Colette Cornatzer, a student in Norm Dannen’s class at Southern
Regional High School in Manahawkin, New Jersey, says, “A rubric
is a scale that teachers may use to grade an article of writing from
their students. Because the student knows the stipulations of
the rubric, the student knows how to write the paper. I like rubrics
because they make the student aware of exactly how to answer the questions
or write the assigned article, and it plots a very fair and easy–to-understand
grading system. A rubric creates a backbone for your paper.”
We began the story of Norm Dannen in our May 2006 column, “Hitting
the Bulls Eye as a Beginning Teacher.”
In that column, we focused on how Norm Dannen used objectives to communicate
to his students what they are to learn. In this column, we will
share with you how Norm Dannen assesses and tests his students on that
learning.
Students get more done when they see where they are going and
what they are doing.
Just think what would happen to student learning
if the students knew
what they were to learn and thus knew they could not fail.
To do this, effective teachers have objectives for each lesson.
These objectives govern what the students are to learn and what the
teacher, concomitantly, is to teach.
Objectives are classroom learning targets. The students
know what they are aiming for, thus, they know what they are responsible
for learning.
Thus, when both the student and teacher are moving towards the same
goal, that’s when learning takes place.
Telling a student to read a chapter, story, or book involves no learning,
because the student does not know what he or she is to accomplish by
the reading. The teacher, likewise, does not know what he or she
is to teach; the teacher is merely filling time and covering
the material.
The students must be given a set of objectives
at the beginning
of their assignment telling them what they
are responsible for accomplishing.
(The First Days of School, p. 229)
Assessment for Learning
Students like to have lesson objectives because it tells them
what they are to learn. They also like objectives because they
know how they will be evaluated, because the test is aligned to the
objectives.
Thus, effective teachers give their students a scoring guide that spells
out how they can earn points or a grade for accomplishing a lesson.
A scoring guide helps a student to determine what is expected of an
assignment.
Sometimes these scoring guides are called scoring rubrics or just plain
rubric.
Don’t worry if you do not know what a rubric is, even though
you hear it bantered around in educational circles. Don’t
bother looking it up in the dictionary either as the dictionary’s
definition has nothing to do with what educators call a rubric.
The word was coined in 2001 by a group called the Assessment Reform
Group in England, but that does not make it correct.
Some educators delight in picking up words and making a cottage industry
out of them, never realizing that the educator in the trench has no
clue as to the invented word.
What’s interesting is that if you go to the Assessment Reform
Group’s web site, you never see the word “rubric”
used. Rather, the group advocates “Assessment for Learning,”
which they define as the process of seeking and interpreting evidence
for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners
are in their learning, where they need to go, and how best to get there.
To help students reach the highest possible
level of achievement, the
effective teacher is constantly assessing for student learning
to help students go where they need to go and help them to best get
there.
This is done by assessing student work and comparing it with the scoring
guide or rubric.
Give the Students a Scoring Guide
There is no need to confuse the students with jargon. At the
beginning of a lesson, give the students a scoring guide and call it
a “scoring guide.” A scoring guide is a clear, simple,
understandable term as it tells the students what is expected of them
and how they can earn a score.
But, amongst us educators, let’s agree that a scoring guide,
a scoring rubric, and a rubric are all the same and move on.
Look at a rubric in the same way as scoring guides that are used in
gymnastics and ice skating. The judges are not grading the contestants.
Rather, they have a predetermined guide that governs how points are
earned when skaters complete certain spins, jumps, turns, and steps.
The skaters know the scoring format and practice and practice to improve
their scoring.
Helping Students Make Progress to Improve
If you wonder how ice skaters perfect their jumps and spins, there
is a system of cables and pulleys installed in the ice rink. The
cable is attached to the ice skater with a harness (with butt buds and
crash pads to cushion the falls).
The coach pulls the cable to control the lifts while assessing and
teaching at the same time—over and over again, working towards
PROGESS and ACCOMPLISHMENT.
Likewise, when the students are given a scoring guide or rubric ahead
of time, they can see how they will be scored and can earn better scores
by doing better work. All the while, the teacher is involved in
helping the student progress and improve his or her score.
The role of a teacher is not to grade a student.
