This past week's readings really got me talking. I was curious to see how my colleagues felt about and approached the use (and theories behind NOT using) of rubrics. I am constantly struck by how much I can relate to the concepts discussed in this course, and this week was no exception. I remember reading last week in Murray's piece that he told his students that every piece of writing is a draft. That stuck with me, and I aggressively highlighted the section in Spandel's "In Defense of Rubrics" that said, "Writing is revision" (20). How completely honest and true is that? She goes on to explain how she tries to encourage students to hit that "wow" moment when writing; when they create something so meaningful that people are moved by it and exclaim, "'You've got to see this'" (20). Those words kind of helped me in trying to construct a way of thinking where rubrics weren't the end all, be all, but instead worked as a piece of scaffolding for students to adhere to in terms of guidelines/benchmarks/checkmarks, but not so much as a rigid structure in which they had to follow exactly.
I do think that all students need some sort of guideline, though, because most of them have to work toward achieving success using the state mandated Keystone rubric. Problem is...right now this is simply a 4, 3, 2, or 1, and if you think about it, the way one of my English teacher friends put it, either an A, C, D, or F... As unfortunate as that is, how are we supposed to widen that to help them feel achievement and success if they make a few mistakes and all the sudden have a "C" grade on a piece of writing? This is what my friend and I talk about during prep period and lunch duty. I mean, once in awhile we slip in gossip of who is more authentic: Jay Gatsby or Nick Carraway...or why JK Rowling shouldn't have ended the HP series with an epilogue and just kept writing out the story instead...But this week I got her chatting about rubrics. She teaches 10th grade, smack dab in the middle of Keystone, dare I say..."training," and she had some interesting perspectives on this. She gives her kids more of a detailed rubric than this (from the PA Dept. of Education) so that they have more grading flexibility, because, and I agree, she feels that giving kids a "C" as the punishment for not being "perfect" with a "4" seems a bit intense.
That's where I believe rubrics [should] have some flexibility and be catered toward the prompt or assignment genre. There is almost no way, the way I see it, that I could be told to write an essay on a piece of literature with absolutely no guidelines and promise to be successful. And I'm an English Writing and Literature degree holder!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had a big enough panic attack when I had to write a25-page lit analysis on Invisible Man during senior year of undergrad. And for that, I even talked through a basic rubric and scoring sequence with my advisor in order to get some sense of stability.
So I agree that rubrics need some work, some nurturing, some love...but I think that we can't abandon the idea altogether (or, like in Wilson's eyes, let them be a work in progress--that makes me think of chaos and mayhem, actually). I mean, realistically, this more of a conversation to have with the state than with teachers in the classroom who have basically no control over whether or not rubrics are used, because if we don't use them and get kids used to them, how-oh-how will they possibly be ready when they face them on the Keystones (which are required in order to graduate...............)???
No comments:
Post a Comment