The Slice
Description
Copied with permission from vol.12/no.2, Horace entitled "Looking Collaboratively at Student Work: An Essential Toolkit" by Kathleen Cushman (writer/editor), Coalition of Essential Schools
What might one learn by examining all the student work produced during a narrow time period by a broad sample of students in a particular school or district? In a 1996 project of the Bush Educational Leadership Program at the university of Minnesota, one Minnesota district agreed to capture such data in a “vertical slice” and analyze what it revealed about the purposes of education in the real district they referred to as “Prairieville.”
The collection came from a sample of two Prairieville elementary classrooms at each grade in two socio-economically different schools, and from a sample of secondary students that cut across curriculum “levels.” Everything students did from the morning of January 10 to noon on the following day – homework, worksheets, artwork, notes, drafts, even discussions or events captured on audiotapes, videotapes, or photographs – was to make up the completed archive. Later, groups of school people pored for two hours over its contents. Then, in a Socratic seminar with the archives as its “text,” they discussed the implications of what they saw.