Feedback

I really liked this week's blog article and see it as a skill that I do need to work on. It is primarily to help with feedback that I am making an effort to create rubrics starting with all the major assignments during my year, and some generic rubrics that will work with some of my smaller daily type assignments.

My hope is that these rubrics will do exactly what the article suggests, which is to focus on the learning objectives. Having the rubric at the top of the assignment will allow me to have that reminder of what I asked of the students and where my primary focus should be when grading and giving comments.

The second benefit I'm hoping to receive from creating rubrics is to increase the speed with which grading and feedback is given. I know it probably isn't appropriate to do something simply to speed up the process, but I've found that the time commitment to grading is killing me. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat, but I have approximately 140 students on my team, and they all take Geography. That means whenever I give out a major assignment, I have a huge, imposing, heavy, cumbersome stack of big time assignments to grade. Sometimes I'm almost too embarrassed to hand them back because of how long it has taken. I need to find a way to pick up the pace, and I'm hoping that the rubrics will not only help my students focus on the objectives of the assignment, but also help me focus more on the specific stated objectives.

This article spoke to me much more clearly than last weeks and I also felt like it was offering me a way to make myself a better teacher not only for my students, but for myself, and I appreciate that.