Chapter 1: Organizing for
Collaborative Work
There are three activities that can support a "data culture" within
schools: (a) creating and guiding a data team, (b) enabling collaborative work
among faculty, (c) and planning productive meetings.
Data team - having a few people responsible for organizing and preparing
the data means that you can dedicate the full faculty's time to discussing the
data.
3 Questions to ponder when considering school improvement:
What data do we already have? What initiatives are we already
implementing? What is our current approach to improvement?
Three tasks to begin:
1. Create a data inventory (external and internal assessments)
2. Take stock of data organization
3. Develop an inventory of the instructional initiatives currently in place
Are you satisfied with the way you
capture the information generated from each of your assessments?
Four Helpful Strategies for Planning Productive Meetings
1. Establish group norms (i.e. no blame, no wrong answers)
2. Use protocols to structure conversations
3. Adopt an improvement process
4. "Lesson plan" for meetings (repackage data results so they can be
easily understood)
Chapter 3: Creating a Data Overview
Preparing for a faculty meeting:
1. Decide on the educational questions
2. Reorganize your assessment data (simple is better)
3. Draw attention to critical comparisons
4. Display performance trends
The underlying educational questions should also drive every aspect of the
presentation of the assessment data and provide a rationale for why it is
important to present the data one way rather than another.
Understanding how students outside your school perform on the same assessment
can provide benchmarks against which to compare the performance of your
school's students.
In labeling and explaining graphs showing student performance, it is very
important to be clear about whether the display illustrates trends on
achievement for the same group over time, or whether it illustrates
cohort-to-cohort differences over a number of years in the performance of students
at the same grade level.
Components of Good Displays
1. Make an explicit and informative title for every figure in which you
indicate critical elements of the chart, such as who was assessed, the number
of students whose performance is summarized in the figure, what subject
specialty, and when.
2. Make clear labels for each axis in a plot, or each row and column in a
table.
3. Make sensible use of the space available on the page, with the dimensions,
axes, and themes that are most important for the educational discussion being
the most dominant in the display.
4. Keep plots uncluttered and free of unnecessary detail, extraneous features,
and gratuitous cross-hatching and patterns.
Actively involve teachers with the data by giving them an opportunity to make
sense of the data for themselves, encouraging them to ask questions, and offering
them a chance to experience and discuss the actual questions on the test.
In reality, student assessment data is neither weak nor powerful. The real
value in looking at this kind of data is not that it provides answers, but that
it inspires questions.
Chapter 4: Digging Into Data
Without an investigation of the data, schools
risk misdiagnosing the problem.
There are two main steps when using data to identify the
learner-centered problem in your school: looking carefully at a single data
source and digging into other data sources.
The first thing to consider is: What questions do you have about the student
learning problem, and what data will help answer those questions?
The next consideration is context: What data will be most compelling for the
faculty?
Understanding how students arrived at a wrong answer or a poor result is
important in knowing how to help them learn to get to the right answer or a
good result.
Challenging assumptions is critical for
three reasons:
1. Assumptions obscure clear understanding by taking the place of evidence
2. Teachers have to believe that students are capable of more than what the
data shows
3. Solutions will require change
Starting with data and grounding the conversation in evidence from the data
keeps the discussion focused on what we see rather than what we believe.
By triangulating your findings from multiple data sources- that is, by
analyzing other data to illuminate, confirm, or dispute what you learned
through your initial analysis- you will be able to identify your problem with
more accuracy and specificity.
Students are an important and underused source of insight into their own
thinking, and having focus groups with students to talk about their thinking
can have a positive impact on your efforts to identify a problem underlying low
student performance.
Chapter 5: Examining Instruction
Reframe the learning problem as a "problem of practice". It should:
-include learning and teaching
-be specific and fine-grained
-be a problem within the school's control
-be a problem that, if solved, will mean progress toward some larger goal
There are four
main tasks to help you investigate instruction and articulate a problem of
practice:
1. Link learning and teaching: With this particular learning problem, how does
instruction impact what students learn?
2. Develop the skill of examining practice: How do we look at instructional
data?
3. Develop a shared understanding of effective practice: What does effective
instruction for our learning problem look like and what makes it effective?
4. Analyze current practice: What is actually happening in the classroom in
terms of the learning problem, and how does it relate to our understanding of
effective practice?
If teachers don't fundamentally believe
that their teaching can make a difference for student learning, then it's going
to be difficult to convince them to change their teaching.
Components of
examining practice:
1. Evidence, data about teaching
2. Precise, shared vocabulary
3. Collaborative conversation with explicit norms
Hearing others' responses to the same lesson helps challenge individual
assumptions, helps us notice different things and see the same things Ina new
way, and leads to a better understanding of the practice observed..
