Specific Advice To More Effectively Use Assessment Data At School
1- Create a data task force at school, a specific team of people who are primarily responsible for organizing the aspects of managing data use at school
2-No one person can be alone in the responsibility of managing assessment data. That does not send the right message that assessment information is important for every teacher and that it is a team effort
3-With all the testing available, it’s important to identify what YOU need to know about your students. Find out what data is available on your students!
4-Create an inventory of your student assessment data, with a clear purpose in mind
5- Dialogue! My school is small, so the whole middle school ELA team could discuss what we know about our students and look at our assessment information together
6- Turn the dialogue into a consistently scheduled meeting in which we analyze the data on our students and the progress through the year
*A NOTE ON COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTIVITY
Establish norms of behavior and communication for meeting from the start
Create structured ways of completing the work, using protocols that provide strategies for completing the group tasks
Make a plan, or “improvement process” with small, manageable goals to complete
Create a lesson plan for your meetings
Looking At Data
Simplified, visual displays of data are necessary to aid in the understanding of data. The better assessment data can be understood, the more it can be used to inform instruction.
Choose a specific educational question to guide your display. The more simple it can be, the better (usually). Tables with rows of numbers can be difficult to assign to memory. There is too much information. So ask yourself a edu question- “How are our 8th grade students performing in reading skills relative to the overall scores of Hillsborough 8th graders?” “Are free/reduced lunch students in our school performing lower than higher income bracket students in the same grade?” “How did 7th grade do in ELA test last year compared to their 6th grade year?” (I love comparisons, and they really do help in understanding the significance of the rows and rows of numbers)
Now create a data display for these comparisons. It can be a simple bar graph or a pie chart. The standard practice puts proficiency categories on the horizontal axis and outcomes on the vertical access, with higher bars then reflecting higher proficiency. Simple enough.
Displaying trends can be done with simplified columns of data, each indicative of a school year or grade level. In the past I have gone through the years and looked at the lowest ten percent of students through the years to see who has remained in the lowest achievement category for repeated years. I realize I could have charted this and kept up with the chart for a simpler way of figuring out what I wanted to know, instead of sloppy names of students on post-its all over my desk.
***A NOTE ON GRAPHICS/DISPLAYS FOR YOUR DATA
Title your charts and graphs!
Label your rows and columns
The significant information needs to be the most visually dominant (largest, boldest, centered)
Don’t get cluttered!
Clarify if the comparisons are of the progress of the same students, or other groups
Turn all this charting and focused looking at data into discussions to best benefit the teachers at your school and help affect their instruction
Hands on talk time with the data, such as passing out charts and asking teachers to think-pair-share will create two greats things, an opportunity for teachers to communicate about what they see in assessment graphics AND meetings that aren’t a total and complete BORE! Hooray!
Always encourage the asking of questions about your assessment data. Teachers can brainstorm and have questions ready during meetings, or they can get in small groups and come up with questions together.
I also thought while reading this that teachers could brainstorm questions they’d like to know about their students success, much like I did above, and be responsible for creating graphics themselves and sharing them in meetings. Yes, they are busy and this wouldn’t be the most fun, but with examples, it could be incredibly beneficial.
PRO-TIP- Have actual test questions from the assessment your discussing available in your meeting
Do you know what the problem is and how you’re going to attempt to solve it?
It’s important that specific problems your students face are not ignored or “misdiagnosed” as everyone scrambles to improve low performance with an action plan but not a clear issue they are trying to address, besides general low performance.
Start with a single source of data (though you should have a large inventory of data, remember?) and don’t leap to conclusions. Try not to let old biases get in your way.
What specific question do you have about problems with your students’ learning? Is there a specific content area within the test (one single source of data first!) that the students are struggling with? Many tests now have the scores divided by content area standards and it’s not hard to find the specific ones students are not successfully learning. For example, a chart could be made with each item on a test that a majority of students got wrong.
Essential questions to know whether you have identified a specific “learner-centered problem” to drive improvement
A Look at Instruction
There are so many factors that change the results of classroom instruction and so much blame seems to be put on teachers, that having productive conversations about specific learning issues can actually be difficult.
With one simple goal for change, we can look, with a protocol and specific hands on tasks, at what can change in instruction to better meet the learning needs of students.
Example in the book was to brainstorm the many reasons (several beyond our control) that students weren’t thinking abstractly and then categorize that information. A few, like students struggling with critical thinking, were labelled as instructional shortcomings and therefore they were able to make a game plan to help students think more abstractly about the math they were learning.
Looking thoroughly and critically at your own instruction is a difficult and necessary skill.
***Tips to Peer Observe Teachers***
Peer observe other teachers- make this practice feel supportive.
