BYOSW: How "Bring Your Own Student Work" Can Revolutionize Teacher Collaboration

By Max Ray-Riek
September 21, 2016

For most of my professional life, I've been obsessed with what we can learn from looking at student thinking. At the Math Forum, we've spent a lot of time together examining how students solve Problems of the Week and how they write about their thinking. I've learned about how concepts develop from seeing the range of methods and understandings that students bring to the same problem. I've even learned new math content from making sense of student methods that worked, but I didn't know why. I really started learning new teaching ideas from student work when I used student work in preparation to teach those students something.

My goal was to use student work to engage students in follow-up conversations with their peers after they completed a problem—whether or not they successfully solved the problem. I designed questions that would help students gain new insight into the problem. I saw new connections between student ideas and learned how to help students build from their current understanding to make sense of another way of thinking about the problem. Now we were cooking with gas!

How can you have similar experiences I've had using student work to design follow-up questions in a context where you can receive feedback and work through your ideas before you implement them with students? It's hard to make that time in the course of a school week, let alone in a workshop session at an NCTM conference—but that doesn't stop us from trying.

In this blog in late February or early March, we'll share an algebraic reasoning task that can be used in some way with students at any grade level. I'm inviting you to use that task with your students (or the students of teachers in your building if you're a coach or an administrator) shortly before you leave to attend the NCTM Annual Meeting (or, if you can't come, shortly before you can join the conversation on Twitter and blogs like this one!). Bring copies of the student work—a class set or a few samples that you found interesting our representative. We'll work together to talk about what we see in the student work and how that informs our decisions about what to do next with each and every one of your students.

We can continue the collaboration when you return to your classroom. Try out the questions and discussion prompts we come up with for your students. Share what worked and what didn't. Reflect about what you learned using your student work with colleagues to design follow-up activities. Work with us to figure out how to make this kind of "Bring Your Own Student Work" collaboration possible in school-based and online teacher groups.