Which is why I am troubled by rubrics.

Although the rubric certainly helped me approach the project – I knew what I would be evaluated on before I even started writing – it did not give me any idea of what I did well or what I could have done better. Now, I know it’s possible to use a rubric better than this example, but I’m concerned that in using a rubric as a time-saving measure, it’s all too easy for a teacher to fall into the habit of providing minimal feedback for the sake of fast grading. After all, the numbers circled correspond to a certain performance level. But, for many students, that’s not good enough. I’m a graduate student and have been employed as a writer, and I’m unable to derive much feedback from the circled numbers on my rubric; how can we expect high school students to make meaning of the same?

In exploring my aversion to rubrics, I’ve found more support for them as a tool than anything else. I’m beginning to come around to the idea of using rubrics, but I think we need to be certain that we are using them well. And, perhaps, not using them as the only tool for feedback, especially in a secondary English class. If we are to provide our students with meaningful feedback that they can make sense of and use to improve their writing, we need to be more specific than circled numbers on a chart.

But I could be wrong about this.

According to this article   from teachervision.com, rubrics provide several advantages for students:

• “Teachers can increase the quality of their direct instruction by providing focus, emphasis, and attention to particular details as a model for students.
• Students have explicit guidelines regarding teacher expectations.
• Students can use rubrics as a tool to develop their abilities.
• Teachers can reuse rubrics for various activities.”

In addition, the article states that “many experts believe that rubrics improve students’ end products and therefore increase learning. When teachers evaluate papers or projects, they know implicitly what makes a good final product and why. When students receive rubrics beforehand, they understand how they will be evaluated and can prepare accordingly.”

Nothing I’ve read in favor of the use of rubrics has convinced me that they’re truly useful for students. I’ve been at a loss to find a better alternative thus far (and I don’t think I could accurately determine what my alternative should be until I’m in a classroom for real. At this point, I’m just speculating.)

Maja Wilson’s article “The View from Somewhere” presents the argument that the use of the rubric provides an assessment without considering the reader or the writer thought processes, hence “the view from nowhere.” But good writing is all about the reader, and how the writer conveys ideas to said reader.  Maja writes “rubrics were developed to make direct writing assessments palatable to testing companies—and thank goodness, or multiple-choice grammar tests would still be the only acceptable method of determining writing skill. However, the disagreement that is inevitable when unique individuals bring their perspectives to a text doesn’t lend itself to objective testing procedures.”

Because every reader and every reader and every writer will bring different perspectives to the writing process, the rubric provides only a false sense of objectivity to the assessment process. I’ve been told that the rubric allows for several teachers to evaluate the same essay (presumably an essay written for a standardized test) exactly the same way. In this way, the rubric seems to provide greater accuracy in grading writing, but I’d argue the opposite. Being standard is not the same as being accurate.

As a writer, I’ve made the most improvement to my writing when I’ve had a good editor. A person who is both a reader and a writer and can help me determine where my sentences are unclear and where my structure could be better. In the time I spent editing my college newspaper and working as a newsletter editor in a post-college communications job, I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had really, really talented editors. This experience, at least in part, is something I want to provide for my students; maybe the writing conference in place of the rubric.

But I also get that it’s not practical. Even with only 25-50 students (which I realize is unrealistically low), it seems mathematically impractical to spend even 10-15 minutes working with each student.

At this point, there are more questions than answers. It’s something for another day.

Sorry, world. I still hate rubrics.

I’ve been having all sorts of problems with WordPress lately, but it seems that I am the only one. It’s not working properly yet, but I am at least able to post again. I think.

This is what my dashboard looks like right now. I can’t get any of my stats to load. I could have done this last weekend while I was poking through my past posts and comments, but I put it off until the last day. I’m a little hesitant to get all meta and self-assess on the internet. And now I am still a week late, and far behind.

For right now, I’m going to do what I can and hope to fill in the relevant stats later, either when WordPress is working properly or my internet is fixed. I don’t know which is the problem. I’ve been looking into it, and I think it’s a CSS problem. With my computer? Who knows. I’m not that technologically competent.

