NO MORE MARKING ?
BY : ANDREW BAYFIELD
Red Pen . Green Pen . Double Marking . Highlighters only . Surely no area of education has raised such heated discussion as marking .
How often ? How much ? Who is it for , the observer or the student ? As a secondary English specialist , marking is a particularly sensitive topic in my and my colleagues ' professional lives .
The last five years have seen a growing body of research emerge , which has challenged the orthodox way teachers are ‘ supposed ’ to mark . The 2016 study ‘ A Marked Improvement ?’ by the EEF ( Education Endowment Fund ) identified marking as the biggest contributor to teacher workload issues , as well as re-establishing that high stakes accountability , agents such as Ofsted would now commend schools taking more innovative approaches in how they feedback , so long as those approaches were consistent ; too often the report and others ( see John Hattie ’ s 2018 work with Shirley Clarke , ongoing work by Teacher Toolkit and a 2019 study by the UCL ), claimed schools mistake ‘ marking ’ for ‘ feedback ’. It is important to note that none of these studies claims that written marking is bad . Instead , they discuss how the research is inconclusive as to whether it is worth the time it takes teachers to do it properly . To quote Dylan William , it is about ‘ stopping teachers doing good things to do better things ’ The tide was turning ….
With this paradigm shift in mind , my principal and I started to think , listen to our teachers and think some more ….. What if we did something different and focused on varying types of verbal feedback instead ? One of the few real ‘ truths ’ in educational research is that high quality , quickly delivered and acted on feedback is just about the most powerful alchemy a teacher possesses : what if we pivoted from a marking policy to a responsive feedback policy , focussing on three fundamentals …
1 . Live Marking or Mobile Marking : Assessment for Learning in its purest form , with the teacher constantly engaged in ‘ reading ’ the room and responding as students work .
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