Education methods classes didn’t prepare us for this, did they? They probably didn’t want us to walk out when we learned how horrible grading essays would be.
Yes, grading essays will BREAK YOU as a teacher if you let it. I taught for 13 years in a small Catholic school. Teaching AP Lit and English 11 meant covering American Lit, Brit Lit, Poetry, Composition, Reading, you name it. I taught it all! And for the first 5 years or so, I did what most new English teachers do. I took home massive stacks of essays every other weekend, filled them up with comments and corrections, wrote 1,000s of margin notes and end-of-essay notes, and then handed them back to 120 students each year who barely glanced at them and often threw them on the floor or in the trash within 10 minutes of getting them back.
If this sounds familiar to you and you want it to stop, keep reading…
I was losing my mind and wanting to quit, and producing feedback that was getting ignored and tossed in a recycling bin was part of the problem. So I stopped doing that. I figured out better ways to do things, and I’m going to share those ways with you, now, because you deserve your nights and weekends back! Student essays should not consume ANYONE’S life, not even yours, English teacher!
Start with the Paragraph, Not the Essay
The most important change you can make is this one: stop assigning full essays until your students can write a body paragraph.
I know that sounds obvious, but it really isn’t because I was (and I bet many of you were) assigning 3-5-page essays to students who couldn’t even write body paragraph number one.
Asking them to make a claim and then support it with evidence was a crazy thing to do when they didn’t even know what a CLAIM was or how to incorporate evidence or flesh out an idea. We wonder why we get 120 terrible essays that feel like many versions of one confused and tangled essay over and over again…
After a few years, I realized I needed to slow down and go back to square one. I couldn’t assume they knew how to write an essay, even if they did write 3 or 4 the year before. I started the school year spending time on body paragraphs: claims, evidence, analysis, transitions, you know the drill. And guess what? Everything got so much better.
I would assign just ONE paragraph about The Scarlet Letter, and then I’d grade just ONE key skill when I received those paragraphs. Then we’d do another with the next chapter chunk. For example, can you find strong evidence to support your claim? Great, you get 5/5 points! Yay. Tomorrow, I’ll grade whether you used in-text citations correctly and led into your quotes well. Next week, I’ll look at your analysis. Can you tell me why your quote matters and what it proves rather than just restating what it shows? This was my new method…
GRAB MY SCARLET LETTER UNIT HERE!
Then, by the time my students sat down to write a FULL essay on Frankenstein later in the year, they weren’t clueless and producing slop. They had practiced the building blocks of the essay for WEEKS, and they knew that an essay was just a bunch of tasks they KNEW how to do, but now strung together. Suddenly, I had 120 much better essays, so I could grade much faster. EVERYONE was much less miserable!
If your students can tackle body paragraphs, they can scale up. Teach these skills BEFORE assigning whole essays. It’ll change your life AND help students TRULY LEARN to write.
Need related lessons?
- Body Paragraph Practice Lessons and Activities
- CER Paragraph Sentence Starters
- Body Paragraph “How-To” Handouts (CER Method)
- Rubrics for GRADING Paragraphs (Paragraph-Only Grading!!)
Need essay-teaching materials for a WHOLE essay?
- PowerPoint/Google Slides Lessons: How to write Literary Critical and Literary Analysis Essays (Essays about Books, Plays, or Stories)
- How-to-Guide for Writing Essays
- Lessons for Teaching AP Lit Essays
Grade One Thing at a Time
I know your rubric has six categories. What if you weren’t married to that rubric? Why not try using only 1 or 2 of the columns at a time?
When I want to save time (especially when grading practice body paragraphs, but you can do this with whole essays, too, especially if you do a lot of them), I will pick 1-2 things to focus on, and I’ll grade just those things. It’s just not realistic to ask students to focus on and improve 10 things all at once. Plus, we all know it’s VERY HARD to grade 10 things on 120 essays without losing our sanity and losing our free time.
Single (or 2)-Trait grading actually helps you be more focused and intentional about your teaching and your assessment time. If you are asking students to do revisions, focusing in on one thing, like “Your claims are vague; they don’t zero in on what you are arguing…” means your students know what to work on and will actually REMEMBER the lesson of your feedback after focusing on and revising that bit of their work.
On the other hand, if you hand back a paper covered in notes and comments about ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING, from evidence to transitions to conclusions, to comma splices, your students are less likely to learn from fixing their errors and more likely to not even try a revision because they are overwhelmed.
Less feedback, yes, but it’s more useful feedback.
And look, NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS A GRADE. Sometimes, writing is practice. Sometimes, writing is thinking aloud on paper. If you let it be that and just give a few encouraging comments and a completion grade, that might be worth more to a student than a rubric score out of 100 with 59 discrete skills being addressed.
Need a rubric? Try these!
Make Your Students Do Some of the Work
Color-coding may sound babyish to those of you who teach high school. I do not care. It works, and you should try it…
Before looking at your students’ work, have them go over their own essays with colored pencils or a variety of highlighter colors (or markers). I would have my students do their thesis and claims in yellow, their evidence in green, analysis (reasoning) in purple, and transitions in blue. Then I could flip through their first drafts and see quickly where they might have an imbalance or a missing piece. (I advised that they should have about 50/50 evidence and analysis, or even lean toward 40/60.) Often, they had WAY not enough analysis, or the highlighting would reveal to them how LITTLE evidence they’d used…
This activity does a few things: first, it forces kids to actually READ THEIR OWN WRITING, which is not something many of them will do unless you MAKE them do it. Second, it cuts your grading time WAY down because you don’t need to go looking for a claim or for their analysis when they’ve highlighted it for you. This helps a LOT with immature writers, confused writers, and writers who lack organizational skill. If you teach writers who give you essays that make your head HURT trying to figure them out, THIS is the tip/practice you need to try ASAP!!
