I’m currently reading In Schools We Trust by Deborah Meier, and I think there will be several entries coming from what I’m reading. For anyone who thinks at all about school reform, the book is a must read.

For tonight, I want to just hone in on a piece she wrote about really create a culture where teachers trust one another… even when that trust is difficult. She writes about the trouble her new school — Mission Hill — had in setting up and sustaining intervisitations between teachers, and that jives with what I saw at Beacon, and what I’ve heard from other folks in other schools.

But what Meier writes about was a much more informal, and yet much more empowering, powerful and authentic. She created space for teachers to talk about teaching, about their work, about their curriculum, about their practice and about their students. And while there were difficult conversations and moments, they built a culture of trust where teachers felt that they could have conversations that included constructive criticism and intervisitations — not based on a rigid schedule — but based on need and interest.

And what I kept thinking about as I was reading was the most authentic form of healthy peer pressure and and peer critique… and that was the yearly gradfolio process at Beacon. It was an amazing process, and not just for the students. I remember sitting down with different members of the English department each semester and we would talk about how our students interpreted the standards for portfolio. And there definitely was a sense that we wanted our kids’ work to measure up, because we knew it was a reflection of our teaching. And it led to amazing discussions about our larger portfolio process, about our own teaching, about the different things that we would emphasize. It was amazing, when you sat with another teacher and looked at fifty or sixty revised, polished essays that came from your class, the idosyncracies about your style of teaching came out. Brian’s students never used "it" in their essays — and they would challenge many of the assumptions we make about perception itself. Mary’s kids essays were always so well polished and structured, and they could be counted on to bring the larger social lens in powerful ways. My kids tended to use the "inverted triangle" method of opening paragraph and they tended to focus on close textual analysis.

And some of the best conversations about teaching came as we looked at those difference. I learned more about how to teaching writing by listening to my colleagues talk about their craft. And we all were most critical of our own kids’ work. But we weren’t afraid to critique what we saw in each others’ work as well.

Looking back, the biggest problem with it was that we were so fried from the grueling nature of school-wide portfolio assessment that many of those conversations could have and should have been longer. I would have loved some time for staff development right after portfolios to talk more deeply with our partners about what we had seen and how it could inform our teaching. But overall, I think we learned as much as the students did from the process.