Keeping Your Own Record
The real product of marking is a picture of the class that appears nowhere in the grades. That picture has a short half-life. It is vivid on the evening you build it, hazy by Tuesday, and gone by the time you plan the unit again next year.
Five lines, written the same evening, preserves enough of it to act on. It is the cheapest professional habit available and almost nobody does it, because at the end of a marking session the last thing anyone wants is more writing.
For comparison with workplace systems that formalise time or activity data, Monitask’s page on online timesheets shows how the same type of measurement is handled outside education.
What to write
Five lines. Not a reflective journal — a note to yourself in a hurry.
What they did not get. The specific thing, not the topic. Not "quadratics" but "they can factorise and cannot tell when to."
For an external perspective on teaching, assessment, and feedback, see ASCD.
What surprised you. The most valuable line and the one that decays fastest. Anything that was not what you expected: a student, an error, a question that failed.
Who to watch. Two or three names, with a word each. Not a pastoral referral; a private note.
What to reteach, and when. Specific enough to act on without rereading anything.
What to change about the task. For next year, and only if something was wrong with it.
Two minutes. Any format, as long as you will find it again.
Why it is worth the two minutes
It survives the fade. By Thursday you remember that the class struggled. You do not remember that six of them made the same specific wrong move, which is the part you could actually have taught to.
It compounds across a term. Four notes on the same class start to show a pattern no single session reveals — a topic that keeps resurfacing, a student whose engagement is trending in one direction slowly enough that no individual assessment shows it.
It survives to next year. The single highest return. When you teach the unit again, the note tells you where it went wrong last time, and that is worth more than any amount of replanning from scratch.
It is evidence. For a parent conversation, a departmental discussion, or any point where you need to say what you observed and when. A contemporaneous note is a different thing from a recollection.
Why it matters more now
Because it is what automation removes without telling you.
If scoring and comment-drafting are handled by a tool, the pile still gets processed and the students still receive feedback. What disappears is the by-product — the picture built while paying attention. Nothing announces its absence, and the model of your class you are carrying quietly ages.
A deliberate record is the only reliable countermeasure, because it makes the diagnosis an explicit output rather than something you hope happened along the way. If you cannot write the five lines, that is the finding: you did not read enough to know.
Which is why the fifteen unassisted scripts and this note are really one habit. The first produces the picture and the second keeps it.
Making it actually happen
Attach it to the end of the marking, not to a separate occasion. A note you plan to write tomorrow is not written.
One place for everything. A single document per class, appended to. Not a file per assessment.
Set a floor, not a standard. Three words per line is fine. The failure mode is not writing badly, it is not writing.
Reread before you plan. This is the step that makes it worth doing, and it is the one people skip. Open the note before planning the next unit and before the next assessment of the same type.
A note on what not to record
Keep it about the work and the teaching.
Observations about a student's home circumstances, health, or behaviour belong in your school's proper system, with its access controls and retention rules, not in a personal file. And it should go without saying that this note is not somewhere to paste into a tool: it is exactly the material that should never leave the room.
The record described here is a teaching aid about your own practice. Keeping it that way keeps it simple and keeps it yours.
The short version
- Five lines the same evening: what they did not get, what surprised you, who to watch, what to reteach, what to change
- Two minutes, any format, one document per class appended to
- The picture fades by Tuesday and vanishes by next year — the note is what survives
- It compounds across a term and pays for itself when you next teach the unit
- Automation removes the diagnosis silently; an explicit record is the only reliable countermeasure
- If you cannot write the five lines, you did not read enough to know