This week we are looking at how to grade efficiently and swiftly. We've gathered over ten tips to share to help you step away from the pen and back to what matters.

Grading can be a struggle. With long hours, lots of objectives, expectations, and more, grading can wear you down. It is a source of stress for many educators, and creates friction between teachers and parents. Not only that, but when grading gets in the way of family, the situation can become dire.

With these ten grading tips and tricks, plus a few bonus ones, we hope to ease some of your teacher struggles and give you back time.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Grab your holiday activities today!

The holidays will be on the minds of students in November and December so embrace this season within your content areas. You don't have to pause academic practice - you can bring the joy of the season into your curriculum with these tried and true activities from The Colorado Classroom. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/the-colorado-classroom/category-06-holidays-nov-amp-dec-190806

How to Grade Efficiently with 10+ Tips and Tricks

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Ellie: Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Teaching Toolbox Podcast. I'm Ellie, and I'm here with Brittany.

Brittany: Hello.

Ellie: And today we are going to unlock the secrets of swift and efficient grading, giving educators you more time for what you do best teach. Today we've got about 10 tips and strategies to help you simplify and speed up your grading, so stay tuned.

Brittany: Hey Ellie, did you enjoy grading?

Brittany: Yes. Actually every summer would miss grading about mid-July.

Ellie: Oh boy.

Brittany: And so I would start to want to go back to school,

which is very sad.

Ellie: No, that's great.

Brittany: But in the long run I did not really enjoy grading. You know, I did like to see the growth and the analytics. I love data,

Ellie: Mm-Hmm.

Ellie: Mm.

Brittany: So I, I just didn't enjoy that part. And in my early years, I could spend from around eight or 9:00 PM until three or four in the morning grading.

Ellie: my gosh.

Wow.

Brittany: I wasn't getting a lot of sleep.

Ellie: No, you can't function that And this is one of those things that makes our teacher's jobs so difficult is trying to figure out how to, how to fit in all the grading, how to make the grading go more quickly how to decide what to grade.

Brittany: Exactly.

Ellie: So that's where we've got some good tips today.

Brittany: Yes.

Ellie: What would like to start with?

And it made it really fast.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm.

Brittany: You could do it on the right hand side if you're, maybe if you're left-handed, you could do it on the right hand side. Or you just don't want answers mishmash around the page. 'cause it can just, that takes a lot of time just hunting for answers.

And so you just wanna, you want to have all the answers, like in a line, ready to go in a column,

just let it, let the answers flow out and just go

Brittany: Yes. Yeah. , what about you? What's something you would like to do one thing

it?

Ellie: I liked to do, especially if I had multiple pages in an assessment, was do one page at a time. So all of page one, then all of page two, then all of page three for every single student. And that way I kind of me memorize the answers as you're going, you know what they are. And if you're only memorizing, say the 10. Questions on the first page, then doing all of the first page makes it faster. It's, it's kind of like not task switching because you're sticking with one page, one task over and over and over again.

And it might have been, you know, maybe more. Times touching a student's paper because you're doing one question at a time, but it was ended up being more efficient for me.

So then you do have to hunt for those key points that you're looking for. And then you're also looking for like sentence structure and punctuation and spelling maybe, and you know, grammar, correct grammar and that sort of thing. And so when you're doing all that, you do wanna keep those criteria fresh in your head and so you don't wanna switch and then go back and be like, wait, what was I, did I, did I count spelling in this one?

Did I count? Yeah. And so, yeah, doing all those problems first or at one time makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yep. Yeah,

I would do the same thing.

Ellie: When I started doing that, that really cut down.

Brittany: Same here.

Ellie: yeah.

Brittany: It was a big help.

Ellie: For sure. Yeah.

Brittany: Yeah I, would do that occasionally too, or sometimes I would even kind of like pre grade it. Hmm. I would let kids turn it into me. This is when I taught math. I would let kids turn it into me and I would skimm it real quick. And I would say, you know, you might wanna look over page two again, you have some errors on page two, but I wouldn't tell them what was wrong.

Brittany: And so they had to go find it and.

Ellie: Oh, that's great.

Brittany: My daughter in college, her math teacher actually does the same thing.

And so I was interested to find that out

last semester when she took math that she actually does the same thing. So that was kind of, that was kind of interesting that in college she's choosing to do that method as well.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm. yeah.

Brittany: And that kind of helps when when they do finally turn it in, done, done, because then you might have less to grade because maybe they found their errors and now you know more are correct and you have less corrections to make and explanations to write and

Ellie: mm-Hmm.

Brittany: feedback to give and all of that.

You know, we didn't do so hot on fractions last week, or the kids didn't know their capitals last week or whatever. Then you can just pick out, I'm gonna grade, you know, number three, number six and number 10 off this warmup or, or whatever, and not grade all 10 problems. Then that's gonna save you a lot of time as well.

Ellie: Right. Definitely. Awesome. All right, so those are some great streamlining tips. How about an organizational tip or two, do you have any organizational strategies that you used?

Brittany: I I like to alphabetize my students' papers when I grade,

Ellie: Okay.

Brittany: And and then I would actually also have a sheet that I made. It was a little half sheet that. It would have all the students' names on it.

At the very top. It would have the assignment name and the number of points possible it might have, and it would have the date, it would have, like if there was a snow day or absences and that sort of thing down on the side. And then I could put the students' scores next to their name.

Ellie: Okay.

