Ah poor neglected little blog... I made a conscious decision last half term to stay away from twitter and the blog, as there was so much to take on board as a new subject leader and I wanted to find my feet a bit first rather than be distracted by the amazingness of the ideas on twitter - my brain couldn't handle the overload!
So anyway, a few blog posts coming up, and this one is about marking.
We have made a few decisions regarding marking in the department this year. Firstly, we will rarely give levels/grades on work. There has been lots of research to suggest that students only focus on the grade and not comments, and this approach has always worked for me, so we are trying it as a department. We give feedback in the form of www (what went well) and ebi (even better if) and this works well too. However the (for us, new and exciting bit) is that we are using RAG to give an indication of whether or not the work is 'good enough'. I know effort marking is really subjective and a bit of a guess on the teacher's part, but this seems to us the best way forward. For all 'chunky' tasks the students create or are given success criteria. We them 'mark' their work by commenting www/ebi against these success criteria, and giving things to correct as per school policy. They then get a red dot if the work is not of an acceptable standard, I.e. They have not fulfilled the criteria, orange if it was acceptable, most criteria at least partially fulfilled, and green if they have completed the task well. Our school also uses white as a measure of exceptional performance, so we give this too for real 'above and beyond' work.
This is helping us and the kids to understand how well they are doing in between termly work which is levelled or graded. Firstly it avoids the situation whereby they get level 4a one week and 3c the next due to the nature of the task, or the fact that it is a new topic. It has also been really easy to decide what to give them in our interim 'snapshot' reports to parents as we can see what they have been mostly given. Kids can get an idea of what they need to do to improve via the www/ebi and also get an idea of whether we think they have done enough or not via the RAG dots. Some bright but lazy kids have been given a bit of a kick up the derrière by this system!! It makes recording how they are doing much easier too as recording comments is a bit impractical but it is easy to put a dot on a mark sheet:
And this really helps in conversations with parents too.
I am really happy with how this is working for us at the moment. I am planning on doing some students voice next week to gauge their opinion too, but we have seen a big impact anecdotally with kids being mortified about red dots and making huge strides in their next piece, and also weaker students who feel good that their effort has been recognised and celebrated.
It has also been fab for self and peer assessment too.
My next plan is to come up with some 'can do' statements that could run alongside/instead of levels at KS3, so that students could have an even clearer idea of where they are at and where they need to go. I'm hopeful this might be the way forward for our primary transfer information too...
