Broom cupboard 4 - soon be time to think about heating this place

[TheHoneyBadger]

Will post this on the end of the other thread too but I have just found this:

If you are identified as a contact and asked to self-isolate by NHS Test and Trace, including by the NHS COVID-19 app you may be entitled to a payment of £500 from your local authority under the Test and Trace Support Payment scheme. If you are the parent or guardian of a child who has been told to self-isolate you may also be entitled to this payment.

^Presumably that is all of the 'thought' that has gone into the situation I've been talking about. Still doesn't tell us if we would be seen as taking unauthorised leave or able to work from home or anything - need union specific advice on that.

Everyone at my school live marks AFAIK. I'm KS1 so it's very quick and also often it's more verbal feedback (which I then note in their book). The prep takes me a while after school but it's nothing I can take home so it's done there.

'Verbal feedback given' wouldn't wash at my school unfortunately. They need to see your swans and the kids green penning.

Live mark in lessons with answers given for all questions for students to mark (maths). We also do checkins and post assessments so marking is heavy at start and end of term.
It's only taken me 20 years but I am enjoying my second ' school free' weekend in a row!

That must be a nice aspect of primary teaching? Seeing genuine progress and increasing independence as the year goes on and really knowing rather than having to pretend to know from a spreadsheet where every single kid is at and how they've progressed? Come dash my delusions.

Oh yes, I can see progress in some of them in even a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to seeing how they are at the end of the year and comparing it to the beginning.

I am working towards QTS on a salaried programme so it's very full on, but things like that which are already so rewarding are already reminding me why I am doing this.

I refuse to use a verbal feedback given stamp and have had repeated arguments about it.

SLT do expect green pens and whole class feedback includes targets.

I think of it more as live feedback than marking. I'm scaffolding etc in red as I go.

@TheHoneyBadger

'Verbal feedback given' wouldn't wash at my school unfortunately. They need to see your swans and the kids green penning.

Luckily it's school policy, my old school didn't but this makes my life easier. Half of them can't read/understand marking any further than that or a tick anyway at this stage.

What is SWANS?

Seeing the progress made is one of my favourite things, although for me it always seems to kick in when they get to someone else’s class and you realise how far they’ve come on.

Part of my remit this year is some dyslexia support and it’s great. Even since August some children have made a lot of progress.

Green penning was ditched whole school several years ago. Hod is trying to bring it back. Sigh.

Green pen should be ditched (mostly). For maths it's pretty pointless but ticks the 'response to feedback' box on SLT checklist.

I can see the value in re writing a paragraph with improvements though.

Absolutely. But I don't want it done THEN. I want to come back to it next time we do the same thing. That might be today or it might be next week.

Yeah, that's because it was one choice only Noble. I would have put it second.

I hate marking. It's the bane of my life. My lessons would be so much better if I didn't have to spend so much time on marking. Our department policy (and the rest of the department are happy enough to do it) is to mark all homework in depth every week, and we set each class 2 homeworks per week. I spend just under an hour marking year 7 books, up to 2-3 hours marking sixth form homework. It's ridiculous as a policy, but everyone thinks it's fine and I'm the lone dissenting voice.

Off to laugh at that DfEpost Noble....

Here you go, Jan educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2021/09/10/what-the-experts-say-schools-are-not-drivers-of-covid-infection/

Schools are not drivers or hubs of infection, which is a relief really, given the amount of covid in them.

We mark in green and pink highlighter. There is a really complex marking system of dashes and ^ those things and underlining in straight lines and wibbly lines. I ignore it totally. It isn't fit for purpose. If a child hasn't put a full stop, or hasn't spelled the word properly, then me fiddling around it with a pink highlighter isn't going to embed the fact that something should have been there/should have been different.

I highlight HFWs that they are spelling wrong. WHITH for example, which gets right on my tits. I highlight one missed capital letter and then mention that in WCF. If I highlighted every mistake at year 3 level, I'd be there forever, and they'd learn nothing from it. I say at SLT that I ignore the marking policy, so far no one has pulled me up on it.

To be clear , I like marking when I get to mark what I like, how I like and when I like. As head of two subjects , I do have control. We also don't have any silly marking policies in English. Yet.

S - Strengths
W- Weaknesses
A - Assessment (grade)
Ns - Next steps

The grade is added to their marksheet spreadsheet and viewable by parents so they can always see if they're working at, below or above expected and that generates data on overall how all of your groups are doing. For my subject which has 3 lessons a fortnight they have about 10 of these QMAs (quality marked assessments) a year plus apparently we're meant to give effort grades on homework and occasionally do a quick tick and flick in books. It's crazy really.

HOD reckons they are, 'just a paragraph' but there is no way anyone could access anywhere near the higher grades in a paragraph so it has to be a lot more than that if the more able are to have any chance of meeting their expected level and frequently the questions really don't lend themselves to the kids producing a good bit of work or the sources/interpretations chosen are incomprehensible or don't really lend themselves well to the inquiry.

They're kind of the bane of my life tbh. I'd rather pick a piece of work myself to do the quality marking on rather than dictated assessment pieces that don't work well for my students and sometimes seem to have been picked without considering what they've actually learned therefore you have to teach additional content to give them a chance of being able to access it but someone somewhere feels a box has been ticked and standardised I guess. I miss autonomy.

It's also rather unfair when, for example, Maths might count a 10 question quiz marked to give a mark out of ten as a qma which is rather different as a marking task than 30 essays per class. I've suggested we could use simple knowledge tests or multiple choice quizzes on key terms and concepts for some of them instead of endless essays but I am ignored.

The kids are sick of them and the teachers are. My year 7s had their first one about 4 lessons in ffs - we don't even know what level they should be achieving at yet because they didn't do sats this year but the box has been ticked I guess.

It's not a bad idea it just needs a bit more thought and a bit of variety rather than just endless hard to read (some kids literacy is so weak) and assess essays. For the kids sake and the teachers.

@TheHoneyBadger

S - Strengths W- Weaknesses A - Assessment (grade) Ns - Next steps

Thanks! Was racking my brains thinking what SWANS might stand for and couldn’t find it online (just the Aussie Students With Additional Needs!)

I don’t give a grade when marking homework apart from exams/tests (Wiliam advised against it, rightly or wrongly because pupils often just focus on the grade and then nothing more) and get the pupil to do a strength/weakness I guess when they review their own target but then I just focus on next steps, if it needs a label I suppose!

and underlining in straight lines and wibbly lines

I was wondering about these in my DD’s Yr 2 homework booklet these past couple of weeks (hasn’t had a homework booklet before due to Covid) and was curious!
What do they stand for?

Good god that must take ages!

WHITH for example, which gets right on my tits.

That’s so funny, we get ‘wif’

I try and grade as little as possible. It's not really a true grade anyway (there's no such thing as a grade for a topic). Whilst I understand reporting using grades makes it easier for them to 'see' progress, really the grades are BS. We need a better way (probably reporting on effort, engagement, targets for improvement and assessment percentages in context).

Oooh I started watching a video I saw on twitter which was 'how to line manage a maths department' for SLT.

Stuff like 'why is maths being awkward about our whole school initiative?' 'Why do they not want to write comments on work?' 'Why do they need to set?'

twitter.com/jemmaths/status/1440977776090230789?s=21