At Bushey Meads all staff and students know the importance of work being marked and next steps being identified and responded to in purple pen. This is why we all engage in the important process of marking and feedback – marking our own work, the work of our peers, listening to and responding to verbal feedback, capturing verbal feedback on the orange stickers and of course responding to direct teacher feedback, often clearly demonstrating the progress made by writing in our ‘purple pens of progress’.

Each year we arrange three Marking and Feedback fortnights as a way of honing our craft of providing feedback and capturing and sharing the very best practice across our learning community. It is also a time for all students to check that their exercise books are completely up to date. As parents and carers do take time over the half term holiday to sit down with your children and make sure that they have:

• underlined all their titles using a ruler and a coloured pen
• put the date at the top of their work
• ruled off from any previous work
• carefully labelled all diagrams
• coloured in all pictures where needed
• completed all blue self-assessment stickers
• responded to all ‘SP’ markings by writing out the misspelled word 3 times in purple pen
• responded to all ‘next step’ comments provided by:

1. Their peers on a green peer-assessment sticker.
2. Themselves on their own self-assessment blue sticker.
3. Their teacher’s green pen marking on a white sticker.
4. On any orange verbal feedback sticker.

This term our Marking and Feedback fortnight will have a focus on low stakes quizzing and it was great to hear from two of our Advanced Lead Teachers Mr Symeou and Mr Gray on Monday morning of this week in our Monday Magic Moment about the importance of this technique in strengthening retrieval practice and enhancing the smart strategy of marking work and providing feedback.

The low stakes quizzes can often be self or peer marked by students and responded to in a short starter or plenary activity. They are powerful ways of clearly checking progress and helping students to build on prior attainment and effectively close gaps in their learning.