Ethics6th, 7th, 8thYear 7, Year 8, Year 9
How to save time on rubrics in middle school ethics
How to get a rubric for a class discussion without typing and formatting it yourself, and how to have every student graded against it about a minute after they finish.
Jemel Fanfan | Founding Member at Flint
Why this matters
A US teacher spends a median of 5 hours a week grading and giving feedback (EdWeek Research Center, 2022). A class discussion in ethics adds to those hours twice. First the teacher writes the rubric and lays it out as a table. Then the teacher reads each student's reasoning against every row. Those hours come out of leading the discussion and talking with students.
How to create a rubric
A rubric is "a coherent set of criteria for student work that describes levels of performance quality" (Susan Brookhart, ASCD).
- Grade three or four things, one per row
- Describe each level in words a student can check
- Show students the rubric before they start
No teacher has time to read every student's discussion against every row. Sparky, Flint's AI, writes the rubric from one message and grades each student's conversation against it.
Make the rubric in one message
In a Flint chat, describe the assignment: the grade, the question, what to grade and how many levels. Sparky writes the rubric as a document. You can edit it in place, print it, open it in Google Docs or download it as a Word file.
Flint chat
Sparky wrote this rubric 28 seconds after the teacher's message
The message and the rubric are from a real chat on a Flint test account, and Sparky's reply is shortened. Sparky wrote the rubric in the first person, so students can read it themselves.
Grade each student against the rubric
Ask Sparky to turn the rubric into an activity. Each student then discusses the question with Sparky, which asks for their position, asks why, and pushes back with the other side. When a student submits, Sparky grades the conversation on each row of the rubric.
Lena
Lena
I think it depends, but mostly no. Lying to protect a friend from getting in trouble usually just makes things worse later.
Sparky
Lena
If the truth comes out, now two people are in trouble and the adult won't trust either of you. And your friend doesn't learn anything from what they did. But if a friend is in real danger, lying to protect them is OK because their safety matters more.Sparky
Lena
I get that, because loyalty matters. But I think having their back can mean helping them tell the truth, not covering for them.Strong on all three rows
Diego
Diego
Yeah I think it's OK. Friends should help each other.Sparky
Diego
Because if you don't lie, your friend gets in trouble and they might be mad at you.Sparky
Diego
Some people would say lying is wrong. But I still think it's fine.Getting There on position and reasons, Needs More Work on the other side
Lena and Diego are example names. We typed their messages into the activity on a test account. Sparky's replies and grades are the real ones, shortened. Sparky graded each session between 59 and 76 seconds after it was submitted.
Last school year, Sparky graded more than 500,000 student conversations against their teachers' rubrics, for more than 10,000 teachers.
Check the grades without rereading every chat
The Grades tab on the activity page shows every student's grade on each row of the rubric. Open a session to see the reasons: Sparky's feedback links each point to the student's message. In Edit feedback you can change the grade on any row, and Flint recalculates the overall grade.
Example activity page
Every student's grade on each row of the rubric
The school and students are made up for this page. The grades are the ones Sparky gave in the test run.
Example session
Sparky's reasons for Diego's grades, and the teacher's controls to change them
Sparky's feedback is from the test run, shortened. Every grade stays editable.
Make a rubric for free
Sign up for a free Flint account and ask Sparky for a rubric. Name the grade, the question, the three or four things you are grading and the number of levels. This is the message from the example above:
Example message
Make a rubric for my 7th grade ethics class. Each student will discuss with you whether it's OK to lie to protect a friend. Grade their position, their reasons, and how they answer the other side, on 3 levels, in words a 7th grader can understand.
To grade with the rubric, ask Sparky to turn it into a Flint activity, select Build on the activity card, then Create activity. In the activity's Grading settings, check that Auto-grading is on, and turn on Rubric visibility so students can read the rubric before they start. In a study of 162 middle school students, those who read a model, listed criteria and checked their own drafts against a rubric wrote more effectively (Andrade, Du and Mycek, 2010).
For more ethics activities, see Flint for ethics. For rubrics in other subjects, see the AI rubric generator.
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