Furthermore, most teachers rarely experience any form of structured
and regular professional conversations about specific pieces of children’s
work. It is hardly ever part of regular staff discussion, inservice programs,
or most teacher training courses. In this light, the Gloucester workshops,
focused and structured as they were, were an extraordinary professional
experience for these teachers. Without making specific claims for their
value, it is reasonable to suggest that the focus and structure of these work-
shops were a radical departure from the ordinary.
A Conference in Action
Following is an account of the discussion around one piece of student
work we considered during the Gloucester workshops and the first from
a 1st grade classroom. This was the eighth piece of student work we had
discussed together. The text is briefer than a full transcript, but it does
represent the flow and focus of the session.
After we settled in, Julie and Pam handed out copies of “May Is” for
everyone to read. Before continuing with this chapter, stop and read “May
Is” in Figure 13.1. Reading this work carefully before going any further
will help you understand the discussion that follows. (You might even
want to read the work aloud.) Julie had agreed to take the role of the facil-
itator for this conference, and Pam was the presenting teacher. Julie gave
people several minutes to read and reread the text and to consider the pic-
ture. After Julie called for observations and descriptions, it didn’t take long
for the teachers to raise the issue of punctuation in the piece or, more
correctly, the lack of punctuation.
The teachers noted the ambiguity of the author’s meaning. Ellen said,
“To me, it [the text] is a child brainstorming the world going on around
them or feelings about the month of May, which is ‘bees in flowers’ and
‘birds in the sky.’”
Alyce jumped in, “Or ‘sky dogs walking flowers’! That’s what I see.”
Cherylann was the first to point to the lack of punctuation: “I don’t
see any punctuation, and I see an interesting choice of word placement
that sometimes doesn’t reflect whether the child has sentence structure,
such as the whole idea of ‘butterflies dancing in the sky dogs walking flow-
ers... .’ or is it ‘dogs walking. flowers that are blue and red.’ There isn’t a
real finite way of knowing where things stop and start.”
240 Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind