Is Grading Essays Causing You To Burn Out?

Is Grading Essays Causing You To Burn Out?

#1 GRADING HACK FOR ARGUMENT ESSAYS and CONSTRUCTED RESPONSE

What is the greatest cause of burnout among ELA teachers? You guessed it! GRADING ESSAYS! No wonder! Teachers spend hours carefully determining what needs improved, crafting

feedback that students will understand, and writing or typing it all out by hand, only to have students ignore it. It’s maddening. But feedback is absolutely vital to help improve student writing.

So, how can a teacher navigate the feedback conundrum without destroying sanity?

There is one saving grace. Students tend to make approximately the same 50 content and structure mistakes (this does not include grammar mistakes). So, that means it’s possible to qualify those mistakes (f you’ve been grading long enough) and curate the feedback needed to help students correct those mistakes. Once the feedback is coded, you can simply pop it onto their checkoff rubric and they are responsible to match the code with the feedback and correct the mistake.

Will they actually do it? YES!!! Most students will fix mistakes if they have clear and specific feedback to help them do so. Believe it or not, many students want to write well, and care about the quality of work they produce. They often feel helpless and lost, and this can wrongfully appear to apathy or ineptitude. But it isn’t! Writing is difficult, but given the proper tools, students can do amazing things, and teachers won’t crash and burn!

Here’s how it works:

This is one of the cards. There is a card for each rubric element.

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Teacher (or students peer evaluating) drops the appropriate feedback code into the rubric. If a mistake is not covered by the pre-made feedback, you can write in the boxes.