grading

Grading Essays Online vs. Grading on Paper: Pros and Cons

Grading Essays Online vs. Grading on Paper:  Pros and Cons

I find myself dancing between grading essays online (via Google Spreadsheets and Doctopus/ Goobric) and printing out student essays to grade on paper. If you’d like more information on getting started with online grading using Google Spreadsheets, check out my YouTube tutorial for some helpful tips.

Tips for Grading Essays: Don't Grade Every Piece of Paper! Try These 8 Strategies for More Efficient and Effective Grading

Tips for Grading Essays:  Don't Grade Every Piece of Paper!  Try These 8 Strategies for More Efficient and Effective Grading

Teaching on the secondary level can be challenging with the number of students that we are required to teach each year.  Therefore, it is essential as a secondary teacher to develop strategies for more efficient grading practices and to rethink our roles as auditors rather than graders.

Grading Essays: A Strategy that Reflects Writing as a Process

Grading Essays:  A Strategy that Reflects Writing as a Process

Writing is a process.  It is recursive.  No piece of writing is ever "final."  Something can always be better.  I often feel this way whenever I read back over my own old essays and inevitably find a sentence that could be better, a paragraph that could be stronger, or a word that could be more precise.  

A Philosophy for Assessing Writing: Aim for Improvement, not Perfection

A Philosophy for Assessing Writing:  Aim for Improvement, not Perfection

Over the past 10+ years of teaching high school, my philosophy for writing instruction has changed greatly.  It has been a decade of experimentation and adaptation; a decade dedicated to finding what works and trying out new methodologies...