006 | Grading: Five Strategies to Save Time

As educators, we often find ourselves drowning in a sea of papers to grade, struggling to provide meaningful feedback without sacrificing our evenings and weekends. But what if there was a way to streamline this process, making it more efficient without compromising on quality?

In this episode, I'm excited to share five practical strategies that have revolutionized my grading approach. These techniques are designed to help you reclaim your time while still offering valuable insights to your students.

Download "5 Steps to Streamline Grading" here: https://www.productiveteacher.academy/resources

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Transcript

Hi, teacher friends. Dr. Sarah here. I hope your week is going well. Thanks for joining me today. Well, today I want to talk about one of my favorite topics, grading. And you're probably thinking what this crazy person loves to grade. And the answer would be, well, no. But what I really want to talk about is how we can streamline our grading process. So. So we will still give meaningful feedback, but don't spend hours and hours doing so. I am a high school teacher, so most of my strategies will apply more to those who teach in the higher grades. But I hope you will find some inspiration even if you are an elementary school teacher. In any case, you should never just blindly follow my or anyone else's recommendations. We all have styles and workflows that work best for us. My goal will always be to tell you what works best for me and to encourage you to think about how you could fine tune those strategies to work best for you. One size definitely does not fit all. So grading. Many teachers would say it is the bane of our existence. It takes so long, so much time. We want to do right by our students and give them meaningful feedback, but who has that much time? Paper submissions, like quizzes, tests and worksheets are often the best traveled items in our teacher bags. They travel home with us after school. We're going to spend the evening grading, right? And then those same papers travel back to school with us the next day, ungraded. That night, they come home with us again, only to come back to school with us the next day, still not graded. Does this sound familiar? I wish I could just wave my magic wand and tell you that you will never have to spend the weekend grading again. You and I both wish for that. But what I can do is share some strategies that I have used to shorten the amount of time I spend grading in hopes that one or two of these strategies might work for you. Speaking of those strategies, most of them apply to electronic submissions in my lms. However, you can still implement many of them even if the work was turned in on paper. Just because the students did their work with a pencil does not mean that you have to grade with a pen. Think outside the box. The pen and paper box, to save time. So today we're going to discuss five grading strategies you can personalize to fit your style and situation. And I have a special treat for you. I know many of you listen to podcasts while driving, so taking notes is not possible. So I put together a summary of what we're going to talk about today. You can download it by going to my website, www.productiveteacher academy, and click on Free Resources. There you will find all kinds of goodies, including a link to download Five Steps to Streamline Grading. So if you're driving or can't take notes right now, don't worry, I've got you covered. That's www.productiveteacher.academy and click on free resources to download five steps to streamline Grading. All right, so my first strategy is to curate frequent phrases. That's right, curate frequent phrase phrases. There are several ways you can do this. The goal is to create a database of the phrases you use most frequently when giving feedback. So for me, as a German teacher, that would be word order. You didn't get the word order right, or you don't have subject, verb, agreement, or my favorite, you didn't follow the directions. I think that applies to all of us, not just German teachers. So. So whatever those phrases are that you use frequently, let's find a way to create a database of those. I know a lot of teachers who have a Word document where they've typed in the things that they say frequently. And when they're grading, they can just open that up and copy and paste those frequently used phrases into their lms. And that works great. So it could be a Word document, or if you're a Google school, a Google Doc. That's great. But there are a couple ways that we can kind of speed that up even more. So check to see if your LMS allows you to save your grading comments. My school uses Canvas, and in the Speedgrader part of Canvas, you can save things that you say most frequently in a little database right there in the Speedgrader and just open that up and click on the phrase when you're grading. That is obviously going to be a lot faster than going to Word Document or a Google Doc and copying and then pasting into your lms. So check to see if your LMS has that function. In Episode four, we talked about Clipboard History for Windows. That would be another great resource to use for copying and pasting feedback that you give frequently. So if you haven't listened to episode four, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that. If you are a Mac user, you can just search the app Store for Clipboard Manager and download something that has a similar function to the Clipboard history in Windows. Either way, the goal is to create a database of phrases that you use frequently. So whether that's in a Word Doc, a Google Doc, or directly in your LMS or in your Clipboard History, that will really speed up your electronic grading process. Another suggestion along those same lines is to use abbreviations that you have explained to your students. So, going back to the German teacher example about word order, I just type in capital W, capital O. And my students know that that means that they got the word order wrong in a particular sentence. So think about some abbreviations that you could use that would speed up that typing process. And just make sure that your students know what you mean by by a certain abbreviation. Okay, strategy two. Grade in batches. I think most of us try to do this already, but I think we could be even a little bit more intentional about this. So one thing is to wait until everyone, or nearly everyone, I know there's always that one student who is absent, but wait until everyone has submitted before you start grading. And again, I think most of us try to do this, but the advantage of doing it and being very intentional about it is that when you grade everything at once in one sitting, you can reuse the same phrases and don't need to waste time trying to figure out what to say or what you said. If you graded half of the submissions yesterday or the week before, how exactly did you phrase that? And how did you assign points to something? When we grade everything in one sitting, we know exactly what we're doing and we don't have to figure it out or try to remember from when we graded some of those submissions before. If you know that you will not be able to grade everything