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In-service program documentation
Monitoring and evaluating the implementation of an illustrative unit (D6.7)
Examples of reports on the implementation of one of our illustrative units

Once again, because we believe that Implementation A of the field experiences provides a better image of the learning experiences we would like to encourage and the artifacts show what can be done by participants when given sufficient support we have chosen to take our examples from that set of reports. We are sharing two quite different examples of "final reports" here to give the reader a sense of how teachers might interpret and carry out this task. It is important to note that though the styles of the reports are very different engaging in the task of preparing and writing a final report seemed to have accomplished our intended goal, as each of these teacher pairs used these reports both to inform their final reflections of the entire year (see Section D 8) and to make changes to their subsequent practices and implementations of the unit.

The first example is the final report submitted by Julie and Linda of their very first implementation of one of our the tessellation unit. This is the same team whose preliminary plans for the unit were reported in Section D 6.4, and whose support team journals during the implementation were shared in Section D 6.6. We chose to include this report because it is representative of the typical report submitted as well as to provide the reader with a rich set of artifacts from a single team of participants. This report includes a general overview of the teachers' thoughts about the unit, its strengths, and weaknesses and an annotated copy of the final version of the original set of lesson plans. The annotations were primarily focused on how students responded to the activity and pedagogical modifications to make in the future.

The second example is the final report of the implementation of the area unit submitted by Frank and Diane. This was the second illustrative unit they implemented, the first was the tessellation unit. The implementation of the second unit did not carry a formal requirement to submit preliminary plans and though the team did develop them they did not submit them. Rather, in contrast to the first example, this team chose to write a "story" of the actually implementation. This report contains a brief story, which includes some student dialogue, of what happened in each activity, and the teachers' reactions to the experiences for each of the 24 days of the unit. It also contains a brief analysis of the results of individual students on the final assessment. Due to the length of this report, we have only included the first seven days in our example. Our hope is that this will provide the reader with an image of what such a report might look like as well as with some information about the kinds of observations teachers make and issues they grapple with at this point in their development.

In subsequent implementations of the field experiences, when we could not provide the same level of support, either financially or in the classroom, of the 2 reports actually submitted only four (2 from the same person) included more that a very brief comment on the original lessons plans. The comments were generally about whether a particular activity was actually done, skipped or moved though occasionally there were notes of ideas for "next time". Though this may already be more documentation than teachers usually find the time to do it does not engage them in the deep reflection necessary to get the most out of this very "new" unusual experience of teaching through inquiry.

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