In collaborative assessment conferences, the purpose of the reading
is to investigate the meaning of the writing and the child’s intent (what the
child was trying to say and do in the piece), to bring the reader closer to
the child through becoming familiar with the text. This purpose presents
difficulties for many participants. Meaning is subjective, and a teacher’s
grasp of a child’s intent is speculative. Sometimes there is considerable
evidence, and other times there is very little. In these sessions, teachers’
concerns about the subjective nature of this practice were almost as con-
stant as those about the decontextualized readings of the works.
These two aspects of the protocol—the decontextualized nature of
our readings and the nonjudgmental character of the discussion—are
based on a belief that seemed to be deeply unsettling for most of the teach-
ers. Simply put, in relation to children’s writing, there are no absolute or
right answers about meaning or quality. Not only that, the structure of the
conference demands more questions than answers. The structure encour-
ages speculations based on evidence, and it requires thinking about how
to teach writing based on reasonable but uncertain ideas about what chil-
dren are working on and interested in.
To s o m e p e o p l e , f i n di n g a c o m p e l l i n g qu e s t i o n i s a m o r e i m p o r t a n t
moment in the learning process than finding an answer. Although that
belief is not at the heart of our educational system, it is at the heart of
this collaborative assessment practice. This belief seemed to be quite
disconcerting for many of the participants, but I also suspect that all the
questions were deeply exciting to the teachers. Margaret was the most
vocal about the delight she felt at times in this work. At the end of the
final session, she spoke about how these meetings had “made me very
humble.” The repeated process of thinking she knew what was going
on in a piece of work, and then hearing something surprising from one
of her colleagues that made her rethink her whole interpretation,
delighted her.
“[I would] think, ‘Well, this and this and this,’ and somebody would
come along and say something that would open up a whole new world for
me,” she said. She suggested that simply looking at a work with a col-
league “and saying, ‘What do you see?’ and ‘This is what I see!’ [would be]
immensely fruitful.”
Wonder ing to Be Done 251