this to a class is difficult. You could have done this… You could also have done this… Additionally, you could have done this…

I understand how Maths, for example, could be a subject where marking could be reduced and even removed. Students could mark their own work. Patterns can be highlighted in class feedback. Examples can be modelled. Again, there is a clear right and wrong in Maths.

English is much harder, and I think MFL is too, to reduce marking. Experts pick up on the expert things. Novices aren’t experts yet, because they have too many gaps in their knowledge or they haven’t been through all the processes fully. John, read Tom's Spanish writing and correct all the mistakes. John can’t do it because he doesn’t know all the spellings or verb tenses.

My solution
So, what have you done? My solution, and it is something I have done this year with numerous classes, is a bit old-school but it has reduced my marking considerably outside the classroom. I still mark assessments every term and I occasionally mark books outside the classroom. That is where I feel the solution is: outside / inside the classroom.

This is what I do. I set students to write and while they are writing I mark their books. To be fair, I don’t get to every student, but I get to about five or ten, while they are writing in one hour. And, it makes a huge difference to the final output. I sit at a student desk and read the work and mark it with the student. They are next to me and I do quite a bit of chatting with them and I write comments as I go along. It goes something like this:

That first sentence is a bit pointless. Get rid of it. Try starting with something more abstract. Now, that paragraph there is brilliant. Repeat what you are doing there again and again.  I see you picked up there what I said last lesson. Look, you are not developing your ideas here. Remember, that’s the problem with your writing: you start off well and then you forget to develop and extend you thinking. Use this sentence structure to develop this idea. It could also mean…

I think you get the idea. Their book is awash of marks, scribbles, ideas and directions. It was fun. When I have seen two students or more, I might spot a pattern and stop the rest of the class and teach them or remind them about the aspect. With this approach I have had my best improvements in student progress.  Why?

1.       Students engage in the feedback there and then.

2.       The feedback is relevant and immediate.

3.       The feedback is given at the point it is usually needed most – when the student is working.

4.       The feedback is personal.

5.       The feedback includes examples and I can model, if necessary.

6.       The feedback can be used to develop the whole class.

7.       The feedback is appropriately differentiated.

I could go on and on about the benefits of this approach, but I use it again and again with classes. All you need is a pen and a desk. Oh and students.

Our problem with marking is how it affects teachers. They sit on their own reading books and marking them. They watch the pile slowly dwindle and they count them down. The marking always happens at the end of the process. We mark the product and not the process. What if we shifted the marking to the process? Mark the process and not the product.

We want to change the way students think, yet we offer them advice post-mortem. They have had the thought. They have done the thinking. Is it any wonder students don’t improve? We don’t tell them at the right time.  Telling a student he got the wrong end of the stick, after the work, isn’t very helpful to him or her.

I haven’t taken many books home this year, but I have marked quite a lot of books. I get around five students in a lesson, but over the term I get to all students at least twice. I love marking now that I am focusing on teaching. All too often, it was focused on reactions. I reacted to their work. They reacted to my comments. I then reacted to their updated work. I am engaging with their work in a meaningful and constructive way. I can see when they are getting it wrong and what I need to do to correct things. Next week, or next lesson, isn’t the best time to tell a student when they are going wrong. The best time to ensure change is when they are thinking. After all, how often as teachers have we moaned about students not acting on our guidance.   

Because things aren’t real until it has a name, I have called it ‘Live Marking’. You can stick with your old ‘Post-mortem Marking’ and I  will keep my ‘Live Marking’ – it smells so much better. Oh if you are part of the highlighter clans such as  'Yellow Box Marking' and 'Tickled Pink Marking', you can still use them - this time you are not painting a corpse!   

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Purple Praise: a spoon full of sugar helps the marking go down

A couple of months ago a new student in a year called me over to his desk. I had recently marked a piece of work. He said, ‘Where’s the nice comment?’ I looked at him dumbfound. He expected all marking to have something positive said about it. Does all marking have to start with a positive comment? Or does marking need an emphasis on positive praise?

When I take my car in for a service and MOT, I get a sheet of paper with some details about the car. It tells me lots of stuff about how the car and what I need to do as the owner. But, I don’t get anything personal written down on the sheet from the garage. We love your collection of CDs. We like the sticker in the back window. We are impressed with your collection of sunglasses. Nor, do I get something personal about the car. We love how the car turns corners. We love how pretty the tires are. The process is purely functional as the car needs to pass a series of safety tests. Never do I leave a garage feeling that the experience wasn’t personal enough. Never do I leave a garage feeling unmotivated and let down. I might be depressed with the amount of money I end up paying, but I never feel let down by a lack of niceness about the experience.

There is an unwritten rule about marking. I think it was Mary Poppins who started it off. We think, no feel, that we should be saying something positive about all pieces of work. We spend a lot of it comforting egos.  We have structures for doing this ‘WWW’(What Went Well) or ‘two stars and a wish’. The emphasis is always on the positive. And, if I am honest, I have written some absolute drivel in the past for the sake of positivity. If you want to see empty, bland, beige writing, pick up any exercise book in secondary schools. The first comment written by the teacher will be bland McBlandy bland face. Good use of …. Good, you have…  Well done for …  It is all bland.

