Grading Hacks for Middle and High School Teachers
Are you buried in grading papers and google docs? Digital grading and paper grades add up real quick. Not to mention writing all of those comments that most students and their parents never read. Here are some grading hacks that have helped us to save time and energy.
Self Assessments - John Hattie says that student self reported grades is the #1 influencer for student achievement. Well, that sounds like a good use of class time. We primarily use self assessment for essays and essay based tests. For the most part, we have found that students can accurately grade themselves and learn from the experience. There are always a handful of students who need more practice…usually the lower performing students and the students with immense parent pressure to get high grades by any means necessary. We just take these students aside to show them how to improve in their thinking and learning.
Conversation Based Grading - We just came across this phrase in this ASCD Magazine ~ “The Empowered Student”. This has been something that we have been doing for awhile now, but we just never called it that. Conversation based grading allows for students to have an input in the grading of their learning. It is amazing what you can assess from a simple conversation with a student. We often use conversation based grades when we are grading their independent reading progress. It also serves as a time for the teacher to give 1:1 instruction to suggest further learning that will move the student farther along.
Absent Grading - This one is just trying to keep up with the number of students who are constantly absent every day. What we do is if a lesson takes 10 days to teach, we enter it into the grade book as 10 points, but weigh it between 25 - 50 points. Every day a student is absent we make a comment about what work needs to be made up and then deduct a point for every day absent. Then when we go to review the work we just deduct points from the points left over. It saves so much time when grading a unit of study.
What are some of your grading hacks? We’d love to hear them!