Looking at Student Work

Welcome again to Wealth o' Websites, a web research project sponsored by the Philadelphia Education Fund. My name is Don Glass. Christina Cantrill and I coordinate the Fund's Small Learning Community Mini-Grants. In preparation for a web publication of student work and teacher commentary from our Mini-Grants, I searched the web to find out what others are doing. The theme for this edition and the next is "Looking at Student Work." This page was developed by searching the web for examples of why? and how? teachers and others are looking at student work. Next time, Weekly Websites will feature sites that post samples of student work.

Part One--Why and How

At the basis of all teaching practice is student learning. How do we know that students are learning the knowledge, skills, and concepts that we are investigating in our classrooms? This is the guiding question that has led many organizations and teacher networks to develop guidelines for teacher inquiry into student learning by looking at samples of student work. As described by Shereese Williamson-Carlisle in the Cross City Campaign video, "Student work is where the rubber hits the road."

The available guidelines and protocols are tools for promoting critical dialogue between professionals that is grounded in the analysis of student work. The objectives for these conversations are to guide improvements in student learning and classroom practice, to encourage teacher collaboration, and to remind us of the successes and challenges of individual students.

The educational/web lingo for these guidelines and protocols seems to be that of a tool-kit or tool-box. The choice of metaphor moves the guidelines away from being prescriptions to being useful tools that you can adopt and adapt however you and your colleagues see fit.

An excellent place to begin is at the comprehensive Annenberg Institute for School Reform's webpages aptly titled, "Looking at Student Work." The Annenberg site sets a high professional tone describing the process of looking at student work as "serious work in a climate of accountability..." The Institute supports their strong belief in professional practice and "making teaching public" by providing extensive resources from many school reform and teaching organizations that are currently involved in this process.

Here is a quick tour of the Annenberg site:

• principles guiding the work
• getting ready
• collecting student work
• protocols-descriptions and links

Linked to the Annenberg protocols page are the ATLAS Schools webpages called the Looking at Student Work Toolkit. The toolkit is written in a supportive manner that reflects a genuine effort to create non-threatening environments for discussing professional work. On the right side of each page is a useful table of contents that describes the linked pages. The first pages discuss: why of look at student work? The next pages describe how to select and examine student work samples. The final pages describe some useful group discussion guidelines as well as provide sample reflection questions on the inquiry process.

Another useful link is part of the Coalition of Essential Schools website. At this site you will find the Improving Instruction Through Inquiry and Collaboration Toolbox. On this page is a handy listing of links to ready-to-use "tools" for teacher inquiry. The pages contain less descriptive narrative about the tools than other sites (Note the shift from "tool-kit"to "tool -box"). The website supports teachers as classroom researchers by advocating action research as a means to improve practice. Examining student work is one of the strategies for classroom research described here. You will find a version of the descriptive review process outlined in the toolbox.

In addition to the web resources, Annenberg has published a book with Harvard's Project Zero titled Looking Together at Student Work: A Companion Guide to Assessing Student Learning. Click here to see a review of the book at the Project Zero site.

These websites of large education reform organizations lay out a vision for teacher inquiry and professional dialogue. Currently, many efforts both locally and internationally are underway using these guidelines to collect samples of student work and to document teacher commentary. Many of these efforts have posted or plan to post student work samples with commentary on the web. The next Weekly Websites will feature some of these websites. See you then!

Image: student work from Spruance Elementary, Phila.