rubistar

I have a love hate relationship with rubrics. I love that they provide students with guidance, clear criteria and demonstrate the type of evidence I’m looking for in a project. I hate making them. I love that I can transfer responsibility for learning by answering most questions with a simple, “check your rubric.” I hate that rubrics take me forever to write. I love that the quality of projects usually increases when I’ve written a good rubric. I hate that, even if I write a good rubric, I have to spend adequate time and effort training my students on the rubric before they “get it.”

A rubric ensures that a project supports your learning objectives by defining the criteria students will be evaluated on and listing the evidence that is to be produced for each criteria.

If you have a favorite rubric resource, please share in a comment for the rest of us! One of my favorites (which is free) is rubistar. Rubistar allows you to find, create and share rubrics. You can search examples or browse by subject area. If your project needs a little spicing up, you can visit the inspiration page for help.

When creating a rubric on rubistar, you don’t have to start with a blank slate. The site helps you find a similar, customizable rubric to help you start. Here’s the beauty: there are drop down menus of criteria choose from (or you can enter your own). There are also presets for the evidence columns and you can choose how you want to weight each criteria. When you’re finished, you can save, print and go!

Classroom Engagement Tip for November 10, 2008

It's Up and Running

In April, we released the book Strategies to Integrate NOW, a desktop reference to help career and technical education teachers who want to be more purposeful as they integrate academics in CTE courses. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Simple, effective strategies to approach integration
• Provides ideas for quick, limited use or for full-scale efforts
• Suggests practical ways to Prepare, Plan, Deliver and Assess
• Easy-to-read - great for individual use or with teams/groups/PLCs
• Supplement efforts already underway with additional ideas and strategies

The book and strategies have really caught on and we’ve had great response with our professional development sessions around the country.

We’re happy to announce that the website supplement to the book is now up and running! The site has free customizable templates, excerpts from the book, example integration plans and more. Visit for yourself and tell us what you think!

Career Development Tip for November 10, 2008

Storyboarding to Build Understanding

The next time you deliver a lecture or assign students to read a long passage, encourage them take notes using a storyboard format. A storyboard is a timeline of events that are visually displayed for use in movies, commercials and animations. Storyboarding notes during the lecture or while reading involves the students creating a series of frames with images to represent a sequence of events or topics. Under each frame students should place a caption that describes the particular event in the sequence. The storyboarding process will encourage students to meta-cognitively process the information in the lecture and/or passage. The following shows an example of storyboarding a basic photosynthesis process.


Tips for success with storyboarding:

• If this is the first time you have students take “notes” in this way demonstrate what you expect them to do for the first few frames by showing them an examples.
• If this is the first time that students are learning the content make sure to share the number of “frames” students should have in their storyboard. This will help scaffold their understanding as they complete the task.
• This approach works especially well when the content of the lecture or passage is a process or procedure.
• If you use this technique with a lecture pause intermittently throughout the lecture to let students capture the information in a frame.

Classroom Engagement Tip for 10.31.08

High Demand Jobs

Have you ever wondered what jobs are in highest demand in today’s labor market? Afterall we are preparing students for careers and life after school. What opportunities are out there for them after they have a diploma or complete some form of post-secondary training? Career Voyages, a partnership between the Department of Labor and the Department of Education is a unique website designed to help students explore careers in a number of high growth industries.

According to their Web site the following are today’s highest growth industries:

• Advanced Manufacturing
• Aerospace
• Automotive
• Construction
• Education
• Energy
• Health Care
• Homeland Security
• Hospitality
• Information Technology
• Retail
• Transportation

Emerging industries include: Biotechnology, Geospatial Technology and Nanotechnology. If you’re like me you are probably wondering what a couple of those even mean! Check out the Career Voyages Web site it’s well organized and provides a number of resources to help both you and your students understand opportunities in these high growth and emerging industries.

Career Development Tip for 10.31.08

Who’s On First – A Quick Communication Activity

Employers continue to cite communication as an important skill for successful careers. Consider using this short 10-minute activity to begin a discussion about effective communication in your classroom or during a student organization meeting. To prepare, ask two students to read through the script prior to the class or meeting. As you select students to act out the story remind them that practice, enthusiasm and careful enunciation are important for success. Have the two students read the following script and then ask them the debrief questions that follow.

Script for Activity:

• Abbott: Alright, now whaddya want?
• Costello: Now look, I’m the head of the sports department. I got know the baseball players’ names. Do you know the guys’ names?
• Abbott: Oh sure.
• Costello: So you go ahead and tell me some of their names.
• Abbott: We have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third.
• Costello: That’s what I wanna find out.
• Abbott: I say Who’s on First, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third.
• Costello: You know the fellows’ names?
• Abbott: Certainly!
• Costello: Well then who’s on first?
• Abbott: Yes!
• Costello: I mean the fellow’s name!
• Abbott: Who!
• Costello: The guy on first!
• Abbott: Who!
• Costello: The first baseman!
• Abbott: Who!
• Costello: The guy playing first!
• Abbott: Who is on first!
• Costello: Now whaddya askin’ me for?
• Abbott: I’m telling you Who is on first!
• Costello: Well, I’m asking YOU who’s on first!
• Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
• Costello: That’s who’s name?
• Abbott: Yes.
• Costello: Well go ahead and tell me.
• Abbott: Who.
• Costello: The guy on first.
• Abbott: Who!
• Costello: The first baseman.
• Abbott: Who is on first!

Debrief Questions:

• What happened?
• What was the source of the confusion?
• Where do you see this kind of communication confusion in real life?
• Based upon this experience, what can we do to improve our communication with others?

Leadership Development Tip for 10.31.08

Do You Know Your Targets??

Last week we exhibited at the National Career Pathways Network Conference in Cincinnati Ohio. The booth across from us happened to be the International Center for Leadership in Education. You may be more familiar with this group due to their founder and CEO, Willard Daggett. Mr. Daggett has been a champion for improving rigor, relevance and relationships in our schools. We, of course, share a passion for making classrooms and learning meaningful and relevant to students’ futures. Throughout the course of the conference, we learned about a neat resource offered by this group – the Curriculum Matrix.

The Curriculum Matrix assigns a priority rating to each state standard in English, math, and science based on the emphasis given to that standard on state tests. Standards are also crosswalked to the Essential Skills study, which ranks the importance of curriculum content in the subjects relative to what graduates need for success in adult life. The International Center uses education experts in each state to assist in creating the Curriculum Matrix.

In their book, Strategies to Integrate Now! authors Seth Derner and Dr. Jack Elliot discuss the importance of locating, in writing, a clear list of the academic standards/ benchmarks as a first step in making meaningful real-world connections in either a Career and Technical Education or Academic classroom. The Curriculum Matrix does this well! It’s a resource to consider having at the school or district level to guide curriculum and instructional decisions and priorities. This kind of resource is one tool to help ensure that schools and teachers don’t have to lose their vision of a complete education to the practice of “teaching to the test.”

Professional Development Tip for 10.31.08