Tips For Effective Teaching (3) all about grading

Run on the Rubric Road

The challenge for many teachers with a large number of students in a classroom is enough time 1:1 to ensure that they all understand the learning task before them.

The learning styles of children fall into the following categories:

• Kinesthetic (hands on)
• Visual
• Reading / Writing
• Auditory

However, while students can and do learn in a number of different modes, the majority learn best through a combination of kinesthetic / visual material while less than 30% learn best through simply reading and writing.

By issuing the instruction " Do this chapter and answer the questions at the end" the teacher does ensure that the students in class understand the task, and occasionally, this is quite a legitimate teaching strategy.

However I believe there's a better way and that is to use Rubrics.

The incessant requests for 'What's my grade?" from students is frequent in most classrooms. Directing a student to how they fulfilled the stages listed in a rubric when completing a project avoids the challenges of not giving them a higher grade than the student wants

Similarly when more inquisitorial requests from parents and administrators as to why a child has been given a particular grade, they can be justified as being objective assessments of a students performance.

Giving projects that have a clearly defined grading system means that any teacher should be able to give to the students in their classroom a clear pathway to the highest grade.