Rubrics, part 1

Hello everyone,

First, some of you are still having questions about your pay. I think it's best for us to work on those things one-on-one. Give me a call or email me if you have questions about whether or not you're being paid correctly, or if you're not sure how to read your paycheck. I'm glad to come by and help at your convenience.

Yesterday I said that I'd go into more detail on how I set up rubrics for performances.

I taught three classes that used performance as a major part of the class; I also used performance based assessments in my English classes, along with other assessments.

During the course of a semester or even a full year, I would teach my students a variety of things that I wanted them to be able to do, and I would assess each of those individual things more informally during the course of the year. During the performance, I would grade them formally on each of the elements I had taught them, giving equal treatment to each of the elements. (If I thought that some element deserved more value, I would grade it accordingly, giving it a larger percentage of the overall grade. Since the semester grade in my performance classes was tied so heavily to the performance, the grades were a large percentage of the overall grade.

Each category was worth 100 points. Here are the categories in my film production class:

Screenplay, Acting, Directing, Editing, Sound, Videography, Overall.

In this case, I graded more easily than in my English classes. The course was an elective, and the mere fact that students were actually able to hand in a completed film by deadline meant that they deserved a decent grade. The students understood that they would have deductions from the grade for each portion of the performance that was less than the requirement. (It was very difficult to receive a fail on this assignment.) The Overall grade allowed me to give a score based on my impression of the whole, apart from the excellence or lack of the individual elements.

In my drama classes, the categories were Memorization, Being in the Emotional State, Production Elements (costume, props, makeup, etc.), Blocking, Voice, and Character.

It was this breaking a performance down in the individual elements that helped students understand why an overall grade may be a B or C rather than an A, and they were very understanding of it.

These are tricks of the trade and not immutable principles, but I hope they're helpful.

Jeff Combe