Are stacks of papers to grade weighing you down? Keeping you up at night? Depressing your spirit because the pile never shrinks? Grade fights with parents? I’ve been there.
Grading student writing takes time; you have to climb inside the kid’s mind and think along with her. That is labor intensive. And we have to assign large volumes of work to keep the kids reading and thinking. So how can we as teachers give prompt and valuable feedback on writing without simultaneously driving ourselves crazy? Here are a few tips from 30 years’ experience trying.
Understand that it’s a complex and difficult task, and it’s full of emotion and consequence for the people around us. There are no solutions to this (until someone creates a truly effective grading app); only schools of thought. So here’s mine.
One: Don’t grade, rank
The main tip here is to remember that your goal is not to grade the students’ papers but to rank them vis-a-vis some empirical standard. Create a 1-10 scale by which you assess and evaluate a piece of student writing. 10 corresponds to 100 percent, nine corresponds to 95%, 90, 85, 80 etc. five points off going down. These are typically called “rubrics.” These are great tools for rapid evaluation of large volumes of student writing. While they do have problems, using them is a great asset to you.
When creating a rubric to grade a kid’s analytical writing, it’s necessary first to delineate your database. Define what you looking for. Take a sheet of notebook paper and record some of the main claims, ideas, and relevant facts that the student should be hitting within the writing, and then match their paper up to your established criteria. Create what you define as the gold standard, and then compare the student work to that. It’s what Advanced Placement graders call “the golden minute.” Briefly create a model of what you are looking for in a top-shelf answer, and then measure the kid’s work against it as the backdrop.
Two: Forget about attempting to line edit all of it
You can’t correct every grammatical, syntactical, punctuation nor spelling error of the students. You’ll go crazy. Imagine a 12-page history paper turned in by 60 students. You want to be able to give prompt and valuable feedback without debilitating yourself. However if you still want them to improve, you must show them where they need improvement and what needs to be done more precisely.
Simply line edit one page as of their work as a representative sampling. Take one page and scrutinize that, and then inform the students that ”These are the issues with your writing — the problems and also where you’re succeeding.”
That one line edited page is you taking the temperature of their writing. The student gets the careful feedback he deserves, but you can evaluate it quickly and move on to the next. I even recommend that you stand, not sit, while grading. You will learn how to read entire pages at time rather than agonizing over every word.
Think of yourself as a basketball coach. The coach doesn’t give feedback on every shot that the player takes. Nor must you grade everything you assign them. Sometimes the coach can tell the players to go shoot around for 30 minutes.
Three: Don’t grade every single assignment
Imagine a teacher of sophomore English assigning writing journals over a ten-week period. Twelve entries required, 80 students. Almost 1000 essays to grade by next Tuesday? Yikes. Just select two at random for evaluation. If the students do not know which two are being graded, and these will be different for all students, then students must complete them all while you do not have to grade them all.
Prompt and valuable feedback and you can have Thanksgiving dinner with your family instead of holing up to grade.
The last thing to do is to set a time for writer’s conference with the student if the student wants more. It’s the student’s right to ask to take a closer look with you, but it is the institution that frees and establishes that time for you. Again, you can’t write extensively on the papers of all the students because of the volume, so give the students their rankings. If the student desires, create a conference time to go over the work in detail.
For teachers, the in-class timed writing, in which students plan and write and essay within a specified time period is one of the most effective teaching tools there is.
Did these tips help lighten your psychic burden and your workload? Please share with a colleague.