How to Develop More Effective Teachers Through Student Work

Throughout the year, teachers use student work to drive at mastery. They create assignments, grade them, provide feedback, debrief them and ultimately use them to push for a certain level of student performance. As leaders, we care deeply about student performance, but our job is not to directly impact student performance, but to impact teacher performance and thereby cause a ripple effect. What if there was a way to take stock of and enhance teacher performance in that same way? Observations are nice, but teachers aren’t permitted to make assertions all year about their class by what they deduce from simply watching. So why can we? We need something more concrete. Essentially, what we need is “teacher work”.

Below is an example of a weekly assignment that I have used to improve teacher performance. My two performance measures that I am looking to build upon are the teacher’s bar for rigor and the teacher’s ability to achieve mastery. Here is the assignment:

“Submit two rigorous Exit Tickets or Do Nows by Friday. For each exit ticket or do now include a teacher exemplar, two high quality student work samples, two medium student work samples, and two low student work samples. Each of these work samples should be graded. Then attach a short (3-5 sentence) reflection on your work samples, describing the implications for your practice.”

Below are the elements of the assignment that connect back to rigor and mastery as a performance measure.

Assignment types

The assignments placed in front of students tell them what we as educators think about their intellectual capacity. Although every single question they encounter does not need to be complex, curriculum should constantly remind students that we think they can do anything. Therefore the rigor of assignments submitted should be used as an indicator of the teacher’s bar for instruction.

Teacher exemplar

The teacher exemplar should mirror the full potential of the response, not what the teacher might expect to see based on where student mastery is currently. If the response can be imagined, than it can be pushed for during instruction. Through this assignment, I have found that teachers with collegiate-level exemplars demand the most out of their students and those with “age appropriate” exemplars stop short of student potential.

Grading/Feedback

How teachers score assignments is particularly telling. Grading too harshly is not ideal, but does often indicate that the teacher has high standards for what students can produce. Giving “pity points” is a huge red flag. The thing that we love most about teachers is their propensity to be loving, caring individuals, but caring has to be disassociated with inflating scores. To care is to be brutally honest because the teacher believes that the student can do better. To give unwarranted points is actually much more harming in the long term because it stifles students from seeking out the growth that they need. Feedback should be contemplated similarly. In terms of comments, “Great Job!” shouldn’t be strewn across a paper riddled with grammatical errors, regardless of whether the question was answered accurately. Instead the comment should read “Good answer! However, please proofread before submitting in order to receive full credit.”

Categorization of Highs, Mediums, Lows

Comparing the high samples to the teacher exemplar is key. Sometimes teachers will submit the highest that they have as a high, but I discourage teachers from doing so. The idea of something being high quality is not a relative designation. It is an objective one. Teachers and leaders who understand this notion are on the right track to a rigorous academic program. Scrutinizing the lows are important as well. How low are they? There still has to be a floor. Even the student with a learning disability, or who isn’t “good at math” should still show high effort and some semblance of understanding of the topic. Next, look at the mediums to determine if they are closer to being high or closer to being a low. This indicates whether or not the highs are an exception or the direction that mastery is moving in. Lastly, make note of which kids are in each category. Ideally, the same students should not be submitted as highs (or lows) across the weeks. If the same students are re-appearing, this indicates that instructional value is not being added. Simply put -gaps are not being closed.

Trends in Content Understanding

While sifting through scholar responses, leaders cannot just look at the score at the top of the page, but what exactly students are getting right and wrong. Leaders should ascertain whether students are struggling with making meaning of a text, or developing their ideas- whether students cannot make sense of a word problem, or whether computational mistakes are being made. Mastery is not dichotomous. It is on a gradient. Therefore we must be clear on where the class is on the landscape in order to acknowledge growth and give feedback that has real specificity.

Reflection

Teaching and leading are all about decision-making. Sound decisions can’t be made without the ability to look at situations objectively, and diagnose issues happening in the classroom. What makes this difficult is that education is a very personal job. So sequentially, a class of failing children can make a teacher feel like a failure. A school full of failing teachers can make a leader feel like a failure. Results can be a hard mirror to look in the face. Nonetheless, a reflection that absolves children of blame, identifies problems, and fixates on solutions indicates that the teacher is prepared to move kids to the next level.

Just to underscore, these assignments in isolation do not move teacher practice. They must be coupled with feedback. Just as a teacher does not collect exams from students without returning them with a grade. After collecting this sort of assignment, I will either send a feedback email or schedule a one-on-one to share my thoughts on rigor and mastery as it relates to the aforementioned categories. Additionally, I use this assignment to guide my observations. For example, if I notice that the same students are being submitted as a low over the course of a couple weeks, I observe to see if the cold calling and circulation during independent practice are strategic. If assignments are being graded loosely, I will look for whether or not half-right answers are being accepted during a class discussion. In short, teacher work is a window into instruction and therefore a development tool. Just as the student work gets better over time, so will the teacher work, if leaders keep giving feedback, allowing for revision and goal setting. Stop waiting until major assessments to tell you whether or not mastery is happening when the indicators are being produced every single day.