to make all this jargon a bit more
concrete. I’d suggest using more of the
online interview, since the story of the
day-to-day realities of the job can help
you form some images in your mind that
will ground the abstract jargon and allow
you to understand it enough to make it
more simple for us. Let me know if you
don’t quite understand what I’m
suggesting you should do here. . . .
After handing back the students’
drafts, I approached Sarah at the end of
class. I was curious whether I’d guessed
an imaginative exercise changed my
experience. In addition, Sarah brought
what she had learned from our conversation into her next research paper.
When she encountered sources she
didn’t understand, she sought out
people who could help explain the
sources—something I do routinely in
my own writing.
Could I have come to this insight if I
had been using a rubric or other means
of scoring Sarah’s paper? Perhaps. But
Students who invest in the writing
process generally do fine on
standardized writing tests.
the problem of grading—giving completion grades every time a draft is handed
in but asking students to continue
working on it until we’re both happy;
putting off grading until the third draft,
or negotiating grades with students at
the end of the semester. I have also
found that students who invest in the
writing process—including working
through revisions that come from our
assessment conversations—generally do
fine on standardized writing tests.
But every time I feel the pressure to
conflate assessment with quantification
and standardization creeping up on me,
worrying me and my students sick, I
think of my grandmother and ask
myself what she would do. It always
makes me feel, think, write, read, teach,
learn, and live a little better. EL
my focus would have been different. I
would have been comparing the paper
to something outside myself—the categories or standards on the rubric.
right and whether she’d understood my
feedback. I didn’t need to ask her
anything; she saw me and immediately
began laughing. “Adjunctive therapy I
have no idea what that means, right? I
even looked it up, because I knew I was
supposed to use different words, but the
definition didn’t make any more sense
than my source.” As Sarah and I talked,
we thought that her best course of
action was to drop the plagiarized
source altogether and talk to an actual
music therapist about what he or she
does, because the online interview
didn’t give enough information. Her
next draft not only was more interesting
to me, but also reflected Sarah’s greater
understanding of the career she was
researching.
My attempt to narrate my reading of
the plagiarized material and get inside
Sarah’s state of mind not only served to
deflect her defensive reaction, but also
enabled me to actually enjoy responding
to the plagiarism problem. When I’d
encountered plagiarism before, it had
always made me angry, frustrated, and
disengaged. But turning the reading into
VIDEO
Beyond Grading to
Responsiveness
Although I believe that grades and
rubrics get in the way of the kinds of
response and assessment that create
better writers and, ultimately, better citizens, I still have to give grades. And my
students still have to take standardized
writing tests that are the epitome of
unresponsiveness—tests in which they
write on canned topics for faceless
readers (and sometimes computers) and
then receive a “response” months later
in the form of a number or perhaps
scripted “feedback.”
I experiment with ways to get around
References
Daiker, D. (1989). Learning to praise. In C.
Anson (Ed.), Writing and response (pp.
103–113). Urbana, IL: National Council
of Teachers of English.
Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what
happens: Body and emotion in the making of
consciousness. New York: Harcourt and
Brace.
Fish, S. (1980). Literature in the reader. In
J. P. Thompkins (Ed.), Reader-Response
Criticism (pp. 70–100). Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Huot, B. (2002). (Re)Articulating writing
assessment for teaching and learning. Logan:
Utah State University Press.
Johnston, P. (2004). Choice words. Portland,
ME: Stenhouse.
Rosenblatt, L. (1993). Transactional theory:
Against dualisms. College English, 55,
377–386.
Wilson, M. (2006). Rethinking rubrics in
writing assessment. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
View a video of Maja Wilson
explaining the problems with
rubrics at www.youtube
.com/watch?v=hjKLvvMxXwM.
Maja Wilson is currently on leave from
teaching high school English in
Ludington, Michigan, to attend the
University of New Hampshire. She is the
author of Rethinking Rubrics in Writing
Assessment (Heinemann, 2006); 231-
288-7417; maja384@yahoo.com.
