How to Grade Less…and still be a good teacher!

Welcome back! Here we are, one week closer to summer break. Not that we’re counting or anything…

Last week, we talked about Teacher Tired Reason #1: Not Enough Planning Time, and I gave you a few strategies for carving out extra time in your day, little by little, that can really add up! Did you try any of them for yourself? How did it go? Drop me a line; I’d love to hear about it!

This week we’re going to tackle Teacher Tired Reason #2: Buried in Grading. This one is pretty universal. The really good news about this problem is that you have a relatively large amount of control over it; the bad news is, old habits can be hard to break.

Let’s get right to it: STOP GRADING ALL THE THINGS!

Because I don’t want to annoy you, I won’t re-type that 10 more times…but you need to READ it 10 more times, at least.

To illustrate, let me tell you about 2 very real case studies: me (high school English teacher) and my husband (elementary teacher).

Case Study #1: My husband, year 1 teaching

In August 2020, my husband Scott was in the middle of his MAT program: he had done some classroom observations already, and was slated to finish his coursework in Fall 2020, followed by student teaching in Spring 2021 and graduation in May 2021.

The small private school where my daughters had attended since kindergarten called him in early August:

School admin: “Hi! So we loved having you here for observations, and you had said that you’d love to work here if something ever opened up…Can you start in 2 weeks?”

One of their teachers had resigned unexpectedly 2 weeks before classes started. They offered him an immediate full-time position and said they’d work with his college to work out the details. Now keep in mind, this was Fall of 2020, and the world was still very weird, especially in education. 

If you’re a teacher, then you KNOW what a trial-by-fire experience Year 1 is, no matter where you go. So, this was what his first year of teaching looked like:

• Combined level grade 3 and 4 class
• Class roster of 7 boys in person, 1 girl completely remote (live hybrid teaching) the entire year
• Masks and desk dividers being enforced
• No mentor teacher
• Finishing graduate coursework in the Fall while teaching 
• “Student teaching” in his own classroom in the Spring, with a coordinating teacher from the college coming in for observations
• Very little guidance for curriculum: he invented most of it from scratch on the fly
• Our twins were in 2nd grade, and oh, did I mention we had a newborn at home? (born July 2020)

Overwhelmed?? You’d better believe it.

He needed all the shortcuts and efficiency tips he could get!

Enter: wife, who had a few suggestions…

Scott began his career as an elementary school teacher later in life, so by that time I’d already been at it for a good while. When we actually got a moment to talk shop every now and then, one of the first pieces of advice I gave him was what I’m telling you now: STOP grading ALL the things!

He did have a hard time shifting that mindset, though, I think for the same reason so many teachers do: we think that if we don’t grade every single thing they ever do, we will be missing some crucial piece of evaluation information. But that’s simply not true. You CAN keep a finger on the pulse of your students’ progress and ALSO not grade EVERYTHING! It took me years to realize this.

Case Study #2: Me, year 1-8ish teaching

As a new teacher, I was pretty old-school. I did a lot of things the way I saw my own teachers do them back in the day: I assigned homework almost every night, and every day I would walk up and down the rows of students with a clip board, checking their homework and “grading” on the spot. I thought I was saving time by doing this…but I was actually just wasting precious class time from my short 46-minute class period. I collected pretty much every scrap of paper my students wrote on and graded it, including journals that I tasked myself with responding to personally…for 150 students.

I had a constant, looming stack of papers on my desk, and with a roster that size, it would take me literally weeks to get through them all.

(I’m from the pre-cell phone/pre-covid generation, where we read books made of paper, wrote things with pen and pencil on paper, and wrote 9 page notes to our friends during class on paper, folding them up into origami triangles to be surreptitiously passed under desks and in hallways…so when it comes to grading essays, I do like to write in the margins and annotate on paper…)

As a student, I always loved getting writing assignments back from my teachers with their handwriting all over it (yep, always been an English nerd)! So I wanted to give this same experience to my own students…but it took a LONG time. But what I found was that by the time I returned things, most of them had forgotten what the assignment was even about, and any feedback I’d written they simply glazed over and flipped past while searching for the number grade. 

What No One Tells You in Student Teaching

Let me also insert here: Yes, I had completed two successful student teaching placements before graduation, but what I realize NOW, years later, is that while student teaching is definitely an intense learning curve, and you might feel tired, you can’t truly “burn out” in student teaching. Real burn out is something that happens over the marathon of a career, not the sprint of an internship. 