Connecting best practices to data serves multiple purposes: it increases the
likelihood that the practice is effective rather than simply congenial; it
reinforces the discipline of grounding all conversations about teaching and
learning in evidence rather than generalities or assumptions; it's more
persuasive-teachers are more likely to try something for which there's evidence
that it works; and it reinforced the link between learning and teaching.
Chapter 6: Developing An Action Plan
To create a
successful action plan, four tasks are required.
1. Decide on an
instructional strategy or strategies to address the identified area of need.
2. Agree on what the plan
will look like in the classroom. Be sure to include what others should expect
to see teachers and students doing if the plan is being implemented.
3. Put the plan on paper.
Document the roles and responsibilities of team members and the specific steps
that need to occur. This will create internal accountability. Also include the Professional
Development time and instruction that the team will need to ensure support.
4. Plan how you will know
if the action plan in working.
What type of student outcome data will be collected? Is
it a school-wide problem? Is it a grade-level issue? Is the problem specific to
a content area? Is the issue specific to a group of students or teacher(s)?
Brainstorm
solutions to the problem: Engage teachers in conversations about addressing
problem.
Develop
a common vision for implementation: Establish implementation indicators: 1.
Description of what teacher will be doing. 2. Description of what students will
be doing. 3. Description of classroom environment when strategy is in place.
Put
the plan to paper. Identify specific tasks that need to be completed for
success. Assign responsibilities and time frames. How will school support
teachers as they carry out new work? Making sure the chosen instructional
strategy is broad enough to cover a number of different content areas or grade
levels and specific enough to ensure discussion, improvement, and concrete
classroom practices.
Chapter 7: Planning to Assess
Progress
Assessment plans address the
following:
What assessments will be used to measure
progress? When will each type of assessment data be collected? Who is
responsible for collecting and keeping track of the data? How will the data be
shared among faculty and administrators? What are the goals for student
improvement and proficiency?
Assessments to Measure Progress
Short-term data can be used to make assessments
of students’ progress that includes:
·
Student’s classwork and homework – data is
closely aligned with classroom instruction so teachers keep track of which
students seemed to learn the critical skills of the lesson. Teacher can use
this data to drive their instruction.
·
Classroom observations of student performance –
this can provide teachers with rich data on what tasks students are engaged in
and how they talk about texts, concepts and problems they are working on.
·
Conferences with students about their learning –
insights from students can be gleaned through individual conferences, small
focus groups, surveys or written reflections.
Individual classroom teachers should be responsible for
collecting the short-term data.
Using
Benchmark or Interim Assessments
In selecting benchmark assessments, leaders must consider
the kinds of diagnostic information they want the tests to provide. It is
important to keep in mind the amount of effort needed to administer the
assessment, the speed with which results can be obtained and the richness of
the information they provide.
Using
In-House Assessments
Developing in-house assessments provides flexibility.
Schools can design assessments closely aligned to their goals of the action
plan. To ensure validity and reliability each school must:
1) Ensure
that each version of the test must measure the same skill.
2) Difficulty
levels should be consistent from one version of the assessment to the next.
3) Tests must
be administered under standardized conditions.
4) A
consistent scoring system must be established.
Long-term
Data
Long-term data (statewide assessments) are collected on an
annual basis. They are often generated by an external accountability system
connected to state and federal mandates. This is the data that seems to “count”
for schools and places pressure on them.
Long-term data can be helpful for evaluating progress over
a longer time frame, such as several years and reflect trend data.
It is important to set short-term, medium term and
long-term goals so teachers have targets to aim for and benchmarks by which to
assess their students’ progress.
Chapter 8: Acting and Assessing
To help bring the action plan alive, school leaders need to
communicate the action plan clearly, integrate the plan into the ongoing work
of the school, and use teams for support and internal accountability.
Communicate
the Action Plan Clearly
One effective means of communication is the creative use of
school documents. Offering a one-page summary that sets out the key components
of school improvement work can be an important step in helping create an
environment in which all teachers are able to describe in specific and concrete
language how the school is working to improve student performance.
Integrate
the Action Plan into Ongoing School Work
Work with staff to develop a school wide curriculum map and
describe how your new strategies fit into this overall plan.
Use
Teams for Support and Internal Accountability
The system of interlocking teacher teams created for the
collaborative data analysis is critical. As teachers become accustomed to
checking in with their colleagues regularly, they make a greater effort to be
prepared for meetings. They become more motivated to use strategies shared in
their classrooms and to make positive changes to their instruction. Teachers
also develop an increased sense of personal responsibility for their students’
performance.
References
Boudett, K.P., City, E.A., & Murnane, R.J. (Eds.). (2005). Data wise: A step-by-step guide to using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
