Soooo... How Am I Supposed To Grade A Yearbook Class?

RENEE BURKE, MJE Renee Burke, MJE, was the yearbook adviser for 20 years at William R. Boone High School in Orlando, Florida. She’s no longer in the classroom, but still involved in the yearbook community. She’s known for her meticulous grading system, but she says her first year as an adviser was a struggle. She gave the students a schedule and told them the deadline. “And the first three weeks were really rough because I just thought that if you told kids they had this deadline, it would be done. And that was not the case.” After those first three weeks, she started breaking up the tasks into mini deadlines, with photos due at one time, captions at another and copy at another time. “We started kind of developing a system after that first nine weeks, but it was still very loosey-goosey, to be perfectly honest. If you finished it, you got an A, but a lot of the work was not A work, which I had to figure out. I wanted A material.” Throughout the rest of her first year, Burke developed a checklist of what the students needed to do, which evolved over the years. In her second year, Burke started using grade sheets to evaluate her students. “My first year was very subjective, which was hard for me because that’s not how I operate. I like things to be very organized. So it was a learning process.” HER METHOD Burke’s grading method starts with a story planner, which is equivalent to pre-writing in an English class. The group brainstorms what story they want to tell and how they’ll tell it. The key is to get students thinking about the assignment both visually and verbally, and consider the main story, secondary coverage and the visuals that will be used in the story. “The three primary grades a student receives for each spread are for body copy, photo and design, and captions. The method utilizes self review and peer-review, with student first grading themselves with a checklist. After the self-edit, the work goes to their section editor, then an editor-in-chief, then a copy editor before finally landing on the adviser’s desk. By the time it gets to me, I should really just be fine tuning anything. The content should already be there. It’s for students, by students, is what I believe. So it should be what the students felt was the important story to tell.” ORANGE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS ORLANDO, FLORIDA

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