TheVirtualProtocolStep IV. Speculating
- The facilitator asks the group, "What do you think the child is working on?"
- Participants, based on their reading or observation of the work, make suggestions about the problems or issues that the student might have been focused on in carrying out the assignment.
peculating about the problems or issues with which the student was most engaged allows the group to understand the piece without making evaluations about the quality of the work or its appeal to their personal tastes. The facilitator helps this process by asking participants to point out the evidence in the work on which they based the judgements that inevitably slip out.
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Facilitator: Let's move on to the next section of the protocol. This is where we get to speculate about what the student is working on. What we do is to say no matter what the assignment was, this is what we think the child might actually be working on.
Participant: I think he's working on developing more sophisticated sentence structures.
Participant: I think he's working on telling a complete story.
Participant: The writing process, I think he's working on the writing process.
Facilitator: This is where we can be really helpful to Brenda. When the teacher who knows the assignment and what she was looking for listens to what a pair of outside eyes sees...
Participant: It looks to me like he's working on a state assessment of some kind.
Participant: I think he's working on writing big sentences.
Participant: I agree. I think he's working on dialog and the way the characters interact in the story.
Participant: I think he's working on answering those W/H questions: who, what, when, where, and why.
Participant: And how.
Facilitator: While we're speculating, we're talking about what he's struggling with, what we see emerging. But we can also talk about what might be next for him.
Participant: I think you can begin to see that he's beginning to have a handle on what a sentence is.
Participant: When June said, "I think he's working on big sentences," lots of people nodded, but I want to go back and say, are we sure that we know what you mean by that?
Participant: What do you mean?
Participant: I mean more than just a simple sentence like, "Jack ran to the store," he's trying to put ideas together. He strings them with "and."
Participant: Higher order sentence strategy, strategies...
Participant: Yes, there are not just three sentence in order. He's elaborating.
Participant: They're choppy sentences.
Participant: They're not quite sure how to get there.
Participant: There are connecting words...
Participant: See, I don't see him as working on that. I just see he threw it together with "ands" because he didn't know how to stop it and start another sentence. Or it was coming out of him very quickly.
Participant: Yes, it could be the ideas were coming out so fast and the thoughts were coming faster than he could really write and punctuate. I don't know.
Participant: To go with what you're saying, I think it means for Miguel that it's easy for him to have the ideas flow out of him. It's not stilted, it's not fragmented, it's of a piece.
[Speculation continues for several more minutes. The group takes a short break before Brenda's response allowing her time to reflect on what she's heard. As people get up to stretch or get a cup of coffee, the facilitator asks Brenda if she wants anything to drink or eat. Brenda replies, "Bring me a margarita," and everyone laughs.]
Step I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII
