Blogging Brookhart's How to Create and Use Rubrics

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.