Academic Rubric

Team Rubric

Rubrics are owned at the team level, not at the teacher-user level. Every teacher on a team has access to the team rubric and can edit the team rubric. Any edit made by one teacher changes the rubric for ALL teachers at any time during the year. 


As a team is developing the rubric that will be used for the year, it may be helpful to have only one team member edit the rubric during the discussion.


Academic Focus Area

The Academic Rubric has three parts. The first part is the focus. The focus is an overarching skill, ability, or content big idea that spans an entire year of instruction. The Academic Focus will be used by the team members using myImpact as a centering focus for their discussion of the instructional impact on academics after each strategy trial period. In order for those discussions to be rich and meaningful, all the teachers using the data tool will need to connect to the focus and the criteria in the rubric in a way that is authentic and relevant to their teaching context.  


Some examples are Key Ideas and Details for ELA, Makes Sense of Problems and Persevere in Solving Them for math, or Developing and Using Models for science. 

Team teachers determine a common academic focus to enter into the "Enter Academic Focus Area" field. 

Teachers on the team should choose a focus that builds over an entire year, not a lesson or unit, and has observable criteria in many lessons across the year. 

Academic Focus Criteria

The second part of the rubric, Focus Criteria, will contain the observable criteria for the chosen focus. Observable criteria must be measurable, desirable, and likely to change over the course of the year. 

Example criteria for the Key Ideas and Details focus area are Makes logical inferences, Cites specific textual evidence, Determines central idea, and Analyzes how individuals interact over the course of a text. Additional examples are found below.

Team teachers identify three to four observable and measurable criteria of the academic focus which are desirable and likely to change over time to enter into Focus Criteria fields added with the +Add Criteria button.

See the Facilitating Rubric Development article for help with that discussion.

Rubric Level Descriptors

The last section of the Academic Rubric is where the team identifies four rubric level descriptors for their academic rubric criteria to enter into Rubric Levels fields added with the +Add Level button. 


The team should decide on a set of descriptors that will be meaningful when capturing observations of student proficiency in the classroom or student work. It is helpful to understand that the descriptors should allow observers to differentiate between multiple degrees of focus area criterion proficiency. To reduce the number of rubric levels, simply click on the trash can next to the level to be removed. The levels will automatically adjust so the scale begins at 1.