Keep Data Inspiring! What Inspires You?

On a recent hot walk to build up my endurance for the Maine Half-Marathon in October, I heard an interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour with a musician who was new to me, Regina Spektor. When asked by the host, about how and where she composes her music, Regina’s way of working rang my bells personally and professionally. Regina described how artist friends of hers have a daily routine with set times when they enter their studio or writing nook and lay down the notes or words leading to a new composition.  While she admires their discipline and what it leads to, she was quick to describe how her creativity isn’t regimented by the clock.  Her creations come from INSPIRATION, when something she observes, hears, or experiences, provides the germination of a new composition.  On a personal level, when it comes to writing, I’ve always envied those who set their alarms, and write.  Doesn’t work for me. I have to be inspired and then I grab my phone to enter quick notes until I can get to my computer or iPad. Inspiration from whatever source always leads to threads going off in multiple directions as did the inspiration from this interview.

Our work for many years at the Using Data Project, now Using Data Solutions, has been to help teacher teams learn how to analyze student data both formal and informal in order to plan and adjust instructional strategies. A foundational cornerstone of Collaborative Inquiry relies on principals and department heads creating schedules that provide teacher teams regular time everyday / week to analyze results and plan instruction. Schools that invest in this practice begin to see the needle move upward as their students begin to “get it” at higher rates and with deeper understanding. This is the discipline that leads to growth gains, many of which come when teachers are inspired to try new strategies or fill gaps in the curriculum until they find the pieces that work. And yes, data can be inspiring.  It can reveal patterns or trends un-anticipated. Or a colleague’s comment during the team meeting, can inspire a new line of thinking. But this is a discipline.

Let’s consider the other part of this discipline.  Team meeting is a daily, weekly, sometimes bi-weekly scheduled working session. There’s preparation involved to collect and share the data to be analyzed. There is a routine protocol for taking the data discussion to new levels. And it works. We have years of evidence to support this discipline. But let’s not overlook the other sources of inspiration and how they too, shine a light on new pathways.  In a recent EdWeek article (What Teachers Love Most About Their Jobs and Why by Madeline Will, July 31, 2023), teachers noted where even in the difficult times they’ve just lived through, their joy comes from what happens in the classroom.  It’s seeing students’ aha moments – “I got this!”. it’s observing a student engaging and experiencing something they didn’t think was possible. It’s hearing students begging for one more chapter to be read, or a teacher constructing learning and seeing it evolve as students take hold of it. 

We never want the discipline and routine of PLCs or Data Team Meetings to be perceived as “just one more thing”, a drudgery to be endured.  Inspiration comes in many forms and data team meetings should include the informal, observational data that brought joy to a teacher and is just as valid as all of the interim assessment’s charts and graphs or student work showing student progress.  Data Team meetings should collect and chart the impacts of teachers’ intuition and experience that leads their instruction in a different direction. If the intuition was off center or the experience was missing an element, the data will be revealing, just as it will be when the teacher’s intuition was right on target.   Inspiration comes differently to us all.  Let’s recognize and value it however it comes. 

 

Choose Your Own Adventure! Shifting the Optics for Your Data Use

School administrators introduce data use to their staffs based on different pressure points. For most of them improving student achievement is the most visible need.  Their end-of-year state assessments may consistently reveal too many students are not meeting progress goals, or the gaps in achievement between their English Language Learners or high poverty or black or brown, or special needs students is huge. Even in schools with high percentages of students performing well by state benchmarks, the addition of online diagnostic assessments or adaptable tutoring programs, implies an opportunity to use their data to identify student needs. This is absolutely the most compelling goal. This is what we do as teachers, figure out what our students aren’t getting and figure out what to do to help them. In the vast majority of schools across the country, teachers at all levels are doing just that and they are working very hard every day to plan instruction around helping students understand and be able use the concepts and skills being taught. 

Regardless of what the impetus is, with one of the above circumstances sited by the principal in the introduction to the faculty, it would be remarkable indeed to find a group that gives their administrator a standing ovation with fist bumps in the air. Teachers may simply groan internally as they register “just one more thing” to be added to an over-burdened schedule. You sense teachers’ pain when you begin working with them to provide tools and processes needed to collaboratively analyze their data and use it to plan and adjust instruction for ALL of their students. 

What if we flipped this approach on its head? Instead of focusing on improving student achievement as the endgame, we focused on What’s Working?  What are Our Best Practices? Which of our programs or policies are having the most positive impact on our students’ learning? What’s giving our students the most bang for the buck?  These are all questions that schools already invested in and supported in using their data get to.  But by shifting the purpose for the work at the beginning, we are also shifting the focus from my students and therefore, my teaching, to the school-wide decisions, many of which were not made by me. We’ll do an inventory of programs and practices. We’ll look at our curriculum to see how well aligned it is to the learning standards we want all students to master. We’ll do an assessment inventory and assessment calendar but we’re looking at THAT not me! The glare of the klieg light is over there.  

While at the same time, we’ll have to look at which kiddos are thriving and which aren’t. It’s just a different reason to look and just maybe, it will help teachers feel less apprehensive and threatened and support them to enthusiastically invest the time and energy into answering many of their own questions about decisions often made far above them. Let teams develop their questions – choose your own adventure to find the data to help answer those questions and we’ll begin to ask many more questions which is where good data analysis always starts. 

 

Ethical, Equitable, Responsible, Use of Data

The Role of Professional Development in Preparing Educators for Data Ethics

It was one of my greatest privileges to present at last week’s AERA (American Education Research Association) conference in San Diego. My fellow symposium presenters are all authors of chapters in the just published book The Ethical Use of Data in Education (Teachers College Press and WestEd). The book is edited by Ellen Mandinach and Edith Gummer and includes chapters delving into the contemporary and shifting landscape of what it means to use data in ways that are both ethical and equitable while enabling educators to use the data responsibly.

The chapter I co-authored with Ellen, as you might guess, dealt with “The Role of Professional Development in Preparing Educators for Data Ethics”. “In this chapter, we set the stage for what we know about the complexity of students and requisite teacher knowledge. Second, we explore what professional development is doing to better prepare educators to use data ethically.” Before beginning the work to compose the content for our chapter, we reached out to PD providers in this field to learn if and how they were addressing data ethics in their services. Only Data Wise and myself responded and furnished examples of how this topic is incorporated into our PD.

Over the next few weeks, I would like to share with you some of the key points we highlighted in our chapter and most importantly, the recommendations we share for educators and policy makers to consider. These blogs won’t serve as the Cliffs Notes version of the chapter. You will want to order your own copy of the book because there is so much more to learn given the vital role of data use in our schools.

If you are curious about how this topic might apply in your own context because your assumption is that data privacy is protected by FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) and COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act), and your district has clear policies in place, I hope to deepen your understanding of how much more is there to consider.

When you think about the ethical use of data, is protection of student and staff information the first thing that comes to your mind? Is it the only thing that comes to your mind? Let me know. More to follow.

 

Measuring COVID Learning Slides – Teachers are Doing it Every Day

If the primary reason for testing students this Spring and at the End-of-the-Year is to diagnose the COVID-19 learning slide, states can save the dollars expended to assess students’ learning deficits. The vast majority of schools have been collecting and using benchmark and formative assessment results since schools returned to all remote, hybrid or in person schooling resumed in the Fall. With few exceptions, school districts at every level spend precious dollars on benchmark assessment systems. Teachers collect and analyze student learning results. Students routinely engage with on-line assessment systems in core subjects, log-in to adaptive practice instruction and complete student work samples.

Rather than viewing annual post-mortem data, teachers use classroom data to make adjustments to instructionIn. Meeting weekly, often daily, in common planning meetings conducted through video conferencing, teachers analyze diagnostic reports and student work samples to determine what gaps exist from the abrupt pivot to remote instruction in the Spring of 2020, as well as identifying deficits persisting as students and their families navigate routine swings between hybrid and in person schooling and back to fully remote due to on-going quarantining requirements.

