Education cuts are continuously shaving time off teachers’ days when they are already hard pressed to complete their roles to the full. At the heart of their role teachers need to mark work. Students love it too. It gives them more detailed and nuanced feedback than a computer, that they understand and they value. Students appreciate the time that their teacher has spent helping them. Software systems to automate the marking and feedback process can reduce workload but can commonly weaken the student-teacher connection.
Education makes its way to the top with PG Online
The Oscars of UK Business, the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards, celebrate those innovative companies working to make a real difference to their industries. In our belief, there is no industry of greater importance than education. It is at the heart of everything and matters to everyone.
As an education company ourselves, we are delighted to be recognised as a finalist of the 2018 Lloyds Bank Small To Medium Sized Business of the Year.
Teachers' roles are changing. They are becoming lawyers, accountants and diplomats in sorting students’ social, moral and cultural issues on top of their own teaching load. They are increasingly responsible for the analysis of student data, for aligning their resources to constantly changing curricula and for more and more frequent reporting. Teachers have never worked harder.
One of the first things that has to go in order to make space in the day for all of these additional duties by which teacher performance is more and more quantitatively measured, is the more qualitative input, such as detailed planning. According to Patrick Lencioni, founder and president of a leading management consultancy group, a lack of attention or poor preparation of lesson plans is a “behavioural problem that occurs long before any decrease in measurable results is apparent”.
How would you respond if you were asked what you or your teaching colleagues, friends or spouses spent most time on in their teaching jobs? Which element of teaching would you or they most want to delegate to the mystical midnight elves?
According to several surveys, marking is right up there in the top responses. But why? Teachers shouldn’t, and in my experience, most, don’t dislike marking. It can be hugely rewarding when proper time can be devoted to it. As a teacher of 13 years, I disliked not having the time to mark properly and to do students’ efforts justice with detailed feedback. Students love having their work marked by a teacher, and we (teachers) know that too. That adds to the frustration because we often know that in the time we have to mark their work, we simply can’t give the quality of feedback we would so like to give. A significant part of the job that we went into teaching to do, but can no longer fit in. One solution, commonly agreed on by many organisations, is to get a computer to mark and provide feedback automatically. Students get some live feedback and the teacher isn’t marking; great for revision purposes but there’s no real feeling of care if this is relied upon as a single solution. This is cure not prevention and often more of a sticking plaster than a breakthrough antidote. A reliance on tech, removing the human input, is a potential cause of a greater behavioural shift that could blur rather than sharpen teacher intuition.
The prevention solution is to provide all of the planning and preparation a teacher could possibly wish for, for an entire course. This frees up time to be able to mark work with more care, without the guilt of having rushed it and returns the satisfaction of seeing the results of their students’ efforts on every page, and the glint in the eyes of those who tried hard and have done well.
Our innovation has been to strip away all the Tech part of EdTech and concentrate solely on the Ed. This ‘Keep it simple’ approach has been a breath of fresh air for teachers and it is fantastic that this has been celebrated by the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards.
