I came to understand that this kind of careful examination of “the
actual work itself” can be a bit like stepping through Alice’s looking glass.
At first, the room seems familiar, but further exploration reveals remark-
able surprises. Looking at students’ work not only allowed us to see the
child presented in a unique fashion but also provided unique views of the
classroom with its complex of materials, ideas, pedagogy, and approaches
to writing.
Questions Raised
Raising questions about the work did not seem especially difficult for
the Gloucester teachers. In all the conferences, they raised at least a half
dozen questions, and most conferences generated many more. At least
two significant kinds of questions came up in these sessions. The first were
questions that one could ask of any piece of student writing, and they con-
cerned the context of the work (e.g., age and gender of the author and
whether the child worked alone or received help). The second kind of
questions were those that could only be asked of a particular piece of writ-
ing. They grew more directly out of the specific description of a particu-
lar piece.
The specificity of questions raised may well be an indication of the
depth of engagement the readers have had with the text. The deeper
the reading (which I take to be an indicator of the rigor and success of the
descriptive process), the more text-specific the questions. In the discus-
sion of “May Is,” for example, participants asked many text-specific ques-
tions. One that intrigued a number of us had to do with why the child
erased “thats the end” from the last line.
Further analysis of all the other questions that emerged in the course
of the 10 conferences revealed that they fell into three major categories:
teaching, curriculum, and assessment; the nature of writing in different
genres; and children as writers. These categories are significant because
they provide insight into both the participants’ concerns and interests and
what aspects of a child’s work can and are likely to be explored through
using the protocol. In working with numerous other groups of teachers
and the protocol, I’ve found these categories to be consistently useful for
parsing the questions raised. What I find significant about these categories
252 Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind