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Two Protocols for Looking at Student Work
When teams sit down to look at student work together, they often use protocols that structure the time for sharing student work and engaging in evidence‐based discussion. Protocols can be helpful for keeping the expectations for students clear, the evidence of their performance documented (rather than intuited), and implications for lesson planning more evident. The two protocols that follow incorporate specific Reading Apprenticeship tools. One includes Text and Task Analysis for deepening teachers’ understanding of what the student work may show, and the other pulls on the Reading Apprenticeship Student Learning Goals for considering how the student work may reflect or suggest specific areas of growth.
Looking at Student Work with Text and Task Analysis
Teams have many reasons for looking closely at student work, but regardless of what they may be, a Text and Task Analysis makes the process more meaningful. For teachers to fully appreciate the work students are accomplishing with assigned texts and tasks, they must first do this same work themselves. (Chapter Five includes a description of using the Text and Task Analysis routine in lesson planning.) Understanding the demands of the assignment, teachers can then better understand how the assignment contributed, in ways both helpful and not, to students’ thinking and accomplishment of the intended learning.
After analyzing the text and task, teams then examine samples of student work from that assignment. Team members collect evidence of what they see in a piece of student work and describe what they infer as a result. When the evidence is out on the table, other ideas, conjectures, and possibilities can arise from the resulting collegial conversation. Such conversations are likely to expand teachers’ thinking about the work at hand and spill into evidence‐based exploration of implications for teaching and learning. Team Tool 6.14, Student Work Protocol with Text and Task Analysis, lays out a structure for learning from student work in this way.
At Chabot College, faculty in the Reading Apprenticeship FIGs made it a habit to bring in texts that were a struggle for students and to try and figure out why. Instructor Cindy Hicks reports that participating faculty used students’ written metacognitive conversations about the texts, as well. A biology teacher, for example, asked her students to focus their metacognitive logs on challenges in the reading, so in addition to the text, she brought in students’ logs, which provided some concrete evidence about what in the text was causing confusion and how students were working to make sense of it.
Looking at Student Work Through the Lens of Student Learning Goals
During some meetings, to teams want to spread their attention across student work samples from every team member. Reading Apprenticeship Student Learning Goals (Appendix C) can provide a common focus. In a gallery format, team members respond to what each sample seems to reveal—about a student’s relationship to particular learning goals and the support provided by the assignment. Team Tool 6.15, Student Work and Student Learning Goals Protocol, is designed to allow everyone to get and give feedback and to gain insights from colleagues’ implementation of Reading Apprenticeship.
Looking for Growth
It is common for teachers to think of student work in terms of culminating tasks they have assigned—the essays, speeches, reports, and tests that offer a gauge of students’ grasp of course content. When Reading Apprenticeship teams focus on student work, it is in terms of helping students embrace the challenge of complex texts, solve problems of comprehension, reason more productively in distinct disciplinary traditions, and use texts intentionally to learn something new. What kinds of student work can help teams recognize how students are taking on these new dispositions and practices, and how they are growing as learners? Team Tool 6.16, What Counts as Student Work, gives examples of the kinds of student work that can provide information on learning targets of interest. |
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PURPOSE
Time spent looking closely at student work should be preceded by time spent doing the work—and analyzing its challenges!
PROCEDURE: Forty Minutes
TEXT AND TASK ANALYSIS NOTETAKER
EVIDENCE/INTERPRETATION NOTETAKER
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