I thought that title would get your attention!
Fool that I am, I brought home all my books for years 7, 8, 9 and 10 to mark.
OK so it’s not really to mark the books, it’s to do the “teacher” feedback following their tests last week. We had originally considered spreading out the assessments so that they weren’t all in the same week but we (well Seager!) decided it made sense to be able to mark the tests when the next class were sitting theirs. To be honest this worked so that by Friday four of my year groups (year 11 have mocks in 2 weeks) had sat two papers (+ mental tests at KS3), all have been marked, data collected and most importantly the students have colour coded their personal question level analysis and also have time to reflect on their results.
Now that I’ve had time to update their folders with their grades so that they can see their progress over time I started looking at what they had written as their comments and let’s just sat it was “variable”. There are a couple of things that we are going to change next time:
- We are changing the student sheet so that it says “next steps” and not “target”, along with making it clearer which part of the sheet that they fill in and which we fill in. The idea that the student sets a “target” is confusing for them but more importantly I think that learning maths is done in “ickle” steps which break down the bigger journey that they are on during their time with us.
- I’ve bought some “next step achieved” stamps for the department (from amazon) so that when the students have done their “next step” question (something that we know they should have gotten right on the test) we can just quickly stamp it and we know how much students love getting their work “stamped”.
- As I’ve said the comments weren’t that “enlightening” so I’ve put together a couple of slides for “DIRTY MATHS” time which hopefully will provide some structure and also give the students some ideas about what to write when it comes to their reflection. To be fair to most of my groups they have approached this with some maturity and written some really good stuff, but a couple have just written “I did not do well” and “revise” as their target, and there is just no way of EVER ticking that target off as having been achieved. It may be that over time this will develop into a bank of useful phrase but I don’t want the students to just copy stuff down for the sake of it …. I want them to think!
Busy weekend marking! Followed by another busy week with a Maths GCSE launch event on Monday (hopefully I’ll finally get to see this presentation that includes a picture of me apparently!) and hopefully our soon to be newest member of staff (starting in Jan) is coming along too.
Have a great weekend everyone .. you will find me under my pile of books!
PS: Not really I AM having a bit of a life too!
