Higher English Textual Analysis - how to cut down your marking

Sometimes good ideas are planned, sometime they are instinctive and sometimes they just need to be shared! I (Mark) was teaching in Music Box 1.23 the other day and saw post-it notes with lots of writing on them. I recognised the energy of the students. I had to know more and I knew it was a 'Joyce initiative!' What was all think wonky donkey business I asked myself. I will leave the explanation to Joyce...

I’d like to say I had this planned all along but this lesson emerged from desperation – I was just way too busy to take on any more marking this week.

I knew we had to tackle a ‘proper’ textual analysis before the October break.  To date, we’d been having fun examining the techniques in different texts, and trying out a bit of writing to see how difficult it was.  But now they had to get serious.

I had two options (I thought).  One: Go over a text in class.  (Boring – I hated those days when the teacher did all the work and we had to sit in passive listening mode.)  Two: Introduce and read the text, and set them the task or writing their answers individually.  (Tempting that – then I could get on with other marking.)

I chose neither.  On the way in, in the car, I struggled to think of a way to make this a participatory exercise.  I decided I would divide them into teams.  When we had read the text together, each team had to come up with a single answer for each question, and write it on a single post-it note.

On the wall (my magic paper whiteboard) I put the five team names as columns, and listed the question numbers down the side.  A “runner” from each team came out and placed their answer, as soon as they had it, under their team name.  As the lists of answers grew longer, I could tell which teams were working more slowly.  One of those had a particularly bright group of girls.  Turned out they were spending too much time working out the best ways to phrase their answers.  Their answers were good, but they came last because they didn’t complete enough of the questions in time.

After 45/50 minutes, I stopped everyone.  Working as a class now, I displayed my answers (one at a time) on the smart board.   For each question, students copied my answer from the board, and then I read out the five answers on the wall. 

This meant I could also do a live commentary on the common mistakes students make (eg not using inverted commas, writing answers which are far too long, writing incoherent answers, not evidencing a good answer, over-writing etc.)  I put marks on each post-it answer with a red felt pen.  And I asked student to keep a separate sheet called “Hints and Tips for Textual Analysis” which we created together as more and more “mistakes” became evident.

At the end, we tallied up the scores (I was fairly generous) and I made it clear that they were obviously quite capable of doing this – they just needed a bit of exam technique, better focus on the question, to work faster etc. 

Comments from students afterwards were very positive.  “I didn’t realise there was such a simple answer.”  “I’ve never seen that done before”. “Really enjoyed that.”  “Now I know why I always run out of time.”  And I also have a semi-permanent feature on the wall which can refer to for revision.

My only regret – I didn’t organise a tube of Smarties for the winners.  (Maybe next time.)  At least I didn’t have any marking.

Joyce