Consistency

I’ve struggled to be consistent in my blogging, but I’ve averaged nearly a post a week, which is not terrible. Part of my difficultly in posting often has been finding the time to post. It’s not that I don’t have enough time for blogging, because I do if I’m disciplined, but more that my best posts have taken so much time and energy that I find it hard to do often. There have been times where I’ve felt pressured to get a post up quickly, and that has never resulted in writing that I’m proud of. At first, I didn’t want those posts on my blog at all, but I’m trying to go easy on myself.

Part of the adjustment to blogging for me is in finding my voice and figuring out what I’d like to write about. I can’t do that if I continue to hold myself to my own impossible standards. (Before I made the decision to return to school to become a teacher, I had a conversation with a friend of a friend who has dedicated his life to the teaching profession. Within half an hour of meeting this person, he said to me, “You’re quite a perfectionist, aren’t you?” To which I replied, “How did you know?” Apparently, I make it obvious, but am oblivious to it myself.)

So for consistency, I think I’ve been about average, but I have room to improve. In April, my goal is to continue to post once a week, but also to be satisfied with my work. I tend to be very, very hard on myself, but I know that I have not yet done my best work with this blog. That’s an abstract goal to anyone who is not me, but it’s one I know I can achieve.

Food for thought: in most internet communities, approximately 90 percent of the members are lurkers. Nine percent of members are occasional participants, and the remaining one percent is active participants. It’s very, very difficult to convert a lurker into a participant. I tend to be a lurker, and I would guess that many of my classmates more or less the same. I give us all credit for pushing beyond our natural tendencies to observe and entering the conversation, even if we’ve done so reluctantly. (There is some variation to these numbers, but lurkers are always the largest percentage. See here  or here  for more info. The same breakdown tends to apply to engagement within other communities, including workplaces and offline organizations.)

Quality

Quality is another category where my perfectionist tendencies get the best of me. I have few favorites among my posts, but I am most pleased with my post on rubrics. I have more to say on that matter soon as it’s a topic that I’ve continued to research and ponder this semester (though I still have no answers, I’m thinking perhaps that is for the best). My post on rubrics also generated my only comment from a person I do not know offline, which I’m still pretty excited about.  I’m also pleased with my post on laptops in the classroom.

I’m having a difficult time deciding where I fall on the quality of my posts. I’ve gotten a lot more personal in my recent posts than I’ve expected to, but I’m not altogether comfortable with the quality of my writing. I don’t think they’re bad posts, but they’re not really what I want to be producing. That said, a lot of those posts are the product of moments where I’ve hit a stride with my writing and the words just poured onto the page. Though I personally prefer my well-researched and edited posts, my more thoughtful blogs have been those that were more extemporaneous (and slightly stream of consciousness). In every post, I’ve tried to keep a larger audience in mind (beyond my Penn State classmates) and I think I’ve done well with that aspect.

Going forward, I think I need to work harder to combine the different types of writing I’ve used. I cannot consistently post long, well-researched blogs like my post on rubrics because they are much too time-consuming (altogether, that post took more than four hours). I want to be more concise. I need to write posts that I’m happy with – something I have not done regularly on this blog.

Conversation

This I think is where my tendency to lurk has hurt me the most. I have commented on many of my classmates’ blogs, but I am reluctant to comment on blogs that are not written by people I already know. I’m also hesitant to participate in other online communities my classmates have enjoyed, such as the English Companion Ning or Classroom 2.0. I have only one comment on my blog that is from someone I don’t already know. On paper, this is my weakest category. But like I said, I’m a lurker. Stepping out of my comfort zone to write this blog at all has been a challenge, and I choose to give myself credit for that.

Overall

I don’t like blogging for a grade, so I’m going to stop short giving myself a grade for this project (though I would never have started blogging if I weren’t being graded for it). I plan to continue blogging after the semester comes to an end, because I’ve found great personal benefit in this project. It’s something I enjoy, when I finally force myself to sit down and write and gives me an outlet for the questions I have about teaching and learning. For me, this reflection is about deciding whether I am committed to this blog or not. I choose to commit. There have been times this semester when I’ve put my best effort into this blog, and times when I’ve only gone halfway. For April and beyond, my goal is to convert this blog from something that I do just because I must to a place I am fully proud of.

There’s response here, but also some good links to other posts on the internet that deal with similar subject matter. hurrah for personal responsibility.

