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Highlights and
Notes
PTSA Co-President Debora Hoard welcomed the panel and attendees, then handed the evening over to Dr. Jones to moderate.
Dr. Jones: As a part of the NEASC review we needed to look at curriculum
resources, etc., including assessment. From our newly established Missions
Statement, we have established new performance rubrics. We hope to explain to
you what those rubrics mean student performance expectations.
Carol Pilarski, Assistant to the Superintendent
Deb Perry, English Dept. Chairperson – how a performance rubric can be used
to assess a student’s paper
Jackie Crowe, Science Dept. Chairperson – how a rubric can be used to score
papers
Rob Collins – Social Studies Dept. Chairperson – Department chairs are
available for questions.
The idea of having expectations and rubrics goes back 15 or more years in
U.S. education, an effort at making sure standards were met. Those standards
needed to be defined. The Committee on Education and the Economy (Pittsburgh) used
industrial quality control standards as a model. The transition from a
business model to an education model took a long time, but at this point our
models are pretty state-of-the-art stuff.
Carol Pilarski, Assistant to the Superintendent: We
welcome the chance to show you the work of the entire LHS faculty and
department heads. It has been a collaborative efforts.
A review by New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) prompted
the development of our performance rubrics. Even without the NEASC as a
catalyst, we would have gone down that road.
Rubrics are designed to promote teaching, motivation and assessment. We began
development and phased application a year and a half ago, prompted by efforts
to succeed and for NEASC re-accreditation in 2008.
Using rubric methodology helps accomplish the ten key academic, social and
civic expectations expressed in the LHS Mission Statement:
Students at Lexington
High School will
• write clearly and effectively, producing work that is informative, well
organized, and appropriate to its purpose and audience.
• read and comprehend varied materials and be able to interpret and apply
what they have read.
• listen actively and respond to communications through inquiry, discussion,
writing, and various forms of art.
• speak clearly and effectively in a variety of contexts including academic
discourse and oral presentations.
• gather data and critically evaluate their content, source, and relevance.
• reason logically, using appropriate qualitative or quantitative methods,
and use their analysis to answer questions and to solve problems.
• employ technology to gather, organize, and communicate information, to
create and share visual images, and to investigate and solve problems.
• demonstrate an understanding of the political, social, cultural, and
scientific contexts of knowledge.
• demonstrate practical applications of knowledge.
• demonstrate awareness of aesthetic principles such as theme, motif,
pattern, and symmetry.
What are rubrics?
They are grids graphically showing intersecting areas of emphasis versus
levels of performance/proficiency.
1. Criteria – key ingredients (what counts, what is evaluated)
2. Gradations of quality – performance levels
The implementation process
hierarchical, extending to all levels.
•GLOBAL – schoolwide
••PROGRAMMATIC – departmental specific programs; can apply across departments
with intersecting skills
•••INDIVIDUAL COURSES [Program of Studies] – specific to course subject
matter
••••SPECIFIC LESSON PLANS – teachers use for particular units
•••••STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS – applied to each student’s work
Academic expectations and rubrics
Research shows a strong correlation between the use of clean and concise
rubrics with improved student achievement. A richer school environment for
all results.
Benefits of using rubrics.
• serves as an instructional and assessment tool
• makes expectations of programs courses and assignments very clear and
concise
• provides informed feedback
• increases and improves inter-rater reliability
• promotes professional collaborations
How do rubrics relate to the ten key
expectations in the LHS Missions Statement?
Using “Write clearly . . .” as an example, Deb Perry noted that rubrics
provide standards for writing such as,
• Organization
• Begins in a dynamic fashion
• Establishes a clear, concise and compelling preview of the paper’s purpose
Several examples of student writing from English and from Science illustrated
the varying levels of accomplishment at different grade levels. The
clearly-delineated expectations and measures of success outlined in the
rubric made it easy for teachers to evaluate a student’s work,
and for that matter for a student to discern the reason for their grade on a
given assignment.
The writing skills rubric can apply beyond English class. Science lab reports
also depend on the elements in the writing rubrics to achieve clarity in
expressing scientific knowledge and understanding.
Pilarski went on to say that using rubrics to
evaluate student work does not replace grading, but rather assists and
supports the grading process.
