I’ve just discovered a new evaluation system, based on whatever I can define and describe. A new way to make the evaluation more transparent. Especially if the students know the rules because they are aware about the expected result so they have a direction to work, an objective to reach.

Nothing similar to what I experimented at school, where teachers used to repeat a phrase that used to take me out of my boxes: “you can do it better”. Later they scored my job with miserliness or at least I felt it wasn’t fair.

I’m still convinced that the system is very rigid, so very valid people have not brought the best grades and vice versa. But, since I was a teenage student many things have happened to me. And, above all, I have opened my mind and I’ve become aware that not everyone is like me.

Now, even if I don’t know the whys of others, I know they exist. And now I think “the other” ways are our best weapon: as we look at different things, from different points of view, seeing the same we can see different things and arrive further. It’s because all we have strengths and weaknesses. That makes us valuable to the rest. And, at the same time, this puts us in a different starting point and with different goals in different subjects. As a teacher, I can’t wait that all my students have the same capabilities, skills, motivations, needs… but my work, I think, is to get the best out of each one.

How to combine my convictions and my discoveries?

Here come into play the rubrics, a new tool (for me). I think the rubrics are useful to establish a lowest common denominator, a point that consider basic in terms of acquisition of knowledge. But… so that each student took advantage of my subject, to encourage them to follow later, to strive… I have to go a step further: Let them work in group to make each individual contribute and receive.

Again the rubrics can be useful, so that students know what is expected from them. But those rubrics are subjective by nature: how to measure creativity? How to rate the different approaches? How to assess the capability of negotiation and agreement?

One of my teachers used to say that to score a ten you had to know more than she… impossible mission, from my point of view. However, a group of students, even if all of them know less than me about the subject, they can produce a much better result than I could provide alone. That’s a 10!

That is why, in the phase of acquisition of knowledge, I will use the rubrics to establish a minimum. Then, in the application phase, in group, I will use the rubric as a guide for the students.

My challenge will be that whoever had more knowledge will expose it, whoever had a more practical view will apply it, whoever had creativity will find the way to present it… My mission, I think, should be to compose various working groups and exercise them in teamworking.

So welcome rubrics! They will be also usefull to be used by different judges to evaluate: they by themselves, they about the others… and me. Because ones see the forest and others the leaves on the branches of the trees.

María José Medialdea Fernández

as a CLIL Teacher