Teachers are on it!  Their analyses go well-beyond Below and Above Proficiency cutoff rankings and growth measurement calculations as they take into account levels of student engagement when learning is remote and in class. Data includes levels of Internet interruptions, number of siblings sharing band-width and devices, food insecurity and other factors impacting capacity to deliver and participate in  instruction. 

An equally important part of teachers analyses focuses on the identification of specific foundational concepts where students are struggling in order to help with their day-to-day planning for both in person and remote learning activities. What should the focus be for those with unfinished learning and for those ready to extend their learning? How do you deliver the instruction needed when all students must sit 6 ft apart, facing forward, no movement within the classroom permitted, and access to manipulative and other tools have to be disinfected and organized for every iteration of a lesson or lab in advance, then re-collected, disinfected and organized for the next class. It’s a daunting agenda and it’s EVERY DAY.

Instead of eating up precious instructional time with a modified versions of  state testing, which means fewer questions, fewer concepts being measured and at best, it’s just a snap shot of student learning at any given moment, why not simply ask schools to share the whole year’s record of diagnostics that could furnish a much deeper understanding of where our kids are now? Use the $ that are expended modifying assessments and re-purpose state systems to receive existing results that can provide a time-lapse picture of student learning for 2020-21.

And if we really wanted to make a difference for our current PreK-12 population of students and coming future generations, why not pivot to what needs to be done to build on what COVID is starkly revealing about the vast inequities between poor neighborhoods and wealthier ones when it comes to the buildings teachers and students are in six to eight hours a day. We would all be better off if we spent the dollars need to diagnose  that “learning slide” and how our school funding mechanisms must be prioritized  and reformed to make our kids’ educations as big a priority as our military budget.

How much data is your school / district already generating that is more useful than End-Of-Year testing?

 

What’s Working?

As educators look at End-of-Year state assessments, End-of-Course results and other data points used to track progress toward achievement and growth goals, teachers are getting more experienced and comfortable identifying gaps in learning.  What they aren’t as comfortable and confident about is knowing what to do next – how to use what they’ve learned to take action beyond student grouping decisions – how to create lesson plans with specific instructional strategies aimed at engaging students more effectively in the concepts and skills needed. An even further reach is encountered when it comes to expanding their investigations into verifying the reasons “Why?” students are experiencing the challenges revealed. 

Continuous, effective use of data by teachers requires that all three components of learning from our data are part of professional routines in a culture where we believe it is our moral responsibility to help all students thrive.

1. Examine student learning and other relevant data to identify who is getting it, who isn’t, what aren’t they understanding and what aren’t they able to do successfully.
2. Use that information to plan specific instructional strategies to engage students in the areas needing additional learning and plan how to measure the impact of those strategies.
3. Continue to broaden the analysis to identify and verify the root causes of student learning gaps.

No. 2 above is perhaps the most critical component of the cycle and it actually speaks to a topic that

in itself warrants careful attention and requires additional analyses beyond the classroom. What’s working? And what isn’t? Which students are we leaving behind?

The reality in most schools is that as teachers are focused on their students, they are also often implementing new materials, new intervention programs (Social Emotional, Growth Mindset, Brain-based Learning, etc), developing higher level questioning strategies, identifying ways to scaffold rigorous instruction for ALL students. The list goes on and it’s all happening concurrently. But when we see improvements or our state report card ranking moves up a level, we aren’t sure which programs or combinations of changes contributed to the outcomes, or which ones had no impact whatsoever, except on our budget.

New programs and initiatives should from the outset include the following questions: What is the change we want to see, what will it look like when it’s implemented successfully, how will we know that it is successful, what is the evidence we’ll gather to help us know if it’s working?

Are you asking these questions?

