Up: [[Metaphor]] Created: 2024-04-17 Too many of the kids in my class of eleven- and twelve-year-olds were happy to hand in projects that looked really good, but were alarmingly close to content-free. It made me think of that iconic Wendy’s commercial from the 80’s where the old lady lifts the bun off the minuscule square of a McDonald’s hamburger and demands to know, “Where’s the beef?” So often, students in school see assessment as something that is done to them. They ignore the written comments their teacher has often laboured over, look only at the grade, briefly celebrate or mourn, and move on. Rubrics can be one solution to that problem. A well-written rubric shows what progression of a skill looks like and, ideally, gives a suggestion for what the student can do to move from one level to the next. There are two challenges with rubrics and they relate to the terms ‘well-written’ and ‘levels’. A teacher needs to deeply understand the nuances of a skill in order to write a decent rubric. Too many rubrics you find in schools just have kids doing ‘more’ of something; that isn’t very helpful. The even bigger problem is that because a rubric has levels and a teacher ultimately needs marks for a term report card, both teacher and students tend to translate the levels into letter grades. Wanting to battle these tendencies, I set out to develop a rubric with my students, one they could use to self-assess whether their assignments demonstrated qualities like thinking, clarity, synthesis, not just visual appeal. I hoped metaphor might do the trick so I showed them the “Where’s the beef?” commercial and that became the header for the first level on our rubric. It worked well. There was a lot of laughter as we crafted the descriptors of what minimal looked like for thought and the other rubric elements. The other end of the scale, which the kids decided was “the whole cow” was equally fun. I can’t remember the terms we used for the remaining levels of our four or five level rubric, but a burger with the works was in there somewhere. The descriptors for those levels were trickier to write, but well worth the effort. For the next couple of weeks when I’d ask kids how they were doing with an assignment, I‘d get responses like, “I’m going for the whole cow, man!” Fast forward two months. My kids and I have reunited after a seven week teacher strike that has left the teaching staff demoralized and feeling that most of the progress made with their students has been lost. Our principal, Fran, asks me if there’s something I could do to restore teacher morale. I cut out hundreds of yellow construction paper stars, my kids bake squares and cookies, and we host a teacher appreciation day. Teachers are sent off to the staff room to drink coffee and eat sweets, while groups of my kids descend on their classrooms. They give each student a star on which they complete the prompt, “My teacher is a star because….” When the teacher returns, it’s to a classroom door covered in a shower of stars. Needless to say, the day’s a big hit. My kids and I are relaxing in our portable near the end of the day, feeling proud, sharing highlights, when Fran comes in and sends me off to the staff room where, no surprise, there isn’t so much as a leftover cookie crumb. After waiting the requisite time, I cut across the playground, heading for my portable, when I meet Fran striding towards me. Fran’s an ambler, not a strider, a sure sign that something’s wrong. She thrusts her forefinger at me and says, “One of your kids almost lost his **life** today!” I have just enough time to worry that something happened earlier while I was trying to supervise multiple classrooms from my position in the hall before Fran finishes with, “Ryan called you a cow!” Ryan had actually completed his star by referring to me as “the whole cow.” And while, as metaphors go, I’d have preferred almost anything else, there’s no doubt that applying a personally meaningful metaphor gave Ryan and his classmates a way of thinking about assessment criteria in far more depth than a letter grade imposed by another. That was the beginning of my conviction that a personally meaningful metaphor opened doors to depths of understanding, clarity and creativity. It was reinforced many years later when I led an assessment workshop for teachers at a remote Cree school in northern Ontario. The school was on an island, accessible in winter by a ‘taxi’ which consisted of a snowmobile pulling a large open wooden box where the passengers sat or, before the river froze, which was when I was there, access was by helicopter. One of the teachers, a Cree man, seemed disengaged until we worked on metaphors for rubric levels. His was ‘boiled potato, baked potato, and French fries’, reflective of both the limited access to other produce in his community, and his personal food preferences. Now I think metaphorically all of the time. Applying a metaphor to my PKM has aligned me to my purpose, informed my design choices, and suggested relevant actions. I’d like to do the same with self-assessments of my writing. The question is, What metaphor works for me?