I am teaching youth, I am creating questions for discussion or experiences that the child can do with their family in homes and communities.
This is why learning our community's assets are so important, because they can help us to create experiences like this in our students' lives.
Texts must be multimodal in nature so that students can engage in print and non-print such as image, sound, performance, and video.
It's also important that students see themselves in the layered text- are the texts relevant to them as people, not just as scholars? How can we use, for example, album covers in a unit on character analysis?
Skills must move to real action where students are learning to connect the academic success that they will experience with skills to real social change that help to make a better humanity for all.
This is especially important for social studies and our upcoming election unit- how can we ensure that students are going to leave our school(s) as active members of society, ready to investigate the world around them.
It isn't about the number of sources, and "excellent" is too vague for students. Be specific and descriptive.
Question: how do we ensure students understand? can we ask them to "help us" make the rubric so they know what their expectations are?
right amount
Challenge: is there a right amount? Is three or four too limiting? Is five too many? What is this sweet spot?
Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them reflect, self-assess, unpack, critique and more
Change: I think the best way to get students to do this is to include elements that they decide. Let them (within reason) decide what the best example of their essay should be, so they know that they know the expectations going in!
We've all had that time when we gave students the rubric and they threw it away, or the papers lay across the room like snow at the end of class.
Confirm: its difficult to get my students to care about the work that we give them in class, especially because its not the biggest thing they have to deal with (at home, at school, mentally, etc) so I completely agree with this!
. If the students can't understand the rubric, then how do you expect it to guide instruction, reflection and assessment? If
Connect: I remember receiving rubrics in high school that clearly had language from the state standards, because I didn't understand a thing!
For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea what she’s doing wrong.
Change: can we adjust this to be part of the feedback, and also provide, for example, annotations of the essay/project/etc? That way, the students will be able to see their grade clearly, but also see specific adjustments!
But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task.
Confirm: This is really really difficult to maintain, and will require the teacher to limit the students before they've even handed in their assignment.
The main disadvantage of single-point rubrics is that using them requires more writing on the teacher’s part.
Connect: my co-teacher often discusses with me various ways she uses rubrics in her classes, because they so often can take up too much time for her while not providing clear examples of where students need to improve and where they did well.
nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations
Question: how will students know where to stretch themselves and extend?
Creating them takes a lot of time
Challenge: I wonder if we can use standards to fill in these rubrics, so that the heavy lifting isn't on us!