Questions about rubrics have come up a couple times in our open pedagogy seminar, and a couple times Julie has mentioned reading about a rubric that enables students to choose their level of effort. I believe that she saw this in Hollis’s blog!
- Jean drew our attention to the post “Specificity Is Tyranny” at Hollis’s blog. In this post, she explains why her assignments and rubrics have gotten more general. In brief, she doesn’t want students taking a checklist approach to their assignments; she writes, “The endless precision (hello rubrics) focuses them on details and checking off boxes or making a checklist, instead of the deeper more meaningful aspects of the assignment.”
- If you want to get a sense of what Hollis’s rubrics originally looked like, read the first post in the blog, “Teach, Don’t Grade”: “My old way of teaching was standard: 3 main speeches, each with a detailed evaluation sheet that had points assigned for every element I could think of. Fifty points for 10 different delivery aspects, 50 for the outline and so on. I also had mini-speeches, mini-assignments, all intended to keep the students moving toward completing the semester by accumulating points every week, each assignment building on the previous ones.”
- The post “The Liberating Grading System” describes Hollis’s newer approach. I think this post is what Julie has been talking about!
If you have the time, it’s worth reading the posts in order to see Hollis’s thinking evolve and also to see what her students think, via the comments.
I’ll also note that one of the suggestions in one of our readings from Open Pedagogy Notebook is to develop rubrics with students. “Student-Generated Rubrics: Bringing Students into the Assessment Process” by Mary Jo Skillings and Robbin Ferrell describes how elementary school students were guided through creating rubrics. I don’t think that the process would be much different with students at any level!
