Best Practice

Teaching tips: Three ways to reduce your marking workload

Marking can too often become a millstone around teachers' necks. James Ball offers some workload-reducing approaches to marking and feedback in your classroom
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Few people would argue against marking being one of the most important weapons in a teacher’s armoury when it comes to improving attainment. How else are pupils going to know when they’ve done well? What they need to do better? And how to improve?

Obviously, exactly how you are going to mark is going to be shaped to a large extent by your whole-school policy and the subject you teach. But even within these constraints, there are a variety of approaches you can take to try and mitigate the marking millstone. Here are three:


1, Whole-class feedback

This is something that has been with us for a while now and I doubt there is a school in the country that hasn’t dipped their toes into whole-class marking, not least in a bid to support staff wellbeing and reduce workload. It goes something like this…

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