Building Thinking Classrooms - Ch. 12: What We Choose to Evaluate

I like the idea of co-creating the rubric continuum with the students.

I like that the rubrics are about observational behaviors 

and not about solutions or what is produced.

These rubrics are used AS learning is occuring, not AFTER.

I also had no idea how the headings (Novice, Apprentice, Practitioner, and Expert) 

that I was using in my rubrics were being interpreted.

According to the research,

"Deeper investigation revealed that how students interpreted these headings was influenced by whether they had a growth mindset or a fixed mindset (Dweck, 2016). Students with a growth mindset saw these labels as descriptors of WHERE they were, while students with fixed mindsets saw them as WHO they were."

When co-creating a rubric for a specific competency,

For example, "What does good perseverance look like?"

1) Draw a T-chart

2) Write Good on the right column

3) Students give thoughts on what perseverance looks like, as you write their answers down. 

4) Write Bad on the left column

5) Students give thoughts on this as well, while you write their answers down.

6) Teacher builds a rubric to be used in the next class so students can focus on this competency

Question 1

What are some of the things in this chapter that immediately feel correct?

See above

Question 2

If you have previously used a rubric that has more than three columns, take a good look at it, and see if you see language that is ambiguous and not helpful for moving students from one column to the next. If that rubric were scrambled, do you think you could unscramble it?

This has always been a stumbling block for me when creating rubrics.  The Novice and Practitioner columns were easy.  The Apprentice and Expert column were hard to come up with how to say how they differed from the others. 

Question 3

Think about some competencies that you feel your students need to improve on? What of these do you think you coconstruct a rubric for first?

Perseverance

Willingness to take risks (Sharing your thinking)

Ability to collaborate

Models

Precision

Listening

Question 4

In this chapter I mentioned that it is easiest to coconstruct a rubric right after an experience in which the class was deficient in the particular competency you want to focus on. With this in mind, think of some experiences that you can manufacture that will accentuate the deficiency you want to address first. For example, if you want to focus on perseverance, you can begin by giving them a task that is tempting to give up on, but is solvable with time and effort.

1) Perseverance - Tax Collector, pg. 117

2) Sharing thinking - Country Road, pg. 228

3) Collaborate - 1,001 Pennies, pg. 206

4) Modeling - Painted Cube, pg. 185

Question 5

In the FAQ I mentioned that it is possible to coconstruct rubrics for producibles. What kind of producibles do you use that you would like your students to get better at? What would the examplars look like?

Models - use three exemplars to get a background for the T-chart

Showing work - 

Question 6

What are some of the challenges you anticipate you will experience in implementing the strategies suggested in this chapter? What are some of the ways to overcome these?

Finding the best problem for the competencies I want to focus on