nothing at all. To become engaged with something, it helps to have some,
but not too much, familiarity with the subject. Like works of art, the things
children make can be highly engaging. They can captivate, confuse,
charm, and alarm us. But if we think we know everything about children,
their work, or a particular child, we won’t watch with such care. The pro-
tocol is a trick, then, to focus attention and encourage engagement.
Questions come from engagement and from having our perceptions
challenged. I believe three elements of the collaborative assessment con-
ference protocol combine to encourage engagement:
•Withholding context.
•Withholding judgments.
•Hearing your colleagues describe what they see on the page (and
in turn saying what you see).
Withholding Context
Perhaps the most fundament al beliefs underlying collaborative assess-
ment conferences are that (1) the work children produce is worthy of seri-
ous consideration and analysis, and (2) in that work we can see much
about children and their interactions with the environments in which
they produced the work (the classroom, school, family, and community).
Most readers, given information about a child and her context for pro-
ducing a piece of writing, will view that child’s work through the lens of
that information; they won’t let a picture of the child emerge from the
work itself. Teachers often adjust their expectations of work based on their
associations to the bits of information they have about a child (usually
things like age, gender, grouping in school, neighborhood, native lan-
guage, and socioeconomic background).
Nothing is surprising about such interpretation. Taking small clues
about people and making assumptions about who they are is one way in
which we all negotiate our way through a complex world. The problem
for teachers is that our associations often mislead us, and they might actu-
ally blind us to important aspects of a child’s character and learning.
In describing group examinations of children’s writing at the Bread
Loaf School of English, Armstrong (1992) addressed the effect of know-
ing the context of the writing on a reader’s investigation of the text:
248 Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind