Confession: I stole the title of this post from this post here by the same name written by Jennifer Gonzales. It caught my eye (yes, I judged a book by it’s cover) but then lived up the promise of the title by offering some awesome advice. You could do yourself a favor and quit reading right now and head over to read her post. Seriously.
Still here? OK, here is the basic premise of the post:
1. Teachers love rubrics.
2. Teachers love filling rubrics with loads of writing.
3. Students are unpredictable and don’t like to fit inside tiny (rubric) boxes.
4. Teachers spend the majority of their rubric writing, writing things they don’t really want to see.
I found myself nodding along with everything in this post. I do like rubrics but I feel like it is a lot of semantics and wordsmithing of what essentially amounts to “good”, “better”, “best”.
Solution: The One Point Rubric. Take a look at this:
Three columns, one point for each criteria. Instead of writing four (or five) columns, write one column based on the expectations/curriculum standards which would represent achievement at a mastery level. From here, when grading students’ work, decide if they met, exceeded, or did not yet meet the required standard.
I really like this idea. As Jennifer points out, if you are including the students in on the creation of the rubric, it becomes an easier task as they only need come up with what mastery of the task looks like rather than three or four other descriptors of different levels of achievement.
What do you think?
Have you used this approach before? I am currently working with grade level teams at my school in my role of curriculum coordinator, to plan and reflect on the teaching of writing. One of the things the teams do when/after we meet and agree on the areas of focus from our scope and sequence, is to create rubrics. I would like to share this with them and see if any of them would be willing to try the one point rubric. Stay tuned…
sonya terborg 
I love this concept! Great idea!
I think the efficiency of this is a fantastic simplification of the rubric plan. It is so important to make rubrics student-centered and I’ve always been a fan of creating the rubrics with my students. However, it is very difficult to make time to do this. I would definitely be in favor of giving this a whirl. 🙂 Betsy
Yay! Would love to try this with your next writing genre. I think even with the one point rubric you could still create it with your kids and in a much more timely manner. If you would like to take the lead on this idea, I would love to support you and your team as pioneers of the one point rubric! x