I too have sat with a piece of work staring at me, thinking what I could say about the work. And, I have spent hours doing that. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking. I never got the ‘Magic Eye’ pictures in the 1990s, but marking can be akin to them sometimes, staring at something and hoping that something will pop out. When you have spent ten minutes searching for a piece of positivity, you then have to find another one as the school you work for enforces that all feedback includes two positive comments.

A few years ago I stopped being so personal, or at least I limited what I wrote in exercise books. I stopped searching for the really positive things to say when a student had completed what was expected of them. I only focused on what they needed to work on and improve. I stopped massaging egos and saved myself time and sanity. I also gave myself more time to well mark some more.  

Of course, there is a complex relationship between work, rewards and feedback. If there are no rewards, then a student will be disaffected. But, what if doing the work was enough of a reward? What if students felt the satisfaction of doing work? Not the excitement lottery of what their work will be praised for. It is all leading to the same point, but I think our ‘purple praise’ has taken away the emphasis on the work. We have created a dialogue between the teacher and student, but it is a needy, unreliable, conditional and unwieldy dialogue. A student will only work if they get praised for it. Sir, you never say anything positive about my work.

I don’t get praised for the way I work, but I work really hard. I am conditioned to work hard regardless of who has or hasn’t praised me. I get satisfaction from seeing the work done and completed.

When I see people marking all weekend, I think about this ‘purple praise’. Do the students only work if they are given praise? Does it take them so long for them to mark because of the insistence on praising students personally?  

Marking is about love (according to various people). By marking a piece of work, it shows that you care about that student and that you have read the work. But, what if we have created a bizarre relationship by doing that? A relationship built on ‘need’ and not a mutual co-existence. The teacher’s role is purely to fulfil the needs of a student. I have had relationships with people built on need. I had to praise and flatter the person all the time, but they didn’t give a hoot about me. Maybe that is what we are doing with marking, building a dependency and a need. Interesting, that we have teachers across the land focusing on ‘grit’ and ‘resilience’ in the classroom. Maybe our marking is the exact cause of this indirectly. Our students aren’t gritty enough because we are praising them for everything they do. Our students aren’t resilient enough because they are seeing everything in a positive way with ‘positive praise’.        

The reward for work should be the satisfaction gained from completing the work. The reward should not be a comment from a demigod teacher. As a student, myself, there was nothing better than the reward of seeing several pages written for an essay. The smug, pleased satisfaction was addictive and led me to university. Primary school is about training students to work, and there, praise is needed. Secondary school is about students working on their own with less praise and becoming independent. Independence is about a ‘praiseless’ context. Our praise-led curriculums in secondary schools stop independence.   

Before people go all mad and throw their peppermint tea at me for being cruel, hurtful about a child’s feelings. Listen: if we stop the purple praise, you stop the negativity. Let’s just get them doing the work. I tell students what they need to improve on. That for me is the most important thing. It’s what I do to school for. Making them better. If I do want to praise, I do it verbally and personally.

Thanks for reading,

Xris

It’s all about the books, about the books, about the books - no trouble!

Things have changed.

There wasn’t a sudden announcement, but the emphasis in observations has dramatically changed over the last four years. Because someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided that teaching is too hard to assess simply by looking at the teacher for an hour from the ineffective perspective of being perched at the back of the classroom, the focus has shifted. It went from focusing on the teaching to focusing on the students and that horrible word…PROGRESS. Then, the focus suddenly dropped onto books and exercise books. Now, don’t get me wrong, the exercise books have been a part of the observation process, but they haven’t always been the primary focus. They have always been very far down on the line of priorities. Now it is all about the books. Oh, and that’s no trouble.

Lesson observations have become like a very messy divorce. We now have observers openly blanking teachers. People will observe my lessons by looking at the books and they will simply ignore me. The materialistic things (the second car and the paintings) and the children are the focus and not the person that has been holding everything together for the past few years. Maybe, I should consider getting a prenup before I start a year of teaching. Look, before you observe me, you need to remember that I inherited this class and that I am not responsible for Tim’s terrible attendance or the fact that Susan doesn’t seem to keep still.  But, it isn’t you were are looking at, Chris, so just imagine we are not here. They say this while loudly talking to a child and moving the furniture around.  

So the humble exercise book has become the cross to nail on my teaching for the year. It is all about the books. No trouble. See there is a problem with the humble exercise book. It starts looking beautiful at the start of the year and then by the end of the year they look like something that has seen several years of military service. It is wrinkled. It is creased. It might miss a page. It might have a scar of ink across the cover. They never look like how they should look in your mind. They look ugly. However, the first page looks beautiful because both teacher and student were concerned about making a good impression and three terms later there is no need worry about making a first impression.

Pick up a book in my room and I will go through several states of fear and anxiety. Did I mark it recently? When was the last time I marked it? Did the student hand it to me when I was marking the whole set? Is it marked enough? What colour pen did I use? Did I use the right colour? Is my handwriting clear enough? Did I write something appropriate? Did my handwriting of the word ‘work’ make it look like something inappropriate? Did I have a breakdown mid marking and ‘let rip’ with my anger and frustration? Before this book obsession, I just marked. I didn’t think about anybody else; it was just me and the student. Now, it is like the opening night of my version of ‘Hamlet’. I am being critiqued.  

