Rubrics! Who Needs Them? You and Your Students

When I first started teaching English back in the day of dot matrix printers, I had never heard of that thing we call a rubric. Sure, we had criteria for assessing student work. but it was mostly in our heads. We viewed the product and, in our all-knowing English teacher wisdom, bestowed the grade the work deserved. I'd scrawl comments in the margins (mostly ones I would have to later interpret for a handful of conscientious students who couldn't read my red-penmanship) and hand the papers back. The great and powerful McKinney had spoken!

Fortunately, I've come a long way in 20 or so years. I now believe in the power of the rubric. I've written before about the importance of sharing rubrics with students before the assignment is completed and helping them to use rubrics to inform their work, but I've recently come to value to an equal degree the use of rubrics after assessment to guide their future efforts. 

In my humanities class, I have a recurring assignment called a Humanities Arts Experience, colloquially referred to by the pronounceable acronym HAE. In a nutshell, students venture into the real world for an arts experience at a theatre, museum, gallery, or concert hall and compose a newspaper-style review of their experiences. The rubric I've used for years is holistic, combining a number of skills and criteria for each grading designation. A "B paper," for instance, is more general than specific, relies more on summary than analysis, and contains errors in conventions that cause some minor difficulty for the reader. 

On the most recent essay,however, I developed a more detailed rubric. This one had eight criteria, and each criterion was detailed in a spreadsheet with descriptors for exemplary, proficient, acceptable, needs improvement, and unacceptable work.  

Here's a bit of technical stuff. Skip this paragraph if you're a technophobe. Students submitted their essays online on a Doc via Google Classroom, and I used the apps and extensions Doctopus and Goobric to attach my rubric electronically to each essay. All I had to do was "digest" the spreadsheet rubric using Doctopus, open the rubric on Goobric, select the tab for each criterion, click the appropriate descriptor in each category, type comments in the box, and press submit. Goobric pasted the entire rubric into the student's document, which I then returned to the student electronically. (Really, this is the easiest thing in the world. If technology appeals to you and you're tired of killing trees, grading mounds of physical papers, and listening to "my printer didn't work" excuses, you need to give this a try.)

Tomorrow in class, I will ask my students to open their documents and reflect on the rubric. If I deemed their introduction "acceptable" or told them their analysis "needs improvement," they can view my rubric's written explanation of what an exemplary product looks like in each of those categories, and they have something concrete to work on to improve next time. With eight categories to look at, the students will receive ample guidance to help their next HAE rival this one.   

Life was certainly easier for me when the great and powerful McKinney could bestow a grade on sight. What didn't occur to me then, though, was that the grade was not the most important thing. Student learning was. If it's my job to take these students in whatever condition they arrive in my classroom and lead them to where they need to be when they leave, I owe it to them to provide feedback and concrete steps for improvement. Students aren't naturally reflective, and many of them see the grade as the endpoint, but forcing them to spend some time thinking critically about their previous work and establishing a plan for improvement will help them develop the growth mindset and the tools they need to become exemplary.