Design and Deliver a Rubric

This is where you put to use the time you invested in Step 1. Don't trivialize the work students do by breaking it into too many parts - three to four criteria is best. Choose criteria that align with your outcomes and the goals you identified in Step 1. Look for those pesky redundancies and invalid weightings. For example, unless the essay task is being given to graphic design students, "formatting" should not be equally weighted with "clearly supported argument." At this point you are using your expertise and professionalism to make judgments about what is most important, so it's a good idea to share your thinking with colleagues. 

To help guide the selection of your criteria, go back to your outcomes to see what is specifically being assessed with this task. For example, if your outcome is: "Learners can reliably demonstrate how to use de-escalation techniques to neutralize conflicts", you might give them a set of scenarios to analyze and create if-then statements. This could serve as the first of a few increasingly more complex and targeted assessments of the outcome. After completing the interrogation in step 1, you might choose the following three criteria:

• Analysis indicates understanding of situation
• Phrasing of verbal interventions likely to de-escalate
• A range of possible reactions are given

Often criteria are titled with a noun, such as "Analysis", but it's helpful, at this planning stage, to write them as a statement of expected performance, like the examples above. This will give you a head start when it comes to writing the descriptors. It would also help if you can list some actual things you are looking for to decide if they have met those criteria. For example, for the second criterion (phrasing of verbal interventions), you might list some examples. And for the third criterion, starting thinking about how many examples would constitute an acceptable "range". In this way, you are well on your way to "showing" what quality is rather than just telling. 

Write down three to four demonstrable, high-value criteria on your page and list some examples that might show what you mean. Don't put them into a table just yet.