Teacher Strategies Staying on Top of Grading with a Good Grading System
Teachers in the elementary grades through high school can have an enormous amount of grading, that if not kept up with can just pile up and pile up keeping teachers from performing their best as teachers. The best way to overcome this is to have a system.The system entails having a good grading book and coordinated lesson plans outlining all details of marking and grading.
1) The grading book
The grading book for recording grades should be outlined with the types of items you will need to grade.
• tests• quizzes• essays• essay tests• papers• projects• class room participation• behavior/deportment• homework assignments
This must be done for each subject you are teaching.
The grading book should have columns for each type of assignment for each student with compatible columns for specific types of grades for specific assignments. The teacher notes in class in her grading book for assignments handed in, classroom participation, and other notes that can be made during class. Once papers, tests, and quizzes are graded, they are immediately noted in the grading book.
2) Grading work
Then you will need to grade all work that you assign to students. This work should be checked and graded immediately after the work is handed in. To lighten the load, you can get some of your brightest students to help with this work. They should be able to earn bonus points for helping.
For test-taking, especially the multiple choice test you can have an perforated answer sheet that fits right over the test immediately showing the right and wrong answers - a coordinated test/answer sheet. This can save invaluable time in grading tests.
Students will not be able to easily help in grading essays, essay tests, or papers. The teacher must give herself time to read through these. However she can get through them more quickly by marking for various points that should be covered such as
• neatness• good sentence structure• organization• getting to the point• addressing specifically the subject the essay is about
One can easily go through a bunch of essays quickly by following this outline or a similar outline of the teacher's choosing. Then when the good essays are isolated, the teacher can read through these for best salient points:
• how well does the student address the subject• has the student made a number of good statements• Is the work creative and original• the work is not plagiarized
Papers can be graded similarly but including such items as
• References• Bibliography• Footnotes• Title page• Table of contents
Teachers should have a grading system whereby each type of assignment has a pre-conceived format for grading so that the teachers can easily and quickly do their marking and grading.
Projects can be graded on
• Creativity• Originality• Meeting project deadline• Usefulness
Classroom participation can be graded on
• amount of times participating• good participation or just an interruption• usefulness of information provided
With a good grading system, and excellent lesson plan, applying a good grading book with all specifics worked out in advance, and coordinated tests/answer sheets the teacher will find that grading is extremely simplified. Coupled with allowing their brightest students to help in grading, teachers will get through the grading process with ease and have more time left over to plan excellent future assignments and dynamic classroom lessons.
