The Miracle Ballot - How the Common Core can make judging easier and more instructive

After a two-diamond coaching career in the National Forensic League, I now develop Common Core curriculum, assessment tools, and teacher workshops. I currently sit on California’s ELA/ELD Curriculum Framework Committee and advise its State Speech Council. The National Forensic League originally published this article in its February 2013 issue of Rostrum.

            We expect every judge to be a tabula rasa – a blank slate – whenever they walk into a classroom and evaluate our students. To drive the point home, we hand them a slip of paper that resembles, for all intents and purposes, a blank slate.
For many events, the League has published guidelines galore, spelling out dozens of elements that our judges should look for, but they often form little more than a checklist. In the case of Policy Debate, there are, in fact, four checklists in the League’s official competition guide: criteria that should NOT be used for a win/loss decision, criteria that should be used, behaviors that warrant a penalty, and points of agreement among coaches. Twenty-eight separate items all together, yet nowhere is a judge shown how to measure any student’s performance against any of the listed criteria (“Competition” 20-21). And for all you Policy haters out there, check yourselves. With one notable exception, the guidelines for your event are no better. Although our League’s literature repeatedly implores judges to leave “educational” comments, at best, those same documents train our cadre of Saturday morning volunteers to be critics of our students’ work, not educational assessors.

            A tabula rasa is the last thing I want in a judge because it’s the last thing I would expect from any teacher. Educators approach every assessment with a clear set of expectations. We may view each assignment with an open mind, but certainly not an empty one. We arm ourselves (and hopefully our students) with a set of criteria that is precise and thorough enough to provide clear indicators of what constitutes sub-standard and above-standard work. Once the performance starts, teachers will scan their students’ efforts with a ruthless radar, searching for those evaluative indicators from the very first word.  I picked on debate earlier, but in truth, debate is the first area wherein the National Tournament has tacitly admitted the folly of tabula rasa. For some years now, the League has collected information about debate judges and their expectations, and distributed that data to those competing at Nationals. It’s a process that was first introduced on the invitational circuit, yet its premise should resonate with every student and teacher: if the former knows the specific rubric used by the latter before the performance begins, you’ve given the student a fair chance at success because you’ve defined what success looks and sounds like (Hill & Flynn 7).

            Tragically, very few tournaments offer our students that fair chance. Almost nowhere do we see, on the ballot or in the guidelines of any major tournament, specific benchmarks that distinguish the mediocre presentation from the stellar one. The most common rubrics attempt to outline how judges assign speaker points in Lincoln/Douglas and its brethren, and they are, by and large, laughable. Telling a judge to assign 29 points to an “outstanding” performance and 25 to a “good” performance isn’t constructive or educational for the assessor or the assessed (“Lincoln-Douglas”). The few tournaments that attempt to place a rating beside the ranking for speech events are equally unhelpful. One-word descriptors leave the student and the judge perplexed, and they leave all of us resigned to the disheartening task of trying to decipher and synthesize hundreds of comments that originate from dozens of different paradigms. Confusion and frustration mount, and this is where the inevitable backlash against the judges originates. It is hardly fair to blame the parents and neighbors we enlist to provide weekend assessments of our pupils when we rarely give them the tools to provide sound evaluative feedback.

To be fair to the League, a nationwide academic body such as ours would struggle to build a common, standardized rubric when all fifty states had their own unique curricula for speech education. That excuse, however, has all but vanished thanks to the Common Core Standards. Schools in forty-five states representing over 85% of the nation’s students are already deeply entrenched in curricular overhauls as they align to the new federal learning goals (Proximity One & Center). With due respect to the private schools of the NFL and the states that have not yet adopted the new standards, including forensic bellwethers like Texas and Minnesota (“In the States”), the Common Core will undoubtedly shape the pedagogy by which the next generation of students are trained. In fact, Congressional debate – an event that long ago reveled in its local variance and lack of standardization – needs to be recognized and applauded as the first event to publish a fully developed rubric for its judges (“Congressional” 3). This event has provided the essential bridge between the single-word tags for speaker points and the criteria checklists. Finally, thanks to the work of the Florida Forensic League and Adam Jacobi, who brought the local rubric into the NFL’s literature, judges can see detailed descriptions of what distinguishes the superior speech from the excellent and the proficient from the mediocre. As arduous as it may be, the NFL needs to bring all events up to this caliber of evaluation. Every judge deserves to be given clear and thorough guidelines that enable him/her to authentically assess our students, and the truth is, the Common Core makes the task of creating such guidelines easier than ever before.

