Teachers also emphasized making the standards and benchmarks familiar to students, frequently asking them to score one another's work. DeAvila emphasized the importance of drawing connections, for parents, between the rubrics and expectations, samples of work of various levels, and their own child's work, for the parent to see where their child needed to improve and how they could help. The experience also opened the door for parents to ask questions about how teachers were teaching, and why, that they hadn't felt comfortable in asking before. From these stories, some patterns and lessons emerge. The approaches to including parents and community members in looking at student work fall mainly into three categories.
Schools report that assessment is more authentic when it includes people from outside of the school.
After discussing the stories above, and reflecting on their own experience and school contexts, the working group crafted this preliminary list of purposes for involving parents in looking at student work. To provide more, authentic feedback to students, in the form of a variety of perspectives and voices on their work. To help parents know more about and understand their child' s learning. Looking at student work provides a chance for parents to listen to their children, for parents to see their students in a positive light, and for the work to create an avenue for a new kind of conversation between parent and child. Parents would gain skills for working with an understanding their own children's work.