It’s been that kind of day.

I had every intention of pulling together a really good post today, because it’s been the kind of weekend where I’ve been getting things done (unfortunately not school related, but my fiance and I spring-cleaned the heck out of our apartment, and it’s never looked better).

The real post will have to come another time, and I’m at work on a reflection on my successes and failures in blogging that is also coming soon.

But for now, I will leave you with this post from Scott McLeod on Dangerously Irrelevant that makes my heart happy even on a day when so much has not gone well:

We ARE the system.

Thank you to Scott for putting this out there. I’ll add teachers to Scott’s list of education professionals that includes “principals, superintendents, curriculum directors, technology coordinators, and educational leadership professors.” Sure, these folks are the leaders, the decision makers, and perhaps the people with the power in our schools. But complaining about the system will not get anyone anywhere.

As a future English teacher and a citizen of the world, I am left with this thought: I can only control what I do in my own classroom and my own life. I cannot control what other people do. I cannot make all of the decisions. If I hate what standardized testing has done to school curicculum, I will solve nothing by simply complaining.

“We must point those fingers inward. We must blame ourselves before we blame others. We must recognize the impacts of our own actions rather than always blaming external factors. Only then does real progress occur.”

There are times when I just need to tune it all out and shut down. 

I’m a bit distracted lately and there’s been too much happening in my life to keep all the balls in the air. So I’ve shut down a bit, mostly neglecting my school work, and now I’m trying to catch up with all of the information that just keeps coming, whether I am listening or not.

There were several times in college when I thought, “I could just be a student forever.” I loved the classes and loved the opportunity and even with three majors felt that there were things I was missing out on. But then I graduated, and got a job (then another job) and settled into a pretty nice post-college routine. I found new hobbies and new outlets for my constant desire to learn and try new things.

Now that I’m back in school again, I’m finding it unsatisfying. It’s not that I don’t want to teach (that’s the only reason I’m a student) or that I don’t want to learn. I just don’t want to be a student. At least, a tution-paying student at a conventional university, a student in the most common sense of the word.

In a way, this PLN project has helped make that clear to me. I don’t need to be enrolled in courses to be a student. I have questions, and as a teacher I will have dilemmas, and there are places I can go to find answers. This blog has forced me to ask questions, to research, to find answers, and the compile them all into my own beliefs about how I’d like to trying things when I’m in my own classroom, or how I see myself as a teacher. In that way, I’ll be a student forever.

But I will be relieved when I’m not a conventional student anymore.

As an undergraduate student at La Salle, I never brought a computer to class. Of course, I used a desktop then, so it wasn’t an option anyway, but it wasn’t something anyone else did either. I also am fairly certain that most of the buildings on campus didn’t have wireless internet (but I could be wrong because it’s not something I paid attention to – not having a laptop and all).

So it’s only now that I’ve returned to school at Penn State that I’ve experience the “laptops in class” phenomenon that is apparently so controversial among some university faculty (not to say Penn State necessarily; faculty in general).

One of my regular reads, Moving at the Speed of Creativity , shared this video:

It seems obviously staged, but the guy makes his point.

I was curious what the general reaction might be to the use of laptops in class. It’s something the surprised me when I first returned to school. It seems like in my classes here, not only is bringing a laptop to class normal, it’s expected. When it’s required, I’ve started dragging my three or four year old, billion pound laptop to class, but I’m not really sold on the idea. I know many of my classmates use their computers to take notes, which I can understand, but I’m a little bit of a dinosaur and really love taking notes on paper (I also know that when I write things out on my own, I will remember them far better).  I think the most common use I’ve seen for laptops in class is for Facebook or email when we’re bored or not paying attention.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I can understand why it’s easy to find professors who object to the use of laptops in class, like those mentioned in this article from the Responsibility Project. It’s distracting for sure, and there is some research that shows students who use laptops in class perform worse on tests that those who do not.

The same article from findingdulcinea.com  cites a few more research studies that have demonstrated the negative effects of laptops:

A study by the University of Michigan supports Weiser’s claim. The study found that switching between tasks actually took up more time than just doing the tasks separately. Other reports have found that multitasking increases stress and the likelihood of dangerous accidents.