The teacher’s main
role is to help every student reach the highest possible level of
achievement.
(The First Days of School, p. 237)
The purpose of giving a student a test is not necessarily to grade
a student. The purpose of a test should be to assess what
the student has learned so that further learning can be planned.
And that’s the purpose of education, to make sure the student
is making progress toward some predetermined learning goal.
For instance, when a doctor runs a test on you, such as a blood test,
a blood pressure test, a mammogram, or a colonoscopy (ouch), the purpose
is not to grade you. Rather, the doctor assesses the
results of the test so that he or she can prescribe the proper medicine
or treatment to progress toward the goal of enhancing your health.
And, should you ever visit a family member or friend in a hospital,
you may ask the doctor how the patient is doing. What you want
to hear is, “The patient is making progress.”
Similarly, that’s the purpose of education, to make sure the
student is making progress.
To do this, there must be constant assessment
for learning.
The Great Gatsby
In our May 2006 column we shared how Norm Dannen created a lesson to
teach the New Jersey reading standard:
All students will understand and apply the knowledge of sounds,
letters, and words in written English to become independent and fluent
readers, and will read a variety of materials and texts with fluency
and comprehension.
He created a lesson to teach this standard using the novel, The
Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and
is regarded as one of the foremost pieces of American literature.
It was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald—yes—a
direct descendent of the Francis Scott Key who wrote The Star-Spangled
Banner.
The setting of the book was a period in America called the Roaring
Twenties, a period of great wealth. The theme of the book is how
unbridled materialism was threatening to destroy the great American
dream. Sound familiar today?
The novel centers on a man, Jay Gatsby, his friend, and his girlfriend,
Daisy Buchanan.
In 1974 Hollywood made a movie of the novel and Robert Redford played
Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow played Daisy Buchanan.
The Great Gatsby Rubric
At the end of the lesson, Norm used a scoring guide or rubric to assess
his students for their learning.
Click here to see his Great Gatsby
Rubric (in PDF).
You might want to print off our May
2006 column and have it readily available as we explain his rubric.
Note that the rubric or scoring guide consists of a series of columns
and rows, yes, like a spreadsheet.
The rows each represent a characteristic, such as reading, compare
and contrast, and research/resource skills.
The columns are each headed with a point value that the students can
earn, such as 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0 or NS (no score).
Each box represents the intersection of a characteristic and a point
value, just as you would have two points meet on a graph.
Look at the first box after “reading” and under “4”
and follow along under 3, 2, 1, and 0.
| 4 |
The student can earn four points by easily relating
Fitzgerald’s idea of “The American Dream” to Jay
Gatsby’s actions and give three specific written or verbal
examples. |
| 3 |
The student can earn three points by relating Fitzgerald’s
idea of “The American Dream” to Jay Gatsby’s actions
and give two specific written or verbal examples. |
| 2 |
The student can earn two points by relating Fitzgerald’s
idea of “The American Dream” to Jay Gatsby’s actions,
but has trouble giving written or verbal examples. |
| 1 |
The student can earn one point but has trouble relating Fitzgerald’s
idea of “The American Dream” to Jay Gatsby’s actions
and cannot give any examples. |
| 0 |
The student earns no points by being unable to relate Fitzgerald’s
idea of “The American Dream” to Jay Gatsby’s actions
or give any examples of same. |
Engaging Students
Just as the word, “rubric” is bantered around today, the
other currently fashionable word is “engaged.” Thirty years
ago the same term was “relevance.” That is, make the lesson
related to the student’s own life.
Thus, students learn best when they can make connections between
the lesson and their interest and life experiences. That’s
how we “engage” students.
Norm engages his students by asking them to compare their life today
to the life of the people who lived during the time of Jay Gatsby, in
the 1920s.
To do this, Norm began with the following objective:
Draw parallels between their own lives in the context of the Jazz
Age,
the Lost Generation, Prohibition, and the Great Depression.
You can use a rubric in your classroom as a formative or a summative
instrument. For a complete explanation of these two terms, please
read pages 240 to 242 in The First Days of School.
Very simply, formative tells you what the student IS
learning and summative tells you what the student HAS learned.
Helping a Student Who Does Not Score Well
Using The Great Gatsby rubric as a formative instrument,
let’s say you have a student who earns a zero. That is,
the student cannot relate his or her life to the lives of the people
who lived in the 1920s.