 

Re-Thinking Use of School Data in Light of Pre-Surgery Checklists and Saving Lives

In this space we present all the ways data can be used by teachers and administrators fine-tune or dramatically reinvent how teaching and learning happen in classrooms. We share processes and techniques teachers can use to zero in on students’ learning challenges – the gaps and misconceptions they may be experiencing, in order to re-think how the next lessons need to be orchestrated.  We counsel administrators at the both the school and district levels in how they can both initiate and support the rigorous use of data to inform decisions that can address  immediate needs as well as how to collect data   to monitor the impact of programs and policies.

In both cases, whether working directly with teacher leaders and teams or with administrative councils, we always stress the importance of continually raising the question of “why?”. Why are we seeing these results? If our data protocols are not opening the door to a relentless search for the causes of student learning gaps, we are missing out on the greatest opportunity to question the most fundamental contributors to low growth levels of our students – curriculum and instruction. And we’re not opening the door for teachers to continue to develop deeper knowledge of the content and learning progressions associated with acquiring the concepts, knowledge and skills in a domain as a means of adding to our repertoire of instructional strategies and techniques to engage learners every day in every lesson.

So what does effective data use in schools have to do with pre-surgery checklists? This past week Boston has been a swarming hive of thinking and exchange of ideas in an event called HUBweek 2017. At historic Faneuil Hall, Dr. Atul Gawandwe, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard School of Public Health, discussed with Malcom Gladwell (author of Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers and more) about many aspects of rethinking health care and “introducing innovative systems to help save more lives.” (Boston Globe, 10/14/17 Metro section). Here is what grabbed my attention in the article.

“Despite the rush to find new and innovative ways to save patients, the medical profession must also ensure that basic medical protocols are followed. The extreme complexity of modern medicine has exceeded are ability to handle it.” (bold mine) These two sentences resonate so deeply with what teachers are experiencing every day.

The innovation Dr. Gawande and his colleagues developed, which is saving thousands of lives around the world, is a simple pre-surgical checklist to be used by surgeons and their team before surgery begins on a patient. “The goal, he said, has been to create a new kind of science, one that defines where failures occur, where complexities overwhelm teams and find prototypes to fix these problems” (Boston Globe, 10/14/17 Metro section). See the connection!  They are also focusing on the “why?”.

Many schools where we are working have introduced or are introducing Instructional Rounds, another practice borrowed from the medical world in hospitals, where teams of physicians go from patient to patient to review patient status.  In schools, teams of teachers, administrators and specialists visit classrooms to observe instruction and provide feedback to teachers. Is there something we could learn from the pre-surgery checklist that could help us save student learning in classrooms?  It’s a question I invite you to think about and share insights.

In the version of the check list furnished by the World Health Organization (WHO), there are three instances when surgeons take stock – before anesthesia is administered, before the start of the surgical intervention, before any member of the team leaves the operating room. As educators, we drill down into assessment results after the teaching has occurred (summative), or while the teaching is in motion (formative) and in doing our causal analysis we bring a wider range of evidence to the table. Does this check list from the medical field offer us an opening for what evidence we might confront in the moment in our classrooms?

What questions could we ask our students before instruction begins? During instruction?  At the conclusion of the instruction before moving to another subject or classroom? What interactions with students would this require that help us agree on what the learning needs are and what is going to take place? And make students real engineers in their own learning? What data would this generate to assist us in planning and adjusting lessons?

Is there an opportunity here for us to develop the Pre-Instruction Check List to help us ensure we’re getting ready to teach with absolute confidence in the lessons coming up? What would we include in that check list? What are excellent teachers already checking moment by moment during instruction? Could such a check list focus our attention of the most vital elements required for ensuring that all of our instruction produces the desired outcomes?

 

The thing about Using Data it’s all about discovery!

In facilitating teams of teachers who are focused on using their data to figure out next steps for instruction (or school level teams focused on teaching and learning), Using Data facilitators introduce processes and protocols to support genuine inquiry.  There are the 5 phases of continuous improvement (or the 6 or the 8). And frequently schools implement cycles of improvement.  What they so frequently miss is one element that makes it work.  In music, it’s “all about the bass”.

