Picking up from the last Professional Learning Conception (#4 – Data Analysis), it seems that prerequisite to having data worth analyzing, there is student work that results in the data. Before “data-driven” became the overused cliché that it has in education, we looked at how our students performed. Tables, graphs, and normed numbers, as we now call “data”, make that process a little easier, but do not replace the decision-making step of determining how students got to those easy summaries that are data. This requires collaborative learning through the close examination of student work, a skill that should be close, perhaps innate even, to the heart of even the least data-minded educator.
Consider this: Your team has student assessment data clearly showing a deficit in a specific area or skill. The skill is important because, not only is it listed in the learning standards guiding and binding our profession, but primarily because the skill represents significant academic preparation for the road ahead for students. To really get to the heart of what’s going on with their performance, your team chooses to look at a few of the key pieces of work that you jointly assign. These could be classwork, assessments, exit slips, probably not homework. You know it would be fruitless to each bring the entire class set of work. This isn’t sit and grade together time, it is professional learning time! Instead, you decide that it makes sense to select only a few kids’ work, not those who have bombed everything and not those who aced it all. You want some of those border kids, maybe someone who usually does okay but didn’t on this work. It could be that you have a mass of kids who didn’t do well, or even some who seem to always be just under par. This is the student work you want to analyze deeply: first, to determine what and how the kids were thinking and approaching the work; next, to determine if the task was as true to the expectation as you intended; finally, you discuss what changes or additional instruction need to happen for your kids to hit it. Between these three methods, your team identifies opportunities to improve teaching, learning, and perhaps the assignment itself.
Examining our instruction through the lens of student work should be a regular activity that teachers do together in a self-sustaining school. If it feels clumsy or misguided, there are plenty of protocols (Google: “examining student work”) that can help you structure these conversations in a variety of ways. If student learning is what it’s all about, and I believe it is, then why wouldn’t we spend a good deal of our own professional learning studying the artifacts of theirs?
How do you see implementing this model into your work? What might enhance or inhibit it for you?