Last week’s blog was about strategies I already use in the
classroom to save time grading homework, quizzes, and in-class assignments. See it here. The
following are strategies I’m going to implement this quarter. I’ll let you know
how they work!
Have students turn in
multiple assignments at once: A
friend of mine has students keep all their in-class assignments in a folder and
turn them in at mid-term and at the end of the quarter. He claims his grading
time is cut by a third, simply by streamlining the process (No
collecting/returning papers, keeping track of late work, shuffling papers
around at home…). I will be using this method just for the 30-minute response
papers we do in-class. My concern with this method is that recognizing a
students who are struggling or need to improve their work might be too late in
coming, or a student might not have an opportunity to improve after realizing a
problem. I will be spot checking some assignments just to be sure.
Ditch the rubrics: Look at any article with advice for
grading efficiency, and it will invariably say, “Use a rubric!” At the beginning of my teaching
career, I worked for a university that required rubrics for every assignment,
so I got used to using them, and would have certainly parroted this advice. Although
I still believe that a rubric is necessary for grading essays and large group
projects, I’ve learned the value diminishes with other types of assignments, so
I’m getting rid of most of them. The time saved is in less detailed notes, creating
new rubrics, adding up points, less copy making, stapling, etc… Sometimes it OK
to just slap a grade at the top of an assignment!
Representative
grading: I’ve read about teachers
implementing forms of representative grading, but I dismissed it, thinking it
wasn’t necessarily a fair way of grading. Over the years, though, I’ve noticed
that students are fairly consistent in the quality of their work. I won’t do
this at the beginning of the quarter, and I will only do it with selected
assignments (not writing assignments), but it works like this: The teacher time
stamps homework to show it was completed on time, but the student keeps the
work. Students collect all their work for a given time period (say every two
weeks) and staple it together. Then the teacher asks students to circle or
highlight designated questions that are a representative sample. This is different
than the selective grading that I’ve been doing because it involves grading far
less on each assignment, and even skipping whole assignments.
Assigning work that
multi-tasks: Last quarter, I assigned a 30-minute response paper in class
and asked the students to hang on to it rather than turn it in. The next class
period, we were working on a writing introductions, and instead of the
assignment I had planned, I asked the students to get out the response paper
and work on a new introduction based on what we had learned in class that day.
Over the next few class periods, we did the same thing with other concepts, using
the same response paper. When it was time for grading, instead of multiple
assignments and papers from each student, everything was in once place. As a
bonus, I could see their editing process. I plan to do these types of
assignments more frequently and thoughtfully this quarter.
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