Rubric: a Good Swiss-Army Knife Tool for Your Teaching Toolkit Part 1
Recently, I was invited to present my practices on using rubrics to a teacher development session via Nepris to a group of Highland Park Independent School District teachers. The week prior to my presentation, I took some time to reflect and to organise myself for the presentation, and to put together a simple PowerPoint to help outline my thoughts and experiences. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to put together a good visual that encompassed all the aspects that I have used, and continue to use rubrics in my teaching practice for the workshop session.
So as an afterthought and a small atonement, I am writing this post and sharing a rubric visual (in progress) that I hope many of you will find useful in using this really fab and flexible tool
According to Webster's one of the key definitions of "rubric" is a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests.
So, essentially a communication tool, to communicated expectations (criteria) to students, often developed by an accreditation body or teacher. But as many of us understand there is often more than one stakeholder that needs to be communicated to for a good learning opportunity to happen. Which is why I often think about all the stakeholder that I can reach with using a rubric as parents can be a great help in reinforcing or adding to the learning process, and often a body of evidence is needed by accreditation bodies or management.
Often as I am thinking about the intended audience, I also think of the purpose for the rubric (and visa-vera), and what areas to emphasize in terms of point allocation or weight. The most common uses of rubrics in my assignments/projects/tasks, etc...are:
- formative assessment
- theory application
- skill(s) building
- summative assessment
So, looking at my visual at the beginning of the post, you can begin to see the same connections and aspects in developing and using rubrics in my teaching practice.
I will be going into more details and points of thought in future posts, so please join me, Until then, if you have any input or commentary, please feel free, and have a great summer.