I recently spent two evenings staying at work until almost 7pm to catch up on almost two months of grading. Some of that stems from not having a planning period for weeks at a time; some of it stems from sheer procrastination. In the past, if I had had two months of grading to try and catch up on, it would have mostly turned into completion grades. But no more. I can actually catch up now.
Not that this will solve everyone’s problems, but I just have to share this idea because it was a game changer for me. If you have to grade essays or other complex pieces of written work, I must introduce you to Single Point Rubrics.
“A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic (4 point) rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria. What makes it different is that it only describes the criteria for proficiency; it does not attempt to list all the ways a student could fall short, nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations.”
Guys, this is like the holy grail for grading.
Emphasis is put onto proficiency. What are the skills you need your students to be able to do? Stick JUST those onto that center column and make that column worth a B.
Students can now use the rubric like a check list, before, during, and after the assignment.
When grading, teachers need only to check the center column. Did they do it? Check. No, brief comment to the side. Yes AND it’s awesome? Brief comment to the side. Most students will land in that center column, so most of the grading is just checking off a list. It will go super fast.
Teachers no longer have to try and predict where a student might make mistakes. This is extremely helpful because students will always do something you don’t expect. The more open your rubric, the better you’ll be able to give unique feedback. 4-points always made me batty because there would always be something I left off, and there would be no way to hold a student accountable and give them appropriate feedback OR, I would have to take a ridiculous amount of points away for minor errors. Single Point Rubrics give me back discretion while marking.
Teachers no longer have to try and limit ways in which students can excel and show off their creativity. Single Point Rubrics give an enormous pathway for students who want to work in different ways. This is differentiation at its simplest.
Just to go into more detail about the “advanced/exceeds expectations” column, I recently gave a little assignment to students to create a mini flip book. 4 pages, no bigger than a hand. The pages were already printed and had specific information they needed to fill in to meet the “proficient/meets expectations” point. “Mini book is complete and constructed properly.”
Meeting that meant they had filled in the required research, added a picture to the front, cut out the pieces, and stapled the booklet together. To be sure, most students did just that. A few students didn’t manage to staple their pieces, and at least one put them in the wrong order. But several students went well beyond in ways I wouldn’t have predicted.
One student added an entirely new tab to the booklet so the information was more comprehensive. One student completely remade the tabs on her own and made a wooden booklet (so that it could look more old fashioned). One student did a hand-traced drawing for his picture, then scanned it, then printed it directly onto the paper so that it ended up looking like it had been professionally printed. One student added additional creative details to his picture, to encompass other information we had learned in the unit.
I don’t have to predict any of this. I just need to open the door and say “this is what I’m looking for. You can do just this, or you can go beyond.”
Caveat #1: You MUST give your rubrics to your students before they start their work for this system to be effective.
Caveat #2: You need to spend time figuring out what qualifies as “proficient”. Don’t put anything in that center column that you wouldn’t want to see on a B piece of work. Focus on essential skills or details; be willing to let nonessential things stay off your radar.
Example: I don’t even mention font, heading, title, or grammar on my essay/paragraph rubrics because I want them focused on structure and argument. This is my professional choice based on the students I currently teach; yours may be different. HOWEVER, feel free to have more than one rubric for an assignment. Maybe one rubric focuses on structure, and the other focuses on revision. (But don’t kill yourself trying to cover everything. Seriously.
Please, give Single Point Rubrics a try.
jacobvanloon
areudirty
2087
snowghoul
stormborns
