Tips on Engaging Students More and Mark Less

Who doesn’t want an easier marking load? If you’ve ever taken loads of paperwork home, you know how time consuming and draining it can be. You are constantly speeding up with the curriculum and the textbook to grade as many assignments as possible.

Good teachers need to allow students to make their own choices, grade their own work and learn from their own mistakes. New teachers find this part difficult because they feel they are giving up their authority. But by giving up control, students take over the learning process.

When students are encouraged to grade their own work for example, they soon learn that the teacher’s grade alone does not give the confirmation they are seeking of their own abilities.

Read on for five new teacher tips on how to spend more time teaching wile engaging your students.

1) Distribute answer sheets after students completed an exercise. In order to save paper, have students complete the assignments individually in their notebooks. Have them share their work with a partner or in small groups. As a final step, they also check their answers.

2) Create rubrics using Rubrics.com. Students can suggest categories for assessment, self-check and assess their own work as well as their partner’s. Also, if you will be doing a lot of essay marking, teach and use a correction key and encourage students to correct their own mistakes. You’ll be glad you did.

3) Encourage student teaching and presentations. Students learn best when they are motivated to learn about a subject that interests them. Students can prepare 10-15 minute talks or teach the class about a subject that interests them.

4) Have students create their own tests. Based on the material you taught, students can prepare in advance test questions. You guide students on types of questions and language use and then collect their questions. Choose a number of questions and then students can take a traditional test or talk about their answers in groups. By doing so, you then give an individual and a group grade averaging all the grades together.

5) Do Jigsaw Reading. As students acquire more vocabulary and reading skills, involve students in the reading process using jigsaw reading. Have students choose to answer questions based on a certain reading passage. In expert groups, they go over their answers. Then they teach the contents of their passage back in home groups (different representatives of different texts) so that each member of the group knows the main idea of the other passages. In doing so, they are able to answer the other questions relating to different passages. share their answers in home

Remember these tips as you encourage more learning independence and reduce over time, your marking load.

Try it!