By Erin Fleischauer
How do you create a space during professional development time where teachers are able to hear students as they problem-solve together? We focused on conferencing and feedback practices, but this could be applied to many aspects of schooling. As you read the step-by-step description of our path through this question, I invite you to think about what might work for your community. I’ve presented this chronologically to help you imagine your own possibilities and timing.
Step 1: A month before the PD
A student and Shahzia demonstrated the WISE feedback protocol from Zaretta Hammond’s CRE blog for the literary essay.
The Mastery Committee reached out to teachers who were open to presenting a successful feedback practice alongside a student.
Step 2: A week before the PD
We emailed all teachers attending the PD with an opportunity to rank-vote which three of the four presentations they would like to see. [Click here to see the process.]
Step 3: Day of the PD
To open, we framed our goal of learning together in a spirit of humility by acknowledging the challenges of conferencing that are often voiced by teachers at our school.
Where do I find the time during class?
How do I give truly actionable feedback?
How do I make sure my feedback is for content skills, not just life skills?
How do I do this in a way that affirms students and is culturally responsive?
After that, we rotated through the demonstrations in our rank-voted groups, with one time-keeper identified for each group .
We followed this protocol:
To close we brought the conversation back to our goal of the day: What did we learn from one another by sharing practices about how we are using feedback structures across grade levels and disciplines? We passed a talking piece to share ideas. Amalia Orman and Kenny Johnson from the Student Voice team joined us and offered this insight into our protocol: When we went over time it was because the teachers wanted to ask the students more questions or hear them answer.
Students and 9/10 math (Lindsay), and science (Mariah) teachers shared their mastery binder structure where students track their progress, self assess their work, and prepare for presentations, conferences, and progress reports.
A student and 9/10th grade teacher Patrick demonstrated how filmed presentations led to reflection and narrative feedback in the Science classroom.
Step 4: A Week Later
When we reflected after the PD, we noticed that some questions about feedback practices were left unanswered. We collected these questions in an FAQ document and the mastery team wrote responses to how they addressed each challenge, however imperfectly. In this way, even if we didn’t “solve” a problem together we are able to offer our community a place to describe what different teachers are trying and a place to continue the conversation. I will end by offering you our questions, as they may be areas of discussion that you want to continue in your community:
A student and 11th grade English teacher Amanda used a skills-focused student-facing checklist as a way to give specific writing feedback and a skills-focused teacher-facing spreadsheet to support the teacher in follow-ups.
What do other students do while you are conferencing and how do you communicate that to them?
If a student is ready to present/conference but needs to wait, what do you message to them about how to use their time?
How do you budget time? How much time for each conference? How many days? How do you use class time vs. “community” times?
How do you track conferences? What do you track and why?
How do you affirm students during a conference?
How do you make your conferences culturally responsive?
What is the use of peer feedback in your conferencing process?
Erin, teacher at Brooklyn International HS & MC Mentor.
Erin is from Charlotte, North Carolina. She loves the beach in the winter. She’s been teaching at Brooklyn International High School since 2007.