We know there are times when you’d rather just pull the duvet back up over your head and hide from the pile of exercise books still in the boot of your car but fear not: there are ways to make it easier and maybe even fun!
Its a well known fact that NQTs find marking the biggest drain of their time, therefore lots of teachers have decided to shed light on their marking time management. We’ve asked, begged for and pillaged these top tips from just about everywhere, give them a try and let us know which ones work for you.
- Finding short-cuts around marking are key, not short-cuts which lessen the quality of your feedback but short-cuts which enable you to make more efficient and effective use of you time.
- Consider ordering stamps and stickers to save you repeatedly writing the same feedback. A stamp such as our What Went Well Personalised Stamp requires you to add a short feedback note.
- Try to do your marking daily to prevent building up a backlog. This will also help you gauge what your class might need to work on next.
- Take one evening a week and one day during the weekend for yourself where you do absolutely nothing to do with school and instead catch up on everything you’ve been meaning to do at home or meet up with friends after work.
- Realise that you will NEVER tick everything off your “to do” list. For each thing you cross off, at least two more get added.
- Set homework that doesn’t require lots of marking. For example: get them to revise the meanings of five key words for the next lesson’s starter you can tell who has and hasn’t done this by the quality of their answers.
- Out of sight, out of mind. We all know that it’s not a great idea to try to mark everything in one go. Its a good idea to get a realistic sized pile out and put the rest of the papers away in a cupboard for you next productive marking session.
- Mark books in groups of 5. It makes the task more manageable: you might do five and have a break, or get on a roll and do one more, then before you know it you’ve done another five.
- If you put comments/stamps/stickers sideways in students’ books, they have to turn their heads to read them – a quick tip to see who really reads the feedback you’ve spent hours writing!
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