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At a Turning Points school in Boston, a large urban school serving a mostly
low-income student body, the eighth grade team developed a final portfolio
review involving community members and educators from other districts
as outside reviewers of students' portfolio work.
Asking students to discuss their work habits and the quality of their
work with school visitors challenges students to describe their achievements
to a stranger, just as they will do on some future day when they present
themselves to a potential employer or college admissions counselor. Some
students like Miranda, who will attend the district's arts academy in
ninth grade, approach the review poised for applause. Others like Tayisha,
who tugs at her sweatshirt sleeves, or Kamal, who speaks in a voice barely
above a whisper of his ambition to become an engineer and rebuild his
native Somalia, begin their reviews with less aplomb.
Pushing beyond a simple review of "best pieces," students engage
in a dialogue with reviewers not only about the mechanics of their work
but also about their understanding of the content reflected in the work.
In the process, they articulate what they have learned about themselves
as learners. "Now you've written here, 'When you walk across a carpet,
your body is negatively charged.' What do you mean by that?"probes
one reviewer as Kiana explains her science project. In another meeting,
Marchand displays the cross-section drawings he has done of plant and
animal cells and asks the reviewer, "Did you know a cell is like
an organization?" "So how is a cell like a school?", the
reviewer queries in return. Reviewing Fabio's graph project, a reviewer
wants to know, "Would you prefer to get information from a text or
from a visual display of the data?" Fabio thinks, then answers, "For
me to learn something, I hear it, write it down. It's even better if I
can see it too."
Improving learning, teaching, and assessment involves teachers and teams
in continuous collaborative work and planning to ensure that learning
for all students is rigorous, purposeful, and related to the real world.
The Turning Points school places a strong focus on integrating effective
approaches to teaching literacy and numeracy throughout the curriculum.
Teacher teams use a range of data to guide their decisions about priorities.
Every week they engage in activities such as setting standards and creating
assessments for student achievement, incorporating standards into curriculum
development, and looking collaboratively at student work to assess student
progress and improve instruction.
Strategies:
- Set standards that clearly and publicly identify what students should
know and be able to do at each grade level
- Create an explicit goal of closing the achievement gap between white
students and students of color and between low-income and more affluent
students, and set in place the necessary instruction and academic support
- Develop curriculum, framed around essential questions, that assists
students in meeting high standards
- Promote habits of mind and intellectual inquiry that span all disciplines,
(e.g., gathering and using evidence, making connections, and determining
viewpoint)
- Utilize a wide range of instructional strategies and approaches to
meet the needs of all students
- Adopt effective, intensive approaches to teaching literacy and numeracy
to all students (e.g. reading comprehension and problem-solving strategies,
reader's and writer's workshops, writing across the curriculum)
- Develop authentic and reliable assessments, with clear performance
criteria (e.g., rubrics, exhibitions, portfolios, exemplars), to ensure
that students know how well they are doing and what they need to work
on
- Look collaboratively at student and teacher work with colleagues to
assess student progress and improve instruction and learning
Click on the links below to learn more about other Turning
Points practices.
Improving Learning, Teaching, and Assessment for All Students -->
Building Leadership Capacity and
a Collaborative Culture -->
Data-based Inquiry and Decision Making:
How Are We Doing?-->
Creating a School Culture to Support High Achievement
and Personal Development-->
Networking with Like-minded Schools -->
Developing District Capacity to Support School
Change
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