I look at exercise books all the time. I scrutinise exercise books as a Head of Department. Not because I want to chase people and tell them off for not marking. But, because I want to see what the learning looks like in that person’s lesson. How has the learning been shaped? How has the student developed over time? What has the teacher done with a topic? How have they supported a student? I suppose, if I am honest, I don’t look at things the way others look at things: desperate for some evidence of progress or no progress. The things I look at are:

1] What is the learning that has taken place? What is the journey that students have been on?

2] What activities have students done to enable the learning to take place?

3] How has teacher’s marking guided the student to improve?

My feedback to staff will cover these things. As things have progressed, I have discovered quite a few things, but the most important thing I have noticed is: target setting.

I have noticed that most teachers have a bank of ten key targets that they give students to direct them in the process of improvement. Yes, I am guilty of this. The targets are my short-hand. They make the process of marking quick and easy. They are my catchphrases. The sentences are preconstructed in my head. All I have to do is simply go to the space in my brain where they are located and pick one. I have stock targets for top and bottom of classes and readymade targets for reading and writing. The nature of the job means that at some point in the past we needed a way to speed things up and simplify things. A bank of targets in our heads has been the way to do this.

So what did I do with my department about this target setting issue? I extended the bank of targets the teachers use. I gave them more. I gave them topic related targets. I gave them targets related to reading and targets related to writing. Therefore, when students have an assessment, teachers have a bank of targets to give the students, which they could adapt if they wanted to. But, I even made it easier for staff by giving a skill to a letter or number, so all staff had to do is write a letter and the students wrote out the target. The results was faster and easier marking, but more precise feedback. We used this model for our GCSE mock marking and I’d say it reduced the marking load considerably. Plus, we kept the targets to one per question. The problem we have with marking exam papers is that there is often a catalogue of things that students need to improve, but we opted for one target per question and I can safely say that our recent Year 11 students knew what they needed to do for each question.

For question 1, I need to …

For question 2, I need to …

In addition to this, we made the targets (skills) explicit to students. They knew what the targets were going to be at the start of the topic. In fact, the teaching was planned around the targets we might set the students. Therefore, students were able to see how things linked to the overall task. In fact, I got students to actively engage with the targets by attempting a piece of writing and assessing based on the sheet. I even got students to self-evaluate the targets throughout a topic.

I know, it doesn’t sound too ground-breaking. However, here’s a bit of the principle behind it: Teachers are magicians standing at the top of a ladder.  They are seen, by students, as the experts in their subject. They do the work that students are expected to do without thought /effort and it looks like magic to them. A student is at the bottom of a ladder in terms of how they see themselves. They see the magical stuff but there is quite a bit of a way for them to get close to the magician. If I am honest, students see English as something mystical. Either they over complicate it or they over simplify it. We don’t help things by parading mark schemes written by monkeys with typewriters, checklists and example answers. It is good natured but is it really effective in helping them to see what they need to do to improve? Too many times students say that they must write more to improve their English level. If only, it was that simple.

We have shared these skill sheets this year and we are going to build on them next year. But, for me, they work. They are not a hierarchy of skills. I am not telling students do this and you get a grade A. Instead, I am saying that these are the skills I will see a person do if they want to be the best. It would be crazy to focus on everything. Instead, focus on one at a time. Plus, we have a conflict within ourselves when it comes to target setting. We are conflicted between content and skills. Knowledge and skills. Accuracy and skills. All too often, I have spent three weeks teaching students and got them to produce a piece of work. The targets I set the student do not always relate to the previous learning. It focuses on the basics. I might have taught students to use a range of clauses in their writing, but the target I set them is about spellings. Not related to the previous learning. Yes, the basics are important, but I am giving conflicting messages. It is like me asking students questions about a war poem and then asking them: ‘Which band was at number 1 the most in September 1983?’ The questions and the targets (feedback) should be about the previous learning. All too often they are not. In English, we find it almost necessary to be constantly writing targets about accuracy, but this might be going against the grain of what we are trying to teach.

Our feedback in the classroom is under scrutiny and so too is our questioning. Maybe, rather than focus on endless writing in books, we look at what we write. The language we use for setting targets. The choice of targets. One line of teacher’s writing can be more meaningful and effective than a page of scribbles where a teacher expresses their frustration that a student hasn’t listened through the art of exclamation marks, capital letters and underlining.

Maybe, if we start with the framework of targets as the basis for our teaching, then students might be clearer about what is they need to do to get better. If we use the same language of targets at the start and in the middle and at the end, then maybe these students have a better chance of making progress.

 

I will add more screengrabs from my PowerPoint later. Thanks for reading,

Xris

 

P.S. Like Arnie, there is no point setting a target unless like 'The Terminator' we return. I'll be back.... to see that you have followed your target.   

