Feed Forward An Approach to Marking from PIXL contributor Rachel Johnson This will not be the ONLY marking strategy you will use - it will be part of a tool kit of marking strategies. It is worth having a clear marking policy that states there are different approaches to marking and feedback but that the crucial thing is that students understand their own performance and their own areas of weakness. You may want to use the ideas behind this strategy but invent/adapt your own symbols.

Reduce teacher workload? Maximise student engagement with marking? How can we..? Reduce teacher workload? Maximise student engagement with marking? Get students to understand their own work? Have meaningful dialogue with students about their progress? See patterns over time to set targets? These are the key questions that came out of the recent review of teacher workload and marking. Many of the strategies we use at the moment are more work for teachers without getting the buy in from students and without obvious impact. Perhaps we need to mark ‘smartly’ so that we are not doing all the work for the students?!

How it works in the classroom Teacher marks the work in 1 minute using symbols Students comment on reasons for symbols Teachers mark the students’ reflective comments Students can identify their own areas of weakness Teachers can identify patterns This model can be used in the classroom for instant feedback or when marking a set of books outside of the classroom. The key difference between this and the usual comment marking teachers do is that this is only symbols and then students have to identify why the symbols have been given and explain their own thinking behind what they have done. In the trials we have done on this, many students said that they suddenly realised their work didn’t make sense but had previously not even checked it before handing it in. Other students were able to explain what they had tried to do so that the teacher could see what they were thinking and correct misunderstandings.

These are the suggested symbols but you could change them to anything you wanted – whatever you change them to, the definition needs to be clear for the students and teachers. They may be slightly different in each subject.

Students struggle with identifying where there is incorrect spelling or punctuation because if they could see there was a problem, they would correct it. This works best when the rules have been taught and they can compare what they have written to a ‘correct’ version.

The sentence starters are really important in shaping what students say and helps guide them away from vague comments about ‘trying harder next time’ etc. These can be very subject specific if each department wrote their own. This also works much better if the lesson has had a success criteria – students are much more able to comment on their work when they compare it to something else.

Feedback from teachers on ‘Feed Forward’ “Student have picked it up quickly and the sentence starters really help with self and peer-assessment. Their comments are more meaningful” “It is much quicker for the teacher to point out errors and reduces the amount of writing required from staff” “The star tool is useful for showing students they’re doing well as sometimes I think marking is too much about errors”

Implementation Reduce time it takes to mark. Meaningful student reflection and comment on own work Why? (what change) Students being able to analyse their own work and feed forward into future work Implementation Vision? Explain symbols to students Model examples of feedback Link to clear success criteria Teacher marks feedback Patterns/targets established Steps?