Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2001. It's been a solitary experience rather than being a collaborative experience. But, for us to be a professional learning community, we can't be shy. This practice of having teachers work together to study student work is one of the most promising professional development strategies in recent years. Examining student work helps teachers intimately understand how state and local standards apply to their teaching practice and to student work.
Teachers are able to think more deeply about their teaching and what students are learning.
As they see what students produce in response to their assignments, they can see the successes as well as the situations where there are gaps. Intensive examination of student work is key to creating and sustaining a professional learning community, Easton said. When schools talk about being data-driven, people think of test scores, graduation rates, absenteeism rates. I don't know that those numbers are really very meaningful. Student work is a powerful example of student data.