How to grade writing as an English teacher? It’s tough, and we might not finish quickly, but we can shave minutes off our grading time.
Two years ago, I wrote about saving time while grading writing assignments. I must feel the need for such a reflection at the end of every school year, because here we are again. . . discussing how to grade writing.
This is the end of about my tenth year as an English teacher (part-time for many years). In those ten years, I’ve sat down with thousands of papers to grade. As a new teacher, I’d sit down with the stack, normally a bowl of popcorn, and get grading. Hours of my weekend spent grading, staring at the wall, overwhelmed with feelings of failure. . .
Over time, this stopped working, and perhaps this method never worked well.
One, my family grew. My personal children deserve attention. Two, grading burnt me out. Drawn-out grading hurt my performance as a teacher. Three, I had to kick my leftover college-eating habits. (Studying and french fries turned into grading and popcorn. My older age is not allowing that.) My health suffered.
For many reasons, too much time grading was sinking me.
How to grade writing without losing your mind?
The process of how to grade writing that I had developed was failing me, so I changed. Grading secondary ELA papers this year has not been perfect, but I would count it as manageable. This outline (below) is my process while grading papers. Feel free to follow or adapt it!
Encourage self-assessment with the rubric.
Self-assessment is an important tool in student writing. Part of effective writing assignments is to set young writers up for success in their futures—wherever they will write.
First, review the grading criteria with classes. Move beyond grammar and spelling errors. Discuss organization, topic sentences, cohesiveness, and sentence structure. Be sure that classes understand the big picture of a paper—more than getting a strong grade! Writers should express their knowledge and their thoughts.
Second, provide class time for writers to assess their own papers. What specific feedback can they provide? What are the strengths? The weaknesses?
Third, provide a better way to improve those weaknesses. For instance, writers might realize they need a clear thesis. Review the purpose of a thesis and deconstruct actions in writing one.
Finally, assessing their own writing should be a practiced part of the writing process. Young writers must understand expectations and work to meet them. Consistency will pay off.
Run revision and editing stations.
The more writers work on their papers, the more investment they have, and the better their papers are—leading to less grading for you!
My secret for station work: Start stations the day before. Run through your expectations and routines for stations. If you have time, set up where stations will be so that your classes can enter class the next day and begin.
Specific questions work with stations. For instance, students will exchange papers and then look at sections, such as: Read each topic sentence. For each topic sentence, as: Is this what the rest of the paragraph is about? (Write “yes” or “no” beside each highlighted topic sentence.)
Specific? Yes. Young writers crave guidance. After structure in revising and editing, you’ll have better papers to grade.
How to grade writing begins before classes turn in their assignments.
Read over each paper before “grading.”
This process shortens the amount of time it takes me to grade papers!
As the primary audience, I need to get a feeling for the papers. Before making a mark on papers, read them all first. This encourages looking at students’ ideas and reflect as a reader—not immediately as a grader. (There is a difference.)
It’s a quick read that provides me a “big picture” to decide where my grading and lesson plans should go next. Giving a quick read before marking provides me with an overall idea. Specifically:
- Figure out if the rubric is fair and fix the rubric for next time. I might need to clarify a point if every paper missed it. Perhaps my lessons did not hit targets like I had hoped.
- Plan what we’ll study next. Sure, my curriculum exists, but we might need to tweak and add, maybe subtract.
This “big picture” encourages reflection on my part. Plus, the initial reading was authentic.
Finally, I had an idea of how the class performed. If absolutely every student missed a certain element, perhaps analysis of a quote or a lack of signal phrase, that clues me in to review my lessons. Was that element covered with enough depth? Does the rubric need modified for this certain grading? Should students have the opportunity to make corrections and then return papers to me?
Work out my “mental” blocks.
Grading papers is tough. There are endless memes with ELA teachers as the target audience. Grading can be awful and defeating. It can seem never-ending. Over time, address these mental blocks by deciding what works for your situation.
First, don’t grab thirty papers to grade; choose a manageable number, like five. I tell myself that I will grade five papers and take a break. Then I sit my rubric and focus.
Second, chop activities into manageable pieces. All those brain breaks we are supposed to give students? Yeah, we need them too. After grading the five papers, walk around, get the cup of coffee, play a game, or work toward another goal—outside grading papers.
My largest mental block is feeling defeated with a heavy stack of papers on my lap or a long list on my computer. Give yourself permission to take breaks and recognize success (yes, grading five papers counts as a success) which beats mental blocks.
You might take a different approach. Some of my coworkers do better with devoting three hours to an assignment and finishing it at once. My efforts at blocking off time has resulted in crippling headaches. Like so much in life, find a way to overcome the mental block of how to grade writing that works best for your situation.
Listen to my body.
First, I don’t snack and grade; I gained too much weight. What I learned was that if I was hungry and looking to snack, I was tired or needed hydration. Instead of eating my way through a pile of papers (and honestly, I’d get sleepy), I grab a glass of ice water or mug of tea. This wakes me and stops the fake-hungry pains.
Other times, a walk helps. Stretching helps too.
Still hungry but I know I’m not really? Took the walk? I head to bed. I can’t give papers the attention they deserve if I’m exhausted. English teachers should not burn themselves out of the teaching profession as they are grading writing.
Schedule the grading.
When I leave work at the end of the day, I have goals for the following day. When I face a stack of papers, I schedule them into my day. I don’t avoid grading them, and I don’t assume I’ll grade them at home. Part of getting feedback to students included scheduling devoting time to them. Research shows that timely feedback is important to student learning. Thus, scheduling grading helps me return assignments to my classes so we can discuss and then implement the feedback.
I will tell myself (sometimes I’ll even say it aloud to myself), that I will grade five papers at the start of my prep and two at the end. Sometimes, I write it down. Verbalizing the goal helps me.
Adjusting writing lesson plans and tweaking the grading process never ends. I’m not sure it should. The way I would have described how to grade writing differs this year than it did five years ago. I imagine that in five years, I’ll have a more efficient process. My process for how to grade a paper evolves and reflects years of experience.
What about you? What grading process could you share to help other ELA teachers? If you need ideas for what to say to students about their writing, check out this post.
Are you looking for more tips for grading writing? Check out my Pinterest board, completely devoted to teaching writing.
