Looking at Student Work to Improve my Practice

On Tuesday mornings, we have some time where the teachers look at student work. We're in groups of four teachers, of a variety of content areas, typically teachers who have some students in common. I'm grouped with an ELA (English Language Arts), a Science and a computer teacher. Today was my first time to share my own student work.

We have to bring a task (in this case a Problem of the Week, or POW), the rubric we use, and three samples of student work, typically a low, medium and high sample. In POWs, I require students not only to solve these problems, but also to make some analysis of the situation and to explain their thinking and their solution.

At the beginning of the year, I dedicated about three class days to working on POW "stuff" - we worked on POWs, then we used rubrics/check-lists to Peer Evaluate, revised our work, and resubmitted as necessary. I then gave them feedback and from some students, requested a second round of revisions.

This was their third POW, and some of the students are still struggling with their explanation (I find some write NO explanation, but then there are varying degrees of "correct" in the explanations, depending on the level of detail).

The three students whose work I brought really showed a good range of student work, while controlling for the gender factor (all three students were female). The low said "I used the table to find my answers" but gave no details about how she created the table (since it wasn't given), or how the table related to the context/questions. The medium student explained in more details about how to do the problem, but there was no real reasoning about why her answers made sense  or why she selected her strategy - it was very procedural. "I subtracted, I divided, this gave me this answer" (paraphrasing her response).

The third student (the high level) gave such a great explanation, it was really great to read. Her explanation included answers to all of the questions on my checklist "What was the problem asking?" "How did you solve the problem?" "What steps did you take?" "What strategy did you use?" "Why did you choose this strategy?" "Why does your answer make sense/is reasonable?"

The other teachers in my group complimented me that my expectations were really clearly laid out for the students in the rubric, and the checklist was quite organized as well: it was clear that student C had internalized the structure of my checklist, since her explanation answered each question.

Then came the suggestions/critique:
1. They said it was clear that I had shared the rubric with the students, but how much had I actually modeled for them? They suggested sharing high level models with the students so they can see samples of what they are heading for. Since this was the first year of this curriculum, I didn't have any samples from last year, but this year, I'm going to scan some of my student explanations and erase the names so that next year, I can read some of their explanations in showing my new students how to write their POW explanations.

2. Although we had done a peer review, they had suggested that each student should "self-rate" on the rubric before I collect it to highlight to the students their own knowledge of how they had done on it. I really liked the idea of having students self-assess, especially to then counter-point it with my assessment, so they can check their own understanding of what's expected (in addition to checking their understanding of the problem).

3. The final suggestion from my colleagues was that for some students, the checklist and the rubric being on two pages might be a bit much, especially since there were lots of questions to read, and the rubric is a 5 x 5 grid with (with an addition row and column as headers) explaining a 5-pt rubric in 5 categories! So we discussed what to do to help students who were overwhelmed by it. And here's where I turn into a geek: the ELA teacher suggested giving the students "sentence starters." I wasn't sure how to do that (since I don't have any experience with it), but she pointed out that my checklist already has the questions I'm looking for them to answer in their explanations. For the students who are struggling to get started, she suggested using the sentence starters like "The question asked..." "I found my answer by..." "First I... Then I..." "I know my answer is right because..." "I know my answer is reasonable because..." "I chose my strategy because..." She suggested posting it on chart paper in the classroom, and also going over it for 15 minutes when I give out the next POW.

And this is where I feel like I chose the right profession. The level of excitement that I feel over the idea of sentence starters is ridiculous. I feel like I'm watching myself magically transform from the confused and overwhelmed first-year teacher struggling to stay afloat in the Bronx to an educator who is constantly learning new strategies to support all of the learners in his classroom. I feel very lucky that I work a job I love, and that learning new techniques genuinely excites me. I am mentally engaged with the task of thinking about other ways to present topics/skills to help struggling learners improve.

The next area I feel like I need to improve is how to challenge the gifted students in my class. I feel like I'm so used to teaching to the middle and to the bottom, I don't know how to "differentiate up." I'm guilty of the classic "here's some extra credit" or "read quietly until everyone is finished" or "begin working on your homework." I don't feel like any of these are sufficient, however, and I'm worried because I know that sometimes students who are very bright drop out of school because they get bored and frustrated. I'm looking for ideas next on how to differentiate up. What do I do for the student who has gotten 100% on pretty much everything we've done so far, has the POW explanation down pat (i.e. was the example student for the high), and has been using the equations to solve all of the problems algebraically already. How do I help her delve into this math at a deeper level?