Comments on: How I mark students’ books.

By: Doug Belshaw

Doug Belshaw — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Hi Kate, thanks for your kind comments! I used Tagul (http://tagul.com) to create the word cloud at the bottom. It’s not auto-generated – I had to enter each term manually and then embed it in the footer of this site…

By: Kate Drury

Kate Drury — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:06:00 +0000

‘G’day’ Doug (I’m an Aussie in Sydney), love your blog – you are an absolutely inspirational educator and I follow what you are doing very closely. I’m very interested in the collection of words you have at the bottom of this page that you can click on and be led into discussions of areas that interest you. I can forsee great interest in creating such a thing with my class next year and I would love to know more about it – what it’s called, how you created it…..

By: Doug Belshaw

Doug Belshaw — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Sounds like one step on from my system – thanks for sharing! :-)

By: Foxburg

Foxburg — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Just found this and this is how I was set up to mark when I was HOD, but was told by a so-called expert adviser that it was all wrong.
My day to day marking was like your ‘first wave’ which i could do when I had free time during the teaching week, or to catch up, take books home!
I was a bit more formal with the ‘second wave’ in that students had formal assessments at the end of each topic, and it was the only time they got a grade. In each exercise book they had NC grade table, and an achievement/target able, every half term I would produce a summative assessment comment for each student, which would be a basis for my comment on how to improve, which were colour coded red, amber & green.
I would have for each class an excel spreadsheet, showing both formative and summative assesments, and to be honest all I really needed to do to make notes for reports was the exercise books and the comments I had made on the red sections on the spreadsheet.

By: Doug Belshaw

Doug Belshaw — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:59:00 +0000

Thanks Matthew – interesting stuff! A friend of a friend also uses a netbook to get students to type up their comments. He writes in their books, then they type it up into a Google Doc. This means they *have* to read the comments! :-)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:50:00 +0000

Hi Doug.
Really interesting post and very much in line with what my school has been ‘training us on’. We had a very informative AFL session with a woman whos name escapes me (emma something) she was an advisor of sorts. She made some interesting comments on marking – firstly she suggested that really studnets should only get a grade on 4 – 5 occasions in the year, she argues that in a year you would hope a student makes maybe a 1 level gain in general terms and therfore it can be slightly mis leading or defeatist if this student is seeing the same 4C over and over. The main point behind her argument was that the comments are far more important and that students by habit gravitate towards the mark rather than the bit that is designed to help them – the comment. She also talked about an interesting marking method that i have since used and it works a treat – marking the books using codes, lets say every time you see a student use evidence you use the code ‘evo’ or bias ‘bi’ and also for lets say ‘great uses of a source’ ‘gr8′- then at the start of the lesson she has posters of what each code means around the room and the students have to go around and look/fill in. She argued that this method made them really understand the comments she was making and also know what they had to do to improve.
If you want her name or the slide notes she gave us i could mail both.

By: Oliver Quinlan

Oliver Quinlan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:36:00 +0000

Sounds like a good system Doug. I like the idea of that summary of feedback in the second wave, sounds like it helps to get students to actually look at and make use of marking. Also think it is so important to give them time to read and reflect on marking (especially with 8 yr olds I teach), as otherwise your time in marking is largely wasted.