How Teachers Can Stay on Top of Grading

The job of a teacher seems to never be done. Between making lesson plans, organizing your room, meeting with parents and doing paperwork, a teacher can easily work over 50-60 hours a week. One of the most challenging parts of their job is the daily responsibility of grading papers. Grading papers seems to take tons of time. There are however things you can do to stay on top of this job and make it easier. Here are a few ideas.

Don't let papers pile up. It's easier said then done, but don't let your papers pile up. If you let them pile up you will dread grading them and are likely not to get the work done. A good habit to develop is to grade papers the same day you assign them. This takes discipline to do, but you will feel so much better about not having stacks of papers to grade.

Who says you have to grade everything? The reality is you don't have to grade every paper. Especially at the elementary level, you will have lots of written work that will be for practice. I like the Idea of deciding at the beginning of the week which papers will really be for grades and which will only be for practice. This is especially effective if you are grading workbook pages for reading and language. For middle school teachers, why spend hours just grading homework. Here is an idea; At the beginning of class have all students place their homework on their desk. Walk by each desk and then check each paper quickly just to see if students completed the work(this should not take long at all). Then give students the correct answers. Homework is for practice and therefore should be treated as practice.

Allow students to help you. If your students are old enough let them help you with your grading. Students almost always enjoy helping the teacher, and they can be a huge help. Be selective and reserve major assignments to grade yourself. This can be done as a class grading one assignment at a time, or you can select one student to do a set of papers themselves.

Stay organized. Keep your papers organized. Stay on top of where they are. Develop a system for keeping your papers organized. Time spent looking for papers will add to your frustration and stress.

Limit the amount of written work you assign. A great philosophy to adapt is, 'Don't assign it, if it's not important.' Don't give 'busy work.' Assign only the stuff that's important and you won't have as much to grade.

You can't eliminate papers all together but there are lots of things you can do to make the process of grading papers much easier!