By Dennis Muizers
The excitement of a new school year is in the air! Students and teachers alike are preparing for a great year. As leaders, we sometimes fail to nourish our educators in this time of optimism and high hopes. The wonderful possibilities that come with the start of each new school year give us the opportunity to ensure that this year truly will be different. One crucial way to do this is helping educators use data to drive instruction.
Research-Based Practices
Over my 30 years in education, I’ve had the privilege of learning from many leading experts in student assessment and applying research-based practices to design professional development for leaders and teachers within a school district. As dedicated educators prepare for the success of the millions of children returning for another school year, it’s important as educational leaders to keep the following in mind.
To use summative data effectively in driving instructional planning, zoom out
Many educators will have the opportunity to review student performance data from the previous year as they begin instructional planning. It’s important to remember that summative data is “finished data” — it reflects a summary of information that cannot be changed. Students are now entering a new grade level and are expected to learn a variety of new standards or revisit prior standards at a higher level.
Unfortunately summative data is too often unhelpful when teachers are planning their instructional approaches for the upcoming year because the data lack context—and context always matters when analyzing student data. Summative data from state assessments typically include one or two questions per subset of the standards that teachers were expected to cover in the previous grade level. Knowing that a student missed one question on one standard from the previous year should not be the sole factor in tailoring that student’s curriculum. Knowing that 40% of students missed a question on a particular standard, on the other hand, is actionable data when planning instruction for the new grade level.
Patterns and trends in summative data for groups of students can be valuable as teachers return to school with the goal of adjusting their curriculum to address identified learning gaps and strengthen areas they plan to teach. To simplify this data analysis process, my former district encouraged teachers to zoom out and identify the 3-5 highest-scoring standards and the 3-5 lowest-scoring standards for the incoming group of students when reviewing summative data. With this information, teachers and teams could potentially adjust the time allocated to certain areas of their curriculum, increasing time for the lowest-scoring standards. This approach helps create conditions where summative data can truly drive instruction in the upcoming school year.
Formative data must inform teaching to improve student learning
Common formative assessments (CFAs) provide teachers with a shared language when they collaborate on designing and refining their curriculum and instructional plans to align with students’ learning experiences.
More than 25 years ago, after just a few years of teaching, I was asked to lead the English department. This was a daunting task, not only because of my relative inexperience, but also because my principal gave me the vague directive to “improve test scores.” Our department’s greatest challenge, we believed, was determining which grade levels should teach which pieces of literature. Eager to be an effective department head, I made this our top priority in our next two department meetings. I naively thought we could resolve this issue quickly and move on to more substantive curriculum matters. However, after two meetings, we had barely scratched the surface and could have continued discussing this topic indefinitely.
With the benefit of hindsight and experience, I can now see that our time would have been better spent if teachers at the same grade level had met to identify the student learning outcomes they all wanted to achieve. Each grade-level team could have ensured that all assessments were designed from these intended outcomes and assessed in various ways, also called Backward Design. These teams could have collaborated on developing common formative assessments. As we all shared a desire to continuously improve, we would have eventually started discussing how our students were performing on these common formative assessments and sharing best teaching practices. This collaboration would have ensured that all students benefited from the collective expertise of the group, rather than only those students who were fortunate enough to be assigned to the most effective teachers.
I share this story to illustrate that our department was filled with hardworking and dedicated teachers, but our meetings were not focused on the changes we needed to make to have a significant impact on student learning—starting with clear, shared standards and common formative assessments.
Final Thoughts
As another school year begins, I hope teachers have the time to systematically analyze data. I hope they are given the time and opportunity to create or refine common formative assessments (CFAs) to ensure they are aligned with the learning standards they are responsible for teaching. I hope they can collaborate with designated time to analyze data from these CFAs so that curriculum can be tailored to meet their students’ needs. Finally, I hope each school system provides the training and support teachers need to effectively use student data to inform their instructional practices, ensuring that instruction and targeted interventions are engaging and aligned with student needs.