While college students may be able to regulate their computer use based on consequences, it seems that young students have difficulty balancing the entertainment value of the Internet with its educational opportunities. 

Although computer use for young students with parental guidance can improve performance, it was found that low-income students in Romania who were given laptops performed worse than their peers without laptops. The reason was thought to be that the computers were more distracting than helpful to the students. 

Computer use may have other effects on young learners; a 2008 Pew study found that two thirds of teenagers used Internet slang such as emoticons in their schoolwork.

It seems clear that there is some solid support behind the idea that laptops in class aren’t always helpful and can actually have a negative effect on student performance. That said, I don’t think I’d go so far as to say banning laptops is the right answer. Wesley Fryer, in his post “A professor who takes laptop banning too far” says that:     

Certainly the desire (on the part of faculty / teachers) to CONTROL the learning environment so it mirrors a traditional, entirely teacher-directed environment is strong in many classrooms.

Complete control over the student in the learning environment is not and should not be considered a hallmark of educational excellence. As educators, we are ultimately working to empower our students to make good choices and become autonomous learners on their own. We are training the next generation of Jedi. Of course classroom control and classroom management are vitally important, we cannot teach amdist chaos. Total control, however, is a myth and should not be held up as the ideal at the university or the K-12 level.

(Please note that the Jedi reference makes sense in the context of his post.)

Using laptops in class doesn’t have to be detrimental to student progress. In the college setting, I think it’s the responsibility of both the professor and the student to ensure that laptops are used properly. A blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education(http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Students-Stop-Surfing-After/4576) documents the drop in laptop use after students were warned that laptop use could affect test scores (because of student distraction, not any punishment from the professor). But what about the secondary setting?

As a future English teacher, I’m excited about the possibilities presented by the advances in technology since my own high school graduation. I’ve often read about teachers using blogs to help students work on writing; the audience a blog provides and its published format can make a writing assignment seem more meaningful that something that is submitted to and read by the classroom teacher. But secondary teachers are especially responsible for, as Wesley Fryer eloquently stated, empowering our students to become autonomous learners, even if that means giving up some measure of classroom control.

But how does one do this well?

A quick search on the English Companion Ning  (which I believe is now private to non-members and therefore non-linkable; if you’re not a member, I’d highly recommend it) led me to some great responses to the question, “How do we get the most out of technology in instruction?”

Out of respect to the privacy settings on the ning, I’m not going to copy responses in full, but a few of the great ideas in brief:

• “Before putting students on our blog, I spent class time with them on expectations, including reading the site’s terms of use. I wrote up an agreement that students and their parents had to sign that outlined my expectations and cited the school policy on bullying, harassment, etc. I also didn’t approve some early comments on the blog that were just silly and off-topic; I then replied to those students online to let them know why I didn’t approve them.”
• If lots of your students have cell phones, and you have an LCD projector, there is a free website that you can use to have your students text answers, which then appear on your screen.
• [Students posting inappropriate comments, posts, etc,] is the perfect way to teach them all about appropriate and safe and responsible internet use.
• Blogs and google documents as a means for students to submit assignments

There are tons of great ideas for incorporating technology into the secondary English classrooms that can help students use their laptops effectively. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of laptops being a potential distraction, but I think part of reducing the distraction of technology in the classroom is in how it’s used. If students are simply taking notes while a teacher lectures, the temptation to sneak a peek at Facebook might just be too strong. But how different is that from a student without a laptop who completely tunes out the professor and doodles instead? If we are going to encourage our students to use technology in class, we must be conscious of our assignments and our approach, so that students know the expectations and are occupied by their work. Which, really, is true with or without computers in class.

I spent part of my break putting together paperwork and attending training so that I can substitute teach in several local districts. I grew up in New Jersey, where substitute teachers are only required to have 60 college credits before entering the classroom. It was not uncommon in high school for the subs to have graduated only a few years before. When I moved to Pennsylvania, I had no idea that the rules would be so different. Here, most districts require a person to be a certified teacher to sub. Because I have a college degree, I am able to apply for emergency certification, which I am hoping will let me work a few days here and there.

At the training, I met a woman who is a certified teacher and taught in Virginia for three or so years. Now she’s living in PA, but is not eligible for a teaching certificate here unless she returns to school and completes a program (including student teaching again). A little surprising, right? But her degree and teaching certificate are in an area that Pennsylvania doesn’t currently certify teachers in (ESL) and so she’s out of luck for now.

