“The Holistic Grading Half-Sheet” – A Downloadable Tool to Make Grading Papers Easier
As a high school writing teacher, I’m especially susceptible to the paper pile. My book chapter, Grading Work Without Hating Work, offers tips for balancing speed with specificity, but I’ve also developed a tool I call “The Holistic Grading Half-Sheet,” which you can download here.
HolisticHalfSheetFromRoxannaElden
How to use it: Customize the form as needed to match what you want from your students. Make a couple hundred copies and cut them in half so you have a big stack of the form on hand at all times. Then, arrange the section of your board or teacher website where you write assignments to match the format of the form. When you give a writing assignment, have students fill in the blanks with the directions you have written, which should focus their attention on following the directions. (The only thing more frustrating than writing the same comment on twenty different papers is reexplaining the directions in your comments on twenty different papers.) Then, when you grade papers, expand or contract your level of feedback as needed. When you want to give students additional guidance, you can write comments on the sheet or directly on the paper. Other times, if an assignment is mostly for review purposes or report card day is right around the corner, you can check off the categories and give a grade that is largely holistic. Either way, the format should stay the same with every assignment so students can get used to it.
(c) 2015 Roxanna Elden
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