Jessica Chan, Trellis Scholar:

Students collecting and making sense of their own evidence to support their own learning is really important because—especially in science where you want them to learn how to make a claim, collect evidence, create a reasoning that actually connects claim and evidence. So by collecting evidence to support their own learning, I feel like they feel more confident with the material, and they also perform better on short answers. For example, they might feel more confident raising their hand to actually answer a question that I throw out to the class.

Neal Donahoe, Trellis Mentor:

With my mentee, usually on a biweekly basis, we would collect some type of evidence of learning: maybe an exit ticket, it could be a test, it could be a practice test, a project. We would then, without looking at the names, sort them into piles based off what mistakes were made, what things students did well, and try to look over the spectrum of how we would see the students doing and where the gaps are. Trying to identify maybe what we did not teach well, what do we need to revisit. This would sometimes lead to review assignments, if we noticed a large gap.

This might lead to assignments where students might have some free choice based off previous results, where they can look at, “How can I push this further?” Or, “What can I practice based off my previous results?” By doing this without names and just really sorting them into piles, it really helped us to identify what the students are learning as a whole, instead of trying to really focus in on what individual students need. After they were in piles, then we would bring it back to that smaller level of what students are aware and how can we help those individual students get to that next level, wherever they may be.

Precious Listana, Trellis Scholar:

For me, collecting and responding to evidence of student learning allowed me to teach the content better to my students. I think part of being a first-year teacher, one of the key things that our mentor teachers did is that they would record how you were teaching, and then together you would watch your part of your class or the entire class that was recorded. You could really see from a third-party perspective of how you were communicating the content and how students were reciprocating and engaging.

Josh Deis, Trellis Mentor:

I noticed when she paused and made sure that a student was able to finish their thought or she would ask them the say more, so honoring all student voices, so it really came in the feedback. Then sometimes I would ask, “We didn’t hear from such-and-such or so-and-so. What can we do next time to make sure that we hear from them?”