Chapter 11: Getting Teacher-Evaluation Rubrics Right

When I was first introduced to the idea of rubrics in a summer workshop with Grant Wiggins in the mid-1990s, the idea was immediately appealing: what a good way to get a handle on the perennially difficult task of evaluating students’ written work. I was a principal of a large elementary school in Boston, and that fall we created grade-by-grade rubrics with three domains: Mechanics and Usage, Content and Organization, and Style and Voice. This was an extraordinarily helpful exercise, forcing us to make clear what writing looked like at four different levels of proficiency. For several years, we used the rubrics to evaluate students on a quarterly basis and inform and improve instruction.