I imagine this piece has seemed a bit divisive to this point, pitting various events against each other. My intent is just the opposite; I believe the Common Core provides an instructional language that can build student skills across any and all events. The standards in English Language Arts are structured as an articulated continuum across all grade levels, pinpointing certain skills and charting their development from kindergarten all the way through high school. The rubric practically writes itself as the expectations for each grade level provide the benchmarks for each successive level of proficiency. To illustrate, anchor standard #4 in the Speaking and Listening category requires students to “present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that a) listeners can follow the line of reasoning and b) the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.” (“State Standards” 48 – lettering added). A quick scan of the specific standards for secondary grades shows how this skill develops over time. Here’s a paraphrasing of the unique language in each grade level – again, the outlining is my own to help delineate the precise elements:

Grade 6	Grade 7	Grade 8	Grades 9/10	Grades 11/12
a.1) ideas in a logical sequence a.2) pertinent details accentuate the main idea b) adequate volume, clear pronunciation	a.1) salient points are emphasized a.2) pertinent details are presented in a focused, coherent manner b) (same)	a.1) (same) a.2) details are well-chosen, include relevant evidence and sound reasoning. b) (same)	a.1) All info and details presented clearly, concisely, logically a.2) listeners can follow development of theme b) style matches the purpose, audience, and task	a.1) All info and details present a distinct point-of-view a.2) alternative perspectives are addressed b) style matches a range of formal and informal tasks

                                                                        (“State Standards” 49-50 – lettering added)

If we isolate the very first element, a.1, and draft a five-layer rubric based on these standards, the Common Core has really done much of the work for us:

Merit	Honor	Excellence	Distinction	Special Distinction
Some ideas, but not all, are presented in a logical sequence.	All ideas are presented in a logical sequence.	Amid the logical sequence, salient points are emphasized.	All ideas and their supporting details are presented clearly, concisely, and logically.  (Salient points are still emphasized.)	All ideas and their supporting details work in tandem to present a distinct point-of-view. The emphasis of certain points supports the point-of-view as well.

I use the NFL degree labels, rather than any system of points or letter grades, to show the versatility that such a continuum-based rubric offers us. By collecting the standards at several levels, and placing them in their proper sequence, we create a rubric that can now be used across the grade levels. Language Arts classes in middle school and English classes in high school can assess student work using the same exact criteria. The teachers at the various levels need only adjust the way the rubric gets inputted into the gradebook. For instance, a 6^th grade teacher wants her students to move from the “Merit” level to the “Honor” level, so “Honor” represents the ‘A’ work, while “Merit” might get a ‘B’ or a ‘C’. Subsequently, the 7^th and 8^th grade classes aim to achieve the “Excellence” standard, so perhaps the “Honor” presentation scores a ‘B’ in 7^th grade and a ‘C’ in 8^th grade.

As the NFL continues to expand its presence into the middle schools, crafting rubrics such as these could prove tremendously helpful. Let’s face it, more often than not, our new programs are often helmed by rookie English teachers who are still getting a feel for classroom instruction, much less forensic coaching. Deliver a tool such as this to a teacher who knows nothing about our activity, and suddenly, the pedagogical path becomes so much clearer. That new instructor now sees the way a young person’s presentation skills will develop over the next six years – well beyond that student’s tenure in any one classroom or any given school. Furthermore, every time we hand a volunteer judge their ballot, we have an opportunity to pull back the wizard’s curtain and give entire families within our community a small glimpse into how we teach their young people. If that ballot contains a clear set of performance guidelines and descriptive benchmarks that distinguish each level of proficiency, then those volunteers can view our students’ work as we do. They begin to see through the educator’s lens. The focus is more refined, so the moments of imperfection and inspiration in every speech are more keenly noticed and appreciated. A few of these moments are scribbled onto their ballot, and in that instant, inside a classroom this person had never dreamed of visiting, amid the haze of a morning spent with adolescent strangers parading in three-piece suits around an unfamiliar campus, this poor soul yanked from their recreational weekend and tossed into the coffee-filled stupor of the day’s first round, this judge has become a genuine teacher. They are engaged in the education of dozens of children they may never see beyond those two hours from first speaker to final focus.

That’s the miracle of our activity that we’ve yet to achieve. We need to start preparing our judges in a way that builds towards that miracle. It begins by sending them into the rounds with more than just a tabula rasa. 

Works Cited

Center for Education Reform, The. “K-12 Facts” Data from November 2010, retrieved from the Center’s website http://www.edreform.com/2012/04/k-12-facts.

 “Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.” Common Core State Standards Initiative. June 2, 2010. Retrieved from www.corestandards.org.

Hill., J., & Flynn, K. (2006) Classroom Instruction that Works with English-Language

Learners. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum

Development, 2006.

“In the States”. Common Core State Standards Initiative. Online. 2012. http://www.corestandards.org/in-the-states

National Forensic League. “Competition Events Guide.” Version 2.0.1. September 15, 2011.

National Forensic League. “Lincoln Douglas Debate Ballot.” October 2012.

National Forensic League. “Congressional Debate Judging Instructions.” Undated – retrieved December 28, 2012 from http://www.nationalforensicleague.org/aspx/nav.aspx?navid=27&pnavid=175

Proximity One. “Characteristics of K-12 Schools & Enrollment by State.” Data for 2007-2008 school year, retrieved from its website: http://proximityone.com/k12_state.htm.