I’ll start with a truthful confession. I always felt like the lazy teacher when I had students complete a self-evaluation and used it as their score on a paper (after I checked it over to see if their score was on target or not, of course). I felt like it was the easy way out because I didn’t have to start from scratch; I could start with where they thought they were. This school year I went beyond having students do a self-evaluation at the end of a writing piece, and I used it for other things like their participation in a literature circle discussion. Read on for some of my thoughts on why student self-evaluation is an integral piece of giving meaningful feedback to students.
- It makes them actually read the rubric. Yep, I’ll just throw this one out there to start with. There are many times where I’ve collaborated with Language Arts teachers at my grade level to create the perfect rubric to assess a writing piece or to determine how we’re going to grade student discussion. We toil over every verb and debate the difference between a “meeting expectations” and “approaching expectations”. It’s actually quite humorous how much we put into these dang rubrics. And you know what? I don’t think students read them, understand them, or quite frankly, care about them. Having students use the rubric that was created to self-evaluate their own work makes them read it, think about it, and understand it.
- It is real-time feedback. This year my teammates and I created a rubric that we used to evaluate CCSS for Speaking and Listening through students’ participation in literature circles. In previous years, I sat back and listened to conversations taking rapid anecdotal notes and filling out rubrics simultaneously for the 5-6 students in the literature circle group that was meeting. I would give them their rubrics back the following day and noticed most students glanced at it and threw it into the recycling bin. This year, I started out literature circle meetings by having students fill in the top of the rubric which dealt with discussion question and reading preparation. At the end of the conversation, students filled in the remaining categories of the rubric, which dealt with bringing up meaningful discussion questions, adding on to the thinking of others, and showing their knowledge and understanding of the book through their contributions to the discussion. I saw students really thinking about where they were at in real-time. I walked them through each step of the rubric before and after the discussion, but they made the call on where they fell on the rubric. I would say that 99% of students graded themselves exactly as I would have, and the remaining 1% were too hard on themselves. It was a beautiful thing. I walked them through the rubric and they asked clarifying questions, but they had to think about it and take ownership of where they were at. It was amazing real-time feedback.
- It gives the teacher a chance to give more meaningful feedback. When the pressure of filling out rubric for a class of students is removed, teachers can focus on providing more meaningful oral or written feedback. It simply gives the teacher more time and energy to do what they need to do.
I would love to hear your thoughts on student self-evaluation and how you’ve used it in your classroom. Leave ideas below!
Kasey
