How to Teach Nature Journaling
GRADING AND EVALUATION
When we assess student work in a timely manner, we support students in reflecting and improving their practice. This means that we must take the time to respond to journals more frequently than at the midpoint and end of the teaching term.
A Simple Rubric for Nature Journaling
A rubric can be a simple tool to help you highlight the important features students should include in their journal entries and show students where they have room to improve. Rubrics can also make it fairly straightforward to qualitatively and quantitatively assess and grade students’ journals.
We use this simple rubric as a starting point and adapt it to the needs of each group of students by adding expectations appropriate to their context, or by specifying further expectations for a certain activity. Before a graded journaling activity, list clear and reasonable expectations. During the exercise, students can use the list as a reminder of the tasks they should complete. Students can also use the rubric to evaluate their own work and to identify the next steps to improvement. Download this PDF rubric and adapt it to suit your needs.