1. Develop a rubric you can live with. Make it help you achieve your goals in the classroom and reflect your concerns as a teacher.
2. Use your evaluation criteria to develop your evaluation rubric. Sounds obvious, but make sure these add up, or it confuses students. Be sure to spend some time defining terms that may not be familiar to student so that everyone is working from the same vocabulary.
3. A rubric for feedback begins with the students concerns. You can develop a rubric that, like a side-shadowed draft, begins with student concerns and focuses your responses to those concerns. You can provide prompts for student questions and concerns about the draft, and solicit student input into the project’s strengths and weaknesses. This sort of rubric is a good way to help the student retain ownership of the paper and develop the self-evaluation skills that are necessary for workplace writing tasks.
4. Allow students to design projects and rubrics for evaluation. When I provide students with clear parameters for projects and their evaluation, students usually develop more ambitious projects than I would have assigned, and tougher grading standards than I would create. They are usually more deeply interested in their research and my response to it.
5. Rubrics can be used effectively for assessing whether individual students improved in the skills you’re attempting to teach. If you use similar rubrics across the semester, students can chart their change on specific skills. Don’t expect huge changes–and do expect movement up and down as you introduce new or more complex writing tasks–but you may notice growth as you teach specific skills.
6. Rubrics can help you see patterns across the whole class. If you are attempting to work on writing skills top-down, beginning with content–research and argument–and moving to organization, expression and editing, you can plot all the individual scores on each skill on a single rubric to better see where the class as a whole is. (This is not a statistically valid measurement for anything beyond data to help you respond to your class and its needs, but that can be helpful, nonetheless.)
7. Minute papers provide additional feedback from students for assessment. Minute papers can be used to check for concept understanding, to provide opportunities for students to comment on projects–what they learned and didn’t learn–to provide you with immediate feedback on the pulse of the class so you can adjust to better meet student needs. I use minute papers when we finish a project or unit, after group work, or when I’ve provided info I think students need to digest. (For example, it can be very enlightening–and scary–to ask students to paraphrase the work you’ve just assigned, read aloud, and brainstormed ideas for.)
8. Rubrics allow for blind evaluation and comment. If you and a colleague use the same rubric and agree on the same grading criteria, try exchanging papers for marking. Then you can be your students’ coach without being their evaluator. Be sure to do some of the grading together to make sure you are looking for the same qualities, etc. Many teachers use this strategy with great success.
9. Consider other assessment tools: writing apprehension test, survey of student engagement, surveys you develop, additional questions for the student evaluation of teaching sheet. Your goal is to assess not just student learning, but student attitudes, engagement, and other reactions to your class and pedagogical practices. Most students are generally content (and somewhat apathetic)–you risk little to try to assess how your class worked, and there is much to gain by learning as much as you can about how students learn, what they want to learn, what they need to learn. Our goal is to provide a challenging, engaging curriculum that meets students where they are and pushes each of them beyond that.

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