Process

• Gallery Walks

- Gallery Walks -

Preparing and Participating in
Your In-School Gallery Walk

The In-School Gallery Walk is a critical event moving toward a coherent literacy program. It provides a site for the school staff as a whole to hear what their students are able to do in terms of end-of-year expectations. It helps staff hear the range of assessments in each grade level. It makes visible how each grade level is contributing ot the school’s vision of the excellent graduating reader. These are the reasons why it is one of the core expectations for each school for Year 3 in Partnership READ.

Teachers administer the assessments during the school-wide assessment dates for Fall, Winter, and Spring. For each cycle, individual teachers administer the agreed-upon assessments within their grade levels to their students. This happens within a common period of time as determined by the principal. The cycle includes time to administer the classroom assessments, teachers’ talk with each other at each grade level about their students’ work (using the rubrics and other scoring tools) and implications for instruction, time to prepare their grade level’s presentation to the school, and time for the whole school to share their presentations.

Preparing for the Gallery Walk

These are the formal ‘steps’ to the In-School Gallery Walk:

1. One to two-week window for teachers to administer their assessments in their classrooms. The assessments relate to each of the end-of-year I Cans in each of the areas targeted (e.g., comprehension, word knowledge, writing, fluency, ownership).
2. One- to two-week window for teachers to meet together in grade level groups to talk about the results of the assessment. This includes scoring the students’ work together – trading papers from each others’ classrooms as well as evaluating how well the rubric is working. It includes time to talk about the results of the assessment in terms of implications for instruction: the potential strategies and materials to use to meet students’ needs. It includes time to evalute the quality of information from the assessment and whether it should be tweaked before using again.
3. One week for preparing the presentation (e.g., a powerpoint, transparencies, a display board) and deciding who will do what for each grade level’s presentation to the staff at a whole-school In School Gallery Walk.

The Presentation at the Gallery Walk

Each grade level presentation should capture what the grade level is doing to contribute to the vision of the literate graduate. This includes:

1. The I Cans that are driving the assessment choices and how these I Cans contribute to the overall school vision.
2. The assessment used for each I Can and how it was evaluated (key areas)
3. The results of the grade level
1. The bar graphs which display the distribution
2. What the bar graphs mean for decisions about how to meet students’ needs
4. The instructional plans (i.e., the strategies and the materials likely to be used) between now and the next Gallery Walk based on the results of the assessments.