in one sitting, if it's kind of a long quiz or test or a long worksheet, then what I would recommend is going question by question. That way you're still remembering how you're assigning points to that question, the feedback that you want to give to that question, and you don't have to figure out from one day to the next, or try to remember how you assigned points and gave feedback for that question. So grade in batches, whether that's question by question or the whole thing at once, but try to do it in one sitting. The third strategy is paste the key. So what do I mean by paste the key? If it is a worksheet or a quiz that has true or false or matching or multiple choice and you don't need to give a whole lot of feedback, then one way you can really speed up the grading process is to type up the answer key once and then paste that into the comment section in your LMS and then assign the grade. So let's say Johnny got a 7 out of 10 and you have the key you just paste that into the comments and then Johnny can figure out for himself what he got wrong and what he got right. This also forces Johnny to figure out what he got wrong and possibly why. So pasting the key will save you a lot of time in those kind of low feedback scenarios. Strategy four for longer assignments with multiple parts or steps like projects, make a checklist so you can quickly check off what is included or what is missing and you can add the checklist to your rubric. And speaking of rubrics, I love to design my rubrics by thinking about the feedback that I give frequently. So in a descriptor for a criterion, if I know that I'm going to assign the highest marks to a submission where all the directions were followed and the student went above and beyond, then that is what I'm going to write in the descriptor. If I know that a frequently missed item is oh, that German word order again or subject verb agreement, then that is going to be one of my criteria likely and also in the descriptors so that I don't have to add extra feedback. So the way this looks then is that full marks would be you had perfect or nearly perfect word order and one of the other descriptors might be you missed word order once or twice and then maybe the lowest mark would be your word order was incorrect throughout, something like that. So when you're designing your rubrics, think about feedback that you give frequently and try to include that in your descriptors and your criteria. That will save you time as far as having to add extra feedback to a rubric. But again, add that checklist as well so that you can check off all the things that were were required for the project and check those off as you go. And that way you and the student know exactly what the student completed and didn't complete. Another thing to consider with projects like presentations or videos or audio recordings. There are a lot of really cool tech tools out there and I'm an ed tech coach. I love all of them, or most of them anyway. But consider having your student submit their project or their presentation or their recording directly in the LMS instead of submitting it somewhere else. So an example would be you're having your students use Padlet, which is a fantastic tool. I love Padlet. But then you're going to grade those submissions in Padlet. You have to keep going back and forth between the submission and Padlet and your LMS and entering those grades as you go, and clicking back and forth and back and forth. That Clicking back and forth and having to find the next submission and then the student's name and the lms, that all takes a lot of extra time. A better way would be to have the student submit the link to the Padlet in their submission box in the lms. Then you can just pull it up directly there, grade it directly in the lms, and be done. Saves you a lot of extra clicks and a lot of hunting around. So whenever possible, if a student can submit something directly in the lms, or even create it directly in the lms, like a video or an audio recording, or typing in directly into the lms, all of those things save you a lot of time if it's not possible. If you just really want that submission to be in Padlet, and you're going to grade it directly in Padlet, which again, I love Padlet. I understand why you would want to do that. You should consider investing in a second monitor. I can't tell you how much time having that second monitor on my desk saves me because I can just click back and forth between the two monitors instead of having to open up windows or hunt around. For now, where is that? Where is my LMS open? Where is the other submission open? You can just see them without even having to really click back and forth. Or at least all you have to do is just click on one display to make it the active display, and then you can still see the other window open. So getting a second monitor is highly recommended. They're not expensive. It's money well spent to have a second monitor on your desk. And the final strategy is for you to use audio or video to give feedback. So you may not want to use video. Maybe you don't want your face on there, but audio is a great way to give feedback. First of all, you are likely to give more detail in an audio recording than you are in a written feedback statement. And I found that my students are more likely to listen to audio feedback from me than they are to read a long paragraph from me. And you can make your feedback more personal by having your voice instead of just typing. Your students can hear your tone of voice, your influence, reflection, and all of those things. And I would be curious to hear from you if you find that your students are more likely to listen to that than to read a long paragraph. I know my students certainly are. And if you are grading video or audio submissions, don't forget to change the playback speed. I usually use at least one and a half playback speed to grade. You'd be amazed how much time it's going to save you if you're grading 100 audio submissions or 100 video submissions to just speed up that playback speed. And remember, if you are grading paper submissions, you can still use the LMS to give feedback directly. You can give audio feedback. You can copy and paste things, all of those things in your lms, even if the submission was on paper. Well, teacher friends, those are my suggestions for this week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Now remember, this podcast's goal is to keep things simple and manageable. If we try to implement too many things at once, we will burn out and give up. So don't fall into that perfectionist trap. Be gentle with yourself and celebrate those wins instead. So small steps add up to big wins over time. So, therefore, I invite you to reflect on what we talked about today and pick one thing to try. Maybe you want to incorporate feedback you give frequently into your rubrics. Kind of rewrite those rubrics a little bit to save you time. Or maybe you're excited about creating a database of feedback in your lms. Or maybe you want to give audio feedback a try. Pick just one thing and commit to trying it for at least two weeks. Longer is even better. And give yourself permission to adjust the strategies to work for you. You can do this. I'll see you next Tuesday.