This does not mean the student is dumb, lazy, or failing. It
just means the student cannot see the relationship of life today and
life that existed over 80 years ago. Maybe your great Aunt Mabel
can, but that can be difficult for a young person who is 15 years old
and hasn’t even figured out life today.
So, that’s what makes life challenging and exciting for teachers.
To illustrate, we (Harry and Rosemary) went to an Off-Broadway show
in New York City of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living
in Paris. You see, most of you can’t relate
already.
Jacques Brel was a Belgian song writer and troubadour who wrote about
life in Belgium and France of his time, the 1940s to 1960s. He
sang his own songs and was quite popular in New York’s Greenwich
Village where he sang until the mid-1960s.
The show, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in
Paris, consists of 34 songs, no dialogue (no explanation),
and sung one after another by a cast of four people.
Sitting very close to us was a young lady easily in her early 20s.
At the end of the show, we overheard her say to one of the cast members,
“I don’t get it.” Does she get a zero or an “F”
on the rubric? Not really, if you are using the rubric as a formative
instrument.
It’s very possible that this young lady had no context of life
in the 1940s to 1960s in Europe. If so, this would make it difficult
for her to relate her life of today to the life of the people who lived
over 50 years ago in Belgium and France.
We wanted to get a hold of her and do our teacher thing on her and
say, “Young lady, please sit down. Let’s take one
of Jacques Brel’s songs and read it line by line for meaning,”—just
as you would do with Shakespeare.
In time she would say, “Oh, I see what he was talking about.”
We would then say, “Now, name or describe something that is happening
in your life today that is similar to what was happening to the people
who lived during the 1940s to 1960s.”
To help a student see what life was like in America in the 1920s, go
to the Library of Congress web site, www.loc.gov.
There are over 10 million digital images that you can download showing
life in the 1920s, such as pictures of the great jazz singers.
With an approach of assessment for learning, we can
help students who have scored NS/0 on the scoring guide to score higher
and make progress.
Our Role as Teachers
Our major role as teachers is to help students to learn the
subject of the lesson or the course we are teaching.
Objectives are classroom learning targets. The students know
what they are aiming for, thus, they know what they are responsible
for learning.
The students must be given a set of objectives at the beginning of
their assignment telling them what they are responsible for accomplishing.
Students like to have lesson objectives because it tells them what
they are to learn. They also like objectives because they know
how they will be evaluated, because the test is aligned to the objectives.
The purpose of giving a student a test is not necessarily to grade
a student. The purpose of a test should be to assess what
the student has learned so that further learning can be planned.
It’s as Simple as 1-2-3
The May teachers.net column focused on how Norm Dannen uses objectives
to communicate to his students WHAT they are to learn.
This column focuses on HOW he assesses for the WHAT.
Unless you know where you are going, you will never hit the
bull’s eye with your students.
As you develop your lessons for the year, always ask WHAT and HOW.
But don’t stop there. The most important part of the entire
process is sharing the WHAT and HOW with your students. Education
is not trickery and clever tactics to stump students. Our goal
is to open the wonderment of the world and help students discover the
joy and fulfillment associated with learning.
Learning is a definable process and one that all students can experience.
It is our charge to articulate that process to students in very concrete
terms.
Look at the lesson you are going to deliver tomorrow and ask yourself
these three questions:
- Do the students know WHAT they are to learn as
a result of experiencing the lesson?
- Do you know HOW you are going to help the students
accomplish the goal of the lesson?
- Do the students know HOW you are going to assess
their learning of the lesson?
If you cannot clearly answer these questions, you are not ready to
teach your lesson. You will only frustrate the students as well
as yourself in trying to figure out what went wrong.
The tone of your classroom will change when the students see
that you are there to help them progress through the year.
Parents can see the direction and accomplishment of their children as
well.
Hitting the bull’s eye is not difficult, but it does require
skill and dedication to clearly understanding the WHATs and HOWs of
learning and communicating that to your students. The more practice
you get at the skill, the greater your precision will be in delivering
a lesson to your students that is right on target.
Start practicing the process and become a Grand Master Archer.
Your students will be the ultimate winners!
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