When it’s going well, teaching is the best job in the world.

There’s something very special about what happens between a teacher and a class when the relationship is right and they are united by the excitement of learning. And I must admit that I miss that special chemistry when I look back on my many years as an English teacher.

But (and I feel guilty about this) I don’t miss the marking.

I sometimes try to relieve the guilt by kidding myself that I paid my dues during those many years on the marking treadmill. And I do I remember vividly what it was like when I trekked home on the Metro on cold, wet nights with a carrier bag full of exercise books, looking forward to a brief respite to bath the kids and read a bedtime story before I chained myself to the dining room table until all the marking was done. And no doubt I felt thoroughly sorry for myself.

Well, if you’re an English teacher, complaining about marking is like a farmer moaning about the weather. It comes with the job, end of story. English just happens to be one of the text heavy subjects and so, by its very nature, students have to write a lot and they need feedback on how they are doing and how to improve. Indeed, sometimes I think that providing constructive feedback is the most powerful thing teachers do.

And, of course, in those days I knew nothing about AFL.

Assessment for Learning is an approach to judging students’ work which has been around for about ten years. It’s based on the principle that all learners need to know where they are, where they’re going and how to get there. Not only that but it gives teachers a broad and better repertoire of how to provide feedback – a repertoire I just didn’t have for those long nights at the dining room table.

So under AFL it’s sometimes OK to involve students in assessing one another because they then have to learn the grade criteria and by doing so can focus on what improvements they themselves have to make. On occasions it’s also a good idea to have students assess themselves because it helps them take independent control of their own learning. And also there are times when all that is required is a quick check to make sure that the work is being done to a suitable standard. Take the science lab books, for example. These are essential to science learning because students use them to record important data about experiments etc. They have to be checked and, if necessary,corrected, but they don’t have to be marked as intensively as an essay or an exam answer. Our science staff have started doing something really good. There are now labels on the front of science lab books which make it clear to pupils, parents and inspectors what the books are for and how they are going to be marked.

I wish I’d thought of that years ago!

Anyway, perhaps the Marden students will offer this week to do their teachers’ marking for them. It’s National Takeover Week which means that we’ll be handing over quite a lot of decision making to the pupils. On Friday, I’ll be in school uniform and going to some year 11 lessons while Harry, my opposite number in the School Cabinet, wears a suit and runs the school.

I’ll let you know what it was like in my next blog.