This is relevant because that means you can “get away” with some things in student teaching (like grading too much) that are simply NOT sustainable long term as a full-time career teacher. Trouble is, nobody tells you this in student teaching, so you have no idea that these habits are non-transferrable to your first teaching job until you spend YEARS figuring it out…or until you read this blog post 😉

Let’s talk about REAL solutions to this REAL problem that is sucking up all your time.

Use the Blue File Bin

I once had a fantastic mentor give me some great advice as she watched me fret and stress about how much grading I had piling up: she said, “put it in the blue rotating filing cabinet.” What that actually meant was: throw it away in the recycling bin. (This of course is not applicable to major projects or something important: it’s intended for the 5 random classwork assignments you’ve collected this week just because you felt like you should, that don’t really make a difference to the student’s grades, and that no one will even miss or wonder why you haven’t returned it. Pro tip: wait until after the students have left for the day to dump that pile into the bin). 

Can I tell you how liberating it was for me to do that for the first time? It was magical. And it didn’t make me a bad teacher. 

Mindset Shift

If you’ve been grading ALL THE THINGS forever because “that’s what good teachers do” and you feel your pulse quickening and breath tightening at me even making these suggestions, I get that. Let me help you with the mindset shift that is going to make this possible for you.

Here’s the LEGITIMATE REASON why you don’t need to grade everything in order to get an accurate picture of where your students are at in their learning: because you’re looking for them to demonstrate mastery of a skill or piece of information. How many times do they need to prove to you that they can do it? The answer should be ONCE. 

Think of it this way: when you were trying to get your driver’s license, how many times did you need to pass the written test? Once, to prove you knew the information. How many times did you have to pass your road test? Once, to prove you had the physical skill mastered. And then they gave you a license to operate a deadly piece of machinery at age 16…so how many times does a student have to show you they know what a metaphor is? 

How to Reclaim Your Time by Grading Less

Here’s how to concretely put this in to practice: Do the following steps in order.

1. For each major unit of study, make a list of the major skills or information you want students to be able to know and do. (Depending on your state/school, you may already have this laid out for you in the curriculum). 
2. Align each skill on your list with an assessment: summative, formative, formal, informal, graded, UNGRADED…
3. Cut the fat: eliminate unnecessary overlap. Take a look at that quiz: do you have 4 questions about symbolism? How about paring it down to 2? Take a look at ALL your assessments: if you already assessed symbolism on the quiz, do you have to repeat it on the unit test, or can you eliminate it because they’ve already demonstrated mastery through the quiz?
4. Choose quick-grading formats: Can you automate any portion of the assessments? Maybe use a self-grading google form with 10 multiple choice questions and supplement with 2 short answer questions–then you only have to hand-grade 2 questions per student per assessment. It goes MUCH quicker that way!
5. Use exit tickets and whole-class review to reinforce: I did this literally yesterday. We are just beginning Romeo and Juliet in my 9th grade English class. After watching the opening of Act 1 scene 1, I had students fill out a quick 2-sentence summary of what they just saw, and collected it as an exit ticket. After class I quickly read through them all (but DIDN’T grade them…I filed them in the blue recycling bin!) and this gave me a good feel for where the gaps were class-wide. I then took about 15 minutes to create a very quick 5-question kahoot to address those gaps. The following day, that kahoot was the first thing we did. Seeing the whole class results instantly on the screen, I was able to review, reinforce, and clarify these bumpy areas (it was also a great way to bring those who’d been absent up to speed simultaneously). This is what we’re going for: efficiency!

Proof of Concept

Years 1-8ish, I would always have an average of about 25 grades in my book per report card (over a 10 week term). With 150 students, that’s 3,750 grades…I was grading 375 items EVERY WEEK, or 54 items every day (no weekends off at that pace)!

Well, when you put it THAT way…no WONDER you’re drowning!!  Are you brave enough to do your own scary math…?

See how a little perspective can help you see what an unreasonable workload you’re putting on yourself? 

After I reached this mindset shift, I literally cut that number in half: I now typically have about 12 grades per student per report card. By comparison, this math works out to just 36 grades per day Monday-Friday, and take the weekends off 🙂 

And here’s the proof that the data is still valid for evaluating student performance: When I compared each student’s overall course grade with 25 assignments vs 12 assignments, their averages were virtually the same. No one had a wild swing in either a positive or negative direction: the GPA at 25 vs 12 grades gave a consistent reflection of student performance.   

Give these tips a try. I am confident they will work for you because they’ve been working for me for years, in my real classroom with my real students. They’ve truly helped me streamline my grading and reclaim hours of time every week.

Next week we’ll talk about one more teaching technique to make your own time machine: what to do when you’ve got more curriculum to cover than days on the calendar. See you soon!