Response to: Teaching with Rubrics /Andrade

Response to teaching with Rubrics by Andrade
July 23, 2010
This article addresses rubrics as both teaching and grading tools. Most rubrics list the criteria for a piece of work and the gradations of quality for each criterion. Criteria and levels of quality are the focus. Andrade states that what makes a rubric an instructional rubric are the ways in which it is used in the classroom. I have only used rubrics with my student for evaluating written work. I have looked at the criteria and familiarized myself with the various levels of performance. I have not created my own rubrics and used them for instructional purposes.
Andrade lists the good, the bad, and the ugly of rubrics:
The good: rubrics orient us toward our goals as teachers. They can be used to clarify learning goals, design instruction, communicate goals to students, guide feedback, and judge final products.
The bad: rubrics are not a replacement for good instruction and they are not self-explanatory. Students need to be taught how to use them for peer and self-assessment. Rubrics are not just scoring tools.
The Ugly: teachers need to carefully consider the quality of the rubrics that we use. Validity, reliability and equity need to be kept in mind as we choose the rubrics we use. Andrade says that by attending to these important issues, the good of instructional rubrics can far outweigh the bad.
In my own practice of teaching Resource Room students writing, I think I will find the leveled rubrics that were shared in class to be very useful. The rubric I currently have is just a primary rubric. When I get back in my classroom in August I want to compare the shared rubrics to the rubric I have been using. The website that was shared will also help me create my own rubrics and that was a good “find” for me this summer.
Another implication in my classroom is that rather than using rubrics for grading purposes, I have been using them as a diagnostic tool to monitor student progress. I use them to evaluate my students’ progress on their monthly student writing samples “free-writes”. What I have done and like doing, is to photocopy my students’ work so that they keep the original, and then after analyzing it with the rubric, I conference with students individually and we talk about what they are doing right and what they need to work on. I always make sure they are aware of their own learning targets when we are done. This has been pretty successful and since I have only a small group of students that I serve for writing each quarter, I can be consistent on my follow-up with the students. My challenge will be that I need to work with the educational support staff that work in my room so that we are all on the same page.