Recently, I have had some fairly robust discussions with my peers around success criteria and rubrics. I would suggest that it is impossible to generate a rubric from Success Criteria. I suggest that rigorous success criteria comprises levels of complexity, not levels of achievement. We ended up fast tracking down a rabbit hole, evaluating the effectiveness of rubrics.
Initially, I contested that rubrics constrain activity. Yes, they are transparent and provide clarity of expectations for a task. But to what extent do rubrics promote learning and enduring understandings? In my experience, students tend to simply follow the rubric, rather than work with it. I like Bearman and Ajjjawi's (2019) analogy, 'When is a rubric a recipe for success, or a tool for gaming the system?' (p. 5)
The article has changed my thinking. I do now concur that a great rubric, one that centres on the learning can provide opportunities for students to communicate, collaborate, think critically and creatively, to problem solve, and to understand themselves as learners. What this does though, is provide another invitation to enter another rabbit hole, 'When do we adjust our pedagogies that are associated with our assessment criteria?'
