Contentions
- Detailed and frequent marking is a false proxy for effective teaching
- Assessment of work is far more useful for teachers than it is for students
- Applying ink to paper isn’t entirely a waste of time
Whole-Class Feedback
- No panacea
- Saves time and allows us to do other things
- Prone to ‘lethal mutations’
Format
- Provide specific details of what students have done well
- Identify common misconceptions
- Indicate next steps (not necessarily a ‘DIRT’ or ‘do now’ task)
- Provide plenty of exemplar material
Pen Work
- Don’t waste your time making detailed annotations or writing chunky summative comments
- Liberally apply ticks and add ‘good’ or ‘well done’ from time-to-time
- Highlight functional literacy errors
Pitfalls
- Too much information
- Too many sections
- Poor formatting
- Vague or abstract comments
- Lack of follow-up or future reference
Beware of Cognitive Biases
- Curse of knowledge
- The Ikea effect
And Finally…
My suggestion is this: reduce the amount of written feedback you provide (i.e. traditional ink-on-paper marking) and invest the ‘saved’ time on useful tasks like resource creation, curriculum design and wider reading.
Click on the button below to download a one-page overview of the information in this post.
Thanks for reading –
Doug