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Professional development activities that have proven effective will be included in Develop Your Staff. Your contributions are welcome. Send them to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Rubric-Based Assessment Part 2: Deliver the Workshop
Content Rubrics, or Where’s the Beef?
In Part 1, I told you about rubrics: how they work, why teachers will like them, where to find background information for the workshop packet. Now to the workshop:
Agenda
- Introduction
- Rubric process
- Rubric structure
- Work time
- Rubric share and discussion
Here’s the breakdown.
1. Introduction
Relate a story from your own teaching experience. Mine would confess the endless number of student essays I would cause to bleed red ink, only to rage with frustration, “I’m working so hard! Why don’t they learn?”
Point out another important issue, reliability of scoring. With student writing, do you count the errors and subtract from 100? Grade on legibility?
Move your introduction to rubrics as a catalyst for improving teaching and learning. Use information from Part 1 to provide participants with context, and emphasize the “make-it, take-it” nature of their work for the day.
2. Rubric process
Walk participants through steps needed to engage students with rubrics. [Goodrich, H. (1997). Understanding rubrics. Educational Leadership, 54, 14-17.]
- Look at models of each level.
- List criteria.
- Articulate gradations of quality.
- Practice evaluating models.
- Use self- and peer-assessment for class discussion.
- Revise.
- Use same rubric for teacher assessment.
3. Rubric structure
Give participants clear instructions on how to create a rubric, generally formatted as a table. We use the Rubric for Rubrics, developed by Dr. Gary Sweitzer, Curriculum Director for New Albany-Plain Local Schools in New Albany, Ohio:
Learning Target (table header)
Clear statement of the desired understanding, performance, or product
and the purpose
Criteria (listed vertically at left of table)
Dimensions that reflect the important components of the understanding,
performance, or product
Levels of Performance (listed horizontally from high to low)
Levels of accomplishment for each criterion are specified so that teachers
and students can consistently apply them to evaluate student work. Levels
should be developmentally appropriate and explicitly phrased to be useable
by teachers and students to monitor improvement.
Format
Use a table tool to create an adjustable format for rubric content. (I
like the auto-format table in Microsoft Word.)
Create a blank table, save it as a template, and copy it to diskettes for staff use in work groups. You’ll need a computer, printer, and printer-quality transparency sheet for each breakout room.
4. Work time
Designate work groups by team, curriculum area, or grade level. Select a facilitator to moderate the work and type content into the rubric.
Ask participants to bring a unit, test, or project that will benefit the group. This allows teachers to create an assessment tool they can begin using immediately. Make-it, take-it.
Remind facilitators to print the working draft of each group’s rubric to share with the large group. Emphasize “working draft” to reduce risk.
5. Rubric share and discussion
Ask a nonfacilitator from each work group to present the draft rubric, discuss questions that arose, and ask for feedback. Collect the feedback for use in team, curriculum, or grade follow-up meetings.
End the workshop by giving each participant a diskette with the rubric template. When group rubrics are revised, copy them to share with participants.
It’s critical that as principal, you follow through to attend the meetings, offer your own feedback, and support the work.
