At the end of the week I had a sit down with my new boss, Ken James, who is a pretty cool guy. I wanted to talk to him about American Studies and the trip to Boston. He explained how team teaching has and has not worked in the past, and the successful scenarios are similar to how I now teach with Mrs. Crabtree. We also briefly discussed how school policy and rules work, and overall, we just had a nice discussion for a couple of minutes. I am pretty stoked about the change.

Earlier this week in a staff development meeting we reviewed student work and rubrics. The rubrics we examined were from our colleagues and most were pretty bad. Now I was first introduced to rubric writing in 1999, and I think I can do an above average job. Later this week I was preparing a project for the AP classes, and my colleague and I printed the rubric we created last year. We immediately realized that it wasn’t good. It wasn’t that it was terrible, but it didn’t really measure what we wanted. Part of the problem was language. For example, one line read “student attempted to not include silly answers” while measuring multiple choice test answer writing. The students wanted to know how I knew if they “attempted to not include silly answers” … as if they’d attempt to do a bad job on their work.

Another area of issue was the differences between a check list and rubric. A check lis is for completion and really didn’t address if they did it well. For example, if I give 5 points for writing answers A-E then does it matter if they write something good or not? In the case of a completion checklist, then NO. Unless I could give one point for writing answer and another point for writing a good answer. Or do you give a half point for a bad answer and a full point for a good answer?

Mrs Crabtree & I decided to take the idea to the kids. These are the smartest kids in their class, so we decided we’d ask them. When we approached our classes with the rubric and asked for their opinions, we got blank looks. After trying to pull teeth for 15 minutes, we realized that no teacher had ever asked the kids to help writing the rubric. Mostly they were told “do this, and it’s worth #”. But we wanted them to help us decide how they’d be graded. We weren’t lazy, but we wanted them to better understand the process and to have more agency over their learning.

After the blank stares, we told the kids we’d revisit this Monday. In the meantime we put the rubric on Google Docs and shared it with all of them as collaborators. We told them it was their job this weekend to add comments, fix the rubric and make it wonderful. Monday we will take the rubrics and grade the same assignment from someone from last year and grade it. Then maybe they will better understand how to build rubrics, and how to better build the rubric for this assginment.

Today the students had to write an AP Prompt, and Mrs Crabtree said that her only real requirement was that it was argumentative. Some of the students are weaker when it comes to choosing a side of a written argument and sticking to it, so I agreed. I found a nice one by Postman where he contrasts 1984 & Brave New World. They wrote for 40 minutes and then took a pop quiz on Twelfth Night. We fear some people didn’t read much of Fast Food Nation, and we wanted to reconfirm the importance of preparation. One of the classes today had about half the people prepared, and that’s never fun. The prompt was great, and I saw some good essays. The kids haven’t peer assessed recently, so I don’t know if we should do that again now. We’ll see.