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. 

Something Funny is Going on in Your Classroom

A day without laughter is like a prom without music. A bowl of milk with no Cap'n Crunch. A birthday party with no guests. A classroom without laughter is a barren wasteland of dull, lifeless mental inactivity.

This thought of mine was confirmed by a blog post I read today that explores the link between laughter and learning. The author, Sarah Henderson, maintains that laughter and levity increase student retention of content, and she offers compelling evidence to support her point.

For many teachers, that's great news that confirms everything they've believed and tried to practice daily in classrooms around the world. For others, that's scary news. Not everyone is naturally funny. We can't all be Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld, Wanda Sykes, David Sedaris, or Miranda Sings (look her up).

So what can the not-funny among us do to inject some wit into our classrooms?

Here are a few simple suggestions that are easily implementable by even the most humor-challenged among us:

Whimsical Classroom Traditions: Establishing a few lighthearted routines in your classroom can infuse some vitality into the most lifeless of educational environments. Doing this has the added bonus of creating a classroom culture and building memorable bonds with your students. In my classroom, for instance, we've instituted the tradition of the "Clappy Birthday" song. Inspired by minimalist composer Steve Reich, this alternative to the tone-deaf drudgery of the usual singing of "Happy birthday to you" replaces the singing with clapping; we clap the song in rhythm in honor of the birthday girl or boy. The kids get a kick out of this and remind us when we forget to observe birthdays in this silly and unusual method. Another example of this is evidenced by the sign in the front of my classroom that reads, "Oh, queso." This was inspired by the ubiquitous public speaking habit of beginning a presentation with the filler phrase, "Okay, so...." When students present in front of the class, we take great joy in catching them in this speech tic, and the students are quick to point out when their teacher slips and makes a similar mistake. Just yesterday, a group of former students visited after school and remarked (fondly) how the "Oh, queso" reminder has stuck with them.

Corny Jokes: In her blog, Sarah Henderson gives the caveat that only relevant humor has the effect of increasing student retention of learned material. In other words, just telling jokes about off-topic subjects may be fun, but it doesn't help the kids learn. My frequently hilarious teaching partner, Linda, is a master of the corny history joke. She's renowned among the students for sharing groaners about the material they're studying in class. Why did Julius Caesar buy crayons? He wanted to Mark Antony. Where did Montezuma go to college? Az Tech. How was the Roman Empire divided? With a pair of Caesars.The students may grimace when she tells these, but they remember them. I still recall a terrible joke my Pre-Cal teacher, Mr. Bernard. told us about "putting Descartes before the horse" way back in the 80s. Clearly, there's something to be said for digging out a few jokes to liven up your lectures. A simple Google search will turn up more jokes than you'll know what to do with about whatever subject you teach.

Let the Kids Be Funny:  Kids are about a thousand times more funny than teachers...at least to one another. Give your students opportunities to share their wit in content-related classroom activities. Yesterday, the aforementioned master teacher, Linda, came up with a brilliant and enjoyable way to debrief a history chapter. She divided the students into groups and assigned each group a song title and a fictitious musical group who would perform the song: "Please China, Won't You Convert?" by the Missionaries; "Bye-Bye Mongols" by the Ming; "Sorry to Plague You" by Black Death; "You Got Cotton, We Got Sugar" by Diffusion; "Revival" by Renaissance; and several others. The students' task was to choose a tune, write a song with their assigned title that showed what they learned in the reading, and then perform the songs for the class. We laughed all day long at the groups' hilarious renditions of these soon-to-be chart toppers. And our students reinforced what they learned in the chapter in a way that will stick for much longer than might occur fromn a less jovial lesson.

If you're stuck in a rut of deadly serious instruction, give some of these ideas a whirl. What's the worst thing that can happen? Your students might laugh at you? At least they're laughing.