Rubrics as a Time Saver

For a master’s level course I’ve been teaching this spring, I’ve tried to integrate grading rubrics into my assignments more often.  I’ve used them in the past, primarily for grading big end-of-the-term projects.  This semester, I used them to grade the students’ weekly writing assignments.

(This is for the 2004 edition; another is coming 12/2011)

My guidebook for this endeavor has been Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback and Promote Student Learning by Danielle D.  Stevens and Antonia Levi.  It’s a good solid book without a lot of chaff.  Additionally, it’s geared toward university level instructors, a refreshing change from the typical how-to manual whose audience is grade school or high school teachers.

Of course, the part of the title that caught my attention was “Save Grading Time.”  Writing the my “master” rubric for the typical weekly assignment took me a while, but for each week’s work, I only had to tweak it a bit, and applying it to my students’ writing did in fact save me a lot of time.  Since the grad courses that I teach are similar in the writing requirements, I’ll be modifying the rubrics I used this semester for the next time, saving even more time.

Before the first assignment, I went over the rubric with the class.  A few students have some questions, some not pertinent, but one or two helped me further refine the rubric to be helpful as a guide to the assignment.  After grading the assignment, I showed “real life” examples of the completed papers and scoring based on the rubric (with the students’ permission, of course, and with identifying information removed).  I even wrote up a paper myself to show what an unacceptable paper looked like since thankfully nobody turned one in!

The investment of time up front, both writing the rubric, and going over it before and after the first assignment, paid off.  Informally, students have told me that they liked the system and felt that the feedback was better and helped them improve their writing from week to week.  As part of the course evaluations, I also asked questions on the use of the rubric system and I’m looking forward to reading the student’s unfettered opinions about the rubrics.

Blogging

This one’s dedicated to my two loyal readers:

Taking it slow…

Yesterday I had some free time, and one thing I like to do is bake.  I had seen a recipe for Nutella bread and had talked about it at the office.  In fact, I told the secretary that I’d bring some in on Monday if I made it.

I broke two of my hard and fast rules (okay,  so not so hard and fast as all that): first, I always follow the recipe meticulously when I make something for the first time.  Second, I never double a recipe the first time I make it.  Really, look at that picture.  Does that not look divine?  And to have just one loaf, what a shame.  I do a fair amount of baking, so I thought, “What could go wrong?”

Lots could and did go wrong.  First, I used a pound of butter and a jar of chocolate gold to end up with a doughy lava mess.  It was a disaster.  The recipe called for a bake time of 1 hour and 15 minutes.  I tested at one hour, and the wooden skewer came out clean.  Bingo, done!  Wrong.  I inverted the pans after waiting 15 minutes, and first, there was a little jiggle, then the sides opened up, and out flowed butter and Nutella.

So why am I exposing my baking shame on an academic blog?  Because the same two hard and fast baking rules also apply to classroom assessment techniques:  the first time you try an assessment, do it just like the instructions say.  Probably even the second time.  Then make adjustments to fit your situation.  Second, don’t make a double batch; start with one assessment, master it, then start adding more to your repertoire.

The Academic Hierarchy

Just for fun (HT to S Kraus)….

The Hierarchy of the Academic World

DEPT. CHAIR:	Leaps tall building in a single bound Is more powerful than a locomotive Is faster than a speeding bullet Walks on water Gives policy to God
FULL PROF:	Leaps short buildings in a single bound Is more powerful than a switch engine Is just as fast as a speeding bullet Walks on water if the sea is calm Talks with God
ASSOCIATE PROF:	Leaps short buildings with a running start and favourable winds Is almost as powerful as a switch engine Is faster than a speeding BB Walks on water in an indoor swimming pool Talks with God if special request is approved
ASSISTANT PROF:	Makes high marks on the wall when trying to leap buildings Is run over by locomotive Can sometimes handle a gun without inflicting self-injury Dog paddles Talks to animals
GRAD STUDENT:	Runs into buildings Recognizes locomotive two out of three times Is not issued ammunition Can’t stay afloat with a life preserver Talks to walls
UNDERGRAD:	Falls over doorsteps when trying to enter building Says “look at the choo-choo” Wets himself with a water pistol Plays in mud puddles Mumbles to himself
DEPT. SECRETARY:	Lifts buildings and walks under them Kicks locomotives off the tracks Catches speeding bullets in her teeth Freezes water with a single glance She is God

