This article is the second of a three part series.

A growing number of educators are involved in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) within their schools. Once a PLC structure is established and communities are formed, a set of substantive questions must be addressed:  What is the role of PLCs within a school?  How do we insure that a PLC achieves its desired results? What should teachers be doing when they meet in learning teams?  In other words, how do we make the most of Professional Learning Communities?
The first series published in our December 2009 newsletter discussed the role of Professional Learning Communities serving as a critical friend. This second series addresses looking at student work in teams.

Professional Role #2 – Looking at Student Work in Teams
Three times a year, the secondary English teachers meet together in grade-level groups to evaluate student work from their district’s writing assessments. Student papers from the various classes are mixed and divided among pairs of teachers. Using a common rubric, the pairs score the papers and discuss their judgments (for inter-rater reliability). 
As part of the process, the entire grade-level team identifies "anchor" papers that illustrate the various performance levels of the rubric. The selected anchors are then annotated with comments in the margin, describing the paper’s strengths and weaknesses. The scoring session concludes with the team identifying areas of needed instructional emphasis and share "best practice" strategies and resources for addressing the noted weaknesses.

Increasingly, educators are being encouraged to use "data" as a basis for instructional decision-making and school improvement planning. How does a school or district become data-driven?  In some cases, we see school- and district-level administrators dissecting annual test score reports and summarizing the results for their teaching staff. Although it is surely better than nothing, such an approach to data analysis will have less of an impact if it bypasses teachers. As an alternative, I recommend that teachers be actively involved in the analysis of achievement data and the formulation of improvement plans, so that they will come to better understand and "own" student performance data.

While results from an external test certainly provide data on student achievement, an annual "snapshot" is not sufficiently detailed or timely enough to inform and guide continuous improvement actions at the classroom and school levels. A more robust approach to school improvement calls for staff to engage in an on-going analysis of student performance data from multiple sources. What is needed, metaphorically speaking, is a "photo album" of evidence, including results from traditional tests along with a collection of student work generated from local assessment tasks. Noted "results" author Mike Schmoker (2003) underscores this point:

"Using the goals that they have established, teachers can meet regularly to improve their lessons and assess their progress using another important source: formative assessment data. Gathered every few weeks or at each grading period, formative data enable the team to gauge levels of success and to adjust their instructional efforts accordingly. Formative, collectively administered assessments allow teams to capture and celebrate short-term results, which are essential to success in any sphere."

When teachers meet in role-alike PLC teams (e.g., by grade-level and subject areas) to evaluate the results from agreed-upon assessments, they begin to identify general patterns of strengths as well as areas needing improvement. Wiggins and McTighe offer the following set of questions to guide their evaluation and analysis of student work and their planned adjustments to improve the results.

Questions To Ask When Examining Student Work
Describe
• What knowledge and skills are assessed?
• What kinds of thinking are required (e.g., recall, interpretation, evaluation)?  
• Are these the results I (we) expected?  Why or why not?
• In what areas did the student(s) perform best? 
• What weaknesses are evident?      • What misconceptions are revealed?
• Are there any surprises?     • What anomalies exist?
• Is there evidence of improvement or decline?  If so, what caused the changes?

Evaluate
• By what criteria am I (are we) evaluating student work?   
• Are these the most important criteria?
• How good is "good enough" (i.e., the performance standard)? 

Interpret
• What does this work reveal about student learning and performance?
• What patterns are evident?
• What questions does this work raise?
• Is this work consistent with other achievement data?
• Are there different possible explanations for these results?

Identify Improvement Actions
• What teacher action(s) are needed to improve learning and performance?
• What student action(s) are needed to improve learning and performance?
• What systemic action(s) at the school/district level are needed to improve learning and           performance (e.g., changes in curriculum, schedule, and grouping)?


In addition to such questions, I have found it beneficial to provide organizers for use by PLC teams when analyzing student work. Figure 1 illustrates an example of such an organizer used by a team of middle school mathematics teachers. Notice how their careful analysis of student responses to multi-step word problems resulted in clearly identified weaknesses followed by highly specific instructional adjustments, tied directly to those performance deficits.                               

Figure 1 – Worksheet for Data-Driven Improvement Planning

(example – middle school mathematics)

Data-Driven Improvement Planning

Based on an analysis of achievement data and student work:

• What patterns of weakness are noted?
• What specific areas are most in need of improvement?

Problem solving and mathematical reasoning are generally weak

Students do not effectively explain their reasoning and their use of strategy

Appropriate mathematical language is not always used

• What specific improvement actions will we take?

Increase our use of "non routine problems that require mathematical reasoning.

Explicitly teach (and regularly review) specific problem solving strategies.

Develop a poster of problem solving strategies and post in each math classroom.

Increase use of "think alouds" (by teacher & students) to model mathematical reasoning.

Develop a "word wall" of key mathematical terms and use the terms regularly.

Revise our problem solving rubric to empathize explanation & use of math language.

 

By regularly using such questions and planning organizers to examine student work, teachers properly focus on the broader learning goals (including understanding, transfer, habits of mind), while avoiding a fixation on standardized test scores only. The regular use of such a PLC process provides the fuel for continuous improvement while establishing a professionally enriching, results-oriented culture. This approach is familiar to coaches of team sports and sponsors of extra-curricular activities such as drama and band. As an example, football coaches often meet at someone’s home or apartment to review game film from Saturday’s game and then develop their plans for next week’s practices based on their collective analysis of the team’s weaknesses. Why not adopt these proven performance-enhancing methods from the arts and athletics in a more deliberate way for general schooling?

 

To see these techniques in McTighe’s video series, Effective Assessment for Effective Learning, click here.

For the rest of the roles as defining the essential work of members of a Professional Learning Community see our January newsletter.

To read more from Jay McTighe you can reference chapter 8 in Failure Is Not an Option ® 6 Principles for Making Student Success the ONLY Option.

 

This article has been published by Ontario ASCD and The Learning Principal (NSDC).

Jay McTighe brings a wealth of experience developed during a rich and varied career in education. He served as Director of the Maryland Assessment Consortium, a state collaboration of school districts working together to develop and share formative performance assessments. Prior to this position, Jay was involved with school improvement projects at The Maryland State Department of Education. ©Wiggins, Grant and McTighe, Jay (2007) Schooling by Design. This article has been published by Ontario ASCD and The Learning Principal (NSDC).