Grading Essays: Cease and Disssssssissssst

Marking on student papers -grading, pinpointing, and correcting -  is a waste of time. It doesn't matter how much you write, how often you do it, of how good you are at it. The Education Endowment Foundation from the University of Oxford gives a review of the evidence on written marking (Elliot, Baird, Hopfenbeck, Ingram, Thompson, Usher, Zantout, Richardson, and Coleman, 2016). Kids don't do anything with your feedback and persist making the same mistakes.

But yet, English teachers spend copious amounts of time grading papers, marking rubrics, and so on. Beers and Probst (2017) discuss two questions to help us disrupt our thinking about this dilemma: "What needs to change? What assumptions make that change hard?" (p. 7).

When I ask those questions about writing, these are the answers that make the most sense to me: We need to stop grading essays. It's hard to stop because we think we are supposed to. And we don't know what to do instead.

Mendelson's Solution:

Mendelson (2018) provides an EXCELLENT solution. In this post, I lay out the steps he describes in the article and provide links to instructional materials to put his suggestions in place for your classroom. Mendelson still marks the essays, which I don't recommend. I think this must be addressed during the drafting stage through revisions conducted during writing workshop, student use of rubrics, peer feedback groups, and teacher conferences. Feedback is best when it comes at the formative stages and not after the final copy (Elliot, et al., 2016).

Mendelson (2018) describes five steps to this process: Review, reflect, research, revise, and reinforce. Here's a link to a simplified version for students. 

1. Review: Students evaluate feedback and/or marks on papers. The feedback must be: "specific, clear, contextualized, balanced, and forward-looking" (Mendelson, 2018). There's a lot to be said about what that looks like. I'll be addressing that in future posts. 
1. Students open a google sheet. Click the link to see the one I made for you. Students use this sheet all year long. 
2. Date: Students record the date so they can evaluate their progress over time. 
3. Name of the Assignment: Students record the title. They could even hyperlink the assignment instructions. 
2. Reflect: Students consider the feedback and select a focus for their revisions and edits. 
1. The feedback I am addressing is: In the spreadsheet, students record the feedback they are choosing to address. They must write it in their own words. 
2. Is this a recurring issue (Y/N): Over time, this allows students to see pesky problems that persist, realize that they have mastered a previous struggle, or see their readiness for a new level of writing sophistication. 
3. Research: Students are responsible for seeking their own solutions. They must look back at notes from mini-lessons, previous papers, or recollections from teacher/peer conferences. Students must look at handbooks and websites to find resources and solutions that guide their next steps. 
1. I researched a solution and found: In the spreadsheet column, students summarize their solutions in their own words. They could quote teacher or peer conversations that provided helpful solutions. Students can also copy and paste helpful links to resources. They could also insert links to pictures of notes or previous papers to support their synthesis of the solutions they have found. This is a great place for them to use the academic language of writing. 
2. My original looks like this: Students mine their papers to find examples where the feedback applies and where the resources identified solutions that they can employ. Students copy and paste the targeted text sections in the spreadsheet.
4. Revise: Students make the edits or revisions in their papers. 
1. I revised it to look like this: Students copy and paste the revisions or type the text into the spreadsheet. Students can work with peers or teachers during this stage as well to get needed support. 
5. Reinforcement: Students meet with peers to review their work and explain what they have learned. Peers help the student writer reflect on the accuracy, impact, and completeness of the changes. 
1. My work was reviewed by: In this column of the spreadsheet, students record the name of the people that helped them review their work. Students could also give specific quotes from the peer reviewers and how that refined their understanding. 
2. Teacher reinforcement:  The teacher can now review the work and give final commentary, design mini-lessons for the whole class, or provide further individual support. 
3. Feedforward: Goals for the next assignment: Students now think about how they will apply this new learning in future assignments. They use the spreadsheet to review previous lessons and set goals for the next writing performance. Then they use these lessons as they compose. (I added this last column from the feedback protocols suggested by Hattie and Temperley, 2007). 

Teach them to Fish: 

Mendelson (2018) goes on to describe how he compiles the student spreadsheets and sorts them to identify common problems that he should address with the class or small groups. Most of all, I think this process gives teachers a more simple way to grade. Grade the spreadsheet and not the whole paper. Seems like that is a better way to address how we can help the writer improve the current paper as well as the next one. 

Mendelson says that he developed his ideas on that old truism about teaching people to fish. Applied to writing, it might say, "Give a writer marks on paper, and you give him nothing. Teach a writer how to use the marks, and you help him be a better writer." 

References: 

Beers, K. and Probst, R. E. (2017). Disrupting thinking: Why how we read matters. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Elliot, V., Baird, J.E., Hopfenbeck, T. N., Ingram, J., Thompson, I., Usher, N., Zantout, M., and Richardson, J. ; Richardson, J. and Coleman, R. (2016) A marked improvement: A review of the evidence on written marking. Oxford University, Department of Education and Education Endowment Foundation.

Hattie, J., & Temperly, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research 77, (1), 81–112. DOI: 10.3102/003465430298487.

Mendelson, E. J. (2018). Use the five Rs to avoid the forbidden fruitlessness of feedback. ASCD Express 13(9). Accessed from http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol13/1309-mendelson.aspx