When you don’t know where you are going, any road will do (looking at student work)

Looking at student work

This week provided a great opportunity to apply ideas into practice centered around co-constructing criteria and looking at student work. The context comes from two fronts:

At school we spent a few days with Sandra Herbst and Anne Davies (see previous blog post) and have been putting into practice their work on co-constructing criteria with students, both as a means to clarify student’s work towards a higher level of quality, as well as create a sense of agency in students over their work, as they adopt a growth mindset about how to improve their work.

The Deeper Learning MOOC (http://dlmooc.deeper-learning.org) had a focus this week on Examining Student work as well. The conversation on Monday (video archive here: http://dlmooc.deeper-learning.org/live/archives/#012714) was a panel discussion (Joe McDonald, Ron Berger, Rob Riordan, Steve Seidel, Carissa Romero amongst others) about how and why we examine student work. In quick summary, we look at student work for at least 2 important reasons:

– To help us better understand what students are taking away from our instructional implementation. What skills and knowledge have they acquired?

– To help improve our professional practice. In what ways can we use this work to help future planning and revising our work for a better effectiveness?

During the conversation that happened, Carissa Romero from Stanford talked about her work with helping math teachers develop better strategies and mindsets in students. Since we were in the midst of some challenging conversation around approaches to solving systems of equations, I thought I would apply that to our work this Wednesday. Students were assigned a problem after having watched a couple of Khan Academy videos (a modified ‘flipped lesson’) and used to their tables to map out solutions as a group. We then did a gallery walk of their work table by table. Some examples of their work here below:

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Instead of just looking at the work, one of the things we talked about as a class for each solution was “what are some examples of good mathematical process we see here? What are some things that could have made this work stronger?” This line of questioning and recording it helped identify elements of good mathematical work, and created a sense of ownership (agency) around those criteria that determine what a good mathematical solution look like.

In another example of co-constructing criteria, we had students finalizing their schematic diagrams that they created for their display projects. Students are locating a place on campus and designing an exhibit space for student work. Before they can create their prototypes to show our admin team, they were required to turn their conceptual ideas into schematic drawings represented as orthographic projections. We just finished doing this work two weeks ago on miniature catapults, so it was the perfect time to reach consensus around what elements we should see in a good schematic drawing. We put up examples of student work, and asked the students to consider what elements they think were strong, and what things they want to make sure these drawings had for them to be useful and appropriate. Their list included criteria like:

– use of pencil and protractor to draw all lines and curves
– scale included as a legend
– three views minimum
– attention to detail
– neatness of sketches and text that describes
– measurements given along major directions

We then agreed that these are the ways by which we should judge the quality of their work, and they set to rework their diagrams to be more aligned with these criteria

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The level of student work in both their writing and their drawings went up dramatically. We just collected these documents on Friday, so I make sure to include some images from this work next week.