In the good old days, teachers assigned students to write a summary of Huckleberry Finn. With no further instructions, students dutifully wrote up their summary and turned it in on Friday. The following Friday, they received their paper back,
In the good old days, teachers assigned students to write a summary of Huckleberry Finn. With no further instructions, students dutifully wrote up their summary and turned it in on Friday. The following Friday, they received their paper back, covered in red ink fixing their spelling errors with a note at the end, “Good job Billy. Think about voice. B+”
At some point, perhaps after watching Billy crumple up that paper and toss it in the trash, teachers began to think that there must be a better way to help students produce higher quality work, which after all, is the whole idea. The idea of a rubric was born.
Rubrics are better than the good old days, because through a rubric, teachers outline clear expectations of what is expected across multiple dimensions of the work. It’s not just reducing the entire assignment to a 78 out of 100. Teachers provide descriptive statements of what makes for an effective presentation in terms of clear speaking voice, helpful visuals, posture, correct information, and so on.
Yet after years of wading through rubrics where every item has almost one hundred identical words, differentiated only by “Student always… Student often… Student sometimes…” some of us have begun to feel that there must be a better way.
About five years ago, I had the good fortune to meet Ron Berger, the man Howard Fuller calls “one of the most remarkable teachers in America today,” who helped me understand the power of showing students models of what we want. I have seen how models help students produce higher quality work, which after all, is the whole idea.
But when I describe this approach to others, I have been stunned by the ferocity of the criticisms. “It kills student creativity!” “They just copy the model; they don’t learn to do it for themselves!”
These critics raise an excellent question: is merely reproducing others work a good way to learn how to do something? I think of examples from my own life.
As a physics major, writing does not always come easily to me. When I attended the University of California, Santa Barbara to earn a master’s degree in Education, I was asked to write like an academic. But I didn’t really know how to write like an academic. My first attempts were clumsy and stilted. The main idea, as far as I could tell, seemed to be, “Write in such a way as to obfuscate what you are actually trying to say.” In the meantime, I was reading hundreds of academic papers. Over time, as I read more and more professional academics, I began to get the idea. Over the course of my degree, my writing steadily improved, perhaps partially from feedback from my professors, but mostly I believe because I imitated the style of other educational researchers.
I have played basketball from early childhood up to and including my still regular 4:30 am game on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I was a basketball coach for fifteen years, coaching boys and girls from kindergarten through college. A conversation with Ron Berger helped me understand the difference between rubrics and models when it comes to basketball.
Imagine the basketball coach fresh from a workshop, her mind full of new ideas about assessment. “I need to be clear with my players about what is expected of them,” she remembers. “I should create a rubric!”
|Jump stops||When coming to a stop while dribbling the basketball, the player occasionally picks up both feet while the ball is still in the air and then lands with both feet simultaneously while at the same time grabbing the ball with both hands.||When coming to a stop while dribbling the basketball, the player often picks up both feet while the ball is still in the air and then lands with both feet simultaneously while at the same time grabbing the ball with both hands.||When coming to a stop while dribbling the basketball, the player always picks up both feet while the ball is still in the air and then lands with both feet simultaneously while at the same time grabbing the ball with both hands.|
Having passed out the rubric to her players, she sends them home to do their homework confident that the players will quickly learn how to effectively execute the jump stop. She looks forward to their first game.
The example is absurd on its face. No coach would ever do this. This is because the coach wants her players to get better at basketball. And this wouldn’t be the best way to teach a student how to jump stop. Instead, the coach would show her players what an expert jump stop looks like. Then she would have her students practice doing it exactly the way that she