In data analysis it’s all about discovery,  being open, being in exploration mode, which means leaving assumptions at the door. The tension here is that as humans, we aren’t that comfortable with holding out in uncertainty.  We want to solve problems quickly. We want to feel confident that we know what we’re doing. And any suggestions to the contrary, render us incapable to doing anything but sticking to what is familiar instead of taking the risks that high performing schools have come to relish.

If we extend the notion of being open a little further, it isn’t too far a stretch to realize that  along with discovery and exploration goes one of the 7 Norms of Collaboration – “Presuming Positive Presuppositions”. In other words, assume that everyone at the table only wants what’s best for our students. And most importantly, when looking at our students’ results, presume that every student wants to learn and to be successful. If we can presume positive presuppositions about them while we stay in discovery mode to learn more about their strengths, their sometimes hidden or buried aspirations, we can figure out how to design instruction that overwhelms the effects of poverty, learning disabilities and language differences.

In other words, explorers don’t let students’ historical and demographic profiles bias their instruction. Instead they are continuously open to the possibilities that are within every student we teach. Teacher teams who have learned how to confront their low expectations for student learning use the data to surface the questions leading to the next great discovery rather than jumping to premature conclusions that typically result in same old, same old – cycles of reteaching, assigned interventions and test prep.

On another note, with this week’s announcement by President-Elect, Donald Trump that his nomination for the Secretary of Education position is Betsy DeVos, a strong advocate of education vouchers and charter schools in Michigan, perhaps we could slow down any rush to judgement and instead, benefit by using some of the same processes for using data effectively (be in discovery mode, triangulate the data, search for root causes, monitor progress toward goals)  before we draw conclusions about the implications of this appointment.

 

“Genius Hour”: A Treasure Trove of Data Collection

By Mary Anne Mather, Managing Editor
TERC’s Using Data For Meaningful Change Blog

Photo Credit: Clyde Gaw, TAB Educator

 Too often, when people think about using data, they limit their thinking to consulting test and assessment data from state tests, to district benchmarks, to classroom assessments. And while consulting this level of data has its merits, being truly data-informed requires so much more! As teachers, we can come closer to “data-genius” if we tap the treasure-trove of data that a classroom genius hour reveals…

 

Owning the Data Questions

Guest Blogger: Jennifer Unger

I have worked with so many districts and schools where the leadership proudly points to their “data binders”—most recently I recall a three-inch D-ring binder. Not that binders filled with data aren’t helpful or good, but I caution that if they are not being used to guide instructional and programmatic decisions, well, then they can be a waste of precious time and money. More importantly, if they are not connected to a shared ownership of the questions a group of educators has about instruction and programs and similar concerns, then they can serve no meaningful purpose.

So how do we get from just having data to using data for meaningful change and improved results?

 

Reflections from a Dedicated Data User

Introduction by Mary Anne Mather, Managing Editor
TERC’s Using Data for Meaningful Change Blog
…with a link to Data Quality Campaign’s Flashlight blog on
How Educators Use Data: A Four Step Process
*****************

Effective Use of Classroom Data: It’s a topic that weighs on the minds of many educators these days. It’s also the title of a workshop that TERC Using Data recently facilitated at MESPA (Massachusetts Elementary Principals’ Association). The educators who attended were seeking strategies and resources to bring back to their schools that would help them build a culture of data use that is continuous, meaningful, manageable, sensible, and effective. Who isn’t?

There is little doubt that, in the news, education-related data are routinely discussed, bandied about, and sometimes applied in ways that are not efficacious for supporting effective teaching and learning. TERC is dedicated to making data a sweet and welcomed word, not a dreaded mandate. That’s why we were so excited that Rebecca Shah (@rebecca_shah) from Data Quality Campaign was a surprise workshop attendee! Rebecca took one of the teacher-level data analysis processes shared during the workshop and used it to reflect on the session and its outcomes. Her thoughts and related resources are posted on the Flashlight, Data Quality Campaign’s blog: How Educators Use Data: A Four Step Process. Enjoy!

And if you’d like to learn more about Four-Phase Data Dialogue, visit our Data Tips (see Tips 2-5).