In-class marking and feedback

One of the biggest pressures facing teachers is workload, a large proportion of which comes from marking and feeding back on work.

It’s a bugbear of mine that amazing classroom practitioners are leaving the profession because of the overwhelming marking workload from a seeming mountain of books and assessments. But what if I told you that you don’t need to mark books outside of lessons?

Let’s start with the basics. Marking and feedback is part and parcel of any teaching job, that’s a given. The issue, however, is that there are preconceived ideas regarding what makes good marking.

Every year, there is a fad that claims to reduce marking workload: verbal feedback stampers, marking codes and many, many more approaches are incorporated in an attempt to more easily facilitate the onslaught of book-based input from teachers.