This year my school got a new assistant principal. With a
new administrator that typically means change. This AP brought in a heavy focus
on data. I work in a high performing school that has always valued the use of
data, but never analyzed it to the extent it has been this year. In GCPS, we
take quarterly district assessment in all subject areas in grades 1-5. Usually
teachers are responsible for measuring their student growth and itemizing the
test by standards to find strengths and weaknesses of students. In addition to
this, we have common assessments in reading and math. For every test, teachers
are required to record the results on a spreadsheet indicating which multiple
choice questions are correct or incorrect and then analyzing the short answer/extended
response questions with a rubric. Then teachers have to keep up with their daily
formative and other summative assessments they may have. I am finding that we
are emphasizing the use of data, but are we truly looking at it in a means to
change instruction for student achievement? In my opinion, instead of just
being presented with the data points at a PD session, teachers should be
trained on how to effectively use data. What good is all this data, if it is
not resulting in any difference of delivery of instruction?
Some suggestions made by Sun, Johnson & Przybylski (2016)
were:
- Setting
goals and communicating clear expectations for data use
- Fostering
data-driven knowledge and instructional practices sharing
- Creating
a purpose for data-driven decision making through emphasizing improvements
in student achievement and a vision of best practices for students (Sun,
Johnson & Przybylski, 2016)
- Developing
instructional strategies based on data
- Developing
leadership teams for assessment and data analysis
- Establishing
a structure and making time for teachers to collaborate
- Requesting
that teachers develop professional goals related to student achievement
goals
- Communicate with parents and
the school communities on using data
References: Jingping, S., Johnson, B., & Przybylski, R.
(2016). Leading with Data: An Increasingly Important Feature of School Leadership.
International Studies In Educational Administration (Commonwealth Council
For Educational Administration & Management (CCEAM)), 44(3),
93-128.
While I worked at a Gwinnett County school, data was HUGE. All of our administrators were very data-driven leaders and used data to make almost all of their decisions. I learned so much about data from them and actually, ended up LOVING data and everything you can learn from it.
ReplyDeleteThe whole school was moving towards a data-driven mindset. Instead of looking at individual students or classes during the district assessments every quarter, we would create these huge graphs in the halls comparing each of our grade level assessment results to those of the cluster and county. Our students got really into checking out that graph every quarter to see how our school did.
I strongly agree with your opinion when you shared that we need to be taught how to effectively use data instead of just being presented with data. All of the ideas you listed are awesome. We were fortunate enough to have two really great instructional coaches that trained us on how to use data in our classrooms. They even set up data notebooks with our classes and coached our classes on goal setting and monitoring.
There were some things that I found very useful in using data in our school. As a staff, we were able to all think with one collective mindset. I really liked our collaborative time to develop common assessments with standards, review the data from those assessments, and use the data to develop next steps. I also liked that all of the classes had data walls in our rooms so we were able to always refer to the data with our students. But, we had lots of professional development on how to effectively use data in our classrooms. This was a long process of implementation in our school. I bet your school will get there once you have these administrators a little longer!