dGR – Diane’s Great Rubric

I’m gonig to stick this post on this front page for a few days so we can all get a chance to read and study it before it scrolls out. We need to figure out how it fits/blends, etc. with our current use of jGR. This will take time, of course, as many of us are still examining it now.

Hi Ben,

I love the PLC. Thank you so much for your hard work to maintain and guide it. I have learned so much. I can’t imagine how differently the year would have been if I didn’t join.

In the spirit of giving back, I wanted to offer my newly-reworded jGR rubric if you think it might be useful to others. I had used others’ rubrics at first: a chart with categories of behavior, then a very succinctly worded version. I found that my disruptive, blurting 7th grade class members still were still clueless about what the problem is and what they are expected to do. It took me a few months to get my own sense of what I really needed from them, too. Now it’s very clear in my mind.

So I created the rubric below. We took 20 minutes of class to talk about it. I highlighted the A/A- description, told them I believe every one of them can achieve that (and that at times all of them do), and noted that getting an A has three areas: listening, responding in Chinese and contributing, and letting me know if something is unclear. B is listening but less responsive. C is listening and responding sometimes, but also disturbing the flow of class. D and below is checking out mentally, doing other work, and/or constantly disrupting. (I rarely have that problem so I didn’t feel a need to get more precise on D and below. Will do so if I need it!)

My grades for these behaviors is higher than others in the PLC, I think, but I know for sure that this rubric causes the problem of uncommunicative classroom behaviors to move from me to the kids. Why? C’s around this school are like F’s at other schools in the mindset of these kids and parents. Also: a boy with a C+ the last time we filled out this form complained to his parents, who complained to my (wonderful, thank God) administrators. The boy is well-described by the C on this rubric. The phrase “bummer!” comes to mind… The kids who were in the A or B range were all quite happy with the rubric, and a lot of B-range kids stepped up to A involvement in class after we went over this. Some in the C range stopped making side conversations and blurting immediately. Actually, the boy who complained whose parents went over my head actually was a comfortable A- today in class. He can understand and change his behavior. [ed. note: this is described in fuller detail in the previous article on this site.]

Probably for next year I’ll be able to shorten it but still keep it clear to the kids, but for this semester, I like this one. My remaining thing to get down is just how often to do this. Middle school kids tend to forget about this without reminders. Now that they know the rubric, I could show it on screen and ask kids to give themselves a grade with just a minute of class left. I’ve been doing that a few times at the beginning of a term to establish a grade, and after that on days when I saw a change in behaviors by students (up or down). At the semester end, I also dropped one F grade from a student who improved after a terrible first week of the school year.

Diane Neubauer

Here’s the rubric:

Interpersonal Communication Skills Rubric    Name_________________ Date___________