Blog 1: Assessing Rubrics

When I first read Maya Wilson’s article “Why I Won’t Be Using Rubrics to Respond to Students’ Writing,” I wholeheartedly agreed with her because I have always found rubrics to be incredibly frustrating because I’ve always felt that they are creatively restrictive and are used as a substitute for meaningful feedback. Throughout high school, I found myself conforming my writing style to meet whatever I interpreted the rubric to mean. I chose the word interpreted deliberately because I often found myself struggling to figure out what the rubric that was supposed to guide my writing even meant because they were often loaded down with complicated academic language that was far beyond my knowledge of writing at the time. The more that I think about rubrics, I really like the concept on paper, but it seems like my original opinion of them, as well as Wilson’s perspective in her article, stems more from poor implementation of rubrics, rather than rubrics being innately useless in classrooms.

One of the concepts that frustrates Wilson the most is that rubrics do not allow much room for specific feedback. She writes “While numbers work pretty well for communicating certain kinds of precise information, we have kept words around for their evocative, emotive, associative power” (Wilson 63). Frankly, I do not understand why Wilson portrays rubrics and specific constructive feedback as mutually exclusive ways of responding to students’ work. In isolation, rubrics do limit specific constructive feedback, but what is stopping teachers from using a rubric as a guide for grading, in addition to providing students with specific written feedback? Sure, it is more time consuming to evaluate a piece in multiple ways, but if it benefits students, then it is worth the extra effort. Effective rubrics show students why they received the grade they did in a way that is much more difficult to do in written feedback. Because rubrics are broken down into point values with a specific description attached to each numerical value, it is easy to see what each numerical value entails and how to improve that specific category or to see why a student did well in a specific category. Specific feedback does not breakdown grades into categories in the same way that rubrics do, but it does allow teacher to branch out more and talk writing in a much more holistic way without just focusing on the categories in the rubric. It broadens the horizons for what teachers can talk about in writing, as well as providing students with a much more human and personalized response to their work. Together, these two tools seem to be an effective way to encompass everything that a well-rounded response to student writing entails.

I value making writing assignments be open-ended enough for students to have choice and to be able express their ideas in their own personally creative ways, but at the same time, I think there has to be some guidance incorporated into the assignment. There are a variety of ways for students to write and express ideas that are perfectly acceptable, but there are specific skills and methods of writing that I am responsible for teaching students, so it is necessary that I assess students in these categories to make sure that they are learning what they should learn in their grade level. I think that rubrics can be an effective way to let students know what they are being evaluated on in their writing without necessarily inhibiting their ability to write in their own unique way. For example, my professor is using a rubric to assess this blog entry that is very open ended, but still details exactly what I need to do to get my desired grade. The categories on this particular rubric are Overall Purpose and Focus, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, and Quality of Entries. These categories are specific enough for me to know what I need to do to be successful, but still broad enough for me to be able to incorporate my own writing style into this post. I could have exhibited those four criteria in a variety of ways, such as a narrative, a research article, a poem, or a plethora of other genres. Effective rubrics serve as a guiding force to show students what they are expected to do, but do not mandate the process they must take to reach that point.

In my future classroom, I intend to use both rubrics and specific feedback. Students deserve to know the qualities I expect them to exhibit in their writing before they begin writing. For this reason, I think it is essential to give students the rubric prior to their writing, so that it is not just a tool for evaluating work, but also for explaining the assignment. The rubrics I plan to use will incorporate language that is appropriate for my students’ knowledge-level and cognitive development and clearly outline what they will be assessed on. In addition, I will incorporate my own personal specific written feedback that discusses the characteristics of their individual writing because they also deserve to know that I value their writing and am invested in their learning.