LEARNING RECORD MEETINGS AND COLLECTING WORK SAMPLES

Definition

As the teacher of record (or supervising ES for a SME) who validates attendance and assigns grades and credits and documents progress towards the standards, ESs must see student work and collect a variety of student work at each learning record meeting, in addition to interviewing students and parents. Since the ES is responsible to review and assess student work, they should be looking at a variety of student work and not just "collecting the portfolio samples". Collecting a variety of evidence of student learning at each LR meeting is an important part of the ES job. In some situations it may be more difficult to collect learning samples monthly. The assembling of a student portfolio is an accountability job of the ES to do from the body of work collected over a semester; it is not the job of a parent/student.

Philosophy

There is a huge difference between “requiring” families to hand over work samples at every learning record meeting and “collecting” samples at every meeting.  Our parents should NOT feel that they are responsible for fabricating “work samples” once a semester for a portfolio. Your portfolios MUST represent what your students are typically doing each month, reflect what is documented in their LR, and show progress towards their "checked" standards. Our ESs must collect "actual work samples”.

Procedure

As ESs, you should NOT dictate to your families: “I will need a sample from every subject area every time I come.”  You SHOULD however say something like, “Wow, very nice work! Can I have that page for my file?” every time we see something that looks good.  You as the ES should be aware of the courses you need to look for samples to document, not rely on your parents to provide a sample in each subject are. Over the course of the semester you will then have a good deal of actual work samples to choose from for your portfolio.

Some students do a lot of workbook-type learning that makes for an easy collection at each LR meeting.  For other students who do not, look for ways when you are in a LR meeting to get at least 1-2 samples.  Here are some tips from fellow ESs about collecting samples at learning record meetings:

· Remember to take your camera along and say, “Wow, you learned to play that song?  Will you play it for me?”— then snap a picture. Next month you can bring it printed out on a page and ask them to write/dictate something about that picture for you.

· Know what your unschooler/sectarian curriculum students are studying and bring a fun workpage/assessment related to what they are studying and ask if they would do that page for you.

· Bring extra white paper to every meeting.  While doing "admin stuff" with the parent, have the student write a quick paragraph or draw a picture related to their learning for that learning period.

· Have your unschooler (who isn’t writing yet) cut out something from an article they read (or pictures from a magazine you bring with you), then ask him to glue it to the paper.  Ask him to dictate to you a summary or what he thought was interesting, and write what he says.

· Ask your families, “What are different ways you can show me Tommy learned ____.”

· Ask the parent to take a lot of photos during the month, and then when you meet ask to see the camera and scroll through the pictures.   Do this with the students sitting next to you, and ask them tons of questions as to what they are doing in those photos.  When you see a few that you like, ask the mom to email them to you.  That way, she’s not printing up a bunch of stuff, which goes against her grain, and you still get to see what is going on. For young students, you will have quotes to go with the pictures already.

· While a student is playing a compute educational game, ask her to write a description of her strategy for winning the game.  While she is playing, take a picture of her to paste on her description. 

· See the list compiled here from our all-ES meeting of ideas for samples for those hard life skills subjects: http://www.ieminc.org/handbook/learnrecord/lifeskillstand.pdf.

Summary

The important message here is to not require families to have SAMPLES every meeting, but to have students be prepared to demonstrate their learning, either by actual written work or by demonstrating what they learned. Remember it is your job to balance parent choice with school policies and state accountability requirements. Some ESs are more prone to disregard school policy and cling to parent choice, while there are other ESs who do the opposite. We all need to find a balance between these 2, and your advisor is available to help you with this as needed. We are popular with families as a school because we are here to make the work load easy for them by doing all of the accountability work for them. As credentialed teachers, your job is to document the standards met each month and write the learning record, validate the attendance, assign the grades and credits, and select the collected work samples that should go into the final student portfolios – not our parents.