Marking - The Circles of Correction

One of the frustrations we face daily in marking is that students don’t read our corrections. Their eyes search avidly for the final level and comment, but the rest gets no thought at all. Nothing. Zilch.  The time spent tireless correcting the incorrect use of ‘their’ or ‘a lot’ instead of ‘alot’ can often be useless. It is merely a PR stunt for anyone looking at the books. Parents can see that I have read the work and spotted the errors. Teaching observers can see that I have picked up an exercise book and actually looked at it in the last few weeks. But, what students do with the work is another thing.

Now, there are lots of approaches that people use successfully and unsuccessfully in the classroom to combat this issue. Some might hide the level until the student has read all the work. Others, might get students to complete some action based on highlighted mistake. The problem becomes a simple case of fixing things. I have marked several drafts of work for students and the difference between the first and second draft is the correction of the errors I have highlighted. There’s been no other thought process involved.

Marking policies for years have included marking keys to: (A) help teachers mark quickly; (B) help students decode what their teacher means. I don’t mind having a marking key, but, to be honest, they can be a bit like the ‘Da Vinci Code’. You need the equivalent of the Enigma machine to work out that a student needs to use paragraphs and check that he/she uses capital letters correctly. It makes the student work, but maybe not it the way we want them to. They work out what is wrong and then shrug their shoulders. Yeah, I knew that.

This year, I started circling errors. I such a lazy teacher. Can’t even be bothered to say what is wrong with their writing. Yes, that’s me! Hands up. I read the work. Comment if I like something and, if there is a technical error, I will circle it. Then, I circle the next error I spot. And so on. I measure the amount of circling I do, so their piece of work does not resemble someone with chicken pox. Finally, I write a comment and a target.

When I return the work to students, I get them to do two things. One: write down next to the circle the mistake. Two: write down the correction. The students work hard and I don’t. They have to solve what is wrong with the aspect highlighted and fix it. Rather than simply decode a key, they are engaging with their mistakes and going through the thought processes - which they should have done when writing it in the first place. The two parts to the circling are important. Identifying the mistake is crucial. They need to understand the mistake made. What rule have they broken? Then, the student writing the correction reinforces the correct way of doing things.  If they can’t work it out, they ask the person next to them. If that person can’t work it out, I step in and help them.  

 

I find that this approach has really helped me with my marking and with how students respond to marking. You could spend three lessons looking at contractions and still find errors with them in the work produced, but this way, students do seem to be less blasé about making mistakes. They know that it will come back to haunt them. It really does help things to stick. After all, it is them trying to learn from their mistakes - by themselves.

Thanks for reading,

Xris

Marking wars

There’s a battle inside every English teacher. It’s not a fight between Austen and Bronte. It’s not a war between Dickens and Poe. It is instead a marking battle. The battle between accuracy and creativity.

When I mark, it is often with the focus of accuracy and technical improvement. I will circle a mistake and make a student identify what the mistake is, with the hope they learn from this and never do it again. My mind is always set on accuracy. Targets will be driven by errors and I might spot spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes. However, my marking doesn’t focus on creativity. I am chained to accuracy and I never seem to escape it. The beast is far stronger than creativity. If I am honest, it is only with creative writing does my marking address the creative aspect. I then might say: I like how you have developed the character and how you end the story. The rest of the time the marking focuses on spelling, punctuation and grammar.

This week I did something different. For a few years, I have discussed and blogged about how we neglect the effect of writing in lessons. An insistence on the purpose of writing has led to some dire writing and some boring efforts in class. I have explored in Sexy Sprouts how students should be taught to change the effect of their writing and for me this has really helped my students. This week I thought about this writing for effect in more detail and applied it to my marking. What if the drive behind my marking was focusing on the effect? What if I solely focused on the effect and left the accuracy alone?

As a result of this thought, I asked a group of students to describe a setting for a ghost story. After teaching students the difference between ghost and horror stories (which amounts to one going Ahhhh! and the other going Oh!), the students set off to write their settings.

Enter the red pen from stage right.  

I marked the work with a very different approach. Instead of the boring ‘two wishes and a star’ approach, I simply put the word atmosphere and a number out of ten next to it. The effort was ‘draining’. Most students scored a two or a three out of ten. Then, I got them to revise their setting without any direct teaching. They got underway with the task. Next, I got the students to assess each other’s work. Again, they only marked it out of ten for atmosphere. Finally, the students wrote a third version. At no point did I actually teach the children how to produce an effective setting during this process. I even refrained from providing them with good examples. I only said to them to avoid the most obvious words.

The result: brilliant examples of progress for very little work and marking on my part.

The difference between version one and three was startling. Students had produced clichéd settings in the first version and by the time they got to version three I was reading atmospheric and detailed, original writing.  My only advice / marking was a word and a number. Prior to this experiment, I have listed to students what would make their writing better. And, they have typically selected to follow or ignore my advice.

I think this approach was more successful than others, for me, was due to the way students were writing and I was responding. There was sense of cohesive focus rather than a disjointed list of features to include. All too often improving writing concentrates on adding things. This approach focused on developing and linking things together. Students were improving the whole text and not tiny aspects. Does this mean that a lot of my marking focuses on the small tiny aspects? Yes, I do. After all, God is in the detail. However, maybe this approach is something that needs weaving into the way I teach. Of course, I can’t possibly do it all the time, but maybe I could do it occasionally.

