At a recent supervisor's meeting, I was given a rubric that I was supposed to use to evaluate and grade my interns' lesson plans. I thought it was a really dumb idea, as the point of me looking at lesson plans isn't to assign a grade, but to help them improve. Grades, to me, denote an evaluation of the end product-not a work in progress that lesson plans always are.
My second issue is that one of the categories on the rubric asks how the lesson will be assessed, and requires that each lesson have a pre-, post-, and formative assessment, with a point system already determined. Clearly whoever designed this rubric hasn't actually taught in a classroom. While every unit or section will have these types of assessments, not every daily lesson is going to be able to incorporate all of these factors. And yes, if you are using a backwards planning design you should theoretically have your final assessment determined before implementing the unit. But that's for the unit, not the daily activities. Because let's be honest, in a 48 minute period, after checking or collecting homework, reviewing what's already been covered, and then wrapping up at the end to make sure students "got" what you wanted them to "get", you might only get 20 minutes of actual work time.
As a PhD student, I have to come to grips with not receiving grades until (possibly) the class is completely done. We are on week six out of ten of the current quarter, and I have not been "graded" on anything I have turned in to any professor so far. I've gotten reams of feedback and adjusted my reading and writing to incorporate that feedback into my work, but no A for effort. I assume that my professors will let me know if I'm failing miserably, and I attend every class and do all of the things listed in the syllabus, but I just don't know. And that's okay. Because my doctoral work is about reading, writing about what I've read and what I think about what I've read and how it affects my life and teaching practice, and then...teaching others what I've learned. It's a lot of writing, and I expect to get much better at it as I progress through my degree program.
I wish school was less about what letter grade you received, or how "smart" you are compared to the "norm", and more about the journey of learning. Because no matter where we start, we are smarter today than we were yesterday. Even though I am working toward a PhD, a terminal degree, I will be learning every day for the rest of my life. Some days I may only learn what not to do, but that's okay. As long as I learn something, my day will have been a success.