Preparing for Tenure and Promotion

The hype around the tenure and promotion process is intense.  In my opinion, it’s also misplaced.  The review year should be seen as the culmination of the probationary period.  Candidates should have a pretty good idea of whether they have a solid case for tenure and promotion or not.  Being jittery is natural, but it should not be overwhelming.

One of the keys to success for the tenure review is preparation.  This does not just mean getting the portfolio ready for the committee.  Rather, it involves understanding the tenure process at the institutions and conforming yourself to those standards.  Different activities are valued differently at different universities or colleges.  While one school (or even department) may place a great deal of weight on the scholarship of teaching and learning, another may not, or even see such activity as a negative.  Understanding the institutional culture from the beginning of your career is important, if not essential.

Another important key to success is documentation.   Keeping track of everything you do in a year is difficult, but it must be done.  In five years, you will not be able to remember which committees you served on or which workshops you participated in if you have not filed that information away someplace that is accessible again when it comes time to compile your dossier.  Keeping your CV up-to-date is a good way to start, but I’ve also found it helpful to have a Word file with the three major categories (research, teaching, service) and a miscellaneous area to include activities that might not neatly fit into one of the three traditional areas.  In my case, it made it much easier to review all of these activities, sort them into some kind of order, eliminate the unnecessary or trivial activities, and whip them into presentable shape.

Robert Diamond has written a good, basic overview of how to begin preparing for tenure from day one on the tenure track.  You may want to get his book from your library and give it a quick read.

Classroom Assessment Techniques

Sometimes when I teach, I wonder if my student really get it.  They seem attentive, they participated in discussions, and so on, but then at test time, they completely miss the boat on something that I had thought they had nailed and understood perfectly.

One way to check for understanding is to use classroom assessment techniques (CATs).  These techniques help instructors and students understand how well students have understood the material, if they can locate the main point in a lecture, etc.  The time spent devising, administering and reviewing these papers is generally minimal, but the payoffs can well exceed the investment.

Understanding the value of these techniques, learning them, and implementing them in the classroom are Covey  Quadrant II activities; they are not urgent, but they are important for helping to gauge student success in your class.  After all, isn’t that why we teach in the first place?

FYI: The CAT book I’m most familiar is Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross’ Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers.  It’s well organized and gives practical step-by-step instructions explaining each type of CAT.   But theirs is not the only book, or perhaps even the best.  A quick search on Amazon.com returns many hits for books that deal with the same topic.

G. K. Chesterton and Choices

G. K. Chesterton is author that I admire.  The man was a writer, a prolific writer.  He would have been, I think, right at home in blogosphere.  He is commonly known as the “apostle of common sense” for his no-nonsense approach to many of the problems he wrote about at the beginning of the twentieth century, and many of the problems he expounded on are strangely similar to problems at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  In one of his most philosophical books he observes:

When you choose anything, you reject everything else. (G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy p. 45)

I’ve found sometimes that in my teaching, I’ve had problems selecting what to teach my students.  There’s so much that they don’t know and that I want them to experience, that I try to give them everything.  By trying to give everything, I overwhelm them and they come away with nothing except frustration.   It would be better to say carefully choose the most important things and say “no” to the rest, and live with those consequences.

The same could be said of research: to say “yes” to one project is to say “no” to the others, at least temporarily.

Peter Elbow on Writing

A video of Peter Elbow speaking about writing…

Anthony Trollope Redux

Anthony Trollope suits me.  I like his novels, I like his style, and I like his habits.

