BIG PICTURE Examining Student Work as a PLC How can we challenge them to produce BETTER ANSWERS?

Your commitment The majority of elective PLCs have committed to incorporating Reading and Responding activities in their lessons to help students improve their ability to respond in writing to what they read.

Sample Elective SMART Goal Implement a bi-weekly reading and responding strategy that will result in an 80% passage rate on the reading and responding assessments by the end of the semester. Fabulous goal…now how can we ensure student improvement in this area and track their progress?

Quality Indicators for an effective R&R program in the elective classroom Read through the gold handout and mark each statement with a “+” if you agree or a “—” if you disagree.

Case Study - ROTC Review Capt. Beaver’s article and question. Review the student work that he received. Typical? What does it tell us about student learning/ability?

Teacher’s response to examining student work Question – Did the student responses meet the teacher’s expectations? Why not? So where do we go from here? You don’t fatten the cow by weighing it every day…it must be fed the right way! As a PLC, decide beforehand on an exemplary response – important step.

More classroom discussion to build background knowledge So what did he do? More classroom discussion to build background knowledge Brief instruction on RARE strategy Make sure teachers consider…

Let’s talk about RARE You’ve heard about RARE before – and so have your students Model explicitly and remind often – it doesn’t take long RARE posters available for your wall!

Compare the second round Review the article and directions. How is the question setup different? Examine the student. What are students understanding/doing that is good/better than before? What are they NOT understanding/doing that makes their response unacceptable? How do we address those deficiencies/misconceptions in class to help students improve?

Task Review an article submitted by one of your PLC members. Make sure the question that goes with the reading is a higher level question. With your PLC, write an exemplary RARE response to the question.

Next steps: In your PLCs… Administer a Reading and Responding activity with a constructed response question to collect a baseline sample of student work Share the RARE strategy with your students and have them redo their answer using the strategy. Show them how the strategy can produce better answers.

Administer another reading and responding activity and collect student work to bring to next PLC meeting Analyze that student work using the “PLC Protocol” handout Track your students’ progress throughout the semester on the “Tracking Sheet/Reflection Tool” handout

Exit Ticket Please fill one out before you go!! Pick up a RARE poster!