Marking is Broken!

On Friday, December 4th 2015, I delivered a keynote at the SSAT National Conference: Leading Learning.

Cut through the waffle, reduce workload ...

During my main-stage presentation at the SSAT National Conference 2015, I raced through one-hundred-and-fifty slides in just forty minutes. Throughout, I gave answers to the question ‘How would you reduce the burden of marking, planning and teaching for teachers?’

Marking is Broken:

So, our approach to marking across the country is broken – not just in my school – but I think it is nationally. I’ve blogged about this before (The Marking Frenzy).

Until policy changes where teachers have less than 90 per cent of their timetable in a classroom, so they get more time to mark and plan, nothing will change. Any suggestions to the contrary, such as from the government, is just more waffle.

To put it into perspective, there are five key stakeholders of marking:

• parents
• senior leadership team
• inspectors
• teachers
• the child.

Parents love marking. Senior leadership team members love marking, and school inspectors love it even more. Teachers generally hate it because they don’t have the time or resources to do it properly. And the child is in the middle, not really knowing what’s going on – without feedback, they don’t know how to improve. So, marking is broken.

This came out online through blogs by David Didau and Stephen Lockyer – plan, teach, mark was the original model. We all go to university, train to be a teacher, go through these laborious lesson plans… We’re told we have to plan to the lesson, stick to the plan. Then we teach it, and mark our books afterwards.

But, by flipping the model, you can totally change your approach to marking:

... what we need to do is mark to inform our planning and then plan ...

to allow us to be able to teach. Read Mark-Plan-Teach.