Purple Pens of Progress

 

What is it?:

A way for pupils to improve their work and overtly show PROGRESS before/during/after a lesson. 

 

How's it work?: 

1.  Get at least 16 purple pens (KCS sells multi-coloured pens in plastic candy jars which include purple pens as well as orange, green, teal, pink, red and black, or individual, cheap purple pens can be found at Wilkinsons).

 

2.  Provide time within the lesson for pupils to respond to feedback.

 

3.  Explain to pupils how purple pens of progress work - they must respond to any marking comment made by the teacher or by a peer to show their understanding of how to improve their work.  Then, pupils must make the improvement(s) suggested using the purple pens to show a difference between their previous work and the improvement

. 

 

What does this look like in a real lesson?:

This worked a treat when helping year 8s understand how to describe and explain survey results on peoples' perceptions of India. 

 

The focus of the lesson was to take the data presentation of survey results pupils created in a previous lesson and try to analyse what their results meant for how people viewed India in the UK.  In Geography our experience has been pupils struggle to extend beyond the descriptive when looking at data, so the entire lesson was devoted to drafting and improving their analysis. 

 

I modelled describing and explaining and then I set pupils off to describe and explain what their results meant in 10 minutes.  Then pupils passed their analysis to a peer who had a green pen and a pink pen for feedback (green for what they did well in their analysis and pink for what they could improve on and any spelling or grammar mistakes their peer marker could find).  Pupils had 7 minutes to read their partner's work and provide peer feedback (feedback techniques were modelled before pupils attempted this technique, to ensure the feedback was accurate and constructive).  Pupils then received back their draft analysis with peer comments, which they had to respond to using the purple pen - responses from the year 8s were mostly very good, examples included: 'Thanks for your feedback, I'll try harder to use better grammar next time' to 'I thought I was explaining clearly, but now I know I have to look back over my work to see where I went wrong.'  One pupil, without prompting, went back and extended one of his paragraphs of analysis, acting on his feedback that he needed to provide more reasons to back up his explanation.  Pupils then reflected on what the results overall meant for our key enquiry question 'How do people in the UK view India today?'  When I took their books in for marking I was so impressed with the results - their analysis was far better than what I expected based on experience with the previous year 8 cohort.

 

Where did this come from?:

I found this idea while checking out the following website - http://magpieandtry.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/26-purple-pages-of-progress.html.  Have a look to see how much further this idea on showing pupil progress can be taken.