Making writing rubrics is not hard
Designing rubrics takes finesse

Designing writing rubrics is a different task from making rubrics for writing, just as designing clothes or automobiles is different from making them.

If you are teaching writing, designing rubrics for multiple uses and multiple users will greatly reduce your workload. Moreover, well-designed rubrics makes learning to write easier for students.

If you never heard of rubrics before today, perhaps you should skim the page in which I define rubric before you go on. Don't be embarrassed. The first time I heard the word rubric used in an education context, I had no idea what the speaker was talking about. Bewilderment is a common classroom condition.

Designing rubrics for multiple uses

When I talk about designing writing rubrics for multiple uses, I'm not talking just about using the same ones year after year, although that is is something smart teachers do to maximize return on their energy investments. What I really mean is designing rubrics that can function as:

1. Course/unit outline

2. Students' study guide

3. Writers' checklist for preparing assignments

4. Framework for individual instruction

5. Teacher's grading guide

6. Student progress report

With careful planning, you can make one writing rubric fill all those roles.

1. Course/unit outline

If you are teaching beginning writers, it is best to teach just one writing genre. If you limit your teaching in that way, you can use a single writing rubric for all writing assignments for an entire yearlong course.

The rubric should indicate in broad outline the:

• Topics that you will teach students,

• Relative importance of those topics,

• Order in which you will teach them.

My rubrics contain sections for:

• Content development

• Writing mechanics

• Usage and style

Within sections, I also list items from the most important to the least important in terms of producing a successful essay. So, for example, having a thesis statement is the top item in my content area, and having a conclusion is the bottom one.

The order in which I list information in the writing rubric is the order in which I teach those topics. When I'm teaching beginning writers, I spend most of my energies teaching content-related material, relatively little on usage and style.

2. Students' study guide

Whatever is at the top of your rubric should be the topic that's most important for students to master in order to accomplish your goals for the course. Whatever that topic is should be the topic you tackle the first week of class.

3. Writers' checklist

An attempt at designing rubrics that list everything writers must do is doomed to failure. What your rubric must do is alert writers to the elements they must include in their writing.

If your rubric is worded carefully, students can turn items into yes/no questions without having to have a separate checklist.

4. Allow for individual instruction

The writing process for a particular writing genre can be taught to groups of students. Teaching writing elements such as grammar and punctuation to groups is less successful: there is too much diversity of background knowledge and too wide a range of habitual errors.

I recommend designing rubrics that allow you to restrict your focus to a student's most serious problem areas by "writing in" topics for an individual student's rubrics. I recommend the list have no more than five items.

The problem areas need not be errors. If you have students with good grammar and punctuation skills, you can have them work on some aspects of usage or style that are beyond the abilities of the majority of the class.

5. Teacher's grading guide

An assessment rubric for multiple use situations should indicate the proportion of points allocated to a rubric section.

Using percentages allows you to be consistent in your grading formula regardless of how many points an assignment carries.

The percentages I use (70% for content, 30% for everything else) mimics the amount of time I spend teaching those topics.

6. Student progress report

If you have a single rubric that you use as a grading guide for all assignments in a course, it is easy for anyone looking at the series of rubrics to see how a student is progressing.

If you have a rubric for each assignment, you have to create another vehicle to use as a progress report.

As you are designing writing rubrics, use as few sections as possible to minimize problems when you come to make the actual forms.