Marking and Assessment

Have you really been making an impression while marking?

Teacher’s workload always provides a debate and it’s no secret that teachers are forever questioning if work life and personal life will ever balance out. Both teachers and parents know about the importance of both marking and assessment. The importance of marking work correctly, to ensure pupil improvement is important. The numerous books in which teachers have to mark can somehow be daunting. While there are many schemes put in place by schools to ensure that pupils get feedback correctly and efficiently on their work, there is also simple methods to help speed up the process.

This is where stampers come in, if you find yourself marking work and writing the same comments over and over again, it may be time to invest in a stamper. Although there are arguments for and against the use of stampers they can be very handy tools in the process of helping speed up the rate of marking. Stampers do not mean you’re being lazy as a teacher, pupils will appreciate the comments and the colours and look forward to receiving a stamp. After all it is an award that has constructive feedback embedded into it.

Primary Teaching Services offers a variety of stampers that are specifically designed to help with marking and assessment. There are many stampers available all which can have a different purpose in the process of marking. There are stampers available for generic comments such as ‘target achieved’ and ‘well done!’ stampers can be simple and effective ways to provide pupils with feedback. Personalised stampers are also available and have proved to be popular, they provide formative comments that actively help children to improve their learning. These stampers are the secret to showing appreciation of hard work and effort in which pupils have put into their school work, while allowing for marking time to stamped down.

Stampers and stickers can be an excellent method to provide your pupils with both feedback and rewards. All pupils love receiving a stamp or a sticker to appreciate hard work and effort teacher doesn’t like rewards and feedback rolled into one as well as spending less time on marking while not letting standards slip.

Find the range of stampers available here:

http://www.primaryteaching.co.uk/stampers

Top 5 Marking Tips:

1. 1. Get marking quickly at the beginning of term. It makes students feel valued to know that you are interested in their work from the off and it also helps you to get into a good routine.
2. Use practical targets. Have a stamp made up with phrases to suit you and your pupils for example stamps made up with ‘Now you need to’, ‘repeat 3 times’ ‘two stars and a wish’, ‘practise spelling’, this way pupils are engaging with your marking and know how to improve.
3. Use questions to create a dialogue, e.g. Instead of writing ‘Add more detail’, write ‘Which detail would improve this answer?’
4. Make it clear where you expect students to respond to your questions, targets, instructions. I have just bought star stamps for my department, so they can stamp any feedback which requires a response.
5. Get pupils to hand in their books open at the page you need to mark. You can stack them open that way until you get around to marking them. This will save you flicking through countless pages to find the page you wish to mark.

Click through to the Guardian here to see more ways of reducing the stress of marking.