Get specific with what you’re looking for in observing or examining- Use precise vocabulary. Don’t generalize, literally write what you’ve observed about students and classroom
Create norms to discuss classroom observations
Record teachers to watch themselves
There needs to be explicit and defined vocabulary. For example, all teachers need to agree on what a student looks like when “engaged” or “confused” These vague notions are not otherwise helpful
Analyzing your own practices as a teacher can be difficult. Teachers need to be used to being in each other’s classrooms, being watched while teaching and discussing their own practice. It needs to be seen as an opportunity to improve, not just a stressful evaluation.
Sometimes you have little time, lots of data or little data but regularly scheduled meetings and a task force. All schools have to trade off a little of sacrificing their time to examine data that could be otherwise used (time, the most important resource of all) for planning or tutoring, etc. It’s important, again, to know what you want to accomplish. Essential questions need to guide your focused time to work with data.
Lights, Camera, ACTION PLANS
You’ve charted, brainstormed, discussed and now you have a few strategies to help solve an instructional problem in your school...As Tony the Tiger says...Grrrrrreat!
Now Create an Action Plan….
Tips for Action Plans
Decide on specific strategies for the classroom and commit to them.
Agree on what it will look like. Carefully describe, with examples, how it WILL play out in the classrooms.
WRITE IT DOWN. Put that plan on paper. It documents that everyone has responsibilities to put the plan into effect, it makes us accountable.
Plan checks to monitor the progress of your strategy.
A great aspect of the advice in this action plan was teachers brainstorming how feasible a strategy was relative to its impact in the classroom. The best strategies to work with have high feasibility and high impact. I love when we are realistic about the problems we face, in terms of community support, budget, time, student instructional level. Sometimes I think all teachers are either so jaded they no longer have any interest in changing their practices, or so naive they CAN’T realistically do things in the classroom because they live in a dream world. Let’s meet in the middle. Let’s be realistic, specific and get accustomed to changing and adapting instruction TOGETHER.
Also, strategies sometimes need to be implemented slowly, but sometimes too slow is the problem. Again, communicate specific goals and be realistic. Set timelines and progress checks.
Progress? How to Tell…..
You’ve got a team and a plan. How do you know you’re making it happen….
Decide ahead of time how you’re going to know. Choose assessments, even anecdotal or informal, to check on the progress of your action plan. You can examine classwork and homework, but create a checklist or survey about the work to gather specific information. Did the student answer the open ended question correctly or partially correct? Did they omit steps? A spreadsheet can be used.
Observe students, again with a specific survey or standardized conference questionnaire.
Asking students about their own learning! I love to do this! Have a conversation guide ready. In general, be prepared to standardize these informal measures of progress so that the data can be easily used to check the status of an action plan.
Using benchmarks monitors progress steadily, but multiple choice tests are not the best, however the trade-off is they are not time consuming like individually administered tests.
Develop your own assessment, it’s a flexible and specific way to monitor student progress, especially if you’ve developed a plan for a specific area of low achievement. A self made progress monitoring test could be the best indicator of your action plan’s success. However, there may be challenges in validity and reliability.
Setting Goals.
Be realistic and look at long term data. What level would indicate success? Define this long-term goal, similar to NCLB. A long term goal and intermediate goals in between would help make sure you are making progress with your student and meeting the National requirements for consistent and constant improvement under NCLB.
It is often very difficult to be realistic about what your students can achieve. We as educators want to challenge ourselves to truly increase the abilities of our students, but also do not want to turn these carefully created action plans into more frustrating, blaming and high pressure focal points that detract from rather than support teacher.They can become that if the goal is too steep and outrageous. Too easy of a goal and you haven’t really accomplished anything either.
Momentum for Change.
A dream school is one in which teachers are on the same page. This can only be achieved through clear communication. Use one page summaries and simplified informational sheets instead of relying on the action plan document.
Integrate your action plan into your instruction. Do not allow it to take away from goals that are working well now. It would be a tragedy for your action plan to succeed while creating learning deficits in other areas.
Group teachers into teams with accountability towards different aspects of your plan. It will ensure everyone is more prepared for meetings because they are personally accountable and have a team for support and inspiration.
Being Honest
What works for some groups, even if it is the same plan, does not work for others It can be a difficult situation to take a hard look at whether the strategy you have put so much work into is truly effective. It may be well designed and executed, but if it isn’t working out. IT ISN’T WORKING OUT.
Keep It Fresh
When this hard work communicating and creating an action plan becomes embedded in
your routine, you need to challenge yourself to go deeper, set higher goals, involve more people. The first time the goal is to get staff to think about addressing student needs, driven by data. Years down the road, the process should be more and more effective
