Marking student work can become an enormous task, especially when you’re new to teaching and aren’t used to it yet. Here are my top tips for becoming an efficient marker:
- Come in to school early, and leave late: If you leave all of your marking at school you’ll find that you’ll save yourself a lot of back pain, you’ll avoid losing student work and you’ll probably be a more efficient marker. Assign yourself a mrking target each day and use your early mornings and time after school to get it done. That way, your weekends are yours to enjoy.
- Use peer assessment as often as you can: Make sure that students are provided with the exact answers they need for their questions, and get them to mark each other’s work. Always doible-check the stduent yourself too thoough, as students can pick up misconceptions when peer-assessing. In my book (The Quick Guide to Classroom Management), I outline in detail how you can use Google forms for peer-assessing (which builds technology into the process too)
- Do you really need to assign so much homework?: If you’re not taking the time to sit with your students to provide high quality feedback, then is that homework assignment you’ve set really that useful? Think carefully about the quantity of marking you are creating for yourself, and whether or not this is a effective way to enhance the learning of your students.
For more tips on marking and assessment, there are a good number of books on this issue on Amazon.