Along with this approach maybe I have to adapt the language I use in task setting. Persuade. Advise. Review. Comment. This terms used to describe types of writing are so plain and we are expecting students to come up with creative ideas based on these vague, beige types of writing. Perhaps, I should be asking students to make a letter about the dangers of smoking that makes me laugh. Or, they should write a description of a beach that makes me worry.

When you look at the mark schemes for the exams, the writing always refers to technical accuracy and the effect. Yet, we tend to focus on one and neglect the other. I will rarely say that a piece of non-fiction needs a funnier start.

Now don’t get me wrong: I value accuracy but I tend to think that our overriding focus on it has slightly overshadowed some elements of creativity.

There’s a battle in my head, but this time creativity won and surprisingly accuracy was not injured.

Atmosphere: 2  

Thanks for reading,

Xris

We need to talk about Kevin's work

I find it incredibly funny that English teachers often moan about marking, yet put them in a room for a bit with some other English teachers and the conversation soon enough gets on to marking. Yesterday, I had that exact conversation. We were supposed to be gathering resources and tips in preparation for the AQA Unit 1 exam. Instead, marking featured heavily in the discussion. Furthermore, there are endless blogs about marking, and funnily enough a lot of them seem to be by English teachers. This blog too is about marking.

Recently, I had to do a book scrutiny for the department and I was presented with a dilemma: do I scrutinise my own marking? The answer: yes. I scrutinised my marking and my exercise books. I had to look at things as an outsider. And, what an interesting activity it was. I had to look at the learning over time. I had to ponder the comments I had made in response to a piece of work. I had to work out the story behind the work. So, what did I see? Lots of targets. Lots of work. Lots of marking. But, what I didn’t see was a clear dialogue.  A conversation. A chat. An interaction. A two-way relationship about making work better. I saw little engagement with the work. Don’t get me wrong: the student did engage with the work, but the student was not engaging in the development and the progress of learning.

Like last week, I want to address an underwritten rule in teaching that has seeped through everything we do. Last week I mentioned how effort has masked progress. This week I want to explore the dialogue in books. You call it marking. I call it a conversation. And, if I want to get all new-age, I might insert the word ‘learning’ before the word conversation.  Yes, I want to look at the learning conversation. It pains me to use that phrase. It feels as if I need to wear a pashmina or something as I write it.

A long time ago somebody decided it would be good to adopt a business approach to education. Like workers in business, a student would know their pay-bracket (level), their incentives to do better (targets), and expectations (targets).  Along the way, some business words have slipped in too. I now have appraisals and my performance is managed in performance management meetings. I have had the lucky (or unlucky) experience of working in the business world. I sold things. I made money for other people. I helped some lazy people make lots of money so they could have an extension to their already nice house. (I promise, I am not bitter – far from it, to be honest.) So, therefore, I can see how education has got is so wrong. In my whole time, in business, I usually only had three targets. Three clear-no-grey-areas-no-vagueness-no-questionable-targets. These are the kind of targets I had:

·         Average profit margin = 6.1%
·         Total sales per month = £100, 000
·         Sales= 10 sales a day

My focus was clear.  I didn’t enjoy the business I was working for, but I was clear as to what I needed to achieve. Any meeting or discussion was focused on those targets. I never forgot them. It was clear.

Look at our exercise books. Look at them in every classroom. They contain hundreds and billions of targets:

vary how you start sent
vary punctuation use
avoid using commas instead of full stops
avoid using commas instead of full stops
accuracy
longer sentences and paragraphs
vary how you start sentences
longer and more descriptive paragraphs
vary punctuation use
accuracy especially spellings
avoid using commas instead of full stops
vary punctuation use and sentence openings
vary punctuation use
development of ideas or alternative ideas
vary punctuation use
accuracy
add detailed and precise description
vary punctuation use
add adjectives before a noun to add detail
be more accurate with you use of punctuation
add detailed / precise description
present ideas in an original and creative way
to make sure the style of writing suits the task
to vary the start of sentences and add extra detail to writing with adjectives
 

Each piece of work generates a target. Each subject generates their own target. Then, to add a garnish to this packed hamburger of targets, we add a gherkin: a literacy target. Why don’t children get better? Why don’t they progress as much as they should do? Well, could it be the fact that their brain is filled with targets that they can’t remember the important stuff? Like, the stuff that will really make them better.

Again, the problem is ingrained into the way of thinking in schools. Look at performance management. How many targets do we have? Wouldn’t it be better if someone just gave us one simple target? Make X better. Improve Y. Instead we are try to fix several cracks in the dam at once. Why don’t we fix the most important one first? Give us a direction and a focus. We all want to be better, but the direction for improvement is watered down – sorry for extending the metaphor.

One step at a time. One target at a time. We are at that dangerous exam time. Every second in a Year 11 counts. We chuck everything at them with the hope of them retaining it. This year, I have slimmed down my targets.  They have one key target to work on. They don’t get another one until that target has been accomplished, because I would be only be preventing them from getting that first target fixed.