A lot of the other people who attended the training expressed similar frustrations in becoming certified to teach in Pennsylvania – even those who had taught for years in other states. I consider myself very lucky to be able to take these few years out of my career to return to school to complete my certification, but it wouldn’t have been possible if I’d had more responsibilities (many of my fellow attendees have children).  Before I made the decision to come back to school full-time, I researched my options, but found that I was pretty limited, particularly in central PA. Had I stayed in Philadelphia, I probably could have done a large portion of my certification at night and kept working full-time until I needed to student teach, but I was unable to find anything like that near my new hometown.

I really believe that the best way to learn to teach is to be in the classroom, but I’m sure it’s also helpful to have a solid foundation before getting there. I’m looking forward to having this paperwork complete so that I can start subbing and getting that school experience now, so that I’m a little better prepared when it’s time for me to have my own classroom.

And to my Penn State classmates and any other teachers in training: I recently had a conversation with one of my former English teachers who suggested keeping a file of notecards with ideas for our own classrooms. So often when I am reading or in class, I will hear something that I can’t wait to try as a teacher. But instead of just filing it away in my head (where I am certain it will be lost forever) I’m going to take her advice and start writing stuff down in one place.

That said, I still have a lot to learn. So when going through the pileup in my google reader, I was excited to read Wesley Fryer’s post “Redfining the Beginner: What is a webbed browser and tabbed browsing” on his blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity. Though the post specifically deals with using the tabs available on Internet Explorer and other browsers, I was particularly struck by his introduction.

“We should NOT make assumptions about the ‘digital literacy’ or technology skills / knowledge people already possess, whether those people are younger college students or older professors with PhDs.”

Which I think is so true. I have often met the assumption that because I am a member of the “online generation” I surely must think or act a certain way. Maybe the generalizations are true of generation Y as a whole, but they’re a lot less accurate on an individual level.

In my approach to this blog, I’ve been really focused on what I don’t know. I’m not always sure what to write about. I hesitant to comment on what I think should or should not be done in the classroom until I’ve actually been in front of a class. And, despite my age, I’m not that familiar with a lot of technology.

But as Wesley Fryer (quoting Karen Montgomery) says:

“…beginners are not merely observers or spectators. Beginners are active participants. When it comes to digital and social media technologies, as educators we must choose to become beginners / participants and move out of the stands or off the bench.”

I might be familiar with things like facebook or twitter, but I’m new to blogging, nings, and plenty of other technologies. That’s no reason for me to reject it all on sight. It just makes it a little more difficult to use. I’m learning, though, and I am realizing it’s ok to be a beginner.

I was glad to see Jeffrey Wilhelm address his experiences teaching Kae, an ELL from Laos who was a struggling reader in one of his classes. Kae did have difficulty making connections to the stories she was reading and truly experiencing a book, but it seemed more to be a language issue than a reading issue. As Kae became more proficient with language, she was also better able to experience her reading. Wilhelm’s use of pictures and visualization to help his struggling readers experience a story was interesting; one of the main points we’ve discussed in my class about teaching ELLs is the use of books, particularly picture books. The context provided by the picture helps an ELL to decipher the content. So when Kae was able to use pictures to depict what was going on in the story, she was able to make connections to the work whether she knew the proper vocabulary or not.

There is a lot about my class that is applicable across grade levels, but I’m still curious about the particular challenges for secondary English teachers who find themselves with an ELL in class. At several times in my own high school experience, students joined our classes from foreign countries; it seems likely that at some point in my career I will also have a student who is not a native English speaker.

Which means that I have been spending a good deal of time researching rubrics through the resources that have become available to me through this PLN project (such as the English Companion Ning) and my favorite resource: a Google search.

