Research tells us that effective feedback is the most powerful lever for pupil progress, equating to 8 months additional progress per year. Yet as teachers we seem to spend inordinate amounts of time marking books with very little to show for it.
Here is a strategy which can save you time as well as boost pupil engagement and progress. It is taken from my book Efficient Marking and can be used across all year groups and subjects.
- Display an example piece of work by one pupil on the board. This can either be work that is currently being undertaken in class or a piece of work completed at an earlier time. Ideally, you will be marking a piece of work which had numbered success criteria.
- Mark this piece of work in real time in front of the class, paying particular attention to identifying any success criteria and identifying them with their relative number.
- Now ask the class to either ‘find it’ or ‘fix it’. If they can identify the same success criteria in their own work they should mark it with a tick and its number. If they cannot, they should ‘fix it’ by adding it in, using a different colour.
This strategy not only means you do not have to write the same thing over and over when marking a piece of work at home, it also boosts pupils’ engagement in the feedback process and gets them thinking about their own learning.
If you think your school could benefit from my Effective Marking and Feedback training to aid teacher workload and boost progress and engagement for pupils, please do get in touch.