Do you ever read the on-flight magazines offered on planes?  On a recent flight, I found myself reading the same magazine on both legs of my trip – sadly, I didn’t straddle the end and beginning of the month which would have meant a switch of magazines.  Nevertheless, one article captured my interest – Think Customers Hate Waiting?  Not so fast…  You can read the entire article here.  Basically the article indicated that transparency is good and people like it.

Now, transparency as an adjective describing the bulging handbag slung over a shoulder detailing all the sordid details of one’s life – not so good.  But transparency during waiting is good.  Apparently, Starbucks has started steaming each customer’s milk individually.  This new way of producing coffee actually takes longer but customers appreciate seeing each step of their coffee and are willing to wait it out.  Now, this I can relate to.  Not to Starbucks, mind you – I’m more of a Panera gal myself.  But with Kayak.  Have you every looked for flights on Kayak?  Those flipping windows telling me which airlines they are currently checking with – they certainly keep me engaged in the process.  Now, I realize that they are not actually checking with the airline at that exact moment.  No, more likely than not, it’s just the sweet mouse inside my computer running around his wheel.  But the fact, remains that the transparency of the situation makes me feel better as a consumer.

Let’s talk about this satisfied and comfortable feeling a customer gets as their milk is being foamed and they see each step of their coffee being made.  In reality, just how transparent is this?  Did customers see the beans being picked, roasted, or shipped.  Customers don’t actually see much of their coffee production.  This transparency, despite garnering warm and fuzzy feelings, is essentially fake transparency.

All of this got me thinking – lots of time to think on flights, as your legs are cramping up and the drink cart is still 7 rows away.  I’ve always been a fan of rubrics – particularly student created or student friendly rubrics.  Rubrics like this:

tell students exactly what they need to do in order to be at or above grade level – the expectations are transparent.  Does a student know what they are likely going to score on their assignment?  Yes.  Did the teacher have to throw the papers down the stairs to randomly assign grades?  No.  Did it matter whether the teacher had made it to Starbucks that day to enjoy their transparently made coffee and was feeling the love?  No.  Rubrics like the one above are transparent.  I like them.

‘Rubrics’ like this, my friends:

ARE. NOT. RUBRICS.  Yes, despite the word rubric in the title.

Rubrics allow increased consistency in assessment and provide students with specific feedback about work.  What does ‘organized plan’ mean in the rubric above?  What does the student have to do to get 2 points for an organized plan in the rubric above?  A paper could score 1 or 2 points depending on the amount of caffeine in one’s system or whether dinner had been overcooked that night.

It comes back to transparency.  Assessment of standards is not about arbitrary numbers or a sweet and cuddly feeling about a student’s handwriting or whether the paper was not wrinkled.  Did the student meet grade level standards?  Yes or No.  Should we be making these expectations known to students ahead of time?  Yes, yes, and yes. The pseudo rubric above is, in reality, fake transparency.  Students are given a ‘rubric’ but said rubric does little to help them adjust their performance.

The moral of the story?  As educators we must be transparent with students.  No gimmicks, no tricks, just plain old levels of performance based on actual expectations shared with students.  And the best transparent rubric, in my mind?  The kind where students help create the expectations for the rubric.  More often than not, I find that students have very high expectations and are hard on themselves.  And why shouldn’t they have high expectations for themselves?  But that, my friends, is a different blog post …

Happy Week!

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