Get your students to mark it for you!! Great tips :)

This post was also shared on The Staff Room

We all know that peer and self assessment is the best way to ensure that our students are truly reflecting on their progress. It's with self and peer evaluation that helps young students learn how to assess their efforts and achieve the highest level of thinking; evaluation. 

What do you think? How do you feel? What do you think you have improved? How have you improved since your last attempt? Was your outcome successful? If so, how? If not, why? 

Not only is self evaluation crucial, peer evaluation offers our students the opportunity to learn how to provide supportive and constructive feedback to others. A necessary skill needed in employment.

It can be very challenging to implement this with our timetable demands. How can we find the time to do this?

Tip 1 - train your students in a few weeks with this simple key! Symbols are quick and easy to complete. Older students can spend more time writing reflection statements whilst younger children can use these as early as KS1.

Tip 2 - Once your students have completed this process, mark their reflections. This allows your feedback to be related to their opinion, making your marking more meaningful. PLUS, this also makes marking quicker and easier for you as they have already outlined and labelled the key above so you don't have to.

Tip 3 - Give your students time to read your marking! I call this R2M (respond to marking). As soon as my children see 'R2M' on the board, they know to sit down with their books, read my marking, make improvements where necessary and finally they sign it to show they have read it. Otherwise, if we don't allow our students time to do this...what is the point in marking? 

QUESTION - There are many different ways to do this. This is just one of them! What do you do? Let us know :)