I’ve just concluded a session at Arkansas ASCD conference, hearing Charles DeBerry, principal at a Harlem school. He explained one of the key tenets that has helped them improve to a grade “A” school: teacher inquiry teams. DeBerry described how teams of teachers meet regularly to review student work, focusing on a key target skill. They then discuss their findings and set immediate goals to remedy.
I’d love us to do this with our English department next year. We could form an English Dept. inquiry team, focusing specifically on improving student writing (especially content and style—our lowest scores on our essay EOL Literacy exam). I can imagine us grading a set of student essays (or small writing sample), targeting a specific area. Perhaps one week we focus on students using specific details. The idea would be to set goals, teach the concepts, then meet together to grade student work. We then reflect on their understanding to refine, reteach, improve our instruction.
Perhaps a good starting place is the end—to start by taking a close look at content and style, making a list of specific skills this entails, and then developing lessons that target those skills.
Language Arts Inquiry Team. Great idea.
JasonP / InnerEd
June 24, 2010
Welcome back to blogging. My RSS feed has missed you. I worked at a school that did this one year. What bogged us down was the assessing; we had no during school time to do this, and many teachers struggled to have the essays assessed in time for inquiry. One aspect that was intriguing was that you see how teachers grade so differently. Our teacher who taught all honors was leagues different in her standards on the same student’s essay than another teacher who focused mostly on special ed.
I hope it goes well for you.
Lisa Huff
June 25, 2010
@Jason: Thanks for the welcome back. I’ve been blogging and creating at other sites. I hope to get back to blogging here!
I can see time for grading–as always–being a problem. Any tips on what we might do to improve the process? I was talking with a colleague in our department, discussing the possibilities of grading small chunks of a sample of students rather than full essays. We have five teachers. If each collected four pieces (one-half page max) from our students (including a high, medium, and low student), that would give each of us a set of twenty papers to grade. Is this similar to what your group tried? If we could do this once a month, we’d be far ahead of where we are now. I’d love to hear more from you about the specifics of what you tried and any tips you might have for helping us make this work.
Student Publishing
June 28, 2010
I hope it goes well for you too. I am part of a group that grades in small chunks as you have described. We have found it to be very successful in helping us improve our instruction and assessment. I was so happy to see this post and will continue to check back regularly. Much luck in your continued endeavors to improve the education of our students!