Never enough time? Thoughts on planning and marking

It was interesting to witness John Hattie's blunt dismissal of the notion of time being a significant barrier to teacher improvement at the London Festival of Education. Faced with a question along the lines of 'how can we improve when we don't have any time to do so?' (it wasn't this exactly but something like it), his response was a combative 'high impact teachers have the same amount of time as the rest'. There was an equally interesting audience response to this – a combination of semi-outraged mini-gasping, along with some tentative applause, illustrating the divisions and depth of feeling that the issue of time creates amongst teachers. Personally, I think it would be bonkers not to recognise the fact that teaching is highly time-pressured and that it's a real challenge to get everything done. That's not to say, however, that we couldn't make significant gains in our teaching by focusing on how we use time: here are some thoughts on two biggies, planning and marking, where I think I used to use time badly, and have learnt to improve.

1. Plan for all activities to be as high-value as possible. A recent example: during a recent training session with @thelazyteacher, Jim Smith shared the simple activity 'Top 5'. To summarise, this involves the students coming up with a 'top 5' in relation to the topic of a lesson, eg Top 5 causes of WW1, useful pieces of French vocabulary in a shoe shop, uses of a brick, quotations to sum up a character, influential artists, whatever. Once the 5 have been formed, they then need to be put in order of importance, the top three explained, and the top one justified. This immediately struck me as a usable idea – perfect for a quick starter or plenary – I am teaching persuasive language to year 10, and thought this would be a good one to do with Top 5 persuasive devices taken from a charity leaflet text. But from a time perspective, that's not very useful – good ideas that take 10 minutes mean I've got another 50 minutes hanging, unplanned.
   
   
   The problem wasn't the activity – it was my initial thinking being drawn to the idea of a 'quick starter', a neat little idea to get them going, a bit of a change to keep their chins up... This is the sort of habitual, activity-led thinking which makes lesson planning hard, and time-consuming - what are they going to do? How can I keep them interested? To fix this, I went back as ever to the simple key principles of AFL – poor, misunderstood, tarnished, maligned, abused, wonderful AFL, and it sorted me out. So, the lesson became focused on 'learning to explain the effect of language devices', I stuck in a couple of very quick models, we formed a success criteria together in class and from that it turned from a quick starter into a complete lesson – actually more than one as I still have the chance to focus on 'justifying' next lesson. We looked at the models, and put time into making the SC, which then allowed us to push ourselves on quality and progress, with useful self and peer assessment and some really impressive work emerging. By reframing my thinking, with minimal extra resourcing, I went from having 10 mins planned and a void to fill, to well over one complete lesson - much more efficient from a time point of view.
   
   
   Here's the lesson - slides 6-15 made up the lesson I've described - you'll see that it's not remotely polished, and you'll also see that Slideshare mucks up my formatting bit when I upload, dunno why. Note to English teachers - TEPE (some stick on an extra E and call it TEPEE - is working a treat as an alternative to PEE - a real winner).

For me, the questions asked by AFL moves learning in the direction of depth, with a focus on quality and striving for excellence, and it means that more or less any activity – a table, a graph, a diary, a storyboard, even a poster – can turn from a low-value filler to a high-value, rich learning experience with very little time in the planning and resourcing required. I've blogged about this before so will stop going on about it, aside from concluding that it's learning to improve AFL which has helped me to plan better lessons much more quickly than was the case a few years ago. Which brings me to the bit that, in my view, is much harder to complete quickly: the marking.


2) Marking to the x10 principle. Simply, this is the idea that for every minute we put into marking each individual book or piece of work, students should be asked to spend a minimum of 10 times that amount of time in responding to the feedback. If I mark a book or essay for 5 minutes, the students should be working for 50 minutes in response. This means that we have to build tasks in to the feedback, something most easily, and often most usefully achieved by using the three little words 'do this again', alongside advice on how to improve. Other approaches might be asking students to re-draft certain passages / aspects of work, to use elearning resources to provide direct instruction before having another go, or to complete a similar, related task as long as it allows them to put their targets into action. But I like 'do it again' best of all.