To be honest, I’m still working it all out in my head, but I think I can finally put into words some of the things I dislike about rubrics:

1. I can see how rubrics function as a tool to make assessing student writing easier and more justifiable. But I am hesitant to believe that because rubrics are beneficial just because they simplify a teacher’s life.
2. I think rubrics seek to remove some of the subjectivity from the grading process. By distributing a clear set of guidelines to students before an assignment is due (or maybe even begun), teachers are able to defend the grades students earn based on a set of categories and points. Rubric or no, I think the process is still subjective. What I see as a five in a category is going to be a  four or even a three to someone else.
3. Writing is a messy process that is difficult to sum up in neat, little boxes. It’s even more difficult to sum up in six traits that apply to writers across grade levels.
4. Too often, I’ve found rubrics that assess all elements of an “ideal assignment” on a 1-5 scale. Which means, each area of assessment is weighted the same. But I would argue that in many cases, spelling and grammar do not need to be given the same point value as analysis and synthesis. (And, yes, I realize that the easy solution is to change the point values. Though there are many sites where formulaic rubrics are available for teachers to use, I’m sure they are intended as templates.)
5. Although I think students are searching for guidelines in completing an assignment and rubrics are a way to define expectations ahead of time, I think that a great assignment might not be what we expect it to be. Often, it’s the entire process that defines an ideal result.

In searching for alternatives to rubrics, I’ve found little that I could put into practice in a classroom. There is a part of me that wants to admit that I’ve failed: I did not find what I was looking for and I am likely to use rubrics in my classroom (though, I was always likely to use rubrics in my future teaching). But although I did not actually find answers to my question, I’ve been able to define why I dislike rubrics. I’ve gone from “rubrics are dumb” to “here are the flaws I have found in this process.” In understanding what I don’t like about rubrics, I am better able to create rubrics that address these flaws.

And I did find that I’m not alone in finding rubrics to be inadequate. Maja Wilson’s Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment  addresses some of the same issues. Though I haven’t read this book (yet), I did read through several reviews and find references to her work in other places.

On the book’s amazon.com page, reviewer Allison H. writes “Like Alfie Kohn says in the Foreward, we really should be questioning anything that is designed to make, what I would argue is a very individual process, “easy.” Quality is indeed “more than the sum of its rubricized parts,” and I think before we, as teachers, look for an easier way to grade, we need to look at the how’s and why’s of what we are doing… I think what Maja Wilson is asking of teachers is similar–that we engage in a dialogue with our students about their work, rather than ending all possible chance of conversation by assigning their work to some “neat” and “tidy” category on a rubric.”

Reviewer John Schoen writes “Maja Wilson recognizes some of the most important features of a writer: we are fallible. We are human. We are given to appraise writing according to our own consciences. Our qualities as a writer and the things we value in writing are not prescriptive, but are derived from different social circumstances and person experiences. Writing values are not universal, and they certainly cannot be canonized and placed in neat boxes, dissected and labeled for professional conveniences.”

John’s comment particularly resonated with me because it addresses the subjectivity of assessing writing. There are preferences that I have because of my own experiences that someone else will not share. There are times when a formal tone is required of a work and other times when it’s inappropriate. Understanding the difference between “good writing” and personal preference is highly subjective and doesn’t fit into categories.

In an interview on youtube, Maja Wilson describes some of her ideas and the thought processes that led her to research and write Rethinking Rubrics and explains that she was frustrated with a rubric’s inability to provide constructive, helpful feedback to students. It may have been easier grading for teachers but was a limited response to student writing. I’ve received great scores on rubrics before and not known what it was that I did well. Similarly, receiving a low score on a rubric doesn’t necessarily help me understand what I need to do to improve.

I think Maja brings up good points about rubric shortcomings that reflect my own disdain for them as an assessment tool. But perhaps what I have a greater problem with is formulaic rubrics that pigeonhole “good” writing into a set of traits. In his book Teaching English by Design, Peter Smagorinsky (2008) addresses the criticism of rubrics, saying “In my view, it all depends on what’s inside the boxes and how a teacher interprets the task of evaluation. I believe that a carefully designed rubric can lead to richer reading.”

And maybe Smagorinsky is right. It’s more work, certainly, to carefully design rubrics for every assignment, but they can create expectations without hindering exploration.

When I started writing and researching some three hours ago, I had hoped that I’d run a few searches and find some helpful alternatives to using rubrics in the classroom, but I’m ending up in a completely different place from where I’ve started. I don’t have any alternatives, but I have new ideas (and my professor, Jason Whitney, will be glad to hear this — new questions).