I'm going to be very honest here. I did not enjoy grading. In fact, I may have used the word "hate" regularly because I resented the time I had to spend outside of school doing it. It was also super frustrating to be putting in the time only to read poorly written student work. But, despite the negative feelings I had toward grading, I knew it was a very important part of my job. So, instead of just wallowing in my misery, I came up with strategies to tame the grading beast. And now, I want to share 5 ways to reduce your grading too.
The best thing about the strategies that follow is that they are also better for student learning. They allowed me to get to know my students' abilities more quickly and then to give them faster feedback. This built their confidence, increased their skills, and made my grading more manageable.
Did I still spend time at the kitchen table grading? Yes. But it was less frequent and more "enjoyable." I did this by:
- Providing more in-class formative assessment
- Using focused short assignments for skill-building
- Requiring annotated good copies
- Switching to checklists from rubrics
- Using conferences for in class grading
1. Give more in-class formative assessment
Ultimately we want our students to focus on learning, not a number on the top of an assignment. And, yes, I know most of us teach in a world where we need to assign grades, but that doesn't mean that you have to grade everything students do.
One of the biggest issues with the grading process is not only that it takes us so much time but it also prevents students from getting the advice they need when they need it. They work on learning a new skill and then don't get the feedback until days later - after you've already moved on to something new.
However, formative assessment in class gives them just-in-time feedback that they can use and learn from right away.
You can provide more opportunities for formative assessment when you give your students activities that focus on the steps of a process they need to follow to be successful in later assignments. Then, while they are working on these steps, you can help them if they go off track. This makes learning visible because students can see what it is they need to do, and you can see if they are doing it properly and guide them then and there. This is much more powerful than a scribble on their paper or rubric that comes days or weeks later.
How does formative assessment reduce your grading?
Formative assessment allows you to give focused feedback without having to take in assignments to do so. You do not have to grade everything students do in order to get them to learn a skill. It does take a bit of training at the beginning of a term, but you can create a climate where they will engage in active learning activities in class.
Yes, you will still be grading assignments later on, but by building in opportunities for students to practice and get feedback IN class, you can assign fewer papers and your students will still improve their skills.
If you want some ideas for visible learning activities that allow you to give in-class formative assessment, open these blog posts and save them for later:
- Ideas for teaching writing skills without grading any papers
- Teach Writing by showing, not telling
- Learn how to scaffold writing skills here
- Grab ideas for visible learning & formative assessment here and here.
- Getting students to do work that's not graded
2. Use focused, shorter assignments
Eventually, you'll need to give summative feedback because you have to assess the outcomes of your curriculum. In the first part of my career, most of my assessments were essays, and students wrote several over the semester because I felt they needed the practice. And I graded all the things . . .
I tried using shorthands or fancy coding systems, but I've never really found them to make a huge difference. That's because these systems only shaved a bit of time from a process that was basically the same. Instead, I wanted a streamlined one that didn't require me or my students to be looking up the code for faulty parallelism or a missing topic sentence. I wanted - and my students needed - something that was more user-friendly.
This streamlined process started with a clear focus on the skills I wanted my students to learn. Now we English teaches could fill a full page with the things we look for when grading an assignment, but that can get overwhelming for students. If they are learning to select, embed, and cite quotations, but are too worried about whether their topic sentence is focused and their grammar is up to snuff, they can get overwhelmed.
But shouldn't they be able to handle multiple things at once?
Let me answer that with a sports analogy. Imagine you take someone new to a sport and put them on a field, a golf course, or a court. You give them the equipment they need and a quick overview of the game, and then send them off to play. Most newbies will get through it, but they may not perform well because most games have a lot of complexity.
Golf is certainly not as simple as just getting the ball in the hole; a successful golfer needs to be able to drive, chip, putt, etc. and to know how to do it without sending the ball sideways or missing it altogether. The successful basketball player needs to be able to dribble while moving, pass without giving it to the wrong person, and shoot the ball in the net while others are trying to grab it.
Coaches and phys ed teachers know this to be true, and that’s why they practice and work on single skills at a time. Michael Jordan famously practiced free throws for hours, and Kobe Bryant spent his workouts perfecting only one move. They were isolating the skills they needed for success and working on them. They didn’t read a handout, try it once, and head off to the court to play.
