Chris Jakicic

Chris Jakicic, EdD, an author and a consultant, was principal of Woodlawn Middle School in Illinois from 1999 to 2007. She began her career teaching middle school science.

Data: More Than a Number

Over the last several years, I have had the privilege of working with schools and districts as they develop and use common formative assessments to help assure that all kids learn at high levels. I’m often invited to work with teams at their meetings when they use the data from these assessments. As I sit and talk with teams who are actually doing the work, I’ve noticed several specific mistakes these teams are making. The first is that teachers, while trying to save precious planning time, often each score their own assessments and respond to the data in their own classrooms. This eliminates the opportunity for teams to learn together from the assessment. Without the collaborative conversation, teachers fail to compare how effective different instructional strategies were when other teachers taught the same concepts. They also can’t learn together about how to respond to students who need help.

Another common mistake is that teachers use the scores students earn on an assessment to plan their response. For example, if a student earns an 80% overall the teacher is comfortable moving on. The reality, though, is that if their assessment is about essential learning that is guaranteed, failure to learn any one of the learning targets means the student needs corrective instruction.

Finally, teams often forget that using the student work helps lead to a better response. When teachers bring the student answers to the table, they are able to group together students who had similar difficulties. For example, I worked with a second-grade team assessing two learning targets on an assessment: 1) students can identify the main idea of a multiparagraph text, and 2) students can provide details that support that main idea. I asked the team members to begin their analysis by making two piles for the first learning target: students who correctly identified the main idea in one pile, and students who chose an incorrect idea in the second pile. As they were sorting papers, one thing became clear—students who answered that question incorrectly almost always chose the first sentence of the first paragraph as the main idea. Teachers realized that this was a common misconception, as they often taught students that the topic sentence of a paragraph tells the reader the main idea and that the topic sentence usually was the first sentence in their paragraph. Two things happened as a result. The first was that the teachers were able to easily plan how to respond to the students who hadn’t learned this target. They would start by explicitly teaching why their misconception was incorrect. But they also learned something equally as important about how they should be teaching topic sentences. They needed to make it clear that topic sentences are not always the first sentence in the paragraph.

Using student work to plan corrective instruction has become one of the most powerful practices the teams I’m working with are using. Teams realize how important it is to have students expose their thinking on a formative assessment, generally in response to a constructed-response question. They also realize how important it is to move from getting the answer correct to knowing specifically what students have learned and what they have yet to learn.

Yes, the collaborative data meeting takes more time than having each teacher score and respond to an assessment. However, teams quickly see the value of that time—both in planning more precise responses to students, but also in how they can improve their initial instruction on essential learning targets.

Comments

Chris Jakicic

Hi Jennifer, Your team sounds pretty amazing and committed to the mission that all kids will learn at high levels. I wanted to clarify something in my original blog--pre-scoring the assessments before the meeting works fine--as long as you have created an answer key to use for that. It's the planning how to respond that the team needs to do together. Also, the response to the CFA data can happen right in the classroom and doesn't have to wait until intervention time. However, the real question you have is about time. As your neighboring district found out, to cut short the school day works best when parents understand why this is happening. Districts are most successful with this when they've spent time getting key parents involved in the decision process. But, if that's not the direction your district is taking, you might want to check out the resources on this website (Under tools and resources) for finding collaborative time. Many schools are finding ways to give teams larger chunks of time with substitutes, assemblies, or large group events that can be supervised by adults other than the classroom teachers. Good luck!

