91��Ƭ

School-based data analysis usually takes place in grade-level or course-alike teams, meeting at most for 40 minutes, once a week and often a lot less.

To avoid wasting scarce collaborative planning time, district leaders should not ask teachers to interpret the complicated data visualizations often found in learning management systems. Instead, sessions should start with a simple data display with distinct colors and unambiguous wording so teachers can understand students’ strengths and needs in the first few minutes.

I usually ask teams to focus initially on class or grade-wide data showing the standards in which most students are proficient and those in which most students are not yet proficient.

Because productive data analysis is about instruction, not numbers, the next step is for teams to identify the specific instructional strategies they used that led to successful student learning on some standards.

Don’t skip this affirmation step because it helps teachers associate student success with the things they did (and can do again). Then, have teams identify the standards on which most students need more help.

I suggest that no time be devoted to individual student results. Collaborative sessions should center entirely on data in which all participants have a stake and can act upon. Conversations about individual students should occur in other forums.

Discussing specific students can also lead conversations down rabbit holes from which it is often hard to recover. “Oh, Ronnie. He never does his homework. And his family! He has a terrible home life. They. . . They . . .”

This is deficit thinking and can lead to educators avoiding responsibility for acting. Don’t let this happen to dialogues in your district.

Protocols don’t make meetings boring

Almost 20 years ago, Harvard professor Richard Elmore noted that protocols don’t make meetings boring. Instead, they give a predictable structure to the work by defining roles and responsibilities, providing group norms, and keeping everyone focused and productive.

But Elmore identified an even more important advantage: protocols can depersonalize discussions of data and professional practice. Without this depersonalization, he said, every potential change becomes a challenge to who participants are as people.

The problem is that some protocols are way too complicated. One of the biggest concerns I hear from teachers is that many collaborative planning sessions end after talking about the data but having no time left to agree on what they are going to do in response to the data.

To avoid this, leaders should select a protocol that moves teams to planning definitive actions during the meeting and one that does not require detailed reporting. Rushing through multi-stepped protocols promotes compliance, not commitment and empowerment.

The more specific, the better

While there may be vague agreements among participants at the end of meetings, such as, to “differentiate” or to “use more culturally relevant instructional materials,” it is easy for teachers to unintentionally forget this commitment when they return to the reality of their classrooms.

Instead, leaders should help teachers make plans—the more specific, the better—that directly address the weak standards that emerged in the analysis. For example, this might take the form of all participants committing to implement in their classrooms a specific follow-up, developed collaboratively during the meeting, such as to:

• Reteach a weak standard using an instructional strategy that was successful by a teacher on the team in initial instruction.
• Use consistent criteria developed by the team for grouping students for re-teaching
• Identify one or two passages best suited to re-teach students’ weaknesses revealed by the data, such as making inferences from text.
• Practice using manipulatives most likely to be effective in, for example, teaching students how to subtract double-digit numbers.
• Generate precise and easy-to-administer assessments to check progress after re-teaching.
• Try an innovative strategy to engage reluctant students more actively in class discussions.

Use the time remaining in the session to incorporate teacher expertise to develop detailed lesson plans. Each participant should be ready to report back in two weeks how the new strategy worked and the impact it had on students learning the weak content.

Finally, I found that leaders changing their verbiage only slightly from saying that teachers are accountable for their data (as I have often heard) to teachers being accountable for their response to the data can make a world of difference in morale and focused effort.

The three “S’s”—simple, structured, and specific data analysis sessions—may run counter to customary practice in some schools. But while these three do not guarantee increased student learning, they make it more likely. That is the power of less.

Source:

Elmore, Richard. “Professional Networks and School Improvement.” School 91��Ƭistrator (April 2007) 64 (4).