Our Story

Hi! This is Katie and Liz, and we’re the team bringing you The Grading Method.

The two of us have a deep and long history in the field of education together; we studied literature together in college, we lived together while we earned our teaching credentials, and we got our first jobs teaching high school English together at the same school. 

We also share a mutual passion for helping teachers earn back their time. Through our time working together, we both felt the enormous pressure of lesson planning, teaching a full day of school, and then going home to grade piles and piles of essays. There just never seemed to be enough time in the day. 

When we went back for our master’s degrees, we wanted to focus on the most effective and efficient ways of providing feedback for students. Were there research-backed methods that allowed us to branch out of my normal feedback routines while also helping students grow? What we found was game-changing. We began sharing our research and ideas with teachers at school, and then in a broader arena whenever we attended teacher trainings . . . while some teachers had been applying these ideas for years, we found that many, many teachers were like both of us and had never received formal training on how to provide effective and efficient feedback for students. 

Throughout this video series, we are going to share why our research is important, what we found during the research process that we have been able to apply to our teaching, and various strategies teachers can apply in their classrooms to help students learn more effectively while saving the priceless gift of time.