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Jennifer Hasenmiller

The point you made about assessing student work at collaborative data teams, as opposed to coming with the data already scored, is very relevant to our district. We have been working very hard the past few years to develop quality common formative assessments and use the results of those assessments to determine how to group and/or instruct students during our Response To Intervention time, but we often make the mistake of deciding to come to our data meetings with our data "pre-scored" so we can streamline the decision making process. This practice derived, somewhat, from the stress of limited team time. While each grade level has at least one common planning period each week, the other members of the intervention teams, such as the special education teacher, the interventionists, or other support staff are often seeing other students or are fulfilling their jobs duties at another building within the district, so any data meetings with the entire team are limited to working lunches. While our teachers find these meetings very beneficial and are willing to work over lunch or prep periods, many of us still feel like we need more time to work collaboratively. While nearby districts have proposed schedule changes for next year which would include one shortened school day a week to allow for quality collaborative time, the surrounding communities have had extreme negative backlash to this proposed change, especially at elementary level where child-care is a greater concern for parents. We would love to have an extra few hours each week to continue to improve our collaborative data work, but our current reality is that we have staff member who split buildings and some difficulty coordinating schedules. So, while we work to develop alternatives to increase our time for data collaboration, do you have any pointers for maximizing the time we do have together?

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Katie Kuipers

I found your post very interesting as it addresses a point of discussion at my school. Our team has been encouraged to create common formative assessments in reading and have even met together to grade them. After reading your post though, I realize we are not using the opportunity to its best advantage and am inspired to use our PLC time more effectively. I think it could be very effective to compare our common formative assessments to the criteria for success and sort the results into groupings that reflect student errors. Since there are three teachers on our team, we could create flexible groupings that address specific needs, regardless of homeroom assignment. I foresee that it could be difficult to find the time to implement something like this but that it would be very beneficial to students.

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Noe Garza

I thought it was interesting that you mentioned that students' scores were being used to plan the teacher's response. I have in fact seen this and entirely agree that it can be ineffective. Student scores are important but in reality they are simply the tip of the iceberg in regards to the amount of information that any formative assessment may provide. If a student's scores are not perfect, and most are not, then we must look closely to see which learning targets were not successfully completed and provide focused reteaching/intervention to those specific areas. I worked rather diligently this past school year to adjust the mindset of a few of my colleagues that "just passing is okay" and hope to continue to get through to them this next school year.

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Nicole Vitali

I see the problem of 80% proficient in assessments quite frequently. If a child scores 80% most teachers consider that child to be proficient and are willing to move on to the next topic, which is a concern because that student is probably not fluent in the concept. 80% proficient should signal that the student still requires intervention on various topics or previous topics. When did 80% become the new standard for mastery? It feel to me that we are setting a standard of just good enough and aiming for that.

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Christine Fairbanks

At my school I am a member of a 2nd grade PLC centered around reading and writing workshop which is our school's literacy initiative for the next 3 years. I really like the idea of collaboratively reviewing data and assessments. I think that this is a great way to trace common trends among students and to share ideas about next-steps in order to improve student learning. In our PLC we unpack our reading and writing units together before teaching them. I think that adding in this layer of collectively reviewing both pre-assessments and post-assessments for each unit would be an extremely beneficial addition to guide our unit planning. I am going to suggest that we add in this layer of discussion to our future PLC meetings.

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Alexandra Walocha

As a middle school teacher, the tips presented will be very useful in planning our PLC data meetings for the coming school year. We often find ourselves staring at the numbers on our data sheets (all work has been graded and analyzed by individual teachers), trying to make sense of the differences in our results and where to go from here. We should spend time grading common assessments together and analyzing the similarities and differences in students answers.

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Joe Urban

As most schools are doing, we assess SLO's on our own. We have a PLC group, but there is not much planning time to get together as a whole group. We used to grade each others, but that also had its conflicts with putting teachers up against each other. Currently I have to grade my own, on my own time. I have over 100 students and my yearly goals are based off of these SLO's. It does not seem fair that I grade my own. I grade them as honest as I can be, but there is still that advantage of knowing the students that I am grading. I think that the more proficient way to grade is by other teachers. I just don't know how we can get that to effectively work in my district.

