Robert: What a great letter! What a great letter! Thumbs up, thumbs down. What do you guys think? Now every one of you has that letter in you. Or your version of it.

Robert: Because we use Model Work, it shows students what they’re capable of doing, and it gives them an idea of what’s expected of them. A concrete visual idea of what excellence looks like.

Robert: So are we ready? Let’s go.

Robert: At Maplewood Richmond Heights High School, we try to give students not just the reading and the writing and the arithmetic, but we also try to give them what that looks like in the real world. What can they expect when they leave here?

Kevin: How do you know if you’re doing a good job in whatever career you’ve chosen? Oftentimes, it’s by looking at somebody who already is doing the job well, and emulating them.

Joe: Models of student work are actual assignments that were done in previous years by students that were the best ones that we had.

Joe: Welcome, guys. It’s a beautiful day for you. It is the day we start the Comics Project! This is an outstanding opportunity for you, but it will take a whole lot of effort!

Joe: If you want a student to actually achieve to a certain level, you have to show them what that level looks like. Saying it through a rubric or through a project sheet, it does not exemplify that to a kid.

Natalie: Today, he assigned the Comics Project. We choose an image. And we have to reproduce the image just by graphing it. We have to find every single equation for every single line.

Joe: Mulan has 654 equations in it. You have to hand-insert all that information. Yes, that face right there. That’s the face. I’ve set up a gallery to show you a couple of things.

Joe: One of the main things I like to show them is year-by-year the progress that we’ve made. You can see the projects getting more complex.

Joe: You will be so insanely proud of the product that you’ve produced.

Robert: What does a good letter look like? How do I start this letter? What does it look like when it’s finished? Remember, the Model Work is there to inspire you. It’s to show you–

Robert: Social Studies, in particular, write quite a bit. And one of the things that we decided to show them was what good writing looks like. You know, it’s not something that Lincoln wrote, or it’s Hemingway wrote, this was another 15-year-old.

Chloe: Writing is a struggle for me. Getting the directions doesn’t really help. But looking at somebody else’s work helps a lot.

Robert: Why don’t you guys, as a table, look at the letters, figure out which one did you like the best.

Robert: We study the theory of Dr. Jared Diamond about the emergence of farming, and how that has changed humanity.

Chloe: We’re writing a letter to Dr. Diamond about if we agree with him or we disagree. Last year’s ninth grade, they had to do the same assignment. So we had a book of all these letters that they did.

Robert: I have them flip through and read them to each other, and they start to formulate their own opinion and ideas by looking at this Model Work.

Student: I like this one, because they give more details than the first one that we read before. What do you guys think?

Chloe: Oh, I love how the–

Katelyn: You can see how people put in like different sentences or different citations.

Robert: And it just gets them thinking about how they want to write their letter.

Katelyn: She put like what he said, and made it like her own language.

Robert: From there, then they’re ready to write. One of the benefits for me as a teacher is Model Work gives me another avenue to reach these kids. “I may not understand what he asked me to do, but I can see what he’s asking me to do!”

Kevin: We want them to see what excellence looks like, hold students to that level, and a lot of times it’s getting through the mental block of, “I can’t do that. It looks so hard!” When that becomes the norm in English class, in Math class, in Science, then the competence of a student grows.

Robert: No, that’s good. That’s real good.

Schools That Work

Maplewood Richmond Heights High School