Examining student work has become a significant part of the culture at the Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center in Estes Park, Colo.
Of course, teachers have always "examined student work.’’ But traditionally they’ve done it solo, noted Lois Easton, director of professional development at Eagle Rock.
"It’s been a solitary experience rather than being a collaborative experience. Their learning is limited because they’ve been working alone,’’ Easton said.
"But, for us to be a professional learning community, we can’t be shy. We have to share with each other,’’ Easton said.
This practice of having teachers work together to study student work is one of the most promising professional development strategies in recent years. Examining student work helps teachers intimately understand how state and local standards apply to their teaching practice and to student work. Teachers are able to think more deeply about their teaching and what students are learning. As they see what students produce in response to their assignments, they can see the successes as well as the situations where there are gaps. In exploring those gaps, they can improve their practice in order to reach all students.
Intensive examination of student work is key to creating and sustaining a professional learning community, Easton said. She also sees it as a crucial element in deeply understanding the connections between what teachers think they’re teaching and what students are learning.
"When schools talk about being data-driven, people think of test scores, graduation rates, absenteeism rates. I don’t know that those numbers are really very meaningful. Student work is a powerful example of student data. It’s much more meaningful to go to real student work – a math portfolio, a sculpture, a videotape, a piece of writing – than to look at numbers about that work," she said.
But examining student work is more complex than simply pulling together a group of teachers to chat about a student’s paper or project.
A number of organizations have written protocols to guide these conversations and respect the unique working culture of schools. They are designed to break down the barriers that prevent teachers from viewing and commenting on each other’s work. They also are designed to build the skills and culture necessary for collaborative work to flourish.
Some of the protocols, such as the "tuning protocol’’ from Coalition of Essential Schools, prescribe how many minutes various individuals will speak and even what sitting position participants will occupy during the discussion.
Other protocols created for similar work include the Collaborative Assessment Conference developed by Harvard’s Project Zero, the Action Reflection Process developed by the Education Development Center, and Standards in Practice developed by The Education Trust.
Eagle Rock has adapted the Coalition’s tuning protocol to examine everything from student service portfolios and pieces of student art to the school’s budget process.
The Eagle Rock staff does "tunings’’ at lunch, after school, during staff meetings, Easton said. "As long as you keep some things the same – especially providing uninterrupted time for the presenters and for participant discussion – you can apply this to almost anything,’’ she said.
In that way, the process has become part of the fabric of Eagle Rock, both for its study of student work and for its examination of other structures and processes at the school.
Easton favors the tuning protocol because it requires intense listening by participants. The tuning protocol was designed by David Allen and Joe McDonald at the Coalition of Essential Schools primarily as way to examine student exhibitions.
Eagle Rock has tuning groups of six to eight persons. Some of these groups are cross-disciplinary, some are grade-level groupings. The Eagle Rock groups meet a couple of times each month for about an hour each time. "Sooner or later, everyone in the group will be presenting student work,’’ she said.
In addition, Easton has a separate tuning group of teacher interns that meet every other week. These are student teachers who have not yet entered a teacher preparation program.
In the Eagle Rock tuning protocols, the facilitator begins by briefly introducing the protocol goals, norms, and agenda. During each protocol, one teacher presents a piece of student work. For 15 to 20 minutes, the teacher-presenter speaks without interruption about the context for that piece of student work. What was the assignment? What was the expectation? What was the scoring rubric?
The other participants take five minutes to ask clarifying questions about the information that has been presented.
Then the teacher-presenter literally turns away from the group while the other participants talk among themselves about the work and its context. This process lasts about 15 minutes. The teacher-presenter is able to hear and take notes on all of the comments but he or she does not respond to them.
"This style of having the presenter pull out of the group is really effective. That spreads ownership of the piece. It says in a very subtle way that the learning about this student work is the responsibility of everyone in this group,’’ Easton said.
Next, the teacher-presenter turns back into the group and spends 15 minutes reflecting aloud about the comments and questions raised during the participants’ discussion. During this time, the participants must be silent.
Finally, the entire group debriefs both the process and the content.
"The presenter always has a feeling of personally getting better. They’re usually overwhelmed by the amount of ideas the tunings generate,’’ Easton said.
