I'm a bit of a rubric-aholic. I fastidiously tweak rubrics I've had and been using for years, and fiddle with formatting ad nauseum. While my attention to these details tends toward the obsessive, it's because I do feel so strongly that students desperately need clear guidelines and expectations to be set forth in order feel that they can reach the defined benchmarks. On the other hand, I worry sometimes that in my effort to be explicit, I'm encouraging formulaic responses, and becoming too prescriptive about what final products should be.
I was talking about this tension with a colleague who summarized it thusly (thanks, Erik!): We want the task to be ambiguous, but the path to success to be clear. That is, we want students to have opportunities to exercise choice and interpret some goals for themselves, but also to understand with certainty what would define a successful or effective output.
What a paradox! I suppose it's not too different from advice I once heard in an education class: don't let the scaffolding become the house.
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