How to Co-create a Rubric With Elementary Students

Rubrics have become a staple in the assessment strategies toolbox that teachers use in classrooms around the world. Rubrics feature in pre-kindergarten programs through university graduate programs and are used to evaluate students on state tests. Although the forms of rubrics and types of classrooms in which they are used vary greatly, teachers make the rubrics and students follow them.

When I think of the various rubrics by which I’ve been evaluated, asked to evaluate others’ work, or used with my students early in my career, I recall that these were given to me or I worked to align them to my learning target and standards while I planned lessons. Although I spent time exploring the rubrics with my students, they had very little ownership in this assessment tool. In my opinion, students’ connection between their work and the evaluation instrument was created in the wrong sequence.

The majority of the instruction-assessment-feedback paradigm is teacher-centered and imposed on the learner. This often results in lost opportunities for learning. If we consider flipping the design of rubrics to a student-centered approach, we can deepen learning and help students further develop and clarify their thinking. Here’s how this can look in the classroom.

Determine Your Approach and Get Students Talking

In general, when you assess a task with a rubric, your students are familiar enough with the content to be able to engage in a higher-level conversation appropriate for their level of development. After you introduce and demonstrate the task, there are two ways to develop the rubric with your students. You can discuss the criterion and have them delineate performance within a framework, or you can start with a broad-based question.

I’ve found that the first approach is often more successful when attempting this task for the first time with students who are unfamiliar with developing rubrics. When your class becomes familiar with the process, you can gradually remove the scaffolds and give students greater agency in constructing more aspects of the rubric.

After you’ve presented the task and discussed ideas, you can ask, “What would an example of this look (sound, etc.) like?” When I taught the primary grades, this conversation happened on the carpet with my students while I used chart paper. For this discussion, I will continue with the scenario of the younger learners on the carpet.

Identify and Describe Performance Levels

With my students on the carpet, we recorded the traits that students believed would represent the most successful examples of their own work. This is an opportunity to elaborate and elicit deeper thinking if you and your students have differing ideas about what the “best” looks like. For rating terminology, I use “distinguished” as the label for the highest performance level.

Depending on the time of the year with my first graders, second graders, or third graders, I’d write the students’ ideas or have them write key words or short sentences for the performance levels.

During these conversations, I used specific terminology: “criteria,” “exemplar,” etc. This helped build my students’ vocabulary so that they could hear and use words in context. Once the characteristics were recorded on the Post-its, we identified the similar ones and physically moved the Post-its to group those notes together. These formed our categories.

My students and I focused only on the “distinguished” level. I informed them that other levels would be present on the rubric, but I wanted students to strive to reach the highest level of achievement on the rubric. Although helping students design the lower levels allows them to differentiate between good/poor quality work, in my experience, it muddies the waters of expectations and what students’ goals are. Developing the other tiers with students could be confusing or be perceived as choices.

Make an Exemplar as a Guide for Students

Students developed categories of what they believed were important elements to include in their final product, but this can still be an abstract endeavor. To help clarify this part of the process, it’s important to have an exemplar ready to use as a model. Have several exemplars ready (either teacher made or from previous years), and evaluate them as a class using the “distinguished” criteria that you developed together.

If you use students’ work from previous years, be certain to ask students’ permission. I’m an advocate of respecting students’ boundaries.

You can use a simple, “I love what you did on ______. I would like to use this as a model for my future students. Do you mind if I keep this?” Students’ work is their property, and they often intend it to be only for your eyes. For me, respecting this trust is an important element of building strong relationships with my students.

As they consider the exemplar and student-developed criteria, students may decide to add, eliminate, or modify what they originally included in the rubric. This helps them understand the perspective through which their work will be evaluated. You might be concerned that students will “borrow” ideas from the models discussed. However, who among us has never “borrowed” or “modified” something we saw or heard in another classroom, on a bulletin board, on social media?

Using an idea as a framework is different from entirely replicating someone else’s work. Seeing and discussing other models is a form of additional practice. Continued exposure, review, and application enhance learning. These conversations also lend themselves to higher-level reasoning that may not occur if you simply give students a completed rubric.

Good Rubrics Take Time

The first few student-designed rubrics will take a little time. But it’s an investment with a rich return. The process becomes more routine with structured rehearsal and provides a natural setting for higher-level discussions and questioning. These rich conversations and repeated learning activities make assessment an embedded instructional opportunity. 

With this method, you save time during the instructional cycle, and your students have a meaningful and relevant learning experience. The feedback that students receive from the rubric is more impactful because they helped develop it.