How To Find the Hidden Value of Student Work

Miss Shields Grading Essays from the film, A Christmas Story

Admit it. We have, at some point in time, sat down to grade a stack of student papers and wondered why on Earth we had even given the assignment to start with.  And the grading! Mountains of papers waiting for our feedback. Bookbags full of papers being carried back and forth from home to school.  One of my favorite scenes in the movie A Christmas Story is the grading scene.   Miss Shields wonders if her life's work has gone down the drain as she grades paper after paper filled with mistakes, until she comes across the shear poetry of Ralphie's essay. Don't forget Ralphie's wrong ideas about how is work was going to be assessed. How might she have used those essays to find exemplar work for students who "get it", students who are on the road to "getting it" and students who just don't "get it" at all?  How could she have used the student work to evaluate the alignment of the lesson to the standards she was focusing on? What might she have written on the papers that would have provided instructive feedback to the students? How could she have used rubrics to improve the student work? Could her students have helped to build the rubric? We have entered the age of "Evidence Based Instruction" and we need to recognize the hidden value in student work.

Defining common understanding of what standards "look like" and what evidence of learning should be expected.
Evidence Centered Design is one way to work together as a teacher team to come to a common understanding of what students are supposed to know or do based on the standards.  There are all kinds of crosswalks, flipbooks, and unpacking the standards documents that help teachers to have collaborative discussions around the standards.  What is missing is the use of student work "exemplars" to help teachers to really define what the standards "look like, sound like, and act like" and what evidence of this they would want to collect.

Try this. The next time your team works together to plan an instructional unit, agree to bring back to the team examples of student work from the unit.  Each teacher should bring not only the best work, but work from students who are showing partial understanding and students who are showing little understanding of the standards.  Put this work out on the table, minus student and teacher names.  As a team, sort the work along a learning continuum - from mastery to developing. Look back at the standards that were tied to the work. What was the purpose of the assignment -  building mastery of a skill, assessing learning growth, building knowledge? Does the student work reflect that the purpose? What is the evidence that students produced that shows an understanding of the standard/skill at the level of rigor the standard defines? Does the student work show that the lesson really got at the standard that was tied to it?

• Student Exemplars - Achievethecore.org http://www.achievethecore.org/page/507/in-common-effective-writing-for-all-students
• EQuIP Student Work Protocols http://www.achieve.org/files/ELA%20Student%20Work%20Protocol%20FINAL.pdf
• PARCC Student Work Examples from Spring 2015 ELA/Math tests https://prc.parcconline.org/assessments/parcc-released-items

Using work as a formative assessment tool
Formative Instructional Practices (FIP) help teachers plan instruction and help students measure their progress toward understanding/applying knowledge and skills that are part of the class. All of this work begins with a shared understanding of the standards based learning targets for a lesson or unit. Assignments then become a source of feedback to both the teacher and the students.

Try this. The next time you give an assignment, make a data chart for yourself. As you look at the student work, track things like common errors, misconceptions, ideas or answers that go beyond expected responses, ideas or answers that show a student has a more basic understanding of concepts or skills.  Use this data to plan for follow-up instruction. Share this data with colleagues who are working with the same lesson materials.

Then, look at the feedback you choose to give students. How much of it is success feedback - check marks, smile faces, general comments like "good" or "ok" or "I agree"?  How much of it is constructive feedback - coaching remarks to help students move their learning forward like "How might you  use evidence to support this answer" or "What other strategy might you use to approach this problem?"

 Finally, look for opportunities for students to reflect on their own work. One good example of this is a follow-up to the assignment/assessment sheet - What am I not understanding yet? Why am I not understanding it? What am I missing because of a careless error? What do I need to do to improve my learning of this concept?

Student work is also a great tool for developing rubrics with your students rather than for your students. Keeping exemplar work from assignments/units that students can then use to identify traits for each level of a rubric is a great way to get them thinking about the quality of their own work - and the depth of their own learning.  Working together on a rubric also gives them a road map for their own learning. They have an idea of what "mastery" vs "developing" looks like.

