Taking on the Rubrics Crowd | 3 Steps to Deep Learning
The best rubrics are designed by learners who are investigating and defining quality work. Rubrics allow learners to articulate criteria based on this discovery. The rubrics they design can then guide their own work and inform the feedback that they provide to peers. Angela Stockman
If you think I am challenging every teacher (including myself) who uses rubrics, you’re right! It’s quite simple, we must choose deep learning for students, everything else is bunk. And almost all of what I’ve seen in rubrics is bunk.
Above all else, if the rubrics a teacher uses is evidence of an assessment developed without student involvement, it is useless for student learning at best and detrimental at worse. I’ll even grant that this rubric was developed for a good reason – I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who labored to create the rubric – but if students were not involved as described by Angela, the use of the rubric will not help students learn. Use that rubric and you are hurting children. They just are not learning what you think you are teaching.
Actually, it’s not the rubric or even your definition of “student involvement” that’s critical for learning, it’s the student involvement that expects and provides time for students to have conversations with themselves and others about examples of quality work that, in turn, leads students to personally meaningful discoveries. After investigating and discovering, and only then, students are ready to identify and explain the critical characteristics that will make their work high quality.
So, what is the teacher’s role?
- First, ensure that the conversations take place.
- Second, ensure that students are given an opportunity to articulate what they have discovered.
- Third, after students have applied their best effort and understanding to completing a related assignment, ensure that students reflect on, share and revise what they believe.
Then they are ready for more work. They are learning what you are teaching them.
If that’s how you use “rubrics,” then I’d say you’re cooking with gas. If not, I’d say you’re cooked.
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April 25th, 2011 at 10:07 am
Thanks for opening this conversation here, Dennis. Something I’ve been kicking around a bit in recent weeks, thanks to a suggestion from Jennifer Borgioli: quality rubrics take significant time to design and tend to be overused as well. When does it make sense to devote this kind of time to rubric design with kids?
I do believe that the best rubrics were collaboratively created, but I also know from my own experiences that there are some very solid rubrics out there that were designed by others. They’ve help me consider different perspectives and push my thinking quite a bit. I know that my own learning and growth has often been inspired by high quality rubrics that others have designed. Finding them online is quite the endeavor though, and unfortunately, because so few people are critical consumers of the things they find online, the proliferation of “bunk” that you see out there seems to be influencing people’s perceptions about what rubrics are, how they are best designed, and how they are used. The more people promote these lousy examples and definitions, the more others tend to bash rubrics in general. You strike a refreshing balance here.
We should be grateful to Jennifer for her tenacious attention to rubric design and for being willing to share what knows in ways that challenge people’s thinking about all of this.
April 25th, 2011 at 10:47 am
I too can learn from rubrics that others have written. It can push me to think of criteria of a piece of work that I may not have considered. What are the criteria for a quality wiki page? or a quality post? or a video?
I can also help me to reflect on what I value, leading me to statements about each criteria that articulates what I expect of myself or value. These value statements help define the territory for my efforts.
But as I know you know, we are not our students. As learners new to the work, they don’t have the experience we do. Their frame of reference is narrower. I believe they have to discover what they need to know to to do the work – not what I know not what you know, but what they learn to know about the work in ways that are meaningful for their journey to high quality. Their value statements and ours will not be the same and will develop over time if the culture and the context for the learning are ripe with the appropriate supports.
Rather than encourage the creation of rubrics, why not ask students to create high quality work documents that list criteria and value statements for the work at hand. Over time they can add examples from their own work or the work of their peers or others that illustrate what they are discovering about quality work.
Isn’t that better than reams of rubrics designed with little boxes filled with text whose meaning pivots on vague words like never, sometimes and always that for years now have served adults while leaving so many students wanting more.
I’ve found this article useful to my thinking on the issue. Alfie Kohn, The Trouble with Rubrics, English Journal, March 2006. (http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rubrics.htm)
April 28th, 2011 at 9:28 am
Dennis – I wrote a response a few days ago but I think it ended up being lunch for some hungry internet gremlins.
The frustration for me, as an advocate (or as Angela said – tenacious) defender of quality rubrics is our field’s shifting acceptance of what counts as a rubric. Prior to the addition of rubrics in our assessment toolbox, we already had checklists, scoring charts and criteria. There really wasn’t a need to replicate any of those tools but yet many “rubrics” are in fact, checklists put into table format. Our assessment toolbox is full to bursting with tools that capture and articulate quantity in student work and I intended to continue fighting for tools to express and discuss quality.
After reading anti-rubric commentaries like Kohn’s and Wilson’s Rethinking Rubrics, I’m struck by the fact that they are actually attacking the worst of rubrics or documents masquerading as rubrics. Words you cite: never, sometimes and always rarely appear in quality rubrics for the exact reason you cite – they’re vague. Additionally, quality rubrics should be about supporting students’ self-assessment and reflection – actions that are not supporting by columns that talk about how a learner failed, what they didn’t do, or what they’re bad at.
Working with students to create attributes of quality is a hallmark of quality rubric development, and essential to the process. The challenge often becomes “what then?” For students who already understand reflection and improvement, they can look at their work, look at the list of quality attributes and see how to close the gap. For students who lack that depth of meta-cognition, a quality rubric can help them see how to move closer to the descriptors of quality, that “third” column.
At the end of the day, rubrics can be a tool that support student learning and then a tool to facilitate teacher grading and/or evaluation. They can support student thinking around process, products, and performances that are similar to those that we experience in life after school. I am always willing and happy to explore the strengths and challenges related to rubrics and use my wiki: qualityrubrics.pbworks.com to explore what that looks like.
May 2nd, 2011 at 11:28 am
Jennifer, thanks for your thoughtful, passionate, informed response. I want more time to respond to the specifics in your your comment, but here’s something to think about while I’m preparing that.
In the teaching and learning process, what is the role of each of the following:
- a worksheet on quality,
- a discussion about quality,
- an attempt to achieve quality,
- a completed work, performance feedback,
- an assessment tool, and
- grades?
What is essential to student learning?
What is detrimental to student learning?
May 4th, 2011 at 8:19 am
Dennis – I look forward to continuing this conversation – in the meantime, I’m not 100% sure what you’re asking me. If you’re asking me to classify those items into buckets of “essential” or “detrimental”, I’d have to respond that “it depends” would apply to all of them. A worksheet in theory sounds detrimental but if it’s a graphic organizer that allows a student to organize their thinking, it’s essential. A discussion, in theory, sounds essential but for a student who struggles to remember everything they hear, it can be detrimental if there is no documentation of the discussion (for me, a quality rubric is the outcome of that discussion). Grades almost sits outside the two buckets. I have tried, with limited success to divorce rubrics and grades in my discussions about rubrics. The push-back has been “but that’s how teachers are using them” which may be true, rubrics and grades are only connected because we choose to connect them. (I liken it to combining ice cream and Volkswagons). If we go back to our assessment toolbox (checklists, scoring charts, scoring criteria, point systems) we already had plenty of tools to manage grades – why do rubrics need to be pulled into as well? What negative consequences are there for having an assessment tool (quality rubrics) that sit outside the grading system and serve to help students improve the quality of their work, engage in self-assessment and reflection, and facilitate communicate between student and teachers around what we mean by “good” or “better”?