Pertaining to other expectations in the Mission Statement, Jackie Crowe
(Science Dept.) described how the rubric is used as a scoring guide for an
assignment on genetic diseases that covers gathering scientific information
and understanding it and also included oral presentation skills. The various
proficiency levels have numeric scores associated with them.
Students receive the rubrics before starting the assignment, so they have
clear expectations and can check their progress along the way.
Many teachers and departments have been using similar skill evaluation
patterns for years, but with the global application, LHS can make rubrics
work for every student, every class, every department and the entire school.
Q: How is this
applied for different levels and grades
Carol Pilarski
(CP): It grows and evolves over the four year period.
Deb Perry (DP):
What a 9th grader can do is different from what a 12th grader can do. The
major rubrics can be applied and refined as needed per class and assignment.
If the students hear the same terminology through high school, the results
will be consistent and students will be better able to concentrate on the
academics of their work, not on the mechanics of meeting the assignment.
Q: Has
this been used successfully and does it reduce stress?
Dr. Jones (MJ): These
[rubrics] are home grown. I would think it does reduce stress because it
answers “what does the teacher want?” It de-mystifies. It is also an
instructional experience. “This is what we are trying to do.” The whole class
has a common understanding of the assignment and the academic goals.
Q: This is great that
you’re applying tried and true techniques from the business world. There is a
big difference between the newer teachers and the more experienced teachers.
How are you training the less experienced teachers to use these and to make
constructive comments?
MJ: Professional
development time is so valuable. We need to put time into training teachers
in using these tools. And sure, teachers are going to give students feedback
that may not be directly related to every point on the rubric page. They are
going to respond to the students in the ways they believe the student can
fully understand. More traditional grading methods will still be used. If you
get 90% of the answers correct, that’s still 90%.
CP: Much of the time
teachers spend together is spent exchanging ideas and strategies to making
use of these rubrics effective.
Q: How is the
reception by the faculty?
CP: All faculty
members participated in creating these rubrics, broadly and within their
departments. So, they created the rubrics themselves and are invested in the
program.
DP: We’re continuing
to work even more in-house.
Jackie Crowe (JC): The rubrics have to meet the needs of many departments, so
they may be more generic than we want. We are now taking these down to the
department, class and assignment level.
Q: Are they being
used in foreign language?
CP: Oh yes. The
English, Social Studies and Foreign Language departments collaborated on the
public speaking global rubric, for example, taking cultural consideration
into account.
CP: Applications
of Knowledge is still “under construction.”
Q: Have you done a
curriculum mapping analysis to be sure the curriculum interconnects to
support student performance?
MJ: That is an ongoing
process and we are engaged in constant re-evaluation of curriculum.
Q: This is great. Here
was a collective process which was probably as beneficial as the end product.
How does the grading process work? What happens with this information?
MJ: In the course of
collecting information from evaluations, recurring problems will be evident
as will areas in which the student is doing well, so that the student fully
understands how to improve.
CP: When the teacher
sees the collective results, it is informative for the teacher to see where
the group is going and where s/he needs to be going with that group, what
needs to be re-emphasized and what portion of the instructional plan needs to
be strengthened.
Q: Are students
getting a rubric before every assignment and will each student see the rubric
afterward to see what the grade was and what were her strengths and
weaknesses.
DP: At the very least,
there should be a cover sheet on every major assignment, a list of things
that will be important for every assignment. There should be a breakdown of
all the elements in each assignment.
Q: This rubric is a
powerful tool and is a much deeper analysis of the performance than a simple
checklist of assignment elements.
MJ: There
needs to be a certain amount of benchmarking for grade levels. In department
meetings, teachers are looking at specific student work products as a basis
for discussion.
Q: This works
beautifully in a science assessment. Versus creative essays. Is it being done
this way, as you demonstrated, in classes for kids.
My children found it frustrating because in topics like creative writing, it
is so subjective.
DP: We had kids of all
levels read the same story and respond, allowing us to look at different
examples of writing from different developmental levels. We think it is
important for us as a faculty to determine what it means to be exemplary as a
freshman, a sophomore, a senior... We’re trying to come up with models so we
can begin to make that common knowledge.
Q: Do you in creating
these models have different teachers grade the same paper?
DP: Yes. It is
astonishing how often the same paper gets the same grade from several different
teachers.
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