Perfect Poolside Planning – Thinking About Next Year

I just finished a summer course on critical thinking where I was a mentor for other people taking the class.  This is a wonderful course from the University of Kansas that I took last summer and was asked to come back and help out with.  We talked a lot about rubrics and authentic assessment among other things.  There are many different kinds of rubric that you can use for your instruction from the very specific to the more general.  Rubrics can (and should) be used throughout the learning process as a formative assessment, guide for instruction, and summative assessment.  They can be created and used for behavior, academics, performance evaluation, and a variety of other situations.

I made a set of rubrics for the elementary music standards in my district music curriculum and these rubrics turned out to be very specific.  They are great in that they are very clear about what was expected and what behaviors would look like at each level of proficiency for each standards.  I could use the rubrics to explain to students what I’m looking for in their singing/playing/etc.  For example, when talking about singing I could show them that a 3 was a student who sang all the words in time and on pitch, a 2 was a student who sang most of the right words and usually was on pitch, and that a 1 was a student who tried to participate and got some of the words right but didn’t use their singing voice.  Rubrics like this show the student (before the work starts) what to shoot for and can be used afterwards for assessment.  In the case of the rubrics I made for our pacing guide, they were wonderful because I could use them as a quick reference when I went to assess their work later on in the teaching window.

Academic rubrics like this are great and helpful for both teacher and student in that they lay out the expectations for each assignment and help to communicate the important elements that go into that assignment or task.  Here’s an example that I found of a wonderful rubric that’s specific for a task and easy for a kid to understand.  I love this example because it allows students to see what each level of proficiency looked like.  The creator of the rubric even made predictions before the assessment and were focused on what their boat should do.  Clearly the goal is for your boat to stay afloat the whole time but with this rubric they can see where they would go if their work was incomplete or if their boat didn’t stay afloat very long.

 

This week I also talked a lot about and got super excited about a more general rubric.  General rubrics are like academic rubrics in that they give a level of gradation (1-4 or A-F or hot-cold etc.) but they are applicable to more than one task, assignment, project, or performance.  This type of rubric is great because you can use it throughout your classroom for a variety of reasons.  You could have students use the general rubric to assess their singing, performance in a concert, behavior lining up, or understanding of a concept.  It’s not as great for specific details but it can be used over and over.  In some ways, this is more effective because repetition lets students become more comfortable with the act of assessment and the rubric itself.  One very common general rubric is the “Fist to Five” where you hold up your fingers to show where you feel your level of comfort or proficiency is.  See the picture below for more detail.

I found another general rubric that I LOVE and that I think kids will really be able to understand.  It uses the idea of a hamburger to show students what proficiency looks like.  I read about this approach from Janice Matthews who is the superintendent of Oak Grove School District in Illinois and maintains a blog for the district.  Oak Grove uses this rubric for writing and math but I think that it’s a general concept that all students can understand.

This idea is called the hamburger rubric and makes it really easy for kids to see where they fall on a spectrum.  A bun all by itself is “getting started” and means that the student needs reteaching or significant help.  A hamburger with a patty and some condiments would be a “work in progress” because they’ve got some “meat” but are still working to complete the activity and might need some revision.  A finished hamburger is “Standard Work” and is signifies proficiency or something that meets the standard that’s being taught.  Anything beyond that falls into the “Deluxe/Supersize” work and shows work that goes above and beyond and has exceeded the standard.   I made my own posters to go with this idea and you can download those by following THIS LINK. 

I have an iPad for use in the music room but I rarely use it for instruction since it’s 1 iPad and I have 20-30 students at once.  How to use it effectively!  Well I recently was part of an online discussion thread on Facebook and I was turned on to iDoceo:  an app for grading, assessment, and more!  I wanted to walk you through some of the great things I saw and some of the things I’m excited about!

iDoceo is a grade book, planner, rosterbook, diary, schedule, and resource manager all in one app.  Its spreadsheet engine will calculate averages as you input your assessment data and it’s easy to assess and add grades as you go!  Once you’re happy with your grade book you can export your grades to Excel, to a PDF, and many other formats.  One of the other cool things you can do while grading is to walk around in “roster” mode, click on a student’s picture, enter their grade, and move on!  You can even insert picture of students so that you’re not just seeing names but seeing their face on your iPad while you assess.  I have 500 students, so this function means that when I’m assessing I don’t have to figure out which of the 3 Brian R.’s is standing in front of me.  I match up the student with their picture, double click, and enter their grade and it shows up in the roster/gradebook later.  No internet connection is required to use the app though it does sync wirelessly and can upload to the cloud.

Below you can find screenshots of things that I’ve noticed just in the last few days.  I tried importing a class roster from an Excel spreadsheet that I used last year and it worked perfectly.  I think that set up would take a while it’d probably be MUCH faster for a classroom teacher but for those of us who see the whole school it might take a bit.  I imagine that the payoff will be incredible!