Speaker 1: Grading is my least favorite teaching task. Well, so is sitting in a boring PD. But grading is something that you have to do regularly. Today, I'm sharing some tips on how to get your grading done quickly so that it's not sitting there taunting you all week. Welcome back, I'm Rachel Vincent and I share tips on how to run an effective and efficient classroom so that you can get more done and still have time to teach. Tip number one is to grade as you go. If it's possible, I like to actually grade students' work as they turn it into me. But that's not always possible because sometimes I am helping students on the assignment. So what this often looks like for me is I am grading a little bit each day. This keeps me from having a giant stack of papers to grade at the end of the week. I am much more likely to grade something if I have one assignment or just a few papers to grade than instead of if I have a large stack with multiple assignments to grade. It just feels less overwhelming when I have just a little bit to grade each day. The second tip is to grade one page at a time. Now, obviously, this is for assignments with multiple pages. Instead of taking one paper and grading each page for that one student and then writing the grade on it, I like to do everybody's first page. So page one, I'm grading every student in my classes page one at once. This makes grading go quickly. It allows your brain to focus on certain answers. This works great with multiple choice, but it also is helpful with short answer type questions because what you're doing is you are only thinking about the answers for a smaller number of problems. And so once you get down the first few, you actually speed up because you know what the answers are. Then after you've graded everybody's page one, you turn the page and grade everybody's page two. So then after you've gone through everybody's pages, then the last step is to go through and count everyone's missed questions and put the grade on it. Tip number three is don't grade everything. Just because you assign it to your students doesn't necessarily mean you need to grade it. Often I will give an assignment that I'm just really checking informally to see if my students can do it. I do this a lot during math. When they are practicing a skill, I will walk around and check and help and they'll recorrect and things like that. And I will put check marks and circle things they need to fix. And then when they finish, I'll have them go put it in the turnip bin and I'll file it and send it home so that parents see we're practicing this and I have looked at it but it is not an actual grade. Basically what I do is I look at the number of graded assignments that I'm required to have and that is all I grade. Everything else is just practice and yes I'll check it or I'll have students check themselves and I will send it home but I don't grade anything that I don't need above my district's requirements. Tip number four is to do more informal grading. This is similar to what I do with math but you can also do in other subject areas. You can go around with a clipboard and just sort of mark off students who have the skills, students who need more practice, students who you want to pull for small groups. You can have students work on the assignments and then go over the answers together as a class afterwards so that students can check their own work. You do not have to grade everything to know if a student understands a topic. Tip number five is to grade only a couple of questions. This works particularly well in math when students are working on a skill. If you assign students 20 multiplication problems you know within the first five to ten problems if they know how to multiply or not. So why either why assign 20 problems when 10 is enough or don't grade them all. Grade enough till you know if they have mastered the skill or not. And the final tip is what I call file 13. Yes file 13 is the recycling bin. I try often as the teacher not to give assignments unless I know that I want them to practice or that I'm going to grade it. But there are times when a lesson doesn't take quite as long or your students need that extra practice but you don't necessarily need the grade or even want to send it home. So there are times when those papers go into the recycling bin and I know some of my students watch this. Yes sometimes your teachers throw away your papers but most of the time we don't so you should always do your best. File 13 is only in those cases when you realize you don't necessarily need the work or maybe it's just one of those things like a word search or something fun that you gave your students that you don't necessarily need to send home to parents. Grading papers is actually only one step to the entire process of when you decide what you're going to give your students, to making copies, to giving it to them, to them turning it in, all the steps. There's actually about seven to eight steps. So click on the video that's on your screen now to see how I organize each of those steps. I'll see you over there.