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What makes a teacher effective?
A principal once asked me this question in an interview, and without hesitation I answered, “An effective teacher knows the strengths and weaknesses of each student and adjusts their instruction to meet the students’ needs.” Admittedly, many qualities and characteristics make a teacher effective: their ability to develop healthy relationships with their students, work with other teachers, and manage their classroom are just some traits that come to mind when I think of an effective teacher. But, when I consider what helps me be effective for my students, it’s knowing all of their unique needs based on their performance in my class.
In previous blog posts, I’ve mentioned the four questions of a PLC:
These questions are guides for PLCs and standards-based grading. Up to now, I’ve really only discussed the first question. Our essential standards and our SMART goals give us clarity on what we want our students to know. If we want to know when our students have reached proficiency in the skills, we have to have clear rubrics for both formative and summative assessments. As a PLC, we must discuss the types of rubrics we will use for our assessment and the expectations we have for students to reach proficiency.
Before I discuss creating rubrics for your essential standards, I want to clarify the differences between holistic and analytic rubrics. My PLC and I primarily use analytic rubrics. We have found that analytic rubrics reveal the specific skills where students need intervention as well as the skills they are ready to extend. Holistic rubrics can have a place in standards-based grading, specifically for summative assessments.
Analytic rubrics allow teachers to assess multiple skills on the same assignment. These rubrics can be time-consuming to make; however, they often speed up the grading process since the specific skills are isolated, allowing the teacher to assess parts of the whole. These rubrics are especially helpful if your district requires a certain number of grades per grading period since the teacher can record each skill as a different grade in their gradebook. Analytic rubrics allow teachers to filter out data based on skill so that specific students can receive targeted intervention and feedback for only the skills they need; teachers can also offer extension assignments once students have demonstrated proficiency. Analytic rubrics reveal areas where the instruction may have been weak or misconceptions were not addressed. These rubrics help the teacher adjust their instruction in specific ways so that students may perform better on the following assessment. My PLC and I often use analytic rubrics for formative assessments since we can make adjustments to our instruction quickly and monitor the students’ process toward the end goal.
My PLC and I have identified three components of a written response: claim, evidence, justification. Since we want to isolate each skill to identify where students need support, we use an analytic rubric similar to the one below:
| State Standards* | Foundational | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
| Claim | ||||
| Evidence | ||||
| Justification |
Each PLC determines, based on their state standards, what proficiency is for each skill. Then, the members of the PLC will scale the levels of proficiency up or down based on their instruction and expectations. The criteria for each proficiency level and skill is included in the analytic rubric. Students would receive three grades for their one written response.
Holistic rubrics assess a whole; therefore, these rubrics provide only one score. Holistic rubrics are typically easier to make, but they do not allow teachers to provide specific feedback to their students; therefore, teachers may need to spend time conferencing with students or provide an explanation of the score after grading. My PLC and I rarely use holistic rubrics. When we do use them, we reserve them for summative assessments, since these assessments often emphasize the product rather than the process. These work particularly well for products such as essays or long term projects where students have received feedback from their teacher during the process. Standardized tests often use holistic rubrics for determining a student’s proficiency.
Standard: 10.(B) compose informational texts such as explanatory essays, reports, and personal essays using genre characteristics and craft
| Level of proficiency | Criteria |
| Foundational | |
| Developing | |
| Proficient | |
| Advanced |
After deciding what type of rubric will best support you and your PLCs needs, it’s time to craft the rubric. I strongly encourage you to make all rubrics with your PLCs for two reasons: clarity and consistency. If all the teachers who will be assessing students using the rubric are part of the creation process, then, theoretically, all teachers will have a sense of clarity for the different levels of proficiency. During the creation process, teachers can discuss what misconceptions they can anticipate and how to best address those in their instruction. Furthermore, when all teachers are part of the development of the rubric, then all teachers should have a certain level of consistency in how they teach the skills which increases alignment between instruction and assessments.
To develop your rubric, first consider what a student must do in order to demonstrate proficiency of the specific skill(s). Proficiency should be defined by what the standard determines for your content area and grade level. When developing the rubric, my PLC and I fill in the criteria for proficiency first since it is explicitly outlined in our state standards, the TEKS. In fact, we usually copy and paste the exact language from the TEKS into our rubric for proficiency. From there, we can scale up and down for each of the other three levels.
If you are using the four levels I’ve identified, then, I recommend thinking through the foundational level next. The foundational level is the lowest level of proficiency a student can demonstrate for the assessed skill. Likely, students who demonstrate foundational knowledge/achievement of the skill do not have the prerequisite skills to achieve the one you’re teaching and assessing. Therefore, the criteria may outline the prerequisite that the student is able to accomplish. Criteria should always focus on what the student can do. For example, if a student is not yet able to analyze an author’s purpose for a specific text, I would consider what the student is able to do. Likely, the student would be able to summarize the text; therefore, the foundational criteria for analyzing an author’s purpose may say: The student is able to summarize the text but has not offered an analysis of the author’s purpose. The student then has specific feedback that they have not yet demonstrated that they can achieve the task assessed but that they are able to accomplish a lower level thinking skill that acts as a scaffold to the assessed skill. The teacher is able to target instruction to help the student move cognitively from summarizing to analyzing.
After defining the criteria for proficiency and foundational, my PLC and I think through the criteria for our students to demonstrate that they are still developing the skills assessed. This, in my experience, is the most difficult level to define. There are many reasons a student may be stuck in the middle level between foundational and proficiency, so our job when setting the criteria for this level is to consider what may keep a student from achieving proficiency. Typically, while we determine the criteria for the developing level, my PLC and I will also discuss the misconceptions we can anticipate in this unit. The criteria for the developing level typically uses language such as, “attempts,” “somewhat,” “underdeveloped,” or “insufficient.” In contents other than English Language Arts, this may be based on a percentage of success. For example, perhaps students must demonstrate a skill with 85% accuracy to achieve proficiency, so developing might be 70-84%. The criteria will depend on content area and grade level.
Finally, my PLC and I determine the criteria for the advanced level by looking to the standards for English II, III, and IV. If students are already meeting the expectations for their current grade level and content area, the teacher should push them to achieve proficiency for the next grade level and beyond. To do this, the teacher will need to offer extension activities or offer modifications that challenge these students into a higher level of Bloom’s taxonomy for the specific skills being assessed.
Your PLC and you will likely find that creating rubrics is tedious and time consuming. Many teams delegate the creation of a rubric to one team member who then shares the rubric with the rest of the PLC. I would urge you and your PLC to spend the time it takes creating rubrics together. When one teacher creates the rubric for the entire team, this leaves room for interpretation by each individual teacher. While a teacher’s individuality and autonomy should be respected, teachers have a responsibility to offer an equitable education to their students. Without honest conversations during the development of the rubric, it is likely that some students will be better prepared for the assessment than others. Ultimately, this leads to unreliable and invalid data.
How do you and your team develop and use rubrics? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear how your process is similar to or different from mine and my PLC’s.
In the next blog post, I’ll discuss tracking data and developing pathways for remediation and extension. Until then, be bold and be brave!
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