by Kate Sjostrom
Just over ten years ago, right around the time Ethical ELA was founded, I began teaching writing methods courses to pre-service English teachers. While I strived to model an ethical approach to the teaching of writing, there was one area in which I felt I was not consistently practicing what I preached: rubrics.
In many ways, the rubrics we used were following best practices. I invited students to co-create the rubrics with me. We created them after reading widely in the relevant genres. We placed emphasis on revision, allowing and encouraging room for growth. But within these rubrics, of which I wrote the final drafts, there were vestiges of rubrics I had encountered in less humane classrooms: descriptions of some writing as more “sophisticated” than others, of some evidence as more “ample.” What did this sometimes value-laden diction even mean?
I had always made the rubrics “drafts,” open to revision, but no one had questioned the vague, judgmental wording that had grown familiar to them, too. But then: “Can we change that?” And change the rubric we did.
For years, no one questioned me on it. And every semester, as I carried over rubric wording from the previous term, I made a note to make my next project finding a better way. But there was always a more pressing project. Until a couple years ago, when a student asked: “Can we change that?”
Evolution of a Rubric
I want to share with you the new language we adopted in case you like it as much as I and my students do. The following artifacts come from the original and revised versions of a rubric designed for the course’s literacy history assignment (for which pre-service teachers take the reader into their formative literacy experiences).
Original Rubric Header
| A Excellent | B Good | C Average | D Poor | F Failure |
Revised Rubric Header
| A Portfolio-Ready! | B | C Let’s Try a Little Something New! | D | F Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves and Play with Language! |
Possible Future Revision (Grade-Free!)
Portfolio-Ready! | Let’s Try a Little Something New! | Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves and Play with Language! |
Original Descriptions for A, C, and F Level Use of “Poetic Craft”
| Piece employs ample and imaginative poetic craft—such as imagery, figurative language, specific detail, and strong verbs—to recreate experiences. | Piece employs poetic craft but it could be more ample, relevant, or unique. | There is either insufficient specific detail/imagery to recreate experiences, irrelevant descriptive detail, or consistently unimaginative language/verbs. |
Revised Descriptions for A, C, and F Level Use of “Poetic Craft”
(to replace vague, value-laden diction in the C and F categories with specific, actionable, and encouraging feedback)
| Your piece recreates experiences through imaginative poetic craft—such as imagery, figurative language, specific detail, and strong verbs. | Your piece employs some poetic craft. Can you play with language a bit more by adding sensory imagery or specific detail to put us in your experience, keeping imagery in the same vein, reinforcing theme through word choice or figurative language, and/or having some more fun with verbs? In everything, reach for originality! | Time to play with language! Can you add specific detail or imagery to recreate experiences, purposeful word choice or figurative language to reinforce themes, and a variety of verbs to make your piece move? |
It’s All in the Details
Note that there was no human—no “you”—in the original rubric descriptions. Note, too, the re-forming of statements into questions—into invitations, really. (We made a point of introducing the rubric early in the writing process so it could be used as a tool for revision.) Even the added exclamation points were purposeful, as we wanted to make it clear we are writing cheerleaders, not judges wielding red pens like gavels.
Making a rubric together in the first unit of the course always established some good will, but collaboratively revising the rubric to ensure its diction warmly invited students into a world of writing possibilities—and made clear what those possibilities were—did wonders for classroom tone and energy, as well as for writers’ growth.
A Closing Challenge
Is there language in any of your course assessment materials that rubs you the wrong way upon a closer look? Perhaps some diction is vague or inadvertently shaming? Perhaps it doesn’t honor students’ humanity or promote their agency? Give changing this language a try. And remember, you don’t have to do it alone.
A former high school English teacher, Kate Sjostrom is a teacher educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago and writer-in-residence at the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.