Curating Student Work

Day 20

How do you curate student work–or help them do it themselves?

Meg- A teacher is a curator...that's a teaching metaphor I hadn't thought of before!  But I guess it's as true as any.  Teachers strive to breed students who are critical thinkers and can meet high expectations, so of course we would curate their work to showcase the fruits of their labor.  I love to showcase work in the hallway bulletin boards when a tangible product is produced, although honestly nowadays more often than not the products my students create are not able to be hung up since they are creating movies, podcasts, and websites.  In order to ensure my students produce quality products, we go through the process of looking at some positive examples and some non-examples from my prior year's class (omitting student names, of course).  In chapter two of Moss and Brookhart's book Leveling the Playing Field: Sharing Targets and Criteria for Success, they emphasize the importance of sharing both examples and non-examples to provide students with a more well-rounded picture of the expectations.  When I do this with my students, we have rich conversations about the positives and not-so-positive aspects of the work.  I also explain to them that this is how I will select which student work will be showcased either in the hallway, posted on my class website, or (in the case of a video) on our class YouTube channel (first videos of the year to be uploaded this week...exciting!).  When students blog or create websites themselves, I continuously emphasize that their products already are on display for the world to see and use this as a motivator for them to produce their best work.  Students are generally self-motivated by this, and there are only a few students with whom I need to conference.

Jamie- Students are naturally their own curators in my English classroom through their writing portfolios.  I like to put the ownness on them to curate their own work.  I think it is important for students to have choice in what "piece" they want to put on exhibit to show their best selves.  During writers workshop, I work with students to shape and mold their work.  I let them choose writing topics to demonstrate their skills with language usage, grammar, spelling, sentence fluency etc.  Individual and group conferences provide my students with feedback and time to reflect on their work before taking it through the entire writing process.  When a decision is made to take a  piece to final copy, and it goes to the publishing stage, we always celebrate with writer's chair.

I saw this on Pinterest posted
by Ms. Pfeiffer, and I need to
jazz up my "boring" writer's
chair.

Writer's chair is simply a time to let them read their work aloud to their classmates, and to obtain positive feedback from them.  The digital world has changed writer's chair a bit as sometimes students will choose to make podcasts, digital stories, and/or  posts on a blog.  If you were to peek into my classroom, you might at times see students with headphones on listening/viewing their peers' work on their laptops.  You might also see a viewing party, with students gathered around the Smartboard as book trailers or student made videos are being shared.