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Red pens, green pens, double marking, highlighters only...

Surely no area of education has raised such heated discussion as marking. 

How often? How much? Who is it for, the observer or the student? As a secondary English specialist, marking is a particularly sensitive topic in mine and colleagues’ professional lives. 

However, the past five years have seen a growing body of research emerge that has challenged the orthodox way teachers are “supposed” to mark. 

Making its mark

The 2016 study by the Education Endowment Fund identified marking as the biggest contributor to teacher workload issues, as well as re-establishing that high stakes accountability agents such as Ofsted would commend school’s taking more innovative approaches to how they feedback so long as those approaches were consistent. 

Too often the report and others (see John Hattie’s 2018 work with Shirley Clarke , ongoing work by Teacher Toolkit and a 2019 study by the UCL ), claimed schools mistake ‘marking’ for ‘feedback’. 

It is important to note none of these studies claims written marking is a bad thing. 

Instead, they discuss how the research is inconclusive as to whether it is worth the time it takes teachers to do it properly.

To quote Dylan William, it is about “stopping teachers doing good things to do better things”.  

Changing things up

With this issue in mind, my principal and I started to think, listen to our teachers and think some more: what if we did something different and focused on varying types of verbal feedback instead of marking? 

One of the few real “truths” in educational research is that high-quality, quickly delivered and acted-on feedback is just about the most powerful alchemy a teacher possesses. As such, what would happen if we pivoted from a marking policy to a responsive feedback policy, focussing on three fundamentals…

1. Live marking or mobile marking: assessment for learning in its purest form, with the teacher constantly engaged in “reading” the room and responding as students work. 
2. Whole-class feedback: read the work, find the commonalities and voila. 
3. Coaching conversations: for deeper feedback that allows the student to engage with the feedback.

Too often, however, educational research is decontextualised; what works in Southend in 2010 may not work in San Salvador in 2020 and vice versa. 

We needed more evidence. Evidence from our context.

Feedback and insights 

Leveraging the MA I was studying for, we used some science: a mix of qualitative and quantitative action research, to be precise. 

First, I gave questionnaires to all the students I taught: what type of feedback do you find the most useful? The winner? Verbal feedback. 

Which type of feedback do you find the least useful? The loser? Peer feedback (There is a whole other project in this suite of responses as Hattie, Dylan William and others are clear that peer-to-peer feedback is the most powerful). 

Taking the responses with the requisite pinch of salt while triangulating them with research by “proper” researchers and the thoughts of our teachers, we went for it: we ditched the arbitrary need for written marking and instead switched to the feedback model outlined above.

What happens when you make the leap without the rope?

1. You build trust

By removing the easily accessible, and in my opinion deeply problematic, “quality assurance” that a set of marked books offer, you are communicating a powerful message to your teachers: we listen to you, we trust you and we know you are feeding back in other ways.

2. You challenge your teachers

This one I did not expect. We assumed that, if you remove arbitrary written marking, teachers will fist pump the air and never look back. Wrong. While some did, many did not.

I underestimated the layers of institutionalisation we teachers have been through. Teachers like the security of the weekly bookmarking drill. It’s a habit, almost.

To counter this, we put on PD sessions that deep-dived into the alternatives to written marking. 

3. You challenge the parent community

Again, parents may have their own perception of what marking “looks” like, and they, too, need workshops and transparency about what, why and how.

Some will buy-in straight away, some take more time - it’s important to keep clear communication open with all of them.

Where to next? A year without arbitrary written marking later, and the roof has not fallen in on our heads. The next phase is to review and renew. 

Particularly in Years 7 to 9, when you move away from written marking, the feedback demands on a teacher of a larger class can be challenging, and a silver lining of the Covid lockdown was some trials of marking codes; a potentially powerful middle ground that provides written consistency without the potential for issues of workload and equity.

If nothing else, encourage your teachers to understand the difference between marking and feedback, and that lots of red, or green, pen does not always equate to effective feedback.

Stuart Sitton is a teacher at an international school in a senior role