Gwen  – vary how you start sentences

David– vary punctuation use
Joe – avoid using commas instead of full stops
Pete -avoid using commas instead of full stops
Kate  – accuracy
Carolyn – longer sentences and paragraphs
James - vary how you start sentences
Adam  – longer and more descriptive paragraphs
Kerry - vary punctuation use
Anne  – accuracy especially spellings
Phil - avoid using commas instead of full stops
Linda  - vary punctuation use and sentence openings
Tom - vary punctuation use
Kathy – development of ideas or alternative ideas
William - vary punctuation use
Percy  – accuracy
Lisa – add detailed and precise description
Harry - vary punctuation use
Frank  – add adjectives before a noun to add detail
Maude – be more accurate with you use of punctuation
Enid – add detailed / precise description
Bette  – present ideas in an original and creative way
Mark  – to make sure the style of writing suits the task
Tommy -  to vary the start of sentences and add extra detail to writing with adjectives
 
I have a ready-made PowerPoint of their targets and I will show this slide over the term. They see it up large to highlight how important it is. It is the message I want them to keep in their heads. Also, I might highlight a few to show to students that the learning of that lesson is especially pertinent to them. As soon as a target is completed or I think it has been achieved, I replace it. Furthermore, I might get students to put a post-it note on the board to show how confident they are at that skill.

Then, comes the all important thing. The marking. This one target one student policy changes the way I mark. Yes, I still keep the progress, no progress or some progress grading, but the conversation in books looks different. It is exactly that. A conversation.  

Me: Well done, Mark. You are still varying how you started the start of sentences. However, on the last piece of writing you did this more effectively. Look at that last piece of work and see how you could improve on this recent piece of work.

Mark: Hey, Mr C. Yeah, I just didn’t think about it. I found it hard for me to change the start of sentences in this kind of writing.

Me: You could use ….

Sadly, and honestly, marking tends to follow the pattern of: grade; positive comment; target for improvement. That cycle is repeated again and again. And, if we continue with this model, we are just providing a conveyer belt of targets. Next, please! Surely, we should be moving to having more of these phrases in our marking:

•       You haven’t remembered your target from last time.
•       You were able to X last time so why didn’t you do it this time?
•       Look at the target last time.
•       We were working on X at the start of the year and you still are not ….
•       You can do X, but check how you did it last time.
•       You can’t get to the next stage unless you are consistent with this target.
 

Our conversation with students is always about a new topic and never about the past. Our marking is focused too on new and different things. It is always focused on the next thing. It isn’t focused on the last thing. It isn’t even bothered with the piece of work that was produced before the most recent one. That’s what we have to work towards. It is not quite ‘the sins of the father’ but it is in the similar vein. We shouldn’t let students forget the work sins of the past. That should be the starting point for all work. Stop starting all pieces of work as if this is a new beginning.

Progress isn’t measured in the number of targets we have. Progress isn’t improved by having lots of targets. Progress is made when a student learns to do something. It is the skill that we should be focusing on. Get the skill developed and refined before giving a new one.  

Thanks for reading and thanks to people on twitter for inspiring some of the things here,

Xris32

Teacher: Xris, a lengthy piece of work. This shows me a lot of passion on this topic. What happened to being concise?

Xris: I did try to be concise, but I find it difficult. All I seem to do is just scribble out a few words.

Teacher: Try writing it first and then delete paragraphs that are unnecessary.

Blogsync 8: This marking is killing me

Be assured that the title is not something I have said. It was, in fact, something a colleague said to me a few years ago. The teacher of a different subject turned to me and painfully said that the marking they were doing was killing them. They said to an English teacher that they had too much marking to do. I casually replied: ‘Yes, it might be.’

I never get into a debate about marking and who has the most to mark, as it always ends in bloodshed or death. For years, I have always stood back. There is always somebody worse off. I might have to read the termly equivalent of three ‘War and Peace’s a term, but the poor PE teacher has to spend most of their day in the rain outside. Yes, it might get warm in the summer, but rarely does it stop raining. The Drama teacher has to run after school sessions and the Science teacher has to prepare for an experiment. It is all relative, but just one day I’d love an English exam paper that was made up of simple right and wrong answers. Instead I get bucket loads of writing and I spend the time sifting for gold. Like those in the Gold Rush, there is a lot of effort and it rarely produces gold. Too many times it produces fool’s gold.

The problem I have with marking is time. The time it takes to mark it. The time left of my free time to do it. The time I have left over to call my life.  When I became an English teacher, I held a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare and swore the following oath:

I, Chris, pledge my allegiance to all things related to literature. I swear to use well known quotes from books at any opportunity to show that I have read a lot. I promise to obsess over apostrophes and homophones used in Christmas cards.  I assure people that I will spend at least half of any free time I have marking or worrying about marking I have yet to do.

