_{Participant Roles explains the roles of faculty, principals, facilitators, coaches and district staff.}

_{Note-taking form is used by individual teachers prior to a review}

_{Documentation form helps teams track the evolution of the review process as well as the content of discussions over time.}

_{Team planning guide is used by interdisciplinary teams of teachers to plan the focus and schedule of reviews.}

_{Activity for setting review goals involves the entire school, or groups of faculty, to determine priorities for student learning.}

_{Sample review Understand the process of reviewing student work by reading student work and excerpts from a review.}

_{Links to related sites}

1. Reviews of student work are conducted once or twice a month by small interdisciplinary teams of teachers, with one person acting as a facilitator and one person acting as a documenter. Ideally, each team member presents student work at least once over the course of the academic year.

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2. The student work should be reviewed in terms of specific learning goals that the school has set for itself. The goals may reflect district standards, but the school staff must decide through a consensus-building process which of these learning goals are most important to their students. Once regular reviews are underway, and the team feels confident in their work together, then it would be appropriate for a team to raise specific questions of interest to them that are related to the school’s learning goals.

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3. The student work samples for review should include several pieces of student work--usually from one assignment and from students at different levels of academic proficiency. The student work to be reviewed should be circulated to team members in advance of the meeting with the assignment and the goal or standard the work addresses attached. To begin, a team may want to start with work samples from other schools, so that they become comfortable with reviewing work together.

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4. Team members read the student work in advance of the review, make notes, and prepare to discuss the evidence of the goal or standard that they have found in the work. Reviews should be at least one hour in duration and longer, if possible, so that everyone’s voice is respectfully heard, and there is opportunity to debrief the review.

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Guidelines for Discussion in a Team

1. Teams discuss the evidence that they find for the fulfillment of a learning goal. In doing this, they are not assessing an individual student or teacher. Rather, the student work is data for assessing how well the team is achieving its learning goals.

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2. All voices are heard respectfully during the discussion. When team members discuss a piece of work, they should present evidence from the work itself. For example, if they are discussing whether or not students are writing for effective communication, they should be able to cite examples from the work to illustrate this. They should not focus on what is lacking in the work, but on what is there.

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3. Teams discuss how compelling the evidence that they find is, and whether or not they agree on what constitutes compelling evidence. Team members may disagree with one another, and it may take several sessions to come to agreement about what constitutes compelling evidence. These discussions are valuable because they make public both the teachers’ expectations for students and their standards of quality for student work.

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4. It is very important to debrief the session afterwards. The facilitator should ask the group how well the group stayed on task; whether everyone felt that their voice was heard; and how useful the discussion was to them personally. Instructional issues raised by the review should be discussed in a separate meeting between the facilitator and presenting teacher or in a follow-up team meeting.

Documenting the Meetings

1. The documenter should complete a documentation form. Over time, the completed forms help school staff understand how well they are meeting their goals. Periodically facilitators from all of the teams meet together to talk about how the work is going and to discuss how well the school is meeting its learning goals. The documentation of reviews will help them to conduct this analysis.

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2. The goal of the team meetings for the first year is to gain a greater understanding among teams about how well the school is meeting specific goals set for itself by reviewing many samples of student work. At the end of the year, the school should be able to answer the following questions:

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3. 10. The goal of the team meetings for the first year is to gain a greater understanding among teams about how well the school is meeting specific goals set for itself by reviewing many samples of student work. At the end of the year, the school should be able to answer the following questions:
   

   How well is the school meeting its goals as evidenced by the student work that was reviewed? Did the teams find compelling evidence that the school is meeting these goals? What is the nature of this evidence? Could it be found in work produced by all students in the school?
   

   How could the school better meet its learning goals? What organizational changes might the school make? What professional development could be provided to support teachers in their work? What supports could be provided to students to ensure that all students are meeting the learning goals?