As I finished reading the email from my principal, I exhaled a heavy sigh. “Teachers, don’t forget,” the email read, “tomorrow is data review. Please be on time for your grade-level meeting.” Ugh, data review. Something about data-review day just drained my teacher-soul right from my body. Our data review was held in the basement… I mean, the lower level… of our school. We crammed too many people into a small space and projected the Data-with-a-capital-D onto the big screen. This meant we had to turn the lights off to see the projected spreadsheet with the tiny font. There we sat— in a dusty, crowded, and dark room to talk about “The Data.”
I don’t miss those days. I have since learned that data review doesn’t have to be soul draining. In my current school, I actually look forward to our fall and winter data review. I know that we are going to talk about kids in ways that matter and that we are going to make smart decisions that lead to big learning. (It also helps that we keep the lights on and are in a cozy space with chocolate.) Our data-review days are filled with collaboration, stories about kids, and even some laughter. Here are three ways we have worked to personalize data review.
We Talk About Kids, Not Data
At a staff meeting before data-review day, the teachers are given some time to look at their classroom data from our benchmark assessments. Teachers look at each student’s current level of performance as well as each student’s trend line from the last benchmark assessment. Teachers are asked to answer two questions about each student: (1) Are they meeting grade-level expectations? (2) Are they showing growth? Teachers plot each and every student into a quadrant based on that data:
| Above Grade Level, Not Making Growth
|
Above Grade Level, Making Growth |
| Below Grade Level, Not Making Growth
|
Below Grade Level, Making Growth |
I would bet this process of analyzing data is not unique to our school. What I appreciate is that we go a step further in personalizing this process by using students’ pictures to complete the quadrants. Our all-powerful school secretary prints each child’s picture from our student management system onto a self-adhesive label. This may seem like a small thing, but it makes a big difference. It’s one thing to see Student A’s name in 12-point Arial within a “not making growth” quadrant, but it’s another thing to see Student A’s face looking back at you with his hair perfectly side-parted for Picture Day last year. The names aren’t names, they’re kids. Those sticky pictures do a big job by bringing our work as teachers into context.
I think back to those old data-review meetings in the dark basement classroom, and I wonder how the conversations would have changed if we had been looking at students’ faces—even if we had simply started the meeting by looking at a class picture projected onto the big screen or a rolling slideshow of pictures from the school year. How might that have changed the tone of our conversation?
We Talk About Every Child
We have two parts to our data-review meetings. The first part is used to talk about every child. Yes, we talk about every single student in the whole school, even those students who are in the upper-right quadrant (achieving at or above grade level and making growth). This part of the data review is a conversation between the teacher, the principal, and the interventionist. The classroom teacher does most of the talking and tells us a little about each child in the classroom: What’s working well for this child? What does this child need?
We do take notes during this meeting, but the notes are narrative, not numerical. We have all that child’s data in front of us on a spreadsheet, and we add the teacher’s notes as we talk. Right there next to all those numbers is a little narrative that personalizes the spreadsheet. The intervention team uses this information to form intervention groups. Despite the truth that most of these students won’t end up with an intervention, they are all members of our school community, and all deserve to be seen.
We Watch Our Language
Finally, we watch our language at our data-review meetings. We are careful about how we talk about kids, using verbs, not adjectives, whenever possible. We don’t say things like “Tyler is really low in phonics” or “Jenna is unmotivated.” Instead we say,“Tyler struggles when he encounters a tricky word” or “Jenna doesn’t always finish her work.” Talking about behaviors and not character traits is a gentle reminder that kids are much more than their data.
Data-review days are no longer something to dread. My stomach doesn’t drop when I see the email reminder come from our principal. I know we won’t be looking at numbers on a spreadsheet for hours and hours. Rather, we’ll be looking at the faces of kids and talking about all the kids in all of their humanity. And maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll have a little chocolate.
