Rubrics For the Little Ones

Being an elementary school teacher means that you must think about the capabilities of your little ones (students) before creating grading criteria. If you teach kindergarden, your little ones have completely different capabilities than 3rd, 4th, or 5th, graders. Then again if you teach 5th grade (as I do), your students have  completely different capabilities than middle and high schoolers. Teachers of all different grade levels have certain expectations depending on their students' abilities. Therefore, we should all monitor how we grade our students, and how our rubrics appear so that our little ones are able to follow the organization set by each rubric in order to use it properly.

Because I teach 5th grade, I need to make sure that my rubrics are very simple, straight forward, and use appropriate diction so that my students understand the expectations set aside for each criteria. If I used a rubric created by textbooks that are only for teachers' eye, my students would stress out because it would be too difficult for them to understand.

By adjusting your rubrics to match your students' cognitive abilities, you will avoid frustration, and set students up to succeed. How can we expect a rubric to benefit our students if it is way over their heads?  My suggestions are to use simple diction, clear statements in each category, set aside point values in each category, and limit the number of categories for younger students.

Attributed by: MagneticNorth

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Creating Lesson Plans: College vs. Career

I attended the University of Central Florida for my undergraduate degree, and am currently right back at UCF attaining my masters degree in elementary education. While studying at UCF, one thing I have done time and time again is create lesson plans, some hypothetical, some actually useful for the classroom. Yet I have noticed a huge difference between the lesson plans your professors require you to format and turn in versus the lesson plans you actually write with a team at work. Lesson plans for college grades tend to require tremendous amounts of information, whereas lesson plans for work merely state an objective, description, and page number of the book where an activity can be found. In fact, a whole week's full of lesson plans for math, reading, language arts, science, and social studies can all be written out onto just 2 pages. So why do we create 12 page lesson plans for just one activity for one subject while we're in college?

Taken by: Jose Castillo H

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It wasn't until I was actually working in the classroom during an internship that I experienced what actual lesson planing is like. I was shocked to find that I din't need to write 12 page papers for each lesson that I taught. What I had learned from my college classes was quite different from what I practiced as a teacher. I sat and thought, "Why force us to write out step by step procedures of what I will say to my students, and exactly what my students will do every 5 minutes during the lesson if we don't actually write lessons plans this way as working teachers?" This seemed very tedious and ludicrous.

Taken by George Eastman House

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It wasn't until I had been teaching for about a year that I realized most likely why we had to write out our procedures, materials, and extensions to go along with our topic, standards, and objectives. My thoughts now are that professors were trying to train our planning methods by having us write our each step so that we could anticipate exactly what we wanted our students to do, and exactly what we needed to include in our lesson to do so. All I can say now is that I am extememely relieved that career lesson plans are far less detailed complex than college lesson plans. Would you agree?

-Lisa Costello