large chart and invited their feedback the following day. As you can see by the rubric, students chose to weight some targets higher than others to emphasize their central importance. For example, I can use specific evidence and details from the text to support my answer, was valued at 3 points.
After that, the ten-point rubric became the anchor for our peer-writing conferences and we chose to carve out more time in our literacy routine to include it. Students gathered in pairs with their responses-to-text and the rubric, and scored their papers as a team. Later, I added my score as well, making any clarifications or comments if needed. Most of my feedback reinforced something that had already been scored low or high in the rubric, so we found that it gave us a common language. Being able to simply say, You forgot to start your answer with part of the question, or, Great job using direct quotations from the text in your evidence, streamlined much of the feedback.
In general, the students' scores and my scores were very close, and got much closer as the year progressed. From snippets of conversations overheard during their scoring conferences such as, "I think this is worth only 1/2 of the point because...", along with the decreasing number of questions seeking my input on a score, students' confidence in their own abilities to create and identify a strong response blossomed.
Once students became able to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, they liberated themselves from relying too heavily on me to be the final authority. Ending lessons knowing with clarity what they needed to continue to do or change in order to improve transformed their work. Discovering that they had the ability and knowledge to accomplish this transformed our classroom. They became leaders of their own learning, as Ron Berger of Expeditionary Learning's brilliant book (and my absolute favorite academic text of the last 10 years), Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment, skillfully distinguishes. From then on, whenever they were conferencing in pairs and using the rubric to score each other's work, I felt certain that they were learning at a velocity I could never match.