My experience with data before this class was sitting through a power point created and narrated by someone else in a professional learning meeting. Usually the entire audience had glazed looks on their faces. Creating my own Data Overview was the most challenging exercise of the entire year. I would have never dreamed I could do it, especially alone and I do wish I could have worked with a team for this project. However, looking back each exercise we completed helped to build the Data Overview. The course was well laid out and we knew every exercise was designed to help us change instruction to increase student learning. This Impact on Student Learning (ISLA) consisted of six major activities that asked us to use our own school’s data and create plans to help us articulate why we need data teams and how they will impact student achievement. For our Data Inventory we collected all the different data available to us such as; demographic, enrollment, gender, race, and teacher information. It is a powerful image to see this compiled in one place and I wondered why our school didn’t have a data inventory readily available. The Data Inventory activity also asked us to create a vision for our school. Hand in Hand currently does not have a vision for technology and this gave me an opportunity to begin formulating ideas of how this vision should look in a primary school. We also summarized what a data team would look like at our school. Since we currently do not have data teams this helped me articulate how I would like to see one implemented. All of these activities and the weekly tasks helped me build the Data Overview which told a story of how students were performing at Hand in Hand as compared to students in the state and how they compared to one another by demographic groups over a three year period.
Making sense of all the data we collected would have been impossible without Excel. Many of the weekly tasks gave us exercises in using Excel to create graphs and charts that helped us “go visual” with our student data (Data Coach’s Guide, 2013). Drilling down in the data helped me see how this is not a one person project, data teams need to be in place and I am excited to bring these ideas back to my school. Using the Data Process is an excellent method to change our current professional learning meetings into meetings that use the data to create changes in instruction.
For the coming year I hope big changes will occur in our methods of using data. I believe every teacher should be involved in at least one team that analyzing data. No longer is it acceptable to have teachers passively sit through a lectured power point on data. For their own growth and the growth of the students teachers need to be active contributors to the collection and analysis of the data. The Data Wise and the Coach’s Data Guide would make good books studies for professional learning and give them the foundation for implementing data teams.
Making sense of all the data we collected would have been impossible without Excel. Many of the weekly tasks gave us exercises in using Excel to create graphs and charts that helped us “go visual” with our student data (Data Coach’s Guide, 2013). Drilling down in the data helped me see how this is not a one person project, data teams need to be in place and I am excited to bring these ideas back to my school. Using the Data Process is an excellent method to change our current professional learning meetings into meetings that use the data to create changes in instruction.
For the coming year I hope big changes will occur in our methods of using data. I believe every teacher should be involved in at least one team that analyzing data. No longer is it acceptable to have teachers passively sit through a lectured power point on data. For their own growth and the growth of the students teachers need to be active contributors to the collection and analysis of the data. The Data Wise and the Coach’s Data Guide would make good books studies for professional learning and give them the foundation for implementing data teams.