How Mark My Words evolved from a writing checklist

I needed to see model writing and I needed to know exactly what skills I had to put down on the page and where.

My students love structure, too–they love a checklist.

They love it when, in the lead up to an exam, you can tell them what they need to do in order to prepare, step by step. In their ideal world, you would tell them that if they write five practice essays, memorise twenty-five quotes and schedule three one-on-one sessions, they will receive an 83%. They want to be able to tick things off and know that they are making progress.

In my view, this is why many students actually become more disillusioned with English than they do with Mathematics or Science; subjects where they can methodically work through a textbook and feel as though they are improving. This is only human–we like to visualise our progress. With English, though, the learning is less explicit, less methodical. We discuss ideas, teach students a range of different writing structures and then, across time, challenge them to employ these structures to express their ideas. This happens across weeks, months and even years, and never linearly. 

Unlike Maths, where in the lead up to an assessment you can confidently assert what a teacher expects to see, it is not standard practice for students to be given such a checklist in English. Broadly speaking, there is a ‘right way’ when it comes to Maths–students can see on a very granular level where they are excelling and where they are struggling, and teachers can typically point to the exact step in which an error occurred. This inherently makes students feel more in control–they understand where the goal-posts are. 

This difference is, to some extent, due to the nature of language and writing. As English teachers, we do not want to be overly prescriptive so as to limit a student’s expression.

That said, there are various strategies we can employ to help students understand what we want to see from them.

Model paragraphs is one such approach. I used to rely on these as a student, and as a teacher I love to put a question up on the whiteboard and then plan and draft a response as a class.

While doing this, I will talk very explicitly through each language decision being made. As I write the topic sentence, I will discuss how it connects to the prompt, how it is precise and idea-based, and how it will be distinct from all the other topic sentences. When I make mistakes, it is a fantastic opportunity to amend and explain how I was not showing required skills.

Most effective was this form of teaching, though, when I actually wrote down for the students all the skills that they needed to see.

I realised that all of the ideas were in my head, and although they came out every so often, they were not itemised in a single, centralised place. I had heard Ross Huggard at the VATE conference discuss the importance of resolving the topic, but I had never written this down for them. It was all in my brain and, if they did not ask me explicitly, listen to my every word, or attempt to synthesise the resources I gave them, how would they know? There was no way for them to 'check' it later, as they would with their Maths work before a difficult test.

If you ask any English teacher around the country what a topic sentence should look like, they will most likely tell you that it should be specific, connected to the prompt, idea-based, and distinct from all the other paragraphs. It should frame the paragraph. But how on earth are students meant to know this unless we make it abundantly clear? Besides, what does ‘idea-based’ even mean? It depends who you ask.

These are all answers that a teacher can provide, but that are generally not presented to students in the most accessible way–or if they are, then they are not presented in a way that makes the knowledge meaningful because it is usually out of context.

Many teachers–myself included–seek to address this by providing students with a writing checklist for them to self-assess after writing a draft or before submitting a piece of work.

However, given the demands to mark against a standard rubric, we very rarely actually assess each checklist item for the student. 

This, really, was the genesis of Mark My Words. I wanted to give students a comprehensive breakdown of their performance so that they could see very easily how they were achieving each skill after every assessment.

The issue with using a normal checklist, though, was that it–again–was out of context. A student can see that, great, they have written a point-sentence that is precise–but how do they improve beyond that point? So I expanded the checklist to articulate three tiers: low, medium, high. The challenge then became how to instruct a student writing a ‘medium’ point sentence on the changes required to achieve a ‘high’. 

With Mark My Words, students know how they are tracking on each skill and how they can reach the next level.

The core premise of the software works without AI or Large Language Models–in fact, I began developing it prior to the release of such technology. However, when we add these to the mix it becomes incredibly powerful–and time-saving–as it can leverage information input by the teacher to write feedback on how to advance and even mark the student against each skill continuum by itself.

Of course, this concept is most obviously applied to structured writing–TEEL, AEIRC, TEEDEL, etc. But even without these heavy frameworks, the idea stacks up because at its core it is simply about making learning and achievement visible and transparent for students.

It is about taking the knowledge out of the mind of the teacher and laying it out for students in a structured way.

For example, in assessing creative pieces, we tell students to write descriptively–but what does this actually mean? It seems obvious to us as adults, but as any English teacher knows, students need us to break this down. A student who writes descriptive sentences should, for instance, ‘show’ and not ‘tell’, they should use literary devices, they should write with their senses. Giving students a narrative writing checklist before they do this–and then actually marking them against this–seems obvious, but is a game-changer.

The Mark My Words platform takes the writing checklist and extends this transparency to the way feedback is delivered. The system reads a student's response and then, in an encouraging way, tells the student where they demonstrated each unit of knowledge and offers suggested rewritten sentences where skills were not effectively showcased. 

The ultimate goal of Mark My Words is to make the skills associated with good writing accessible, transparent, and visible to all students. I would like students to know exactly what their teachers want to see from them–without teachers having to increase their workload to step out whether they have done it or not. The objective should be to build students up to become active and engaged in their own learning journey, to drive improved outcomes and save teacher time.

I am biased, but I think it is a true "win-win".