Marking revolution – is it working?
At the start of this academic year, I was fortunate enough to be promoted from Assistant to Deputy Head. And the strangest thing happened. I found that very quickly, rather than worrying about what Ofsted supposedly required (which I did as an AHT) I wanted to simply do what I thought was right for our children and school. I’m not sure which came first, seeing Ofsted’s myth busting series, reading several blog posts taking a variety of similar approaches to marking, or Sean Hartford’s always excellent tweets. But what I do know is if I was going to reflect on my time as a school leader in 20 years, did I want to say ‘well I managed to get through a few Ofsted inspections intact’ or did I want to say ‘Within reason, I did everything I could to improve education of the children in our school, no matter what’.
One significant change we have led this year has been a significant shift in how we mark. Or to be more precise, how we give feedback. You can read the initial post here. This one is about how successful (or not) it has been.
Right off the bat I’d say it’s been tinkered with as we go and is still a work in process. The main reason for this has been ensuring that our teacher journals do not become a burden and ‘marking replacement’ themselves. So we have shifted from ‘an entry required every English and Maths lesson’ to a more flexible, ‘required when assessment of learning in the lesson needs noting down or feeding back where it otherwise might get forgotten’. It shouldn’t be a security blanket for the SLT (which I have had to fight against myself to achieve!) it should be a working document to assist teachers giving feedback and adjusting their next lessons. That’s it.
I do think we need to tighten up on how we ensure this not just happening but actually impacting more in this form. That’s difficult as you want to trust your staff but you are also aware of the odd teacher who might be taking a little more liberty than they should. What I don’t want to do with this is commit to blanket ‘check ups’ as that’s not a good use of my time if it is just the odd teacher. It’s also not fair on the huge majority of staff who are finding the approach a weight off their backs and something that many have said ‘just works’. It makes sense to speak to that odd member of staff. Find out what their difficulties are and whether there is a reason for this and taking it from there.
To be honest, even if it hasn’t been impacting more than our previous, traditional, marking approach directly on our children, it would be having softer benefits on them because our teachers are fresher, happier and more engaged with helping children learn, not ‘ticking an SLT and Ofsted box’. In my experience, there is absolutely nothing a teacher hates more than being forced to do something they know in their heart makes little to no difference. For me, traditional marking, without dedicating huge workload and significant lesson time to constantly feedback, fits this bill. So how can we measure the impact in real terms? Well, our standardised PUMA and PIRA test scores are following a similar pattern to last year. We don’t have the summer results yet, which will be most accurate, but all indicators are at the very worst, our change in direction has not had a negative effect. This is easier to judge in Maths where we have changed little else this year other than continuing to embed our Mastery approach (second year). In English we have a novel approach and utilise sentence stacking as a primary tool for developing writing. These have definitely had a positive impact on most things in English, with a couple of drawbacks (it’s early days!). So it is a little trickier to honestly define that impact.
One adjustment we are continuing to make and work on is an individual writing target. It just doesn’t look good if a child has an error in their book more than a couple of times and if there is no comment in that book and no note in the teacher journal (because the teacher is already well aware of that child’s difficulty in that area) it looks like nothing is being done. And we need something to be done. And due to the range of expertise within any staff, I believe a little direction here is pertinent. That means a simple system so that children know their target and know how to improve it. Not something someone can come round with a checklist to tick off. Real understanding by the children to make real progress. In formative assessment terms, the children being activated as learners. Not there yet with this one as we also want to ensure the children are being given modelled direction by the teacher as appropriate. Ie a different approach is usually required if a year 3 child is not using finger spaces compared to a child forgetting to put a full stop instead of a third conjunction in the same sentence. One probably needs a reminder and a consequence if care is not taken, the other needs to have their misconception unpicked and modelled. Probably quite a lot. Obviously I am generalising here but you get the idea.
So that’s it really. Nothing spectacular to report about amazing raised levels of progress – but I wasn’t expecting there to be. What there has been is no slump. Fresher and more focused teachers. More rather than less compliance with our all encompassing Assessment Policy. I’d definitely like to see our children take more ownership of their learning, but that has always been the case. Which takes me neatly on to my next post, which focuses on a hugely effective development in our school, the introduction of a Teacher Learning Community as the vehicle to develop the quality of formative assessment (linking with the content of this post) to impact on learning.
Spoiler alert. It has. Significantly.
