Keeping Marking Simple in the Face of Complexity

 Year 7 have been writing about food they like and don't like. This is another classic example of where the teacher's focus and the pupils' focus are miles apart. Making marking the work almost impossible.

Remember when we were teaching pets and I told the class that we won't be doing chien, tortue, chat, oiseau for the next 5 years. But un / une and j'ai / je n'ai pas de are going to be important for ever? Well. Pupils still remember chien, tortue, chat and still mangle un, une, j'ai, je n'ai pas de. Is this bad? Should I cover their work in red ink, issue corrections, use codes in the margin to indicate spelling or gender infractions, and give a mark out of 10 for (in)accuracy?

No. I don't worry about this. It's interesting and important to notice. But clearly it is an absolutely natural feature in how language learning works. And I definitely do not want to end up with pupils who are not focused on meaning and on saying things they want to say.

This particular writing assessment at the end of the unit on Food and Drink, is haunted by this piece of work:

This is from three years ago (post on it here). You can see that the pupil has written almost nothing. And his comment underneath is that, "I was so worried about the / some, I didn't write a lot." And indeed almost every word for the (le, la, les) and some (du, de la, de l', des) is wrong. It's painful. But the real point is that it turned into an obstacle.

It made me think about exactly what are we testing in this assessment. I definitely want pupils to be using opinions: j'aime, je n'aime pas, j'adore... and some connectives: et, mais, parce que, par exemple... I want them to remember the words for foods. I think that's not problematic.

But the main things I want to see are not exactly language related. I want to see: 

• Pupils enjoying expressing themselves. 
• Pupils starting to link, contrast and develop ideas. 
• Pupils working increasingly independently, using resources only when needed.

So these are the features we mark for.

You can see the pupil's comment and the tick box at the bottom are focused on the level of support they needed. Or in this case, didn't need. And my comment is focused on how they are starting to link ideas.

You can also see that the le, la, les, du, de la, des is hit and miss. There are a couple of points here. Firstly, if I am saying to them that for the next five years, we are not going to be writing about food, just as we are not going to be writing about pets, then how much time do I want to be putting into demanding they know if beurre is masculine or feminine? Not much. So this piece of writing is interesting in that it shows whether or not the le / la is being picked up by ear as we see some of these words. Or are there patterns absorbed unconsciously so that, for example, it's rare for a pupil to say le pizza or la chocolat. Is that because they've heard it so many times? Or because there's a pattern?

You might say that there's a question of understanding being revealed. Yes. A pupil who puts le fraises or jai'me shows that they are not constructing their French from logical grammatical thought. But that understanding isn't going to be put right by some red ink. Suddenly and magically made a priority. In fact if we talked about le and les, then it may well turn out there is no misunderstanding. It is simply that they are not constructing the sentence from atomised grammatical elements. They are saying/writing chunks of French that come to them naturally to express something they want to say. If that's what's happening when learners use their language, then I would be a fool to pretend that their French is coming from a faulty grammatical assembly line that I need to fix, and to discard their writing as a flawed product that has to be recalled because some of the pieces aren't correctly assembled.

I can address le / les and j'aime, but this is going to be a long process, not a quick fix.

What if a pupil, like the example at the top of this post, was focused on the le, la, les to such an extent that they couldn't write. Well, first of all: well done that pupil for caring about the accuracy. If you really care that much, then you may well be the one who does learn it. In fact, here is what he wrote when I let him use his booklet to check the genders:

So that was my plan for this year. I would encourage all pupils to write as much as they could without using their booklets for support. And if any pupil asked about le / la, I would tell them I would let them check at the end before handing it in. To write without the booklet, putting what felt right, and then checking at the end.

How many pupils out of two classes asked me what they should do about getting gender right? One. One pupil in his first sentence said, "Sir, I don't know if it's le or la." None of the others were bothered.

Even more interestingly... As they finished, I said to them all, "Well done if you've done it without using your booklet. Now I do want you all to check one thing. Every time you have written le or la or les, I want you to use your booklet and check you put the right one."

What do you think happened?

You can see in their comments at the bottom, it clearly says, "I didn't use my booklet except when Sir told me to check le and la." Now look at le and la in their writing. Even when they check, it's not working. This isn't something we deal with by using red ink. It's a long and slow learning process of adjusting focus and attention, without making it an obstacle to self expression.

That would be a good place to stop. But I have one more to show you because it brings home the complexity of marking accuracy versus expression.

Here we have a pupil who wants to express himself, develop and link ideas and challenge himself to work independently. From an accuracy point of view, he has made some terrible mistakes. He has written je boisson eau minerale and je manger la pizza. Am I going to pull this apart for being terrible grammar and give him a low mark?

Of course not. Seen in the wider context of his language-learning trajectory, this is perfect. Firstly he is exploring the limitations of his language. Using the word for "a drink" to try to say "I drink". So this is someone engaged with expressing himself in the language. As exemplified by how his paragraphs are the most coherent and logical, with things like, "For breakfast I would like to eat a pain au chocolat but normally I eat omelets because I love eggs". And secondly, he is anticipating exactly the grammar we will be looking at next. How verbs end in er in the infinitive and how you change the ending when you conjugate the verb.

The comments on the work need to reflect an appreciation of his glorious effort and carefully manage his understanding that when you try a tricky skateboard move, you are more likely to fall off than if you keep it simple. 

So how do I mark the writing?

Firstly, clear criteria:

• Challenge yourself to use the booklet as little as possible.
• Express yourself and your opinions.
• Show off as much of the French you know as possible.
• Think about how ideas link.

Secondly, engage the pupils in commenting on these aspects. This is not for show or in a funny coloured ink. It's genuinely targeted reflection and part of a long term process of becoming aware of priorities. It's an opportunity to shape their thinking and encourage them to take control and be positive about their language-learning. And it is high quality information that allows me to understand how they wrote the piece and what their thoughts are.

Thirdly, my comments engage with theirs and engage with longer term learning, not just this piece. But my comments on the page (in my horrible handwriting) are not as important as what I say and do in the classroom as a result of reading their work. The main recipient of feedback from the pupils' assessed work is not the pupil. It's the teacher. You can see from this post how much it gives me to reflect on. Imagine if I wrote all this in red ink at the end of the pupils' work!

Fourthly. And definitely in last place. I have to record something in my markbook. It needs to be a shorthand for some of what has been discussed here. It needs to contain information on where the pupil is on their trajectory, allowing me to track individual progress in independence, coherent expression, and accuracy. But of course that doesn't work. Because the pupil who copies from the booklet will be more accurate than the pupil who takes risks and turns boisson into a verb.

What we do currently is record the level of independence. As you can see in the tick box at the end of the page, we are looking to record if pupils are:

• Writing by copying from eg a writing frame in the booklet.
• Writing their own sentences but reliant on finding things in the booklet.
• Writing independently but reliant on having prelearned, memorised material.
• Writing independently.

The idea is that all pupils produce writing of similar quality, reflected in our KPI exemplars. And we record whether they achieved this spontaneously, by memorisation or by using the booklet.

We do need to tweak this. Because pupils DO produce work of differing quality. Especially as almost all pupils challenge themselves to write spontaneously without using their booklet, or only checking at the end. We're going to be talking about this at the next department meeting. I am a fan of simplicity. So I don't think it's going to be useful to attempt to encode all the many possible variations of different combinations of expression, coherence, risk taking, accuracy and all the play-offs between them. I don't want to preempt what the department decide. But I am leaning towards keeping our current method of noting the level of independence, plus a simple + = - code to indicate how successful it was. Because this "marking" part of the whole writing and feedback and engaging with learning process really is the least important.