Like most teachers I have a love/hate relationship to rubrics. At some level, they capture the uncapturable. Our love of data has led many educators to overvalue analytic data over anecdotal data. Yet, our classroom reality is not statistical. We are looking out at 20-40 real students with real strengths and weaknesses. Rubrics attempt to capture some of this anecdotal data and force measurement.
Rubrics force us to define the metrics that we wish to capture. This pushes us to define explicitly what we want from a performance. Students understand what is and is not important. A well-crafted rubric can help teachers give feedback on spontaneous performances in real-time. If it is simple enough students can give feedback to each other. The metrics we use, elevate certain behaviors and define what is important and what isn’t. When ACTFL’s performance guidelines added communication strategies, I added them to my rubrics.
Unlike language acquisition, we can directly teach communication strategies – at novice level they are mostly nonverbal. (Actfl, 2015). In the classroom, I extended this idea to add the perspective of French culture.
99% of the time, the teacher is grading the students on the rubric. Teacher are human beings subject to the effects of subconscious bias. In the best scenario we inflate our favorite students’ grades. In the worst case, we penalize students who give us trouble. (Chapman & Lalloo, 2017).
If I am going to use a rubric, I need to give it to the students on the first day of the unit. Each year when I show the rubric above to my students they have moment of panic. I let them know that it is my job to create learning experiences over the next month to prepare them for the encounter. By the time they are facing native speakers, they are ready for the challenge. After they deploy their skills they have a newly found confidence.
The Good and Bad of Analytic Rubrics, To Rubric or Not Part 2
Actfl. (2015). Performance Descriptors for Language Learners. Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/ACTFLPerformance-Descriptors.pdf
Chapman, K., & Lalloo, M. (2017). Science’s problem with unconscious bias. Retrieved July 15, 2018, from https://www.chemistryworld.com/feature/sciences-problem-with-unconscious-bias/3007586.article