Research Assessment (RAR)

For my (RAR) assignment I decided to take a look at Julie Luft's article about building a rubric for your classes.  As educators we can't escape constantly monitoring our children for progress.  We have to test them and we have to test them and we have to, you guessed it, test them.  However when we're not being task masters and assigning quizzes we need to give them something to do, and we need to grade them on it.

Julie Luft's article talks about some of the best and basic ways to construct a rubric for your classroom and for a particular assignment.  She lays out her plan in four easy steps:

1. Know your goals for instruction.
2. Decide on the structure for the rubric.
3. Determine the levels of performance.
4. Share with your students.

To me the last part of this strategy, share with your students, is the most important. As teachers I feel you need to be upfront and honest with your students about how they are being scored.  Being a teacher shouldn't be like being a dungeon master in D+D, pulling out random punches just to screw with the player, education isn't suppose to be a rigged game.  Far to many time in my life I have had to answer to a rubric, only to have the whole class wonder, "There was a rubric?"

In my classroom there will not always be a rubric for everything, sometimes an assignment is very cut and dry, but when the time comes for a rubric I will be sure to give one out to my class, go over it with them, and answer any questions that they might have.