Record who was present, what work was looked at, what standards and content clusters were discussed, what was discovered about the quality of teaching and learning and, most importantly, what ideas for improvement of instructional practice were generated. Develop a prompt that will elicit student work in the focus area. Agree to a timetable by which all teachers will give the prompt and collect student work. Take time to discuss the assignment, your expectations of the students and the means you will use to score it. While this process will never be uniform because of different teachers and different students, having agreement ahead about the standard, assessment and expectations will be more likely to produce similar student work that will allow productive discussion of what quality work looks like and how to achieve it.
Protocols provide safety, encourage listening and deepen the discussion of student work.
They also create an openness to differences in views of quality work so that common definitions can emerge. Based on what you see in the student work, reflect on ways to change instructional practice that will result in improved student achievement. If requested, LAEP can provide resource articles so that you can look at what other schools are doing and what research says. Identify a best practice that all network members want to try. Specify an action plan for implementing these changes in instructional practice.