Shorter assignments allow students to practice and build the skills they need for success in the big game – the longer assignments they need to do. They also take less time to grade and so students get feedback faster – when what they did is still fresh in their minds (read more about this process here).
So, make a list of the skills your students need to have to write their final assessments, then plan to give them short, scaffolded assignments to build those skills.
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3. Annotated good copies reduce your grading time
Whether students are passing in a paragraph or an essay, ask them to show you where they met the required outcomes via highlighting and underlining.
For example, if your focus was on writing a paragraph with a clear, fully supported topic sentence, ask them to underline the topic sentence and highlight the points they made to support it in different colors.
If you are working on embedding and citing quotations, ask them to underline the words they use to introduce the quote, highlight the quote, and circle the citation.
Or if you're working on fluency, they might circle their transitions and highlight sentences of different lengths in different colors.
Let's look at an example. The following is a paragraph that a student wrote analyzing a passage in The Book Thief. My main focus was on teaching them to embed their quotations and on using transitions to create flow within the paragraph. I asked my students to highlight their topic and concluding sentence in one color, and their lead in to the quotation in another color. They also had to underline their transitions.
First of all, because they had to annotate their good copy, most recognized what may have been missing and they could fix it before submitting the assignment. For example, my focus for this assignment was not on topic/concluding statements, but by asking them to highlight them, it was a reminder that they are an essential part of this type of paragraph.
Secondly, I was able to quickly identify the elements I was looking for. In this case, the student is embedding quotations well and is using transitions. However, his transition words are not overly sophisticated and his feedback would indicate that it was time to move beyond the basic list of transitions.
How does this reduce your grading time? Because you have given your students a clear focus, a specific set of skills to work on, you can quickly see if they have met the mark without having to wade through their paper, hoping to find evidence of their success.
However, you need to include the next step to make this really work:
4. Switch to checklists instead of rubrics
Rubrics are a wonderful thing - when students read them. How many times have you actually seen students go through the rubric when they've gotten an assignment back?
After watching my students ignore the information on my rubrics (and on the assignments), I decided to move to checklists. Yes, students have to read them too, but they are quicker and easier to read than the row/columns of a rubric.
To create checklists that reduce your grading time, think about the skills you most want students to demonstrate in the assignment. Then:
- write a sentence that states they have been successful
- under that statement, write bulleted feedback that represents what you typically tell a student who has not been successful
Then, when you do have to provide a grade, you can just check off the area the student needs to improve, rather than writing the feedback. Yes, this is the same as using a rubric, but students find them easier to read. This means, there's a higher chance they will read and use it!
5. Use conferences to get assessment done in class
I've saved the best idea for last: in-class conferences reduce your at home grading time, lead to greater student learning, and help you build relationships with your students.
Conferences with students are the fastest, most efficient way to find out what your students know and to help them learn - on the spot. When you take in an assignment, it can be days before you find out what they have learned and even more days before the student gets the feedback needed to fix or improve something.
But, when you are chatting one-on-one with a student, you have access to their thinking in a way that no exit ticket or written assessment will ever give you. You find out right away what they know and where they might need guidance, and you can get to work right away helping them build the skills they need. That’s the beauty of the conference: the teaching and learning is instant.
Conferences take some upfront work to organize - and to train your students to prepare for them. You also need to adopt some classroom management tricks to make sure things run smoothly. However, all of these things are so worth it once you and your students get the hang of how conferencing works.
One of the best ways to build conferencing into your classes is with learning stations. Your students will be busy working on different aspects of their writing, while they take turns visiting the teacher feedback station to chat with you.
You can also make use of what I call "quickie conferences." For these, you tell your students that you are coming to see all of them and they need to show you that they can do something. It might be that they can identify sensory imagery in a text they are reading or that they can use it in something they are writing.
I would create a form like the one below, put it on my clipboard, and as students were reading or working on something, I would circulate and ask each one to show me, for example, a vivid verb they used in their writing. I would give them a grade and quick feedback and then move on to the next student.
This gave me a quick snapshot of who had achieved and outcome and who needed more work. I could later take those who needed that work into a small group to give them further instruction. You'll see a script for these quickie conferences in the freebie I'm giving you.
Most things in life are better if you focus on quality versus quantity. Strategies that make feedback more meaningful and useful lead to greater student learning - and that means that there are ways you can take in fewer papers.
I hope that one of 5 ways to reduce your grading will work for you.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Jackie, ROOM 213
