Amazingly enough, we did it. Every freshman at Leafstrewn was given the same two-page
passage from a Sherman Alexie story and the same prompt for an analytical
paragraph, and every paragraph was graded with the same 5-category rubric. To make the grading more objective, we
graded the exams, not of our own students, but of our colleagues’.
We will eventually sit down and consider the numbers, but I
have a few reactions now:
(1) reading a passage and writing an analysis of it is an
extraordinarily complex task, which is great, but it’s pretty hard to assess in
an objective way;
(2) the strength of rubrics is that they are specific and
explicit, but this is also their weakness;
(3) everyone got a B;
(4) that’s okay!
(5) I could have done a much better job of preparing my
students, and that preparation would have been better not just for this
assessment, but in general.
(1) Reading a passage and writing an analysis of it is an
extraordinarily complex task, which is great, but it’s pretty hard to assess in
an objective way
There is an incredible amount to keep track of when you’re
reading anything closely—emotions, connotations of particular words, figures of
speech, intertextuality, patterns (like repetition and contrast) within the
text, etc. Writing, too, is
really, really complicated—you have to master grammar, ideas, structure,
logical arguments, relevant evidence, and so on. Skilled readers and writers do all this unconsciously, and
we sometimes forget that it is amazingly complicated, and our brains, even the
most “limited” of them, are quite incredible.
This incredible
complexity becomes much more visible when you start talking about how to
judge the quality of student reading and writing. Different teachers have different ideas of which pieces of
this incredible complexity to focus on.
It’s like the story of the elephant: I’m looking at the elephant’s legs,
one colleague is looking at the trunk, another is bumping into the tusks, and
so on. Designing a rubric is
tough, because there are always things that you’re leaving out, or looking at
from only one side.
(2) The strength of rubrics is that they are specific and
explicit, but this is also their weakness
Much of the trouble in grading the assessment came in using
the rubric. A rubric is intended
to make the grading more transparent and clear, and, most crucially, more
specific. If a student is told,
“Your essay is bad,” the student will want to know what in particular was bad
about it. A rubric is supposed to
offer the kid that specificity.
What was interesting about the grading process was that the specificity
of the rubric was usually exactly what
caused trouble in the grading.
For example, if we judged that a conclusion is not good
enough for the “Good” category, we had to circle the box on the rubric for a
conclusion that “Needs Work.” That box reads: “Brings paragraph to a finish
that repeats previous ideas.” The
problem is that there are many ways for a conclusion to be bad, and repeating
previous ideas is only one of them. I ran into this problem of overly specific descriptors in
every single category on this rubric.
(3) Everyone got a B
Either because our rubric was too easy at the low end, too
tough at the high end, or because our students are all pretty good, or because
we did a good job of preparing our students, most of the grades fell in the B
range.
(4) That’s okay!
I think one of the lessons here is that actually for all our
hand-wringing, our kids are really quite competent. They can read a passage and write a reasonable paragraph
about it. They are not
illiterate. Almost all of them
managed to come up with identifiable topic sentences, evidence that more or
less supported their main ideas, and a conclusion that in some way related to
what they were saying. This is no
mean feat for a fourteen year old, and I wonder, I admit, if it has something
to do with MCAS. Maybe, as our department chair
says, MCAS has really improved kids’ ability to write these kinds of paragraphs.
(5) I could have done a much better job of preparing my
students, and that preparation would have been better not just for this
assessment, but in general!
I think this common assessment was a great thing to do. Having students read something and
analyze it in a disciplined way is worthwhile, and doing it as a group certainly made my own teaching
better. I was more focused, my
students were more motivated, and it took some of the dissonance out of the
grading. (Normally, when we grade
our own students’ work, there is an uncomfortable dissonance. It is as if Bela Karolyi were to judge
his own gymnasts’ routines, or as if a soccer coach were training his team for
a game against herself.) In a
fairly short and stress-free preparation, I think I did a reasonably good job.
Nevertheless, although my students' performance was fine, there was a lot of room for improvement. How could I have helped them more? What could I have done better?
A bunch of things, but here's one: I didn’t train my students well enough in coming up with a good main
idea. They tended to say something
like, “The impression the author creates in this impression is of a family that
is struggling.” That is pretty
obvious, and I need to help my students learn how to go deeper. To take an
obvious thought and push it deeper one may:
* Explore the why of
the obvious thought (e.g. the family struggles because they’re in denial).
* Consider ways in which the opposite is true as well, and
craft a semi-dialectical topic sentence of the "Although A, nevertheless B" type--and then by the end of their paper they may arrive at the synthesis of C. Later in life they can worry, Mr. Ramsay-like, about getting to Q or Z.
* Explore the how of
the obvious thought (e.g. the family struggles ineffectually, trying the same
things over and over again even though they produce no results (father looking
in wallet over and over, son dreaming over and over, etc.))
* Are there other ways? Applying a schema? Making a connection? What else?
Teaching my students to push their thinking further would be useful not merely for the exam, but in general. This is something that would be useful to focus on explicitly, and that I somehow overlooked. That is one of the virtues of this common assessment--it makes the whole process more conscious and transparent, and so lets us see things that we should have seen before.
* Are there other ways? Applying a schema? Making a connection? What else?
Teaching my students to push their thinking further would be useful not merely for the exam, but in general. This is something that would be useful to focus on explicitly, and that I somehow overlooked. That is one of the virtues of this common assessment--it makes the whole process more conscious and transparent, and so lets us see things that we should have seen before.
In the end, though, we and our students did a fine job. Now if we could just get them to like to read...
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