To increase his efficiency as he started to dedicate himself more seriously to his career as a writer (along with his day job at the Post Office), he did two things: first, he started to write while he traveled (and he traveled a lot).  According to N. John Hall’s biography of Trollope, the novelist also kept track of his writing production:

The second system adopted at this time was a working diary of his writing.  For years he had been making scrupulous records of his daily travels and expenditures for the Post Office, keeping track of every mile, every shilling and penny… Now, past 40, he adapted ledger like columned record-keeping for his writing, marking off the days in weekly sections, entering daily the number of pages written each session,  and then noting the week’s total… The working diaries were an extraordinary exercise in self-discipline.  For whereas his postal work had its daily and weekly obligations–including frequent and lengthy written reports–his novel writing was under no compulsion, no deadline, other than his won will, and the result had been what Trollope termed “spasmodic” efforts  only… Henceforth Trollope wrote under the watchfulness, as it were, of the diaries…

I’ve been keeping track of my writing on a spreadsheet (Paul Silvia’s recommendation), and it does motivate me.  The days I fill in a number of words or time devoted to writing or editing, I feel satisfied.  When I don’t, that gap in the journal is like the maul of some beast, waiting for me to shut it by writing the next day.

Sharpening the Saw for Academics and Renewing Empathy

Several weeks ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I read a column* written by geology professor Alan Fryar,  who recently enrolled in a French class.  One of the questions he asks is, “So why am I putting myself through this?”

I have a feeling many of my students ask themselves that same question.  I teach some classes in a sequence required of all students in my college.  Some students breeze through the requirement, but others struggle, especially with the last course in the sequence.  I often find myself putting a patient face on an impatient attitude: “Why,” I say to myself, “don’t these students just get it?!  It’s not that hard.  This is basic stuff!”

Well, yes, it may be basic to me, but for many students, it’s not.  It’s difficult.  They are frustrated because they feel they are being forced to take a useless class and to pay for it.  They do not see the value of learning what I teach.  They want to graduate and move on to employment and bliss, and my class is an obstacle to realizing their dreams.

Teaching in our niche, offering the same course, more or less, for many years, we forget what it’s like to be a student.  Fryar’s column was helpful in that it reminded me of some of the feelings I had as a student, taking classes I didn’t see as helpful (in retrospect, I can see now just how important they were, and I wish I had taken more) or that were frustrating.  He also learned some lessons that we should be cognizant of more often.  These are some of the things he reflected on as he was in the course:

Our undergraduate students. Even with my 10-percent faculty discount and buying my textbook used at the university bookstore, I had to pay $199.05 for the text, the online workbook, a new pocket dictionary, and a grammar handbook. That’s pretty steep. I’m fortunate to have a permanent job I like, with a decent salary, benefits, and flexible hours, and to be able to focus on just two classes this semester (French and the course I’m teaching on hydrology and water resources). But most students don’t have my luxuries of time and money.

Our teaching assistants. I come from a family of teachers, but I was at best an average lab instructor as a graduate student. It took me several years to become a capable classroom teacher. I observe TA’s once or twice per semester in my role as departmental director of graduate studies, but I hadn’t fully appreciated how a committed TA can build a rapport with students that is comparable to (or greater than) that of an experienced faculty member.

Non-native speakers of English. I was a journal co-editor for four years, and I’m a meticulous (OK, obsessive) reviewer of manuscripts, theses, proposals, and term papers. I’ve had little patience for awkward phrasing and seemingly sloppy grammar and punctuation errors. Wrestling with subject-verb agreement, not to mention number and gender, in French is giving me more understanding of my foreign students and colleagues (and an overdue dose of humility).

One of Steven Covey’s habits is sharpening the saw, a periodic renewing of the self, physically, emotionally and spiritually.  I would add “academically.”  As we move along the rut of our academic career, we forget how exciting it can be to discover new things outside of our specialty.  In my case, even when I tried to break new ground, the new was tied to the old–I began reading and writing about a different literary period than the one I had been working in.  I think to  sharpen the academic saw and to build empathy with students taking classes “because they have to,” I should take a course, something that I’m not terribly interested in and something that hasn’t come easy to me.  Maybe economics.  The experience will expand my mind and hopefully make me a better teacher.

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