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Teachers often work so hard to do all that they can for their students, sometimes to the detriment of their own personal life. One area that seems to especially erode into the time of teachers is marking. There aren’t too many of us who sit down to marking with the sort of energy that is required to do a good job. Often we are frustrated by both the sheer weight of marking and the standard of the work. It is often disappointing to see students make the same mistakes that we have painstakingly taught them.

The big names in Education rate the teacher and feedback as the most dominant aspects in influencing student learning. Considering we are the ones that give the feedback it combines both aspects heavily. So if it is so important what should we be doing to make the process more expedient for ourselves yet maximising the positive effects on our students?

The first premise I believe passionately in is that feedback involves a relationship. If we as teachers provide detailed feedback we miss out on the opportunity to engage students in the feedback, they simply read it, accept it or reject it and leave it till the next task comes along. In no way does the feedback become ingrained in what they do as students. This is why I believe that teachers who kill themselves annotating and writing notes on student work are not necessarily helping their students as much as they may think. A more minimal approach to the annotating of their work with a greater requirement from the student can and in my experience does create much more substantial understanding on the part of the student. Once this happens there is a greater opportunity to engage the student in meaningful discussion about their work that goes beyond what mark they achieved.

I have done this in three different ways and I use a variety of these methods depending on the numbers in the class. The first one worked very effectively for a smaller class but I would question whether it is sustainable for a larger class. For this class I read their responses on a sound recording piece of software (Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net or garageband) and then convert it to an MP3 or any file that you can give to the student. When I read their response I will stop and comment where I think necessary. Consider how many times you have been marking and thought, “I wish I could speak to them right now and tell them to stop doing that or keeping doing that.” Well this way you can do exactly that. The greatest thing about this for me was that I was giving more feedback of a positive nature that I rarely did when marking by hand. The other thing I really enjoyed about this process was the fact that I was speaking rather than writing, something that suits my personal style. Another little bonus is that you know exactly how long it took you to complete because the time is recorded on the file you are using. The drawbacks are that you need a very quiet place to do the work, probably difficult when you are at school and that you have no filter between your reactions when you read it. Your distaste for the manner in which they have written their response will be immediately heard by them. This takes some maturity on the student’s behalf because they have to ensure that they listen and accept your reactions. The other challenge is that the file is quite big and is most easily transferred by an external device. If someone reads this and could teach me how to compress an audio file so that you can email it I would be very grateful.

Once this student has the audio they take their blank response put their headphones in and listen to your feedback whilst following their own writing. They write their own notes as they go and once finished write down what they felt where their strengths and weaknesses. Using this analysis they then have a meeting with you as their teacher utilising the marking criteria and their notes to discuss the mark they believed they achieved. This is an interesting process because I found that students tend to be far harder on themselves than you might be. At this point a real conversation about where they need to go from here occurs. The value of this is what feedback is all about. As I said from the outset this worked for a small class (5 students). I will test it with a bigger class this year and see how sustainable it is (23 students).

For my bigger classes I had two different options that both took me less time to mark their work but I felt gave me bigger engagement when it came to their personal reflection on their own work. The first was to combat marking whole forms worth of work. This often meant over 200 5 page responses – a tough task in anyone’s book. As a team of teachers we talked about how often we write exactly the same comment on multiple papers and we looked at whether we were writing much the same thing. We then developed a key outlining the major points of feedback we were continually giving our students. From this came the following feedback sheet that we all used consistently on all student responses. All of us found that it saved us an ocean of time. We became quite familiar with the numbers and didn’t even have to refer to the sheet that much when we were marking. Obviously our sheet is heavily focused on English and would need to be adapted to different subjects but it has some potential. The other thing we all agreed was that we were able to put far more feedback on their response because writing a number took far less time than writing the comment. 

Again what I love about this process is that when we returned their responses they had work to do. They were given the feedback key and their responses and they had to go through and work out what the feedback actually was. The beauty of this is that they saw the same numbers from different teachers and this confirmed to them that they had a problem with this particular skill. Students filled out an evaluation of their feedback and this gave the classroom teacher an opportunity to work with the student on specific points of deficit. We used this for a particular group of students throughout Year 11 and 12 and the consistency in what we were expecting enabled students to achieve results at the HSC that were the best in the school’s recent history. The feedback sheet is below. Feel free to use it, alter it or ignore it.

Assessment Feedback Sheet

Use the following codes to decipher the numbers on your written responses.

 

INTRODUCTION

1

Ensure that you answer the question in your introduction

2

When examining the question give greater insight

3

Make sure you introduce your texts in the introduction

4

Use more sophisticated language when expressing your ideas

5

Your response needs a clear introduction

                                                

DEVELOPING PARAGRAPHS

6

Make sure you topic sentences are based on an idea or concept that helps you answer the question

7

Avoid recounting when examining your texts. Use one or two sentences to give the context of what you are referring to in the text and then analyse the text in terms of how the example answers the question

8

Use more quotations from the text to support your ideas

9

Refer to the techniques used by the composer

10

Explain how the technique used establishes the idea you are presenting or the ideas of the module

11

This idea has merit but you need to expand it by adding more detail

12

Give more evidence to support your ideas

13

Make sure you link your examples back to the question

14

Your response requires more examples to strengthen your answer to the question

 

CONCLUSION

15

Make sure you use the conclusion to address the question in further depth

16

Don’t simply repeat ideas that you have already presented. Try and show how your strongest ideas have helped formulate your response to the question

17

Make sure you have a conclusion for your response

 

LANGUAGE

18

This sentence is too long

19

The syntax (word order) of your sentence needs work

20

Try and use more effective vocabulary to express your ideas

21

Use paragraphs to separate your ideas

 

GENERAL FEEDBACK

22

Your answer is too brief to adequately explore the question

23

You need to use more textual evidence to support your ideas

24

Work on the structure of your response.

25

You need to ensure that throughout your response that you answer the question

The third process is more labour intensive of class time but again saves us as teachers in the long run. As a class in the preliminary year we spent 3 classes writing our own criteria for written responses. Again this would need to be done specific to your particular subject area. It takes a long time because students need to alter words from the criteria into something meaningful that they can understand. It takes a lot of discussion and creates a real depth to what is expected. This activity is particularly beneficial to those students who are able to access a B grade quite comfortably but find it incredibly difficult to access the A range. They are given the opportunity to really reflect on what the difference between these two grades are. You can then use examplers or samples to test the criteria and see if students are happy with the standards they have created. Once the criteria is established each student keeps a copy and uses it every time they complete a practice response. They have to mark their own work prior to handing it in or it will not be marked. Again this is harsh but puts a greater emphasis on the student. The teacher then only needs to agree with their assessment which is generally correct or give them some additional feedback which is usually quite small. In fact prior to the trial and HSC last year I was concerned that my class wasn’t completing the appropriate practice responses to be thoroughly prepared. When I asked them they told me they were marking each others. How good is that – in the end they cut me out and still got really effective feedback. The fact that they understood the standards meant that our original criteria writing two years before had done its job.

So the basic premise of my first ever blog is that teachers need to reflect on their role in feedback. It is imperative that the student take an active role in this process to ensure that long term learning occurs. What really excites me is that I feel these students are better prepared to tackle tertiary study where the demands are similar but the support is generally far less.

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