And then on the right hand side, next to the student's name, I had a place for notes where I could write, you know, maybe had trouble with division or . Had trouble with the essay problem.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm

Brittany: Doesn't understand how to, uh, the rules of ie.

Ellie: Okay. Okay.

Brittany: So I could put any kinda note I wanted on the side or I gave them an extension for three days, you know, something like that.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm.

Brittany: That little half sheet was just like this. Golden re receipt paper for me where I just, and then I would just keep those all year long in case there was ever a question or anything.

Brittany: Yeah. Yeah.

Ellie: That's great.

Brittany: What about you? What's an organizational strategy you would use in the classroom for grading?

Ellie: Sometimes just using color by numbers or color by codes kind of thing makes grading really easy. And so you can actually, you can grade the student's answer sheet in a similar way. To what we talked about because there's a specific spot to put each answer. So it's pretty easy to find them that way. Or you can grade the actual pattern and look at their pattern and see if their pattern matches your pattern. Answer key. And that makes it really fast and easy. So you can see, okay, they got, this one was Red instead of purple. What problem was that? And then you can quickly go to that problem and identify what they may have done wrong in that one. So that's really, it's organizational in a way, but it's also using a specific activity to kind of drive that organization.

Yeah.

And color by codes can be used in so many different subjects.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm. so, Right, right.

Yeah. I have a couple I had for language arts, for parts of speech and things like that.

Brittany: Yeah. And you've got a lot for math, as do I and

Yeah. History. And I know there's some out there for science, so

Ellie: right. right.

Brittany: Grab a color by code. Yep.

Ellie: Great. So how about grading choices? We talked a little bit earlier about maybe you don't have to grade every single question, but what other grading choices might we be able to make to make grading more efficient, more strategic?

Brittany: So I didn't learn this tip until a few years in

to my teaching career, but not grading every set of papers.

Ellie: Uh oh.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm.

Brittany: When I was just very stressed out and very overwhelmed with everything going on in the classroom, I had my curriculum director show up at my door and go over to my stack of grading, which was probably about a foot high.

Ellie: No.

Brittany: And she went through and she took like four sets of papers out and just took them away from me, , and tried to explain to me that papers can go in the circular file. IE the trashcan

Ellie: Mm-Hmm.

Brittany: And luckily she just took them away and disappeared with them because if she would've put them in my trash can, being the highly

Ellie: Mm-Hmm. .

Brittany: if those papers disappeared. And so

Ellie: right.

Brittany: that helped me a lot that day because I, I could see that . I could throw things away and they were still going to get an accurate view of how they performed

Ellie: Yeah,

Brittany: be. Yeah.

Ellie: that reminds me my gosh, maybe my third or fourth year of teaching. I was teaching with my fifth grade teacher and

Brittany: How cute.

What were you thinking on this one? What, what do you notice? About this just to get more into their mind instead of what's on their paper.

So, you know, thinking about grading in maybe a little bit different way, and that you don't have to have grade after grade, after grade after grade to understand where a student is.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm.

Brittany: instead of just piling more papers on your desk.

Ellie: right? Yeah,

for sure. feel like I.

I always learned more about what my students were thinking by walking around and stopping in and, you know, say, oh, you know, what are you doing here? What are you thinking here?

What? And they're willing to share. They're willing to tell you what they're thinking, and you learn more about them than you would from what they wrote on their paper.

Brittany: Mm-Hmm.

Ellie: I mean, maybe not especially in math, but definitely in math

Brittany: Yeah.

Brittany: Yeah.

Ellie: every single part of an assignment.

Brittany: Yeah. And you can get like little stamps at like teacher stores or online and stuff that say only graded for.

And then it has different check boxes, or you can fill in a blank that says what you graded for. So if you're worried about parents being upset about what you know, why is there spelling so bad on this paper?

Why didn't you, you know, correct all their spelling.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm.

Brittany: You've got at the top only graded for punctuation or only graded for introduction. You know,

Brittany: Yes. That's a great idea. And we would actually do that. ' cause our history teacher and our language arts teacher were different.

Ellie: Okay.

Brittany: And we would actually just pass the paper from teacher to teacher.

Ellie: Oh, great. Okay.

Brittany: And that actually saved the kids some work too, instead of having to do double work.

Ellie: Mm-Hmm? .

Just looking for those kind of problems. Choose one, two, or three and just check those ones. . So,

Ellie: Right.

Brittany: I did think of another one as we were talking. I would grade orally sometimes,

Ellie: Okay.

Brittany: In history class. I had my students learn their countries and capitals.

Ellie: Okay. Mm-Hmm.

Brittany: And as they worked on their interactive notebooks at their desk we would have a testing week and I would take maybe five or six kids a day and bring them back to my desk and really quietly I would give them a country or a capital and they would have to tell me.

The country or capital that it belonged to.

And so grading orally, you're done right then

Ellie: Right, right.

Ellie: Oh, that's fantastic.

Brittany: So that saved a lot of time.

Ellie: That's great.

Awesome.

Brittany: So that's kind of a grading choice as well.

Ellie: Right. That's excellent

Brittany: All right.

So today we've delved into grading with efficiency and precision. We've explored the art of stream lining your grading process, mastering organizational strategies, making effective grading choices. And so this week we'd like you to try taking one of those strategies from the list of 10 plus we gave you and add it to your repertoire.

Let us know if it helps you at Teaching Toolbox Podcast.

Ellie: If you want any more support and grading ideas, you can find some of these ideas in my post about grading. Have a great week.

Brittany: Bye.

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