3 Life Changing Reasons to Change the Way you Grade

There is a deep dark secret that no one tells you when you become a teacher.  How deeply you will come to loath grading.  For me this is the hardest part of the job, when it feels like it never ends.  That after a long day of doing your job you take home bags of papers (or a computer of digital assignments), some of which are half complete, many of which you will write the exact same feedback on over and over and over again.  For me this is that part of teaching that felt absolutely untenable.  

Grading is an essential task, it's how students understand where they are vs where they can/should go.  It is a key element to the learning process.  However, the way we have taught teachers to do it is time consuming and flat out worthless.  Giving feedback throughout the process that students have to use to move forward so that students get continuous grades and critiques is essential to being a quality educator.  And for me this was the key to transforming myself as a teacher who wouldn’t join the statistics of the many others who burned out in the first 5 years and moved on to other professions. 

I cannot count the number of times in my first few years of teaching I would write literally the same thing on a student's paper 20+ throughout the year only to realize at the end of the year that they never actually read it.  The number of times I had students submit an assignment, get a rubric back with comments and feedback only to ask me a week later, “why did I get that grade? “ and I would say, “well did you look at the rubric?” and they would respond, “no, what’s a rubric?” and I would curl up into the fetal position and cry hysterically for hours screaming, “Why?!”.  

I looked around at my veteran teachers thinking there must be a better way to do this?  And all I saw was more of the same.  We were spending hours of time planning for a unit, to then spend our days fervently teaching, to then spend hours on nights and weekends grading to see marginal results from only some students.  It seemed like teaching was designed to suck out your soul and if you weren’t spending 75+ hours a week then you couldn’t possibly be doing a good job.

And then I took some life changing PD that helped me realize that everything I thought about grading was not only making me a bad teacher, but was sucking the life from me and would almost guarantee I would burn out in a few years.  I needed to find a better way to grade so that I didn’t hate my dream job.

Waiting to provide feedback no matter how great it is until students have turned in a project ensures that students will almost never actually gain anything from the feedback.  Not only do you spend hours doing it, but it almost ensures that students will not use it.  Giving students advice after the fact is something they will consistently ignore and rarely utilize to improve.

What had to change wasn’t what I was doing for feedback, but when I was doing it.  If I wasn’t giving students feedback at a time when they had to use it to move forward in the assignment then it wasn’t going to make any difference and it was only going to serve to make me frustrated with myself and my kiddos.  

So I started using smaller checkpoints on bigger assignments where students had the chance to use the feedback to improve their grade that day, in real time.  This way I wasn’t wasting my time giving my students feedback they weren’t ever going to actually use.

All the grading I was doing outside of class time was also taking away from my planning and personal time which I desperately needed.  When I started spending my time in the classroom  grading and giving feedback to support my students in real time  it freed up my plan time to actually plan, and left me nights and weekends to be an actual human being.

No one benefits from having a teacher who is burned out and feeling lost, exhausted and hopeless.  So transforming work time to actually getting work done was the most important thing I have ever done for myself and the most essential reason for you to change the way you grade, especially if you are feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or are just a human being with a life outside of teaching (or have heard those people exist and want to be one).

Overall, it is important that we as educators are structuring grades so that they are happening constantly and so that students can use feedback in real time to improve.  Otherwise what we are doing isn’t actually teaching, it’s just proctoring, and it doesn’t do us or our students any good.

So how do you do that 

1)Turn your instructions into a graphic organizer.  This way students are doing the work in chunks under your instructions and then you can have them show you each part of the assignment as they go for formative feedback or a grade or both

2) Be willing to let some things go.  At the beginning of the year students who have to keep going back and doing the same parts of the assignment again and don’t get through the whole task aren’t penalized grading wise for what they don’t complete.  This way they are willing to master the first building blocks of understanding without trying to rush through an assignment they don’t fully understand and do poorly.

3) Focus on a flexible structure that allows students to work at their own pace during class time.  That way students who move quickly can, and those who need more support can.  There are lots of ways to do this such as stations or flexible work hours. I personally use workshop organization. 

For the step by step process for how to do this in your own classroom including templates and examples take the 4 Steps to Teach More Effectively Course here!