During a common planning meeting, teachers and I discussed their administrator's (and my organization's) stated goal of gathering data by analyzing student writing. At our training institute, the teachers were shown a Teacher Checklist (click on the title of this post to view) that could be used for formative assessment throughout the writing unit. The checklist was one way of helping us to focus on continuous and careful examination of each student's writing process. Here were several teachers' responses when we began to discuss the goal of sharing student work:
- "How is student work a goal?"
- "Isn't student work just anything the students write down?"
- "Well, we are always looking at student work..."
There seemed to be a disconnection between the stated goals of the administration and the personal goals of the teaching staff. I realized that before we could start sharing and assessing student writing, I would need to try to provide some structure for what we would analyze and how we would collaborate.
The 'what' came pretty easily as I planned my action. The writing unit we were working on was already designed to provide lots of concrete evidence of a student's process: chart notes about the genre (feature articles), conference notes about topic & angle, discussion board posts about research. The 'how' was a little trickier to determine, but I decided that some structure would help.
I decided that my action would be to plan a meeting in which teachers analyzed a student's progress thus far in their Feature Articles writing unit. I accessed protocols from McDonald, Mohr, Dichter & McDonald (2007) at http://www.teacherscollegepress.com/ to organize our group process during this meeting and chose the Collaborative Assessment Conference protocol as the most appropriate for our initial attempt at collaboration. Here is the plan:
- Display the student work on a Smartboard. The work should be the final planning sheet from TMI Feature Articles Handout 1.4 which details the student's choice of topic, angle and inquiry plan. The use of a Smartboard allows a large group of teachers to simultaneously view the work without wasting paper on copies which would likely be discarded anyway. It also protects a student's privacy against the possibility of others seeing the sample in the trash.
- The student's ELA teacher will give a brief presentation of the work with a description of the context. Although the protocol calls for minimal context, I feel that it would be helpful in this case because these teachers have so little experience with collaboration. In addition, Dearman & Alber (2005) state that reflective conversations about student work should focus on assessing both the quality of the work as well as the context.
- ELA team members take turns at the Smartboard describing what they see in the work. Another benefit of the Smartboard is that it allows teachers to make collaborative notes and see each other's thoughts displayed visually. Teachers can select, highlight or mark up the work as necessary without compromising the original piece. I will encourage participants to describe without evaluating as they discuss the work.
- Team members will discuss, "What questions does this work raise for you?" The presenting teacher will listen and make notes.
- Team member will discuss, "What do you think this student is working on?" My role will be to encourage rigorous thinking by pressing members for evidence from the work. At this point we may delineate student strengths and needs.
- The presenting teacher will respond to any questions or discuss the work from his/her perspective.
- Reflection - Most teachers have very little time in their schedule dedicated to collaboration (Korsheed, 2007). Since our common planning is typically only ~35 minutes, reflection will take place through the use of an email listserve. In addition, Burns (2006) has researched email as a reflective tool and found implications for its use with students; I feel that it would be equally useful for teachers to use this way because it allows some time for thought between the collaborative learning and the response.
