Episode 28- Accessible Rubrics
0-0:12 Orthotonics Accessible as Gravity plays and fades out
0:13 Hello and welcome to Accessagogy a podcast about accessibility and pedagogy. I’m your host Ann Gagné and this podcast is recorded on land covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and within land protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Agreement, which is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
0:33 Welcome to episode twenty-eight. In this episode, we are going to talk about everyone’s favourite thing, rubrics. More specifically, I would like to focus on what we can do to make rubrics more accessible and the kind of reflective work that goes into creating rubrics that align contextually to assessments but also to overall course and program goals for the courses that you teach.
0:57 Rubrics are not easy things, and they do a lot of work in our pedagogical spaces. There has been a lot of talk about how to make our rubrics more inclusive and that often frames looking at the rubric language from race, disability, or even a class angle. There are a lot of words that we use on a regular basis in rubrics that are loaded in terms of connotations that could be very exclusionary. A more intersectional awareness of the rubric as a pedagogical tool, needs to look at how rubrics are created and shared, and what pedagogies that they reflect in relation to assessment strategies.
1:35 So this episode is going to focus on three things to think about as a reflective practice when creating rubrics for your assignments and how to make them more holistically more inclusive to the lived experience of the learners in your eduspaces.
1:52 So point one, what needs to be in the rubric? A lot of conversations tangentially related to Universal Design for Learning or UDL talk about the seeming impossibility of having a rubric that can accurately reflect a choice model framing for an assignment. How can I grade an essay and a presentation with the same rubric they ask? Well, that is a really great and valid question and that comes down to what we’re actually looking for in the assessment itself.
2:23 The essential outcomes of the assessment will help support what the rubric should emphasize, and ultimately should not be about the assignment container per se, such as the essay, the report, or a presentation. So if you’re looking for analytical skills or organizational skills or even research skills and using resources from your discipline, for example, then that can be done in many different formats and it’s the analytical or research skills that the rubric should emphasize and not the container.
2:55 But still others will say it’s hard to not be swayed by the lure of the container if you will. Like it may be harder to be less biased against something textual versus something visual when you’re grading. To that I say well the rubric actually can help you be less biased, because if you’re focusing on criteria then it is the criteria that matters again and not the container. So the point of this first point is to reflect on what the essential learning outcomes and objectives are for the assignment and to use those essential outcomes and skills to create the categories for your rubric. And if you have difficulty determining what those are, then please reach out to an educational developer or a faculty developer or a curriculum consultant at your institution if you have one.
3:47 Point two, another way to support more accessible rubrics, is to think about the format of the rubric itself. How are you going to present this rubric information? Will be it be in a chart or table? Are there other multimodal ways to support that rubric presentation? Would the learners appreciate say, a 1-to-2-minute audio file that verbally provides the context of why you have chosen the categories that you’ve determined for the rubric and in turn how they align to the overarching course learning outcomes and their program outcomes or even the thing that folk love to talk about which are employability skills.
4:27 Rubrics do not necessarily make a lot of sense to a learner who has not seen a rubric before, or at least not seen a rubric at the college or university level. Spend some time with the rubric as a format and have a conversation with the learners about what makes sense to them. Also make sure it makes sense to your teaching team as well. We talk a lot about the learners and the instructors, but there are other pedagogical supports such as teaching assistants and even the folk in the learning services or accessibility services, who would definitely appreciate a more clear and straightforward rubric when they are in turn supporting the learners.
5:07 Finally point three, and this is going to be a bit of a theme this season I think on Accessagogy, I can tell, which is co-creation. We are really at a point in HigherEd where there needs to be more dynamic models of pedagogical design and that go beyond constructivist conversations and ideals about having learners bringing in resources that relate to the course. Instead we need to have real meaningful conversations about what learners would like to get out of the course that you’re teaching and the connections that they already can see and how they already know some things from other courses and their lived experience they are bringing those things class.
5:48 In the ISW programs, or the Instructional Skills Workshops, there are choices in terms of the feedback forms that you would like to have as feedback. A similar thing can be added to your assessment strategies so that the learners can talk about what they really would like feedback on and what could be part of that grading process. This can include more feedback loops between the instructor and the learners but also between their peers.
6:15 Having learners tell you what they wished they would have more feedback about is a great way to help support the feedback being used actually in subsequent scaffolded assessments. There is an accessible investment in that conversation- tell me what you would like feedback on and tell me how best to give you that feedback. Some learners actually don’t know the answer to that question, and that’s okay, just asking them that question to start will get them to reflect on what the answer could be.
6:48 How to operationalize this co-creation of rubric work can be done in tutorial or seminar sections where smaller groups talk about what is of value to them and the kind of learning that they want out of the assignment. Then as a teaching team there could be larger conversation about how that can translate to the rubric that is used across sections. This will empower the students in their educational spaces cause they get to see that their insight has direct impact on their learning. It’ll make the rubric more accessible to them because part of what they see will be designed by them, possibly using their own language, language that is meaningful to them and not distant. This is a way to bring in more plain language to the rubric, because it will be language that the learners, that is at the learners’ level and that is language that is put forth by them and by the learners themselves.
7:41 So that’s it, that’s episode 28 of Accessagogy, with a discussion of three considerations to support making your rubrics more accessible or bringing accessibility into the conversation when you’re designing your rubrics, including bringing student voice in and choice and the kind of language that is used in the rubric.
8:00 Remember I want this to be the space where you can ask questions and share concepts that you’d like me to discuss. So if there’s anything that I mentioned here, or anything else that you feel that I need to discuss around rubric design please do let me know.
8:13 As always if you have any ideas or aspects of your pedagogy that you would like me to address in this podcast, please feel free to send me an email at Accessagogy so that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I will try to include as many of these suggestions as possible in the podcast because ultimately, this podcast is for you. So that’s it, that’s episode 28 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great week!