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| Grab your colorful writing implements! It's rubric time! Photo by @alyssasieb. |
In the Spring of 2017, long before I ever thought about becoming a CITL grad affiliate or even particularly understood my own interest in teaching, I participated in the "Four Friends and a Book" reading group hosted by a CITL grad affiliate. We read parts of Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do and discussed how Bain's ideas related to our own practices and disciplines. I recently rediscovered the discussion questions and my answers that we each prepared in advance of these sessions, and realized with a start that this was the beginning of the story I promised to tell you so long ago, about how I became a rubric enthusiast.
In the Beginning: A Skeptic
A selected excerpt from my notes on the Pre-Meeting Assignment for Meeting 3, in response to a question about whether rubrics were the tools of excellent teachers or merely time-consuming busywork:
I’m struck by “Students focus on grades. Sad, but true” (7)
I think this could have potential usefulness for conveying some of those learning aspirations that Bain references repeatedly, though the rubric’s obsessive focus on the grade is why I have shied away from using them before. They always seem to be something that promises to make the subjective objective by putting it in a chart—“mastery of material” or “effective use of evidence” is now clear and undeniably interpretable because it’s in a table!
I do like the idea of students helping to create these—that would give me a sense also of not only what they expect but what they know and what I could work on explaining.
This list of reactions struck me as interesting for a few reasons.
First, I am notorious (with myself, at least) for taking notes that have no content other than the quotation I thought was "interesting." Can you elaborate, past Leanna? No, I could, apparently, not.
Next, wow, was I skeptical! Rubrics "could have potential usefulness"-- that's Leanna-speak for "I guess you may have a small point and I don't like it."
My referenced qualm about the concept of rubrics, meanwhile, now strikes me as being a super-real critique of many rubrics I'd seen as a student and in teaching workshop examples, which I found impenetrable and not very specific, likely because they were trying to be all things to all graders--vague enough you could use them for many different projects or pieces of writing.
What is a rubric?
There are a few different styles of rubric, the most common three of which are well-described in Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single Point Rubrics. I tend to be most comfortable with an analytic rubric, which breaks down criteria of an assignment and helps the grader look at each in isolation to arrive at a total score. For example, the rubrics I’ve featured here previously in posts about teaching The Underground Railroad and The Crucible have been analytic rubrics.
However, rubrics don’t have to be so detailed to be useful. My simplest "rubric" was one I scribbled quickly on every one of the weekly reflection papers for my Fiction and the Historical Imagination class. It began from the instructions from a document called Weekly Response Expectations:
Comment thoughtfully on reading.
Use evidence from reading.
Tie readings together, either within week or with previous weeks.
Which turned into a little abbreviated list that I added to the bottom of each paper with a brief comment about each:
Content
Analysis
Connections
If you had all three, you had full points. If you missed one or two, I noted they were missing. If you could have done more, I noted which needed a little attention. It's not that this is an example or perfect or ideal rubric making-- this could have been a lot better! But for a frequent and low-stakes assignment, it made life quite a bit easier to organize my thoughts in this way, and it seems to lead students toward some quite intriguing and freeform thinking, which was my hope and my goal.
What Changed?: Why I Like Rubrics
As you can probably tell, my feelings about rubrics changed from the time I was writing about their “potential usefulness” to the time I was creating a new and tailored rubric for every assignment I graded. This moment of reflecting on and talking about rubrics in concert with other teachers set off a chain reaction– I tried it, I liked it, and I didn’t want to go back. So, here's the verbs that rubrics help to do:
Refining
One of the critically helpful things about getting into rubric construction was how it forced me to refine how I was conceptualizing the assignment before grading it-- indeed, before I even assigned it. I wanted students to know how they were going to be graded before they started working on their assignments so that they knew how to prioritize their time and attention, what I was looking for, and so that they had the best chance of actually succeeding at that assignment's goals. So, I needed to figure that out, and often breaking things down into the rubric forced me to clarify my instructions and reflect on what was actually important-- every single one of four criteria cannot be fifty percent of the grade, so how much, exactly, should each be worth in the final score? How can I best express success in each criterion via words on a page to actually make them specific and helpful, rather than leaning on a vagueness like "mastery of material"-- what will showcase that they have mastered the material well, and can I just straight-up tell them to do that in the instructions and isolate it in the rubric?
Prioritizing
Past Leanna was affronted by how rubrics focused on the grade, whereas I apparently saw the process as being more about the mystical process of providing tailored feedback, with the grade hinging upon it but incidental to "the point." I now tend to see "the grade" and "the feedback" as two aspects of the process of grading (which is, obviously, not universal-- if you are ungrading or teaching in an ungraded context, great!). If you can simplify "getting to the grade," you have more time to tailor your feedback. This is something I mention frequently in my current role-- it's not that you are skimping on grading by doing it more quickly; rather, you're making more efficient the parts that are not personalized so that you can spend your time tailoring the more individualized feedback to the student, instead of just writing "Remember to proofread your paper before submitting" on thirty-seven separate papers and trying to ascertain after reading whether this feels like a B+ or an A- paper.
Guiding and Aligning
When I was a teaching assistant, there was quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the role of the teaching assistant. In many ways, our sections were like our own class, and we ran them in fairly individualized ways. In others, we had little power to craft the class in our own image. The result was quite a lot of inconsistency, as an assignment you interpreted as being "about" one skill or content area might be interpreted by another teaching assistant for the same course to be "about'' a different skill or content area, and the professor leading the course might have still another take. Now that many of the folks reading my blog are likely professors or teachers of some type themselves (hooray!), you have the power to help the folks you are supervising or may one day supervise in your courses figure out how the heck to grade student assignments by creating a rubric and collaborating on minor edits as each assignment approaches in order to align assignment expectations between sections. In an individual way, making rubrics also helped me create consistency across assignments-- is there a reason why I think organization should be thirty percent of this project but only ten percent of the last one? If so, I should make that clear; if not, I should try to figure out how important organization should be to this type of project.
If you have strong feelings about rubrics (positive or negative), you’re obviously not alone. If you want to share them with me, feel free to drop them in the comments!
