Embedding a new approach to marking and feedback: Opportunities, challenges and lessons learned

SARAH CUNLIFFE, LEON WALKER AND REBECCA MORRIS, UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK, UK Do I really know enough about the understanding of my pupils to be able to help each of them? It was the summer of 2015 and we (Sarah and Leon) had just read this excerpt from Inside the Black Box (Black and Wiliam, 1998, p. 144). Our answer was definitely ‘NO’ and we wanted this to change. We were also drowning in hours of unproductive marking that had become a serious workload issue for our staff. This is our story of how our feedback and workload problem ended up as one of the largest randomised controlled trials into feedback and marking in the UK – FLASH Marking (Morris et al., 2022). What’s in the black box? Saying no to that simple question wasn’t an easy thing to deal with. Feelings of failure quickly rose to the surface when we admitted that our students weren’t getting the help that they needed from us. Every teacher has high aspirations for their students; however, none of us knew wh