In the grand site update, I’ve been looking through all my blog posts on my old site and trying to work out what’s worth reposting. I found this gem from about three years ago…
“On the back of some fantastic A-Level CPD from Alan Jervis, I trialled “Red Pen, Green Pen Marking” with my Year 12s last year. I’ve now adopted this for all of my marking with all my groups, and it’s working quite nicely. Well, except for the times I accidentally use the wrong colour and swear profusely. Occupational hazard of those funky BIC four-colour pens I suppose.
Anyway, the idea is to mark the stuff you like in green, and the stuff you don’t in red. I tend to tick correct answers and write additional comments like “Good, you’ve shown full working out” alongside in green, and circle any errors in red. I’m trying to avoid correcting them fully, especially if the error is something like the classic 1 x 1 = 2 mistake or something similar. Instead, I’m giving a bit of lesson time to reading homework feedback and doing corrections if necessary, with an opportunity for those who got it completely right to attempt an extension question or two.
Incidentally, the course I went on, “Maths – Improving Exam Results at KS5“, is still running with Dragonfly. Worth checking out; thoroughly enjoyable!
Most of the old posts just got deleted – as they say, every day’s a school day and I’m doing things a lot differently now to how I was three years ago. However, Red Pen Green Pen has stuck with me. Our school’s marking policy now uses What Went Well/Even Better If, so all my WWWs are written in green and EBIs in red. It’s really useful for me to see straight away if I’ve had to give a lot of improvement feedback (lots of red!) as that’s an indication I need to do a bit more work on that topic, and the students seem to respond to it pretty well.
| There has, however, been one groundbreaking change to my RPGP marking policy. I’ve upgraded from the blue BIC four-colour jobbies to a far superior pen (marking is slightly more enjoyable with nice stationery). For other nutters like me, give the Uniball Signo Gelstick a go. My local Wilkos sells them for 69p each, and no, I didn’t go in at the weekend and buy 10 of them… Also, apparently Dragonfly are no longer running that course. Who knew? |
