Lazy Teaching - Marking Less, Assessing More

For years I have said I am a Lazy Teacher. By this I don’t mean that I don’t spent hours planning and developing resources. I mean that in my classroom I want to be working less than my students. Instead of standing at the front of the room imparting my wisdom to my classes, usually I can be found sat at my desk or walking around my students whilst they put together their notes or practise the skill we are focusing on.

That’s not to say there aren’t times when I don’t revert to default, but I am trying to make those times as few as possible and find ways where the students are more engaged in the process of learning instead of passively absorbing information.

Our students here at Markham are really good at memorising facts and regurgitating them on and exam paper to score well, but do they understand the content? I feel strongly that unless we can teach our students to think independently, we are doing them a disservice. Surveys of universities in recent years have highlighted that they are looking for students who have good transferable skills, not those who can score 100% in a test. The modern world is changing faster than we can imagine and the skills required by our current P6s when they reach the workforce will be different that those currently required. We need to teach our students to think independently if we are to give them the best chances to succeed.

Now don’t get me wrong, Lazy teaching is labor intensive, it requires more preparation and constant reflection to work well. It just looks like less work. One technique that can be used is flipping the classroom. This technique involves setting the student an assignment to complete at home where they cover the content so that in class you can focus on practice. While our set up with regards to homework makes this impossible for all lessons, I find it a useful tool to introduce new concepts and ideas. Then in class students can discuss their ideas and I can find out how well students have understood and help correct and misinterpretations a lot more quickly than if I taught the content in a more traditional way. By bringing the practice into the classroom, I can give students more support as they learn new skills, rather than leaving them to do so when they are at home and isolated from their peers. It also allows time for more group work and students discussing their ideas and supporting each other. I find that when this happens the more able students become more confident and the less able students more likely to ask for help if it’s only in front of one or two people instead of in a whole class.

Other methods I use as a Lazy Teacher include chunking and spaced retrieval. I use these two techniques in conjunction with each other since I find that they compliment each other. By teaching small chunks of material to a class, I cut down on my time infront of students and by using spaced retrieval I build on and give students time to practise their skills. Before I move onto a new chunk I check students understand and give them an opportunity to ask questions to consolidate their knowledge. By doing this I have found that they not only want to do more problems (balancing equations, determine formulae, etc) than they did previously but they have a better idea about their areas of strength and weakness and come to me asking for help in specific areas whereas before they did not.

The subtitle of this article is marking less and assessing more. I hate marking. It's always at the bottom of my To-Do list. Yes, there are times that it can't be avoided but there are many times when it can, at least in my opinion. I still give quizzes, but now I use a site like quizizz which not only marks the quizzes for me but it also highlights which questions all my students had problems with so I can focus on these areas. Not only this, it jumbles the order of the questions and the answers so no two students take identical quizzes but still answer the same questions.

As a department we have sat down and tried to think of the key skills we need students to have and which areas we feel it is essential to assess them on. So now instead of them just handing in lab reports we also give them a practical assessment where they are assessed on how well they carry out an experiment and analyse their data, not just on how well they can follow a rubric. Controversially, to some people, we have eliminated past paper based tests. Students now are given the same questions as homeworks throughout the whole of IGCSE (we still use end of topic tests in IB) and again I don’t mark these. Students discuss the answers in groups and then I check to see if there are any questions they still don't understand and as a class we go through them as a whole. This cuts out that brain numbing hour going over a test where I talk over the answers and students switch off. Now they focus on the areas they have problems with.

This is still a work in progress. But I have seen an improvement with student engagement as I switch my classes so that they help lead the narrative. All students are happier asking for help than before. Students are better able to explain their reasoning and they get to spend more time practising skills instead of copying or staring blankly at a board whilst I try to enthuse them with my passion for Chemistry. Now I find they are often desperate to show me what they know. And I feel I am achieving my goal of having people respond “chemistry was my favorite subject at school; it was hard but my teacher made it easy” when I say I am a Chemistry teacher.

Chemistry is a subject that many people find hard. In fact the most common reaction I have when I say I teach chemistry is “Chemistry is so hard, I hated it in school” but I feel it doesn’t have to be. It’s all down to how we engage our students. And I do this by being a Lazy Teacher.