• Ohio Battelle For Kids FIP Portal
• New York City Schools - CCSS Aligned Tasks, Rubrics and Exemplar Student Work http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/CommonCoreLibrary/TasksUnitsStudentWork/default.htm
• Expeditionary Learning Project - Student Work Homepage
• http://elschools.org/student-work
• Using Work Sampling in Authentic Assessment - Samuel Meisels (ASCD EdLeadership Dec 1996)
• Learning From Student Work - Gabrielle Nidus, Maya Sadder (ASCD EdLeadership, Feb 2009)
• Book - Jan Chappuis Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning
• Book - How to Give Effective Feedback To Your Students - Susan Brookhart (study guide - is good on its own for discussion topics with teacher teams)
• Article - The Best Value in Formative Assessment by Jan Chappuis (EdLeadership)
• Article - Assessment For Learning - Chappuis and Stiggins (EdLeadership)
• Susan Brookhart - Study Guide for How To Give Effective Feedback
• Article - Feedback That Fits - Susan Brookhart (ASCD EdLeadership 1/2008)

Using student work to identify gaps in learning, plan for extra scoops or build in stretch.
Student work can be a great indicator of how  we are challenging or not challenging our students. It can also be a tool to identify where there are gaps in their learning. As we focus more and more on helping all students to grow as learners, it is becoming increasingly important to use student work to help us measure the effectiveness of our differentiated lessons.  How?

Try this.  The next time you give an assignment, ask students to track how much time they spent on the assignment.  Have them circle or share with you the parts of the assignment that they found "easy" and "challenging".  Ask them what they liked about the format of the assignment?  When you or your team work to create new assignments, think of ways to scaffold the problems or tasks.  Start with questions, activities or smaller tasks that are more foundational and require students to pull from prior knowledge or build new knowledge. Then layer on questions or larger tasks that push them to think about a problem from a different point of view or apply knowledge in a different way. Look closely at how they approach the work and where they become frustrated or start to push ahead.  Use their work to help plan for instructional groups, extra scoops of learning or identify students who are ready to go deeper into a concept.  Think about the difference between benchmarking assignments/assessments that are meant to give you and your students a snapshot of their learning over larger chunks of time and more formative assignments/assessments that give your students a point on their learning map so that they can measure their progress.

• Bloom’s Taxonomy Verbs, Question Stems and Activities
• Example of scaffolded assessment questions (secondary) using Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Webb's Depth of Knowledge - With verbs and question stems

The next time you walk out of the building with a bag of student work, think of it more as a bag of evidence of learning and teaching and less as bag full of work that has to be graded and recorded.

Common Core State Standards for ALL Students

The COMMON in Common Core State Standards is not just referring to the fact that the majority of states in the US have adopted these standards for Math and English Language Arts.  Here in Ohio, where Ohio's New Learning Standards include not just the CCSS but also new standards in Science, Social Studies, Fine Arts, Business, Physical Education, Foreign Language and more, the expectation is that COMMON means for all students in all districts.   That's right, ALL students, no matter what their ability level, grade level, economic background, ethnic background or primary language.   The challenge for teachers is not only how to implement the new standards effectively ,focusing on text complexity, depth of learning, mastery of content, vocabulary development, fluency etc. but also making sure that all students are "stretched" as learners and show growth over a year. Wow.  In order to differentiate learning within a classroom to meet the needs of all students, teachers will need to focus on three things - Complexity of Content, Delivery of Content, and Assessment of Learning. 

COMPLEXITY

In any classroom, there will always be some students who could "take the test" on the first day of a unit, and pass it. Those students are showing mastery of grade level standards and need to be given opportunities to build deeper learning of the material.  As you design your lessons, consider how you can build "stretch" moments into the group discussions, small group activities and individual work.  Building deeper learning doesn't necessarily mean moving them forward along the continuum of learning for that particular standard - in other words, don't just give them work from the next grade level or your future units.  Instead, provide them with tasks that encourage them to learn and apply different strategies to solve a problem,  real world scenarios that require them to think about their knowledge differently or the chance to support peers.

On the other end of the learner spectrum are the students who are not able to begin working on the grade level mastery standard because they need additional supports, may be missing key pieces of knowledge, may be ELL or developmentally may not be ready to hit that " mastery" target.  Formative assessments are key to understanding where these students are in their learning.  As you design your lessons, consider how you can include "scaffolding" moments into the group discussions, small group activities and individual work.  Once you identify the starting point for learning for these students - you need to map out a path that will help them move toward success on the grade level standard.  They may need modified materials, extra "scoops" of instruction, different kinds of practice activities and the chance to learn from "think out -louds", peer modeling and model materials/manipulatives.

