In the last two school years, I've taught a project-based learning course in the History Department called Contemporary World History and a personalized learning course in the Innovation Department called Disruptive Innovation through Social Media. Educational leaders have heralded these types of courses as innovative because they encourage individual agency, strong research, problem solving skills and real-world application. But in practice, I've found that students aren't prepared for these innovative courses. As a result of education's obsession with comprehensive rubrics and completion points, students are more concerned with graded outcomes rather than process and self-discovery. Consequently, many teachers have been dissuaded from developing innovative courses or, even worse, they have brought rubrics into these courses, which defeats the purpose.
More and more, our students want to be told what they have to do and how to do it in order to get an A on an assignment. That's what success looks like to them, as it will give them their best chance to get into a selective college. Teachers rely on rubrics to make grading fair and efficient. They're a great way for teachers to protect themselves from students or parents angry about a grade. And when the stakes are high, teachers don't want to be the person standing between a student and her grade.
Rubrics in Education
Rubrics make for less subjective grading; either the student did something or he didn't. Easy. Objective grading allows teachers to easily defend the grades they're giving. Teachers have even adapted rubrics for traditionally subjectively graded assignments like essays. For example, does a student have a certain number of quotations? Even when evaluating something complex, like analysis, the difference between an outstanding paper and an average paper is represented by a one-column difference in said category, and with some rubrics, that might carry only a one word difference ("excellent" analysis vs. "good" analysis). Regardless, a teacher just has to circle a few of the rubric categories and voila! Done grading.
This is not to say that all rubrics are bad. They can be useful to make the teacher's expectations clear to a student and push him to do more. In other words, they can be helpful in evaluating effort. But when students are working to complete a rubric, they're extrinsically motivated. We want to encourage intrinsic motivation as well.
Another way to think about this problem is with student homework completion. A student is more likely to complete an easy assignment than a hard one; he's more likely to complete a straightforward assignment than a creative or open-ended one. That's because we've reduced grades to the most straightforward measurement possible: checking boxes on a rubric. Students know that a teacher will tell them exactly what they need to do to get an A. And that's what we're getting back from students: "I'm going to do what I have to do to check these boxes, and no more." We're pushing them towards that lowest common denominator attitude.
Beyond Rubrics in Education
By the time students get to my course, they've lost their intrinsic motivation to learn, their creativity, and their understanding of the real world outside of education. In both my project-based and personalized learning courses, I have to teach students how to unlearn traditional school, and embrace a new style of learning that I want going on in my classroom.
Creative, open-ended projects where students have choice confront many of the problems described above. Students have to think for themselves, set their own goals, and learn something that they care about. This type of student agency leads to better, more meaningful projects and increases retention. Students won't be turning in the same project meeting the same requirements; they will be defining their own.
Now that we've thrown out the rubric, the question becomes how to assess this style of learning. I submit the coaching model as a solution. As long as teachers ask the right questions to learn from the student what he's doing, why, and how. It then becomes easy to provide feedback and steer the student in the right direction. One consistent question I ask in my personalized learning class is, "How will I know if you're learning?" Asking that type of question, that encompasses an opportunity for self reflection, should be enough for a teacher to know if a student is truly putting in effort and learning in the course. Only with this style of assessment and feedback is it fair for a teacher to say that a student "exceed expectations," a term that ironically appears in many teacher rubrics.
Project-based and personalized learning courses that are evaluated in this manner emulate what our students will do in the real world. Workers that just complete the tasks of a rubric, or training manual, are low in demand and paid little; in the future, box-checking jobs will be automated. Instead, we want to train workers that are intrinsically motivated learners with strong communication and creative-thinking skills. Finally, we want to prepare our students to be resilient in the face of constructive criticism. This is a tough lesson to teach in schools, but it's made tougher when students work off a teacher's rubric, rather than defining their own projects and metrics of success.
Ultimately, we're trying to change student attitudes from "what do I have to do" to "what do I get to do." We're working to train creative, lifelong learners, who break the mold. We can't do that when teachers are grading them with a mold.