You can also do student self-assessment using a rubric before they submit a final draft (or a first draft–whatever you want to do is fine).
Of course, this doesn’t perfectly fix everything for you. Some kids will give themselves 5/5 on everything every time, even when they’ve written what I call a “disasterpiece.” But most kids, especially if you go over the rubric with them as an in-class lesson and teach them what each column means, will give themselves a pretty honest score. Plus, you can always have a little chat with kiddos who wildly overrate their work…
The point is this: reflecting on our writing is a skill, and ELA teachers should be TEACHING it and REQUIRING it in their classrooms. Make it worth POINTS, too. I like to give 10+ points for color coding or rubric assessment that students do. This serves to make them put in more effort and take the task more seriously 🙂
Looking for fun essay assignments? Try these!
Feedback Students Will Actually See (or Hear)!
Here’s a truth nobody told you when you were in college: it’s not just the most disengaged students who throw their work in the trash after you hand it back. Most students do not read your written comments. I know. It hurts. I’m sorry. They look at the grade, feel some type of way about the grade, and then stuff the paper somewhere. 99% of them will never look at it again unless you make them. You know it’s true. You’ve seen it happen.
So why not do things differently? I did…
Sometimes, I’d pull up a sample essay (without names) on my projector, and we’d comment on it and edit it as a class. Everybody could see the problems I was seeing across 120 papers, and I wouldn’t need to write those comments 99 times. Everyone could see me think aloud about the writing and comment on it right there on the screen.
Read more about this strategy here and here.
I also started recording short audio feedback for some assignments. I did this on a whim when I saw that Canvas (and Turnitin) allowed me to do it, and guess what I found? A ninety-second voice note is faster to record than typing the same information for my students, and my students actually listen to it because it feels more real, personal, and interesting to them.
They can hear ME talking TO THEM. It makes them feel special and involves them more in a weird way. Plus, it FEELS easier to them to listen to a quick comment than to read through written comments, and the novelty of it draws them in. Why NOT click the “listen” button? Right?
The goal has always been the same: we want our students to be able to (and want to) ACT on our feedback. They should be using it somehow to learn, grow, and mature as writers. If a comment I wrote was confusing to them or vague or buried in between too many other comments, or just too LONG for them to read, they weren’t going to read it, and then they DEFINITELY WEREN’T going to act on that feedback, so I was wasting my time. Let’s not do that anymore!
Not Everything Needs Feedback
When I tried to give comprehensive feedback on every piece of writing my students produced, I was driving myself nuts. I often came home from work, fell asleep until 7 or 8 pm, and then was up until 4 or 5 am grading! It was terrible! And forget about having a weekend to myself. I felt like I was being a “good teacher,” but it wasn’t something I could keep doing forever.
I tried things like grading in small batches and taking a break every 30 minutes. I had comment banks I could copy and paste with feedback on bland hooks, dropped quotes, and lack of analysis. I didn’t have to write out the same comment 120 times. These practices helped. They REALLY helped. But the game changer was making peace with the fact that I could not (and would no longer try to) respond to every problem in every piece of writing.
Some writing is there for kids to practice, for them to build a writing habit and grow those writing muscles. Sometimes, the feedback kids’ writing needs is simply, “Keep it up! Keep writing!” Not everything they write needs a full analysis in color-coded awesomeness from yours truly! Sometimes, it’s okay to put a fun sticker at the top of the work, write one nice comment at the end, and hand that ish back!!
The Bottom Line
Thirteen years. Thousands of students. Tens of thousands of essays. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Our students learn to write and grow as writers by writing. A LOT. They improve through feedback, but only when they A) Understand it, and B) Can USE it (preferably right away or very soon). We CANNOT give “meaningful feedback” on everything. So STOP TRYING! Instead, be strategic about where you put your energy.
Build skills step by step, ensure the students know what you’re asking of them and have been taught (BY YOU) how to do it, even if you think they learned it before. Then, assess what you taught, and focus in on KEY BITS you emphasized, not every little thing. Last, make the students participate in the assessment of their work in a way that works for you and doesn’t add to your load. (As in, stop assigning reflections that then ADD to what you have to read through and grade!!!)
We became English teachers because we loved our content area, we loved learning, and we loved helping young people. Protect your love for the craft, your love for the profession, your love for working with students. A grading system that respects your time is worth the world. You aren’t slacking. You aren’t lazy. It’s ok.
Now, feel like you can enjoy the weekend? YES YOU CAN! So go do it!
Connect with Me!
What’s working in your classroom? How do you make grading faster and easier? How do you grade/assess/give feedback on essays?
Drop a comment below to help other teachers reading this blog!
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About the Author: Carly Lamp has taught English 11/English III (American Lit) for 13 years & AP Literature for 10 years. She creates thorough, thoughtful, and rigorous materials, units, and resources for high school English teachers through both her blog and her TPT store (both named English with Mrs. Lamp). She LOVES teaching writing and helping new teachers and homeschool parents teach with confidence!
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