Is this a great rubric or a limiter? How do we know? How do we decide? How do we systematize this?
Last week, a surprising thread running through all of my presentations was unexpected, spontaneous, and recurring conversation about the relative powers and limitations of rubrics. I mentioned that I rarely use rubrics anymore in my work. Instead, I outline a list of qualities I am looking for and write up comments. Some agreed with me; some said that we need to push further so that our rubrics measure more valuable aspects of a project. (One strategy that helped them has been to eliminate numbers — like counting up bullet points, pages, slides, or words.)
Today, the Tie and Jeans blog, a blog I usually read to get a teacher’s take on a middle school makerspace, comments on rubrics in a way that resonated with our decision on rubrics:
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I stopped using rubrics when they seemed to reveal the limits of my imagination more than they provided a ladder for student’s creativity.
What is your take on rubrics? Do they become checklists of minimum expectations? Do they, as a practitioner told my co-professor, take away our professional judgment and de-personalize feedback? Or are they working for you — and, if so, why?
Image Source: “PBL Rubric” by Kathy Cassidy on Flickr. Used with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.