For that big group in the middle, you also need to map out their path to mastery of your grade level standards. Evidence Centered Design is a great starting point for thinking about lesson design. Start with the learning targets and identify what it is that students need to DO. Decide what you would be able to circle, highlight, point to or observe in their work that will show you  that they can DO it.  Now, focus on building a lesson or series of lessons that will get them to the point that they can DO it.  Consider  lesson pacing, how to include a variety of activities, how to provide effective modeling, when and how to insert feedback that helps them to move their learning forward, scaffolding, and how to build in chances to make connections to real world scenarios. Look for materials that offer grade appropriate text complexity and will help them to build understanding of key content vocabulary.

DELIVERY

How do students build knowledge in your classroom?  During lessons that are teacher driven, are you providing written and oral directions?  Are your directions clear and easy to follow? Do you have consistent procedures in place in your classroom that help students transition from one activity to the next within the lesson.  Lessons that are student driven also need structure. What kind of lesson framework do you have in place that would allow students to anticipate what will happen during a lesson?  Are the resources that you are providing to the students appropriate for the rigor of the standard? Is there more than one way for them to access the material (think eBooks, audio books, hands-on materials, visual prompts) What are you doing to achieve a balance between teacher centered delivery of materials and student centered acquisition of knowledge (independent reading, computer research, group work, peer sharing)

ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING

"One size fits all" strategies for assessing progress towards mastering a standard won't work in our diverse classrooms.  Evidence Centered Design is a useful way to look at designing assessments. Take a look at the learning targets or objectives for your unit. Once you know WHAT a student needs to DO and have identified what this DOING looks like, you can build authentic assessments.  Think about what EVIDENCE you can collect to point back to the "DOING". Formative assessments might include simple "thumbs up or thumbs down" quick checks, entry and exit cards or keeping a checklist during group discussions or small group observations. Summative assessments may be computer based, may be portfolio or project based or may be adapted to offer students some choice in how they will be assessed.  Be flexible.  Some students may not be able share "what they know" in the same ways as the larger group.  Think about how these students CAN communicate, rather than focusing on the can't.  Utilize clickers, picture cues, computer aided communication, modeling and drawing instead of writing or offering a scribe as ways to help these students share their learning with you and their peers.   For some students with Severe Cognitive Disabilities, you may be assessing them along a grade band of standards or by using the "essence" of the standard. ( See - Ohio Academic Content Standards - extended)

As our state shifts to using the new Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) teachers must become more attuned to making sure all students are showing growth.  By planning  how we are differentiating by complexity, delivery and assessment, we can make sure to meet the needs of all our students.

RESOURCE INFO

 Resources for Differentiation

• CAST UDL Resources  http://aim.cast.org/learn/historyarchive/backgroundpapers/differentiated_instruction_udl#.Uu-8HD2wJTY
• ASCD Resource Page for Differentiation - http://www.ascd.org/research-a-topic/differentiated-instruction-resources.aspx

Evidence Centered Design
This is the process that PARCC is using to design the Next Generation Assessments for Math and ELA.  It starts with "CLAIMS" - very broad statements about what learners should be able to do.  From the claims - Teachers can identify "what can be circled, highlighted, pointed to, listened for, demonstrated" that show that the student is doing what the claim states. Then, teachers decide what EVIDENCE will be collected to prove this. Lesson plans can be developed that will make sure the students have the necessary learning opportunities to ultimately DO what the claim states.  In a classroom setting - the claims can be Learning Targets or Unit Objectives...or SLOs!

CLAIMS 

• PARCC Math Claims
• PARCC ELA Claims
• Science "claims" Based on the ODE Overview of Science Standards
• Social Studies "Claims" - based on ODE Intro to Social Studies Standards

Ohio's Academic Content Standards - extended 
These were initially designed to be a guide for students who would be using the state Alternative Assessment, but the grade band vertical alignment, the essence of the standard (think enduring understandings) and the "continuum of complexity" also makes a great starting point for thinking about how to differentiate by complexity in a diverse classroom.

• Ohio's New Learning Standards - Extended - For Differentiation ODE Homepage

• Ohio's New Learning Standards --For Differentiation Science

• Ohio's New Learning Standards - For Differentiation Math

• Ohio's New Learning Standards - For Differentiation Soc Studies

• Ohio's New Learning Standards- For Differentiation ELA