Teachers regularly analyze student work, including classwork, homework, and assessments, to inform instruction. They identify individual students’ strengths and areas for growth and look for patterns in student thinking and capability across groups. To do this, they determine and apply criteria to student work, making sure to maintain broad conceptions of competence; analyze work against those criteria, guarding against bias and deficit-based interpretations; and then make inferences about what students know and can do. Teachers plan instructional responses to what they learn from analyzing student work, making decisions about where and what kind of additional or differentiated instruction is required.
Teachers’ interpretations of student work and the instructional decisions made as a result of those interpretations directly impact students’ opportunities to learn and to develop academic identities. Interpreting student work enables teachers to appropriately challenge students. Misinterpretation of students’ capabilities can perpetuate the denial of ambitious instruction to historically underserved groups. With this in mind, teachers must interpret student work in terms of student competence, seeking evidence of what they know and are able to do. Teachers must also identify what students seem not yet able to do, to plan instruction and supports that will enable students to thrive. Doing so requires teachers to monitor both their interpretations of student work for distortion or bias, and the efficacy of the assessments and assignments they are using to ensure that they are not impediments to students developing and demonstrating competence in a content area.