It is half-term for me and I am worrying about the marking I have yet to do. I have seen on twitter that people have spent days marking and I have just, well, done nothing. I know: I will write a blog about marking to avoid marking. I find that I have loads to do in the holidays, because there is very little time during the term to do it. I feel that we are constricted by an old framework. The PPA time, which is great, is based on an old model of teaching. A model that was very relaxed. It was based on a time when schools weren’t so data orientated.  Marking has changed over the years, but have the working practices of schools adapted to it as well? We are now expected to mark more often and more consistently over the term, yet there hasn’t been any extra time to support this. Look at NQTs and teachers in the first few years of teaching and you can see this. They are usually the last to leave the school; even then they don’t get everything done.  If established teachers even find the marking demands tough, then how will the younger members of staff find it?

So, what is my method of marking with impact? It is very ‘old school’ and I think it is very obvious, but I think it is occasionally neglected because we insist on doing something all the time.  I have tried some snazzy ways of spicing up marking, but I think there is no getting away from it: you have to read and write a comment on work. All the ‘verbal feedback’ stamps in the world do not replace the experience of reading and writing on work. It might emulate it a bit, but it doesn’t replace it. And it is a questionable substitute, in my opinion. Ofsted praised my marking at the last inspection we had and there was not one reference to verbal feedback in my books. I think it is a gimmick and a time saver, but not a strong tool, unless I am missing a key point.

Anyway, what is the method?

First you will need:

A table
A chair
A red (green if your school has gone P.C.) pen
A classroom full of students

 I did this last week and it works as a great way to show impact and to push students. Students were set the task of writing a description of a creepy room. They busily wrote for ten minutes. Then, I called students up to my desk one at a time, or, if they wanted to come me. I read the work and then scribbled some comment on their work. They then carried on writing or restarted the task. They could only write the work out in neat if they had passed my strict quality control procedures. Like a flowchart, they had to produce a certain quality before they could move on.

The instant nature of the feedback meant that students got a clear reaction immediately rather than three weeks later, when the teacher had final got around to marking things. It also meant that I could support students then and there and clarify things if they didn’t get it right. It was humorous too, as I said I felt sick if I saw work without full stops or a homophone error.  The student rushed away as they knew I wouldn’t even look at it without the basics of full stops and capital letters present.

Doing this last week meant that I marked every exercise book in the class and pushed and developed several students along the way. It also meant that I had one less thing in mark in the holidays. Furthermore, it has clear evidence of progress. There was a clear pattern of work, intervention and evidence of intervention in work. All this I did with a bottom set and the students improved several sub-levels because of the intervention. Students who normally forget full stops were now using them because the teacher almost vomited last.

Marking doesn’t have to be a disembodied or separate part of teaching. The lesson was great and the marking was at the heart of the learning taking place. This is something that we need to strongly work on. It looks like we are starting to get a bit smarter with how we mark. The recent comments about DIRT and MAD time embody this notion of putting the marking smack bang in the middle of the learning, not in the boot of my car waiting for me to mark it.

For more of my thoughts on marking, read this blog. There are other blogs about marking here on the Blogsync website.

Thanks for reading,  

Xris32

P.S. Verbal Feedback from my daughters

Lots of big words, but it would look better if it was pink.

Blogsync 4: Progress - It's all about STEPS

Progress is the new swear word in schools. It is used frequently to describe everything. Often, you will hear phrases like 'this is progress' or 'I progressing happy', or even 'Oh progress'. It may sound like it means something positive; however, it means the opposite. Worse still, some teachers are spouting 'PROGRESS! PROGRESS! PROGRESS' like some Dalek determined to rule the Universe.

This is entry of this month’s blogsync entitled ‘Progress in my classroom? How it is made and how do I know it?'. Check out here to see more entries. I have decided to use the band STEPS as the inspiration for the blog. And, in particular,  one line:

Wanna make you mine better get in line
5-6-7-8

 
Because that is what is happening in education. We are too obsessed with the numbers 5,6,7 and 8. And students have to get in line.


I find this idea of progress a very puzzling and confusing concept. For me, progress is about the steps to improving and going up those steps. I have progressed from a C to a B. It seems on one level that ‘progressing’ has replaced the verb ‘learning’ completely in schools. It is not what they have learnt. It is all about what they have improved on. How much have they progressed?  I worry for the good, old plenary. No long will students be asked: ‘What have you learnt today?’. They will be asked how much progress they have made in a lesson. Lots. Some. None.  Progress and learning are linked, but they are separate things at times. The learning supports the progress. Not the other way round. The progress, in my eyes, does not support learning; it is the result of the learning and too much focus on it distorts the learning. On another level, our expectations of progress has become distorted. We are expecting all progress to be exponential and continually improve in every minute or hour in a day.

I do have a big issue with this idea of progress. Not because I am ‘a leftie’ and I prefer students to learn things in a more organic way, but because I think we are looking for ‘fool’s gold’. Our obsession with students making progress could do more harm than good. Our point of comparison is weak. In one lesson, a teacher could be teaching students some facts. In another lesson, a different teacher is teaching how a student can shade a piece of art to reflect the natural lighting of an object. Are the levels of progress the same in both lessons? Will there be more progress in the fact based lesson? Or, will the rate of progress be at a different pace with students and their shading as it is developing a skill?   Progress varies from subject to subject, lesson to lesson and task to task. There should be a clear measurement for progress in lessons as, after all, it is a measurement of how good a lesson is. Is there more progress in the fact based lesson because students can do more than the art students at the end of the lesson? Or, is the progress in the art lesson of a better quality because it is refining an existing skill? Knowledge vs skills, again.  There is learning in both, but the nature of one subject makes progress transparent and the other not so clear. Furthermore, what about subjects like English that are recursive? How easy is it for students to make visible progress in something they have done before? It is easy to show progress, when it is something new, isn't. Yesterday they couldn't. Today they can.

