“I’ve just spent a cheerful hours of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It’s a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of a megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will give the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time. The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any further occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest,… ” (Douglas Adams – Last chance to see, p.37)
The current focus in school is on marking. To be fair this has probably always been my weakest area and it would true to say I’m still not quite operating at quite the standard the school is expecting in this regard.
Having never been one who is simply able to do something because I’ve been told to, I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about how and what I mark in order both to fulfil the requirements of the policy, and to do as effective a job of providing feedback as I can.
I’ve developed some marking stickers for KS4 which allow me to give some feedback on the state of their exercise books every three weeks in a quick and effective way, and we’ve adapted them for KS3 as well (although I’m not teaching that this year). They’re designed to be printed straight onto A4 sticker sheets from Staples, but I’m sure they can be easily adapted for other brands!
Then, inspired by this post from Headguruteacher Tom Sherrington, I’ve designed a feedback sheet for KS5. It contains a judgement on where the essay sits in the Solo taxonomy, a tick list of the things I’m looking for in an essay, a space for WWW and EBI, and most importantly a space for students to respond to a particular comment. That might be to write an introduction or conclusions, or rewrite a paragraph or replan the whole thing in a different order (or anything else I think will be beneficial)
They’re all available from the resources page of my site, or you can download them directly below. All files are Word Documents
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