I was excited to attempt the process of Document Analysis this week. I constantly work with the writing of my students and now I work with the lesson plans of my department, so the opportunity to analyze the documents I receive weekly was an interesting and time consuming experience. Altheide says, “In general, data analysis consists of extensive reading, sorting, and searching through your materials, comparing within categories, coding, and adding key words and concepts; and then writing minisummaries of categories” and I have to agree. I already have a checklist that I use weekly to provide feedback for my teachers and I figured this checklist would be a good starting point for developing the categories of my document analysis.
Some of the categories I use weekly are:
-Essential Questions and Standards inform the lesson
-Coherent Structure
-Differentiation
-Checks for Understanding/Assessment
-Learning Activities are appropriate, meaningful and valid
Through this protocol (and the use of my weekly lesson plan rubric), I was able to analyze each teacher's lesson plan document and how succesfully the plans met the school lesson plan goals. However, because the process did not prompt me to change the categories I wasn't sure if I had successfully implemented the process.
Can you share more about your process and/or your findings?
ReplyDeleteSure. I will try to copy and post my chart!
ReplyDeleteI am interested to know more about this, too. I wonder how it is different (for you - the evaluator) to look lesson plans rather than assigned student work?
ReplyDeleteWhat did you find? What do your teachers do well and what do they need to work on? What do you do if your teachers are deficient in an area?