Underlying all this discussion is learning. We shouldn't be focusing on the progress in a lesson, but we should be concentrating on the learning - after that it is what teachers are about. I help students to learn. The progress a student makes is a result of teaching and the student's learning.
 

To make things worse, this progress has to be boiled down to twenty minutes of observation. There must be some element of progress in those twenty minutes or you are not teaching the students correctly. Oh, and it has to be rapid. How can I show progress in twenty minutes? This twenty minute focus is meaning that we are focusing on short, superficial learning rather than deep, long-lasting learning. The learning is going back to this ‘fast-food consumerist’ culture we are fostering. The learning has to be quick. The learning has to be visible.  The learning has to rely on the consumer being satisfied.

I have learnt several things over the years and each time I have learnt something, whether it is Spanish or how to scuba dive, it has been slow. It has also been repetitive.  My scuba divining lesson did not involve a quick starter about the use of an oxygen task. I was not then thrown into the ocean. The instructor did not then measure my progress by checking if I was alive or not. In truth, real learning can vary. You might pick something up quickly like the colours in French. Or, it might take you several lessons to understand something like quadratic equations – it did for me at school. Yet, this constraint of a 20 minute of lessons is constricting us and focusing us to reduce the teaching so that students can make visible progress.

Description of classroom action

So, how can we show progress in a lesson? Or, more importantly, how do I show progress in a lesson?

Doing it wrong

Get students to start the lesson completing a task, knowing that they will do it badly. Then, spend the next 10 minutes teaching students how to improve. Finally, they redo the original task. The new version will be better than the first and you can clearly say that there has been progress made. This can be restructured to focus on prior knowledge and then retest them.  In the words of STEPS, 'One for sorrow and two for joy.' Redoing things shows students going up the steps.

Marking

My exercise books are exhibit 1.A in the metaphorical trial of my teaching abilities. It is the source of progress. If I was an Ofsted Inspector,  I would look at the books, because I’d know that what the buffoon(me) is doing in the class might not always be what they normally do. The books would tell the full story. It would say if the teacher is obsessed with worksheets, grammar tasks, peer marking or film reviews – I hate ‘film reviews’. A quick glance says it all. If Ofsted want to look at progress, then the books are the key to this.  Two basic principles must be applied to this idea:

 

1.       Work in the book now should be better than work at the start of the book.

2.       There must be some clear progress between marked pieces of work. There must not be repeated targets.

Reflection on effect 

What does this all mean for me and my marking? Well, any time I mark a piece of work in a student’s exercise book I look at their previous target or advice. At that point, I draw a smiley face or a sad face and I write progress or no progress. Then, when I write their new comment, I make sure that I acknowledge what they have done before. I am impressed with how you followed my advice and varied the length of your sentences, Martin. By doing this, I am feeding the progress into what I do. It isn’t all about levels; it’s about making sure I don’t repeat the same targets again and again. I am showing the progress in my marking. I am showing the steps up to the next stage.  Therefore, each piece of work in their books is about the student’s progress and shows how they are slowly getting better. I am moving away from the correct or wrong approach to work and moving towards meaningful feedback.   

My last blog argued how one sixty minute block is not a true reflection of the learning in a classroom. Twenty minutes is not enough. That’s why the books are so important, in my eyes. Progress isn’t a twenty minute thing. It is an on-going thing. You can learn something in twenty minutes, but that could or could not help you to progress. Progress is the bigger picture on the learning. Learning is judged in lessons. Ofsted judge the learning in the lessons and progress through the books and data. That is why our exercise books are important to showing students the steps to progress.

If all fails, I might have to adopt some of the following to make sure that there is clear and rapid progress in lessons. Warning: these have not basis for sound pedagogical learning and they will lead to 'Tragedy' if used. Just a bit of fun.   

·         Teach a list of facts.

·         Teach students an obscure literary term, so they can at least name it after 20 minutes.

·         Read a bit of a book they don’t know. Well, they didn’t know who the characters were before.

·         Train them to write inaccurately and terribly at the start of every lesson, so that they know that after 20 minutes they have to write it better. Then, at the end of the lesson they have to write even better than that. 

·         Don’t put any effort into their work, unless I say so. Then when I mention the phrase ‘This will show me your progress’ that is when they show me their best efforts.

·         Get them to pretend they don’t know a technique, so when it comes to looking at the work it looks like they have made outstanding progress.

Thanks for reading and check out my other blog on progress here. Please feel free to comment if you think this is a load of old progress and think I should progress off.

Xris32

P.S. A big thanks to Helene for her opinions about the blog. Her blog can be found here.