Like many English teachers, I teach multiple preps. Mainly 11th Grade English Literature and Composition, American Literature (Grades 11 and 12), and AP Lit & Comp (Grades 11 & 12). No matter the course, however, I’m always coming back to the foundational skills of textual analysis, evidence-based argumentation, and effective writing. For the longest time, my biggest focus was how to teach these skills: my lessons, activities, and units.
Eventually, after getting my sea legs under me, I realized that if I really wanted my kids to master these skills, I needed to be just as intentional and thorough with the creation of my assessments and rubrics as I was with my classroom instruction! (I also needed to figure out how to grade WAY faster and more uniformly: I was spending 30+ hours every time I needed to grade 100 tests or essays. Something had to change.)
Luckily, because I taught both Common Core aligned classes and AP Literature, I was exposed to both the Common Core standards and (as of 2020) the College Board® “Big Ideas and Enduring Understandings.” I started thinking about what language I could use to express the skills I wanted my students to demonstrate on their assessments. I’m talking things like short answer quizzes, paragraph responses, and what I called “CER Reading Questions,” where kids would choose one of their study guide questions to answer using a quotation from the text to support their claim, and then they’d add “reasoning” to explain how/why that evidence supported the claim.
The result of this ended up being a POWERHOUSE of an analytic rubric for me. I had figured out a rubric that I could use for BOTH my English 11 kids AND my AP Lit kids, and not only that, but this rubric made my grading more uniform, it was easier to figure out what score I wanted to give a kid for an answer (I wasn’t just “guessing” based on vague “standards-based” ideas about “meeting,” “needing,” or “exceeding.”), and it made it super easy for my students to see and understand WHY they earned a certain grade.
Over time, I tweaked the wording to make it more and more clear, straightforward, and unambiguous. I used words that directly aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the AP Literature and Composition course objectives, and I started creating different versions of the rubric as well. Sometimes, I needed to just grade their claims, evidence, and reasoning. So that was one rubric, but what if I wanted them to cite as well? Or what if I wanted to grade their structure & proofreading? I made versions for all of those cases.
Eventually, I had a little stable of rubrics I could pull out to grade just about anything. And I could give these rubrics to students BEFORE they turned something in or took an assessment, so they had a clear pathway laid out to demonstrate their proficiency. So not only had I solved a bunch of problems for me in “teacher world,” but I ended up helping the students learn and succeed more as well, which was what I knew I wanted to work toward when I first realized I needed to put just as much effort into assessment as I was putting into lessons and units!!
If You Want My Rubrics, Click Here!
Both the Common Core and AP Literature courses emphasize the importance of close reading, critical thinking, and the ability to construct well-reasoned arguments supported by textual evidence. By using my analytic rubrics (“analytic” just means there are criteria for every skill level from 3, to 4, to 5, rather than just explaining what a “5” looks like & then guessing for a 4 or a 3), I make sure that I am actually measuring what I am trying to teach, and students see what’s important, too.
Ultimately, I really like how my analytic rubrics help ensure consistency and fairness in my grading. I don’t have to overthink whether I’m going to give an answer a 3 or a 4, or whether I gave Kid “A” a 4 and Kid “B” a 3 and I’m not sure how different their answers really were or if the differences justified one kid losing a point, or any of the similar worries I had when I first started teaching. I just LOOK AT the rubric, and the answer is right in front of me. It’s easy. It’s clear. It’s sooooo much faster.
All of us are constantly learning, changing, growing, and adapting to the ever-changing landscape of education today. This is one of those “areas of growth” for me that I’m so glad I focused in on and refined because I made myself a better teacher, helped the kids learn, AND saved myself literally 1,000s of hours of wasted grading time!!
If you are a new teacher and you haven’t hammered out your rubrics yet, don’t wait too long! They’re just as important as your lessons!
Save time with these ready-to-go, standards-aligned rubrics!
⌛️CER Short Answer Rubric for Cited and Uncited Responses
⌛️Rubric for Poetry Analysis Essays
⌛️Rubric for Cited Literary Critical Essays
⌛️Expository Essay Rubric: W1 and W8 Mastery
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