How many of you struggle to keep on top of the ever growing marking pile? If you are anything like me you try so hard to add individual, personalised marking for each and every one of your students…..at the detriment of your own personal life.  Many weekends I have stared at my pile of marking and tried to find every excuse to put it off, knowing full well this is a good few hours amount of work. Surely there must be an easier way to marking that would still provide our students with the necessary feedback needed to help them progress?

So my Head of 6th form challenged me to trial this feed- forward marking approach. Instantly I thought this looked like an excellent way to take the pressure off my self and place the ownership onto the students.

feed-forward

With this approach the idea is to indicate to the students where they have either:

  • Written something really impressive
  • Written something that doesn’t make sense
  • Written something that is wrong
  • Written something with bad SPaG

I trialed this with my AS Media students, numbering the symbols in the margin and underlining the sections that they applied to. It meant that I could get through the marking much quicker as I was annotating the symbols as I went.

The start of the following lesson was then focused on students writing their own feedback. They had to look at where I had put the symbols, and then using the sentence starters on the board they had to give themselves their own feedback. If they received a start then they had to show why I thought it was a good line, if they received a question mark they had to explain what it was that they were trying to explain.

While at first my students were a little confused as this is a new approach for them, they eventually understood what was being asked of them. It also made them realise they had to be clear in their exam pieces as they would not be able to later explain to the examiner what they actually meant.

While most of the time I did know what they meant in their pieces – I challenged them and made them think about going that extra mile in order to fully explain their answers, rather than assuming the examiner will know what they are trying to say.

VERDICT: Definitely something I am going to try again – it cut my marking time down and forced my students to actually reflect over their work rather than just reading what grade they achieved.