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If you have a love-hate relationships with rubrics as I do,
Susan Brookhart's book could help you problem solve your way to rubric peace. |
I have been intrigued by the possibility of blogging through professional development titles for some time. So in light of my six-word memoir, "Tired of fear bringing me down", I am diving in to the world of public writing. Here's hoping that I survive the disparages of the inevitable critics.
Last semester, I tried to embrace the "Rigor and Rubrics" rally cry heralded by my school's NCDPI Transformational Coach. After my initial foray into Rubric-World, I have come to appreciate their value
and their liablility. As of late, I have been feeling their pressing burden as I have been grading Reader's Response Journal's using an analytic rubric to the tune of twenty minutes a piece. While my dining room table was slowly bowing from the weight of eighty-eight journals, I scribbled the calculation in the margins of my notes: 29 hours.
So my dilemma is two fold: how to rescue myself from such a heavy immediate chore while, at the same time, pushing my students towards the sort of deep-analytical thinking that I was hoping to develop through their journals. How convenient that just last week a copy of Susan M. Brookhart's
How to Create and Use Rubrics arrived in my mailbox.
In the spirit of the blogging trend and the self-reflections so valued in the educational field, I have chosen to complete the marginal exercises scattered throughout the text in this forum.
Q:
What is your current view of rubrics?
A: Rubrics can be valuable in that they clarify expectations for students and potentially elevate the standards of quality. On the flip side, every analytic rubric that I have created has taken between fifteen and twenty minutes to score. I do not have an extra thirty hours a week to devote to my job when I have other work that needs to be done: calling parents, developing instructional materials, grading other assessments, lesson planning, and managing a choice reading program that takes significant out-of-class time to maintain. So, I am on the fence as to whether I consider myself a proponent of the rubric movement. I am hoping this book will help me create clear, fair, sustainable -- and dare I say -- rigorous assessment practices.
Q:
What evidence would it take to convince you that using rubrics with learning-based criteria in your classroom would enhance student learning of content outcomes and improve students' learning skills as well? How can you get that evidence in your own classroom.?
A: At this point in my career, I am convinced that using well-crafted rubrics would enhance student learning and improve learning skills, as well. For me, the difficulty seems to be with the time invested to actually evaluate a student product. With regard to Brookhart's text, I would say that the outcomes of some of the mentioned studies on rubrics were encouraging. I especially took note of the study that showed that college biology students, who evaluated a peer using a rubric, came to the same conclusions as their teacher (13). My faith in rubrics as a
fair way to evaluate writing increased earlier this year when my high-school aged daughter's Civics teacher used a rubric to grade an essay; I read the essay, used the rubric to evaluate it, and came to the same evaluation and grading conclusion as her teacher. As far as rubrics
improving learning, I predict that the quality of the rubric will affect the quality of the learning.