Okay, teacher crew. We get it. Reporting season (or szn 🔮) is here, and honestly? We think this is definitely a task us teachers don’t get enough credit for. It seeps into our home life, extends our work hours by, like, a million percent, and copying and pasting to speed the process up is a no-go (although we’ve definitely all done it before 🥴).

Here are my Top 5 Reporting Tips that’ll help you streamline your reporting process. 

My Top 5 Reporting Tips:

1. Create a timeline: Set yourself some due dates and mini goals, and write them out in your planner (or buddy up with another teacher friend and keep each other accountable). Small goals are key here – keep things simple and achievable, and reward yourself with a mojito or wine (or both!) when you tick each stage off on time.
   
   
2. Focus on a few students at a time: I like to pick 2-3 students to observe closely each day. I’ll write their names down in my planner and add notes under their names in my assessment book throughout the day. And my top tip for observing the trickier students to write for? Scatter them amongst the easier kids, so you don’t feel super overwhelmed observing them all at once.
   
   
3. Treat yourself to organisational products designed to make your life easier: Our amazing Assessment Record Keeping Book is perfect for the reporting period. Take it with you when moving around the classroom for small group teaching, or when observing the class from your desk. Use the anecdotal notes section for jotting down your observations and utilise the checklists to keep track of their grades and tick off all the tasks you need to do for each student before their reports are due.
   
   I also would love to share my FREE Reporting Template with you!
   
   
4. Review your school’s reporting policies: Getting caught out after you’ve finished all your reports is a teacher’s worst nightmare. Double-check your character limit, words that cannot be used (for example, I’m not allowed to use the word ‘can’ when describing student achievement), standard comments that need to be used when referring to low student attendance, and more.
   
   
5. Use comment banks to discover words and phrases you like to use: Start a growing document for these so you can refer back to them every semester. This made my life so much easier!

I hope these tips help you spend more time getting your reports done & less time unnecessarily reorganising your store room (again).
XX Rach