So the last time I wrote a blog was shamefully long ago and I’m not a new HOD anymore! The ‘new’ bit this year is that now I’m a parent as well as a HOD and that’s a whole new world of challenging and wonderful and exhausting. Without inviting untold hatred from other working parents out there, I’ve been incredibly lucky that little one (increasingly not-so-little one) is healthy and happy and sleeps well, so hasn’t put the immense pressure on me that I see some colleagues go through as a working parent. Maternity leave was blissful (although admittedly occasionally boring) and I hardly thought about school other than to hear occasional updates and catch up with colleagues and their children.
September last year was a real shock to the system, but several months down the line I’m starting to emerge from the fog of just getting-by to consider department leadership more strategically again and actually try to move things forward rather than just survive.
A couple of years ago now I wrote a blog post for History Resource Cupboard about our marking and feedback approach having started using Triple Impact Marking in the department; Blog post can be read here. We were excited and on-board with it and felt it was best for the students and their progress, and optimistic about keeping the workload down of essentially marking everything twice! TIM did see an improvement in student progress and our students’ progress is generally excellent. However, many of the department, and me, had some concerns the further we got into using TIM;
- It is labour and organisation intensive. If some students don’t hand in books, or if your next lesson with them is the next day, or if some of the class is missing, it makes the student upgrading time more challenging. To then look at the work again after students upgrade it means you’ve got to be quite quick on the turnaround and essentially mark the work again from scratch to judge the quality of their upgrading. If a step is missed it makes the whole thing meaningless.
- We found students were increasingly dependent on teacher feedback to move on, and sometimes needed us to essentially ‘read out’ what their code meant before they would work on it. It meant when we wanted to do peer feedback students were not doing this in as meaningful a way.
- We felt we were artificially inflating students’ grades; because we were giving work a grade/step after their upgrading, students were doing really well (but of course they were, we told them what to do!).
We wanted to move to a more realistic process of students reflecting on their own work, which took less time, where students could still upgrade work meaningfully, that took less time for teachers (don’t we all!). So we joined together something that several colleagues have been experimenting with recently after seeing a format for whole-class-feedback shared on twitter by the awesome mrthorntonteach. So the new plan is:
- Students complete an written task in lessons with a clear criteria for success. We felt that here examples of students’ work to model would be more important than before, so have managed to get hold of a visualiser, in order to show students examples of work and we can identify its strengths and next steps.
- Then the teacher collects the work and reads some/all of it (depending on the teacher’s judgement of the nature of the task and the needs of the class). Whilst reading the teacher doesn’t write on any of the work, but does fill in a crib sheet (like the one on Greg Thornton’s page)
- The next lesson the teacher gives whole class feedback and students identify in their own work the targets which are relevant to them. Again the visualiser should be useful here for showing students examples of each others’ work.
- The teacher then marks the upgraded work, giving students a step. How we should do this, whether we give the step immediately, or later, and how, is something I’m still considering; in the ideal world we’d focus just on the next steps and not worry about the grade attached, but that doesn’t fit with what our (and most other) school wants.
The hope is that this new approach, which we’re yet to trial, will give us the best elements of TIM, with students upgrading their work as a matter of routine, but reduce teacher workload, and give students more ownership of the upgrading they’re doing. Fingers crossed!
A year in the life of a new History HOD 