Picture this: 30 students are busily working away, producing exactly what they are told to. There is no risk, there is no exploration, there is no experimentation: 30 students acting like photocopiers.
The work gets handed in, a drone of a teacher looks at each identical piece of work, A… A… A… A… The process of marking is as soul-sapping as the process that went into producing.
The teacher slowly diminishes into a passionless, rubric-obsessed, marking drone, while the students have successfully done as they are told with zero degrees of freedom. Parents are overjoyed at the A grades, little realising their children are slowly being reconstructed into robots.
Why teachers need to be careful with rubrics
OK, I exaggerate slightly but you get the point - rubrics can, if we are not careful, move from being a useful guide for a lesson and set of learning outcomes into a restrictive set of “rules” that remove the opportunity for creativity, exploration and spontaneity.
I am not saying we should never use these; they are a useful tool to help our students stay on track and set their expectations. And it is understandable, in a busy environment, that sometimes rubrics can simply become a tool by which we tell pupils what to do without much active engagement.
It’s happened to me: I once set a task where students had to present their findings from some research as a poster. I gave them a template to present their findings and a rubric that told them what each section needed.
They did as instructed and I was given 24 identical posters - it felt a bit hollow.
Stopping the rubric takeover
How then do we spot when our rubrics are becoming totalitarian?
There are some signs you can look for: they offer little room for creative freedom, there is no option for students to offer contrasting ideas or opinions - they simply need to regurgitate class content with no spin of their own - and you end up with 30 identical pieces of work.
Now, of course, some areas of education will require a rubric like this - spelling and maths, for example: “I chose to spell it this way” or “I don’t believe 1+1 = 2.”
But this is actually where the problem is stemming from.
We need to be able to differentiate between learning goals that require students to simply embody some simple rules and learning goals that require students to express themselves creatively.
Flexible guidelines
For example, I recently taught adaptation within our “Land, Sea and Sky” topic.
The pupils were given a project to create their own animals using clay, and then justify why it was adapted to their specified habitat.
A totalitarian rubric would tell the habitat, the animals they can use and the justifications they need to use. A freer rubric simply states they need to choose a habitat and create their own animal to live in there.
As long as they can justify why it is adapted to the environment, they have met the learning objectives.
Not one of the pupils made the same animal as another; it was a lesson of creativity, expression and people.
Freedom within boundaries
This, to me, is why it is important that we do not let rubrics take over and turned pupils into automatons.
We must make sure there is always some degree of freedom within the rubric - when the subject allows it.
Rather than telling your pupils the habitat, if that is not necessary to the learning objective, let them choose. Rather than limiting the pupils to combining two animals, let them create their own.
We should be specific - vagueness is not a virtue - but by balancing instruction with interpretation, it gives students a path through which they can reach the learning outcome, while still being creative.
This choice is key - let the students make decisions and take the lead on their work. In the end, it is better for the students and makes marking, assessing and teaching all the more fun, too. After all, we don’t want robot teachers either.
Gregory Adam is a primary teacher at Nord Anglia Chinese International School in Shanghai. He released his first book last year: Teaching EFL, ESL & EAL - A Practitioner’s Guide
