the benefits and difficulties of working with a protocol for examining
children’s work, called collaborative assessment conferences. This proto-
col had been designed by my colleagues at Harvard Project Zero and
myself during our work in the Pittsburgh Public Schools on Arts Propel
(Seidel, 1998). Each participating teacher shared a piece of writing from
a K–5 student, and we followed the conference structure to consider the
student’s work.
The conference protocol called for extensive examination and
description of each work. Over the three months, we read and talked
about 10 pieces of student writing. What a luxurious experience! Four
hours at a time just to look at and talk about student work! There were no
placement decisions to make, no scores to decide on, no remedial plans
to hammer out. It was a situation so out of character from the way profes-
sional time is usually spent in most schools that virtually everyone partici-
pating was, at times, ill at ease.
Still, our work progressed, and in time, some interesting things
began to happen. Reflecting on the first conference, Julie noted the
effect of considering student work collaboratively: “It made me see a lot
more than I would just sitting alone. And the more you looked, the more
you saw.” These comments seemed true to me; I had noticed that the
teachers’ first hesitant observations led slowly but surely into a sequence
of more and more specific descriptions. It wasn’t until the sessions were
completed that the consequences of this phenomenon became clearer
to me.
As I reviewed the workshops, I noticed certain patterns in our conver-
sations. The more the teachers looked at a piece of student writing, the
more they recognized the complexity of the child’s effort and accomplish-
ments. As they grappled with the complexity of the work, they became
even more interested in the child who created it. The more interested
they became in the child, the more they wanted to meet and talk with
the child. They generated questions that only the young author could
answer. The teachers deeply wanted those answers, and they wanted to get
to know the child, too.
With all these positive outcomes, why did I still wonder about the
value of our experiences? Perhaps it was because I kept hearing one of
Wonder ing to Be Done 237