TUNE IN: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY
You sit down in your planning period with a stack of assignments. You tell yourself you’ll knock out a few grades before your next class. Then the bell rings, you’ve barely made a dent, and you still haven’t planned tomorrow.
So the grading comes home. The planning still has to happen, too.
If you teach multiple preps, you know how fast this adds up. You might have a project to assess in one class, practice assignments in another, and quizzes waiting in a third. Each one means switching gears and remembering what students were supposed to be learning.
For a long time, I thought the fix was to get better at grading: faster, more disciplined, just power through. Then I asked a different question. Why was I grading so much in the first place?
If you’re grading things that never needed a grade, speeding up doesn’t fix anything. You just do unnecessary work more efficiently. This post is the first step in rethinking your teacher grading workload.
Key Takeaways
- Getting faster at grading doesn’t help if the work didn’t need a grade in the first place.
- An academic grade should tell you what a student knows and can do, not just whether they showed up or completed a task.
- Heavy grading takes time away from planning how students practice, talk, and show what they know.
- Looking at student work, giving feedback, and recording a grade are three different tasks.
- Start small by picking one prep and one type of assignment that eats the most time.
The Student Who Made Me Question My Gradebook
This happened in year six, in my engineering classes. I had a student who missed quite a bit of class, and his grade wasn’t good.
But when he was in the room, he knew the CAD software. He didn’t always finish an assignment. Still, when another student got stuck, he could sit down next to them and explain what to do.
Meanwhile, another student showed up every day, turned in okay work, and ended up with the better grade. I remember thinking, wait. What am I actually measuring here?
Why Bell Ringers Were Pulling Grades Down
Our administration wanted every teacher using bell ringers to help with a tardy problem. It wasn’t mandated that we grade them. But I did, because it felt like a way to give them teeth. If students earned points for completing the bell ringer, they’d come to class and get started on time.
That made sense to me at the time. But think about what happens when a student misses class. No bell ringer means no points, so his grade was being pulled down by attendance. And attendance isn’t the same thing as understanding CAD.
I was putting a grade on behavior and participation when I was supposed to be assessing content. The student with the lower grade could demonstrate the skill and teach it to someone else.
I’m not saying attendance doesn’t matter, and I’m not saying students shouldn’t be responsible for their work. I just needed to get much more intentional about what went into an academic grade. A grade should tell us something useful about what a student knows and can do. Mine wasn’t always doing that.
What I Saw Later as an Assistant Principal
That question got louder when I became an assistant principal. I watched students get marked tardy to first period for reasons that had little to do with their own choices. A parent dropped them off late. A sibling had a rough morning that put the whole family behind. If you’ve ever gotten multiple kids out the door, you know how one person can change everybody’s schedule.
Some students were absolutely at school and just not getting to class. But I saw enough situations where the student had little control to make me question how we were responding.
When we use academic grades to push behavior, we need to be careful what those grades end up saying. Sometimes we’re measuring learning. Sometimes we’re measuring something else entirely.
There are different perspectives on how responsibility and participation should factor into grades, and your school or district may have policies you need to follow. For me, the shift was looking at grading through a standards lens:
- What am I trying to teach?
- What evidence would show me a student understands it?
- Is the grade I’m recording actually connected to that?
The Hidden Cost of a Heavy Teacher Grading Workload
There was one more part of this that mattered just as much. I was spending so much time grading that I had very little left to plan.
The students were showing up tomorrow whether I’d finished the pile or not, so I was constantly trying to keep up. Looking back, I can see what that did to my teaching:
- I was still searching online for lessons.
- I wasn’t using the activity structures and protocols that later became a big part of how I taught.
- A lot of my instruction was direct instruction, with lots of slide decks and lots of me talking.
- Honestly, I was doing most of the thinking.
Students were more passive than I wanted them to be. But I didn’t have the time or the mental space to change that. I was too busy getting through the grading pile.
That’s what I want you to hear if you’re there right now. The cost of grading everything isn’t just the time it takes to enter the grades. It’s the time you don’t have for something else, like designing how students will practice a skill, talk through an idea, or show what they know.
