Marking and Feedback

Marking and feedback (oral and written) will take place throughout the lesson. Teachers and support staff are to assess children’s understanding throughout the maths lesson. Immediate feedback will be given to children during the lesson and if any children do not fully understand the subject, teachers should try and work where possible with these children in the lesson.

If children are not secure with a concept at the end of the lesson, it is up to the teacher to decide if whole class teaching is appropriate, or whether small group or 1:1 intervention is required. Where possible, this should take place on the same day as the lesson so children have a secure understanding in order to take part in the next lesson.
 

Marking Policy
To allow for same day intervention to take place, marking is to take place within the maths lesson and challenge provided with progression through challenges and deeper questioning.

Our marking within Maths promotes a self-checking system, Maths teachers now have answers to problems available. This means that, after four or five calculations, pupils can check their answers themselves. That way, if they have a misconception or misunderstand something they can alert the teacher immediately.

Self-checking means that mistakes are realised ten minutes into the lesson, rather than at the end. This approach also has the benefit of improving pupils’ confidence. We usually produce work at three levels of challenge (Yellow-fluency, Green-reasoning and Blue-problem solving) Pupils have opportunity to access all levels of challenge but may progress through them at a different pace. However, the new approach lets less confident, but able, pupils see when they get the first few calculations correct. Inevitably this helps them feel more confident and more willing to move on to the next level of challenge sooner.

Pupils use purple pen to check any of their calculations in inverse or make any corrections they have identified through self-checking.

Where Teachers or teaching assistants mark they use a green tick for positive/correct answers or a pink magnifying glass to draw a child’s attention to something that needs further attention.

We also value peer marking within lessons, for example, when more confident pupils finish their work with time to spare, they can consolidate their learning by ‘marking’ other children’s books. Crucially, those pupils actually have to do the calculations again – faster and possibly mentally – rather than just ‘checking’ against their own answers. All this places the onus on the learner to check their work and identify their own errors.

To get pupils thinking about their work, we often use a visualiser to model ways of checking (as an alternative to providing answers). We expect pupils to do the same. We also provide prompt sheets to help pupils who are struggling to identify their mistakes. These are shared at the start of a lesson. In effect, these are just a process success criteria, but recasting them as an error-spotting checklist means pupils properly use it.