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Marking work is the bane of more or less every teacher’s job. It seems to be a never-ending ordeal that is always piling up, but what if it doesn’t have to be that way? Today we are going to share with you some of the best tips and tricks on how to make marking manageable. 

Communicating Feedback

When marking day-to-day work, you are likely to stumble across silly mistakes. This is usually due to students being lazy with things like grammar and not proofreading their work. As a teacher, you don’t want to heavily critique their work, but more so to give constructive criticism to lend a hand in their journey of learning.

Being too critical will be disheartening for most students, especially the ones in primary and early secondary school. A tip from us here at REESON Education is to incorporate some form of system for marking. What we mean by this, is to show the students where exactly they’re working in terms of their own personal targets. A traffic light system is ideal as it can show students if they’re green (working above their target), amber (working at their target) or red (working below their target).

In addition to this, you can give students their own system to rank their progress, so that they can communicate to you what they believe that their own strengths and weaknesses are. When you next mark their work, you can refer back to what they have noted themselves and help them to avoid marking their mistakes in the future. This makes their feedback unique to them and their own beliefs.

Handling Corrections

When it comes to marking, you are certain to encounter mistakes made by the pupils. How about you set your students mini challenges based around their mistakes to try and prevent them from happening time and time again? Try and keep the following handy correction tips in mind when you’re coming up with your lesson plan ideas. 

For example, you find yourself marking a student’s maths homework and they persistently neglect to simplify their fractions. Set this student 3 fractions to simplify under your feedback. Give the class a few minutes to look through their corrections at the beginning of the lesson to try to answer their challenges. This, in turn, should help students take their work more seriously and strive to make fewer mistakes. 

With spelling errors, have the student spell a word 5 times under the feedback you’ve left them. Write the word yourself and leave them space to write it themselves underneath. As annoying and repetitive it may seem, it will become ingrained in the student’s head to take more care with their spelling, thus resulting in an easier time marking for you!

Preparing Yourself

Marking doesn’t always have to be as boring and monotonous as it seems. If you get into the habit of having some sort of system, then it can also help you divide your marking into groups and you can chunk your time around this. You may decide to mark green work during your lunch hour and tackle red work on an evening after work. It’s all about time management and how you actually convey feedback.