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Afton Heyler

As a middle school team we have not stepped into the realm of viewing other's assessments. This concept, though foreign to me seems to be one of merit. We are constantly trying to collect relevant data for our students to see where learning gaps are occurring. Being the head of math for our middle school team a lot of this sits on my shoulders. I am often considering what adjustments need to be made to our assessments to give the most accurate results. From the example you gave of analyzing assessments by sorting and finding commonality among mistakes, I can see there are many avenues we have yet to explore as a middle school team. I think we would greatly benefit from analyzing assessments as a group rather than grading and then looking at a number to find our deficits.

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Karen Zakay

I see the mistake of teachers scoring their own assessments and responding to data in their own classrooms. This takes away from being able to learn from other educators within the institution. By learning from other educators, teams are aligned with the same goals and purposes towards the student's learning. That way, everyone is on the same page. I am learning about learning communities, and this is definitely a significant aspect of teaching and learning.

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Chris Jakicic

SN, As a first year teacher it's sometimes hard to prioritize all of the things you have to do for students. You are doing the right things to make sure your students are engaging in their work for you. I wanted to clarify, however, the two types of data you're working with. As an intervention teacher, you probably have some data that tells you what PREREQUISITE skills the student is deficient in. This information guides your work with these students. You are probably required to do progress monitoring assessments regularly with these students to know whether the interventions they are getting are making a difference. If they aren't working, you need to change either the type of intervention OR the amount of intervention time. If they are making a difference, you will continue your work until the student has mastered the prerequisite skills needed.

Common Formative Assessments provide data about learning from THIS CURRENT YEAR's targets that have just been taught by the classroom teacher. Teachers want to know, before they move on, if students have mastered the essential learning targets from their curriculum. The team itself sits together to plan how to respond to the students from this data.

As the intervention teacher, you will want to know if any of your students continue to have difficulty on these essential skills even after the classroom teacher has responded. You can then make connections to these learning targets when you are working with your students.

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S N

At my school, data collection is important. As an intervention teacher, we are expected to gather frequent data points on our students. This is my first year teaching, and for me, collecting this data is not helpful. It is time consuming, and I only collect it because I have to turn it in. At this point in time, the data is just a number.
I did not know that there was any other purpose for data besides keeping track of numbers. So, I appreciate your insight. If data was used frequently as a means to collaborate as a team, I would feel much better about collecting it. It would probably help me learn to become a better teacher as well as keep me on track with all the assessments.
These last nine weeks, I was careless with data collection. I focused on getting my students engaged and excited about reading. We read several stories that were relevant and interesting to the students, and we did activities that extended beyond reading. I was truly enjoying my teaching, and my students were developing a love of reading because of the diverse reading activities that we did. I got so excited about what my students were learning that I forgot to consistently complete the formal data collection. Don't get me wrong, I had been gathering data throughout the nine week grading period, but it was informal data that guided my subsequent lesson plans. The grading period was over before I knew it, and my students all made progress in their final reading assessments. However, I had little formative data, and I got in trouble for that.
When I looked back and saw how much was missing, I knew that I needed to improve in this area. However, as I read your post, I thought, "This situation would not have happened if it was the practice in my school to use data as part of a weekly collaborative team meeting." If we were in that habit, I would have been sharing about my excitement about the progress of my students, and my team members would be asking about the data, or making suggestions about the kind of data I should collect. Utilizing data in this way would be helpful and positive for my teaching career.

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Carol Dougherty

These tips on refining the collaborative process are much needed. Teams want to become more efficient and effective, the better to serve students. However, the extra time required to dig into assessments collaboratively can be a tough challenge in many schools. I would like to hear ideas schools can implement to find extra time and/or to work at peak efficiency in the time slots available to teams.

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Carolyn Miller

I see this problem as often as I've observed teachers using commercial or district assessments in lieu of developing their own common formative assessments. One step that I suggested was when teams developed their norms they went beyond getting to meetings on time to committing to authentic collaboration when analyzing student data; and they would share effective strategies with team members.

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