Jeff: I think this data helps demonstrate. This student organized it from greatest to least before he graphed it.

Teacher: That is interesting.

Teacher: This one is counting by sixes, twelves, fives.

Jessica: Because our teachers look at student work, they really see what students are thinking and how they’re expressing their understand from the classroom, and they’re better able to guide and facilitate a deeper level of student learning.

Taryn: So it’s two ways of them being able to think about creating this graph.

Jeff: At Two Rivers, we really care about our whole community as learners.

Taryn: So what did we do so far?

Jeff: That includes not just our students, but also our staff.

Jessica: The reason we look at student work is to help teachers become better teachers. Student work is the expression of what kids are learning, and so if you’re thinking about, how am I doing as a teacher, there’s your evidence.

Taryn: So when you guys get with your partner, you’re going to work to create a, what type of graph?

Students: Bar graph.

Taryn: Bar graph.

We just started doing bar graphs with them last week, so it’s relatively new.

Make sure your name is on it, please.

The process of looking at the work will really help me as I’m planning the rest of this sequence of lessons.

Jessica: One of the most powerful things that we do is the looking at student work protocol.

Jeff: Taryn today brought a set of student work. The group of teachers and I took a look at that work to give her some insights into what do her kids really understand around this technical skill of creating a graph?

Taryn: So the task that they had was, Miss Cynthia is ordering new shirts for next year.

The protocol starts where I give a very short introduction to what the work is.

How can Miss Cynthia create a graph to represent the data about the different colored shirts she ordered? And what you’ll see is the chart with the different colored shirts, and there’s different numbers. So it was different shading.

The team looks at the work, and they look at it silently, just thinking about how they would respond to the task, and then looking at how students did. After that, there is about five minutes where the presenter is silent and you’re just talking about things you notice and things you wonder about the task.

Teacher: I notice that there’s three different sets of numbers.

Teacher: I noticed that in one of the sets, it’s only two digit numbers. I wonder which students got which sets of numbers.

Jeff: After about five minutes, we shift the protocol to comments where there is analysis, and we can start to put our own judgments into what we are seeing with the data.

I feel like what the kids needed to grapple with in this problem was really around scale.

Teacher: Look at how different they look based on what the scale that they chose was.

Carolina: I feel like there’s this profound vulnerability in being silent while your team looks at the work that you’re doing. It removes you from the conversation so that you can really focus on what people are saying because you’re listening.

Taryn: Following that, there is a discussion.

I think what was happy for me to hear was you guys noticed. What we wanted them to grapple with was the scale on this one.

That’s the part where we really talk about, okay, well, what are the next steps that students need?

Teacher: Thinking about this story, if we look at Matthew’s and then someone else.

Taryn: It all of a sudden looks like way more shirts were ordered.

Jeff: It does.

Carolina: I think you’re designing a graph to tell a story of something, you know. Scale matters, right?

Taryn: I feel like I get concrete feedback and concrete steps to take.

I like the idea that you guys said. What is the story, like what do we want people to think about it?

So I really like the idea of graphing telling a story.

What else could that graph be telling me?

So I think that’s going to be our focus.

Has anyone ever thought about stories in math before? I don’t know if you’re going to believe me, but the bar graphs you create tell a story.

Jessica: Getting feedback is daunting at first, but after people experience it, they relish it.

Student: This is how much people like yellow. This is how much people like green.

Taryn: The same way students get ideas from each other, I get a lot of ideas from my colleagues. I absolutely love it and I need it.

Schools That Work

Two Rivers Public Charter School