Time is at a premium for any teacher.
You must spend your time well if you want to get the most from it.
This means you must prioritise.
You must decide what you will mark and into what marking you will put the most effort.
You cannot mark everything, and you certainly cannot mark everything to the same degree.
Discrimination – judgement – must be exercised.
Without this, your workload will be immense.
Unsustainable.
And this will have a negative impact on you as a person, on your enjoyment of the job and, quite possibly, on your learners.
After all, the one place where you can have the biggest impact on your learners, and therefore where you need the most energy available to use, is in the classroom, while you are teaching.
So, if you find yourself marking endlessly, devoting hours and hours to it, stop.
Consider the consequences of what you are doing. And consider the cost-benefit of how you are approaching the task.
There is no doubt that marking suffers from diminishing returns.
After a point, the more you do, the less you and your learners get out of it.
If learners are faced with an excess of feedback, they will struggle to take it all in, may disengage, or may simply pass over the most salient points.
(This response is not too different from the kind of response we would have if faced with a similar situation.)
I cannot tell you what you should mark and what you shouldn’t mark.
It is influenced by who you are teaching, what age group you’re working with, the topics you teach, where you are in the academic year and more besides.
But I can stress the importance of you making judgements about when to mark and when not to mark.
About applying your professional skill to decide what will bring the biggest benefit to learners for the effort you’ll need to put in.
Sometimes this means low effort from you and high benefits for learners. Sometimes your effort, and the extent of the marking, will be greater.
But there is certainly no definite link between excessive marking and better progress.
So, what can you do to make good decisions? To exercise your judgement in a manner that leads to positive results?
Three things are worth thinking about:
- What information do I want to communicate to learners through my marking, and how will they use that information?
- What information do I want to elicit through my marking, and how will I use that?
- How will my marking positively influence learning, and what evidence supports my view?
These questions are an excellent starting point for deciding what to prioritise.
They may not give you all the answers, but they will take you a long way towards working out what the best use of your time is – for your own benefit and the benefit of your learners.
Another thing to consider is structuring learner work.
If you plan your lessons so learners produce the work you most want to mark, then it is more likely that your marking will be efficient, and your time well spent.
You will be exercising your judgement in advance of the event, with the intention of facilitating work that is worth marking and which allows you to convey rich, timely and useful information to your learners, as well as to track their progress.
