A series of short posts, focusing on the challenges of teaching all students successfully, informed by lesson observations.

A common, logical technique in teaching is to invite students to highlight their gaps or errors by writing the correct answers or improvements in a different colour pen, to show them and their teacher which answers they got wrong and where they have made corrections. The idea is that this then supports further study and improves learning. Quite often the colour is green (because red is for teachers or something?) – hence ‘green penning’. Amusingly enough, I’ve been to plenty of schools where they call it green penning, even if they don’t really care what colour is used. It’s just become the name of the corrections technique.

Teachers use this with all good intentions but, with my view from the back, I often see that the technique just doesn’t work at all for students with significant gaps in knowledge – ie lots of green pen – or where any particular correct answer doesn’t make any sense to them at all. They go through the motions of writing down the correct answers in their green pen…. the teacher assumes this has been done successfully and that a knowledge gap has been addressed… but all that has happened is that the student has added to the list of things in their book that they don’t know or understand.

Green penning is not teaching. In my view, from the back, it barely gets close to closing the knowledge gaps. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it’s less likely to work than to work.

For example. If you know your chemical symbols pretty well and just get the odd one wrong.. if might help to write down Ag = Silver in green pen to prompt you to learn that particular fact. However, if the whole concept of elements is fuzzy and the symbols are generally a jumble, Ag = Silver in green pen might as well say $%£% + &*(^£. There is no additional meaning-making there. No gap is closed.

If, for example, you green pen the Fibonacci numbers 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21…. or you write down a(x – 5) = ax – 5a in green pen… because you got those things wrong, the mere act of doing this doesn’t teach you anything really. And, yes, this happens all the time. The teacher goes through the test and tells students to green pen their answers. The weakest students do as they are asked but do not learn from it.

So… what to do instead?

Firstly I think it’s a question of recognising this clear pitfall. Don’t assume that green-penning is teaching. It’s not. It only works at all if students do something else afterwards.

Secondly, be clear that students have to be able to consolidate corrections with some kind of practice loop. That could be done right away or set for homework or done as a planned activity the next lesson – but one way or another, unless students revisit the underlying concept and have a chance to encode the ideas and practise using them, they won’t be making meaning. The green penned corrections sit there as a delusion-illusion. They might be a marker.. but that’s all. Something else has to happen. The least confident students won’t do this unprompted; it needs to be structured and directed.

Finally, you might want to selectively re-teach the fundamental ideas for a range of material in a test based on the data that the test has generated – in preference to green penning. Use the test to find out what is known and not known and the re-teach parts of it, followed by further practice. In other words, don’t do the green penning at all. It could just be a giant waste of time. For sure, give out the correct answers, but concentrate the time you have on re=teaching and further practice rather than waste it on the stony ground of green penning.

You only need to sit next to a low confidence student doing this a few times to see how meaningless the whole endeavour can be. So, if you feel irritated by this post because you feel it’s a useful process, test it out. Find out tomorrow, if students can now do the things or remember the facts they green penned yesterday. Focus on the students in the corners.. is it working? If it isn’t.. then make a change. Do something different that supports them to learn more effectively. But don’t assume that the act of green penning their corrections is teaching them things; it most probably isn’t.

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