Data Teams The Way of Our Work: Differentiated Accountability – MTSS – School Improvement – Student Achievement – AMO’s

DATA: A Constant in the Job Description What do students need to know and be able to do? Standards – Based Instruction How will we know that students were taught Standards? Instruction – adult behavior How will we know if students are responding to Standards – Based Instruction? Student behavior - assessments and ‘look-fors’ in student work/learning What will we do if they already know it or don’t learn it? differentiate, intervene These are the Four DuFour PLC questions (with the instructional component added). Mention here – How will we know teachers are teaching it – to the depth of the standard – to the limits of the standard. (Instructional Walk Throughs) Suntree: Already had gone through the growing pains (culture of PLCs school wide, developed infrastructure of intervention block outside the core, weekly Teacher Data meetings already in place – with a focus on Tier 1 two times a month; Tier 2 one week, and a Field Trip to observe other faculty and best practices throughout school.

What is a Teacher Data Team? Data teams are the single best way to help educators and administrators move from ‘drowning in data’ to using information to make better instructional decisions. Doug Reeves It is all about instruction, bottom line is student achievement. How can we get better at what we do? We want to be a leading school – obtaining high results, but also have a high understanding of the antecedents to increased student achievement (not just lucky) – and therefore the replication of success is likely.

Our Goal: To Increase Student Learning How do we do this? By improving instruction! There are two components to improving instruction: Goal to increase student learning. There are two parts to improving instruction – the ‘what’ is the standards and the ‘how’ is the good teaching. We are going to continue to work on the ‘how’ from the ‘what’ we just experienced with Theresa Phelps (Writing Resource Teacher), as we just examined our focus standards in writing. What (Standards) How (Good teaching)

Teacher Data Team Process The goal is to improve student learning and student achievement. The data team process – described as short term instructional data teams that are tactical and very technical in nature, gets you from the standards to the instruction. Process Standards Classroom Instruction

Teacher Data Team Process Standards 1. Collect/Chart Data 2. Analyze strengths and obstacles 3. Set goal(s) for improvement 4. Determine Instructional strategies 5. Determine results indicators Monitor and Evaluate Results Begin Cycle Step 1 This is the process. Chris Reed, AP Suntree Elementary – “You need to get to step 4, otherwise you are just talking.” It is possible to get through these steps in one data team meeting with incredible organization and leadership. This keeps the meetings all about data, instruction, and student learning. So the five basic steps of the data team process are as follows. First, you collect baseline data about student performance and write it on a chart. The idea is that this chart is shared with members of your team, or even posted in the staff lounge for other teachers to see. You then consider the factors that are supporting and working against students’ mastery of the concepts and skills you are teaching; it’s important to focus on instructionally relevant factors, such as prior knowledge, misconceptions, prerequisite knowledge, and so on. You then take your baseline data and set a SMART goal for student learning – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. As we’ll see later on, there’s a format for this goal that ensures that teachers are setting goals that meet these criteria. The fourth step is where we collaboratively decide on the actual strategies we’ll use to help students master the skills and knowledge we want them to learn. It’s critical that these be shared and agreed upon, and be distinct from what people would tend to do anyway. If we’re trying to teach kids to add fractions, and that’s covered in chapter 6, “teach chapter 6” should not be our only strategy. Finally, we need to determine how we’ll measure our progress – how we’ll know that we’re really doing what we agreed to do, and how we’ll know along the way if it’s working. Turn & talk: how is this different from what we currently do? How is it similar? Leadership and Learning Center Data Teams Summit; Beach, FL February, 2011Clearwater

Four Recommendations for Getting Started with Data Teams Provide a basic framework for data teams Get people started Start Small Spend time actually talking about instruction and its effect on student performance Focus on the core Be as specific as possible Select a concept or skill that can realistically be taught and assessed over the course of a few weeks Zoom in Complete multiple cycles Adjust process in response to feedback Iterate and refine So that’s Doug Reeves’ model. My recommendations for getting started with data teams focus on four areas. First, we need to start small. If you go back to your school or district and try to do everything you hear in a book or training on data teams, you’ll leave very little room for developing staff ownership around the process, and very little room for fitting the process into your existing work. I’m not going to suggest that you drop everything you’re doing and do data teams (registered trademark), but that you use the tools and process ideas to improve the collaborative structures you have in your schools. Second, we need to focus on improving instruction in order to improve student learning. Third, I believe that we do this by zooming in on specific concepts and skills that we want students to master, and closely examining and refining how we teach those concepts and skills. Finally, since we’re talking about improving a process over time, and focusing on very specific teaching targets, we don’t want to spend all year on one small thing; we want to go through multiple cycles, each time refining the process so it better serves our goals as a school.

Different Ways of Looking at Data Depending on the Needs of Your School Improve Tier 1 – Look at strengths/weaknesses using common assessment data Child Find – Who are our students who are struggling and how can we reach them? Progress Monitoring -

Data Team Meetings Table Talk & Chart: What are some barriers you have had to overcome? How?

Examples of Data Team Meetings: Reading Running Record Levels – Divide students up in to categories based on their proficiency. What instructional strategies will we use for each group? Oral Reading Fluency – Slow Accurate/Slow inaccurate/ OGL FAIR data – Use decision trees – divide into boxes 1-3, 2-4, etc. Math Item analysis – standards not mastered Performance Tasks – what do we need to change about instruction (keeping to fidelity of task administration) Math Facts Teacher Created Assessments Other Bubble Kids for Enrichment/Extended Thinking Intervention Students – Who is not responding? Kid Talk – struggling students Writing Scores Triple banger students Talk at your table…..what other ways…..

TTHANKS FOR LISTENING! What do we already have in place? What are our districts biggest challenges? How can we tackle this for behavior and academics?