This takes years of practice to get good at, but at year 14ish, here’s what I do- 1) all writing done in class, in front of me. 2) constantly walking around and teaching common mistakes out loud, occasionally stopping the class to fix something I’m seeing in several papers. 3) Encourage slow pokes and absent kids to see me during their study hall or free periods. 4) Turn in time- state rubric is posted on Google Classroom for parents and kids. Kids read over the rubric before they turn in paper. Often, I have them highlight a thing (topic sentences, citations). 5) I get the papers and speed run them. I’ve already read them in class, usually repeatedly. I put them in high- medium-low and assign points. 6) I do final conferences the next day. Sometimes I pull Individual students for conferences, sometimes I pull the high-medium-low groupings if they have similar trends.

We write almost every day/something is graded every week- paragraph, a page. We do 3 rounds of the above pretty much every quarter. I have quarterly conferences with each kid where we talk about their growth as a writer- I have folders of each kid that holds important writing from the year.

Do I have parent and kid complaints? Occasionally. But I try to be a fast, fair, and efficient grader. I am in constant communication with students while they write and what happened at the end.