The Ed World Version of Rubber Ducking

 Rubber ducking is a term I first learned from my son, who just graduated from the Game Arts program at George Brown College. To quote Wikipedia,

In software engineering, rubber duck debugging (or rubberducking) is a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in spoken or written natural language. The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line by line, to the duck.^[1] Many other terms exist for this technique, often involving different (usually) inanimate objects, or pets such as a dog or a cat. Teddy bears are also widely used.

This week is prime time for writing report cards. I spent several hours co-assessing the Grade 7 history projects with Ms. Daley and the Grade 8 history projects with Ms. Wadia. I also spent a large portion of Friday and Saturday together with my daughter (who isn't an educator) evaluating the Pokémon cards that the Grade 1-3 students made as part of their media literacy unit.

I'm not comparing Lisa, Farah, or Mary to a plastic toy. However, the concept shares some similarities to moderated marking, or at least evaluating projects with someone else. Even though it can be onerous and take a lot of schedule coordination, marking assignments together is worth the effort.

Assessment should be objective but also needs to be subjective. What I mean by that is that the criteria should be clearly outlined and determined by the learning evidence, while at the same time, teachers must take into account the various other factors that impact those artifacts (i.e. if the student's first language isn't English, if he/she/they struggled with a particular concept related to the task, how much assistance they required, etc.). 

By having a second person around the explain or justify why a certain project might receive a certain grade, it helps me to see if I'm on the right path. I appreciate having another point of view. 

Because people (such as my dear friend Wendy Kaell) have shown some interest in "the Pokémon project", here is the evaluation criteria we used to mark the cards, as well as 10 of the highest ranking cards created by students. 

I deliberately gave few marks to the written components because the students are in Grades 1-3 and some of their writing skills are a bit weak. However, many wrote much more than I anticipated and demonstrated that they totally understood the codes and conventions of the media text. 

The next (and final) stage (or should I say "evolution"?) of this Pokémon unit is to have my son come in to play various Pokémon video games with the students and do a read-aloud of a Pokemon manga or novel.