Advancing Teacher Talk on Student Work
Conversations about worked examples in Professional Learning Communities
I wrote a last week about some of the build up to a focus on teacher talk and discussion moves in the context of teaching and learning. Over the course of the last four years, I've done a good bit of facilitation of professional learning, coordination of pre- and in-service trainings, coaching on both one-to-one basis, and contribution to collaborative team discourse. In the last two years specifically, I've served as an instructional coach for two large Louisiana high schools with all English language arts courses as well as U.S. History.
This work has been informed by the scholarship of Jim Knight around impact cycles and instructional coaching, as well as the work of Solution Tree around the Professional Learning Community (PLC) concept. Myself and my team members are the first the occupy these new instructional coaching roles in our district, so we've been intentionally working through the roles and responsibilities outlined at the outset, as well as the practical realities of our work day-to-day and week-to-week.
What we've found is we spend the majority of our time in teacher collaborative discussions in the context of "PLC meetings"—a characterization Solution Tree would frown upon as they advocate envisioning the learning community as the school site, or the organization more broadly. In the course of a week of my work now I'll meet with between ten and twelve teams and run through a regular protocol: Check in; Discuss immediate needs; Check on pacing within the instructional materials; then, Illuminate the specific student work at hand at this point in the scope of the courses these teachers deliver. It’s this last bit that may become most impactful—but first, a bit of context.
A few years back, I contributed to a professional learning session at the state level here in Louisiana wherein we provided guidance to school- and system-leaders about collaborative planning (LDOE Common Planning Support Tool), specifically in the context of supporting work in partnership with quality instructional materials. In my context, this means with the high school Louisiana Guidebooks, and the high school LDOE scope and sequence for US History.
In this professional learning session, we advised leaders with next steps for supporting their collaborative teacher teams with more purposeful discussion and work sessions with explicit and direct impacts on student learning and achievement. An off-hand remark I made has stuck with me: "Just get your teachers looking at student work in meetings." This seems absolutely basic, but in my experience it's actually exceptionally rare to find collaborative teams that regularly examine the specific artifacts of student work in collaborative time.
Now, I passed that remark several times in trainings, but I was suffering a bit of not-practicing-what-I'd-preached. However, for the 2021-2022 school year, we've really pushed our team to facilitate more discussions around student work in collaborative team meetings. While it takes a lot of intentionality and follow-through to make it happen, the shared examination of student work in collaborative time has been a boon for our work, and really pushed us into a fun place with regard to discussing content-knowledge of English language arts (whatever that is?).
For example, our tenth grade ELA is now working through a unit on Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi. While examining this literary work, students are tasked with tracking their developing understanding of narrative techniques, their use, and their impact. While the materials provide detailed guidance at the section, lesson and activity level, they do not provide exemplars or answer keys. This is just one of the entry points for advance of teacher discourse around student work. In the past, I was more than guilty of pulling together worksheets or graphic organizers, developing guiding questions and prompts, then getting those resources before learners. What I did not do was come to clarity on success criteria for the task, or, even more fundamentally, do the work I expect of students in my class.
Now, when our teams go through the regular protocol—Check in; Discuss immediate needs; Check on pacing within the instructional materials; Illuminate the specific student work at hand—we’re able to have much more purposeful and intentional conversations. For example, in the context of Life of Pi one of the narrative techniques examined is that of “pacing.” As with lots of terminology in the broad (perhaps content-less) realm of English language arts, “pacing” as a narrative technique is deceptive in its seeming simplicity. Are we talking about the author’s craft through sentence type and structure which affects our reading (i.e., short sentences pick up the pace)? Are we talking about the chronology of the plot events (i.e., this paragraph of text covers three hours, three weeks, or three months)?
Orienting teacher talk on student work makes us put on our ‘student hat,’ so to speak. Were we the learner in the class, what information would we put on the graphic organizer? Were we to note the narrative technique of “pacing,” what evidence would we cite? How would we explain the evidence we’ve selected? How would we describe the effect of the use of this technique? Guiding teacher collaborative discourse around these questions allows us to forecast potential student responses, thoughtfully consider the challenge before students with these analysis tasks, and demand more precision and accuracy of student responses in class.
Furthermore, once we’re clear on the success criteria and we talk and walk through potential responses with a variety of narrative techniques, we’re better positioned to evaluate student responses, diagnose student needs, provide specific and actionable feedback, and modify our ongoing instruction to better meet the need of students. I’m encouraged by the depth of conversations in our meetings (90-minutes chatting about pacing in narrative for a bibliophile like me, right on!), but I’m pleasantly surprised by the feedback of teachers who feel better prepared to respond to students in the context of their lessons, as well as the impact on our shared understanding of how our materials work and cohere at the lesson, section and unit level.