Instead, I was processing assignments, and some of those assignments weren’t telling me much about what students had learned.
From Grading Everything to Assessing Learning
That’s when I started thinking differently. Instead of asking, “How am I going to grade all of this?” I started asking, “What do I actually need to know about student learning?”
Those are very different questions. The first assumes everything already belongs in the gradebook. The second gives you room to decide.
This matters even more with multiple preps. Every assignment you decide to grade gets multiplied across a class. Then you have another prep, and another. A decision that seemed small when you made it has quietly created hours of work.
Looking, Feedback, and Grades Are Three Different Jobs
Grading less doesn’t mean you stop looking at student work or stop giving feedback. It means you recognize that looking at work, giving feedback, and recording a grade are not always the same task.
- Looking at student work: Sometimes you need to see what students are doing so you can decide what to teach next.
- Giving feedback: Sometimes students need feedback so they can fix a mistake.
- Recording a grade: Sometimes you need a grade because the work is real evidence of what they’ve learned.
Those don’t all call for the same response, and they don’t all require you to sit down after school with a red pen. You may not need to get faster at grading everything. You may need to grade fewer things and make sure the ones you do grade are worth the time.
What Grading Less Does Not Mean
When I say grade less, I don’t mean lower your expectations. I don’t mean ignore student work. And I don’t mean give everybody a good grade to make your life easier.
I mean being more intentional about the evidence you collect and what you do with it:
- If students are practicing a new skill, the most important thing might be feedback they can use.
- If they’re demonstrating mastery, you need a way to evaluate that learning.
- If you’re assigning points mainly to encourage a behavior, it’s worth asking whether those points belong in an academic grade.
You can make those decisions thoughtfully, within your school’s requirements, and they can change your workload. The goal isn’t an empty gradebook. It’s a gradebook that says something meaningful without eating every planning period and every evening.
I wish I’d understood that sooner. It would have saved plenty of time, and I could have used that time to plan more opportunities for students to do the thinking instead of relying on me to do it for them.
How to Reduce Your Teacher Grading Workload: Start by Finding the Pile
Please don’t hear this and rebuild your whole grading system this weekend. Start smaller.
Think about the prep creating the most grading work right now. Maybe it’s the class with daily assignments. Maybe it’s the course where late work keeps rolling in. Or maybe it’s a semester elective where several big projects are about to land at once. That’s a real challenge for CTE and elective teachers, and later in this series we’ll talk about how feedback during a project keeps everything from piling up at the end.
For now, just notice where the work is coming from:
- What are you grading?
- Why are you grading it?
- What is that grade supposed to tell you?
You don’t have to answer that for every assignment. Pick one.
Conclusion: Make the Grading Worth the Time
The point isn’t to grade everything faster. It’s to make sure the grading you do is worth the time it takes.
So here’s your step for this week. Before your next grading session, look at the pile. Pick one prep and one type of assignment that’s eating a lot of your time. Then ask whether the grade you’re recording gives you useful information about what students have learned.
Don’t change anything yet. Just notice it. That’s the first move toward a lighter teacher grading workload, and it leaves more room for the planning your students actually benefit from.
Get the Free Multi-Prep Grading Reset
Noticing is also Step 1 of the free Multi-Prep Grading Reset, which I made to go with this series. It’s a short, four-step resource that helps you:
- Find where grading is taking too much time
- Decide what actually needs a grade
- Move feedback earlier
- Test one repeatable routine
For this post, just do Step 1: Find the Pile. Choose the prep with the biggest grading load and name one task you want to lighten.
Download the free Multi-Prep Grading Reset
You can do this without it, too. Just name the grading task taking more time than you think it should.
This post is part of a four-part series on grading on The Secondary Teacher Podcast. Next, we’ll look at what needs a grade, what might only need feedback, and what you can stop putting in the gradebook. Listen to Episode 376 on The Secondary Teacher Podcast.
Resources to Help You Work Smarter
- How AI Can Revolutionize Your Teaching: A Guide for Overwhelmed Secondary Educators
- Follow Me on Instagram
- Connect with me on LinkedIn
- Find me on Facebook
