This week, we're talking about high-leverage practice number six, using student assessment data, analyzing instructional practices, and making necessary adjustments that improve student outcomes. So, Mary, for you and your practice with all of your educators and all the different types of needs that are showing up with your students, what does this look like for you?

So, Heather, I can definitely tell you that data is not something that we have a shortage of. We have. In the current system that I work in, we have so much data. We're constantly surveying students, assessing students, state assessments, and common assessments. We have all this data to work with. But the biggest struggle really is making sense of that data and pinpointing what's going to make the biggest impact.

That's been kind of the discussion for us, for our team this past year, for all the principals, is that we have this wonderful data. But. But everyone's creating their own spreadsheets and spending an endless amount of time on updating spreadsheets and color coding them and all these things. But what are we actually doing with them? And why are we spending so much time organizing data and not actually looking at and analyzing the data to get to the root cause of why we're not seeing the results?

So, in a perfect world, what we would really like to see is a side-by-side comparison of assessments, to see the trends, to group students, and to provide those interventions so that we can truly make an impact on students. Because we know that progress takes a long time, and we know that support and interventions need to be systematized. That's something that has been an ongoing conversation for our team as well as our district.

Well, I think it's a beautiful thing that you've got too much data. But I think what you're sort of referring to is really common. Like, I work with teams all the time that, whether they have a lot of data at their fingertips or they don't really feel like they have much or enough data, they don't always know how to analyze it or how to make sense of it, or what does it even mean? Or like, I have it. Okay, so here's the data.

But so then what decisions are we making from that, and what decisions can we actually not be making from? From that data? That's not what that says. That's not, you know. Yeah, it's not really there and available for our team to work with. I mean, do you run into anything like that?

We run into that on a regular basis. So when we have our teams looking at data and making decisions based on that data, when it comes to behavior data, we tend to have an easier time kind of analyzing that data because previously that data has been readily available, and that's an area that we have focused on for years. But when it comes to academic data, it is really difficult to make a change when you can't necessarily sit down with a teacher to look at all of the classes that they're teaching and to look at the standards to see where students are not making the progress that we want them to make. Right.

And that can be really frustrating for the teachers, too. So our ask really this year, and this is something that we're trying to build out for the following school year, really is for principals or school leaders to be able to look at multiple points of data and to pull out data specific to that teacher for that content area and then to look at that data with them together to say, where do you want to make progress and what do you see happening in your classes?

So, in terms of training to look at data and also to analyze data to come up with action steps, I really think that building leaders also need to be present and to be teaching teachers and teams to be able to look at it, to pinpoint action steps small enough to make progress. Because again, when we look at overarching school improvement data, that's really like a lot too many to look at at the same time.

I know that I tend to be very impatient when it comes to making progress, wanting to make progress in the quickest way possible. I became an educator and the more, the longer I do it, I start, I'm starting to realize that progress takes time. I can't make progress happen overnight. But I do know that when teams are individual teams that are looking at data and coming up with the action steps and realizing that they're making progress in that goal that they created, short-term and long, long-term goals, I do know that they feel a sense of ownership.

And even if I'm not present in that theme, progress is going to happen.

I think part of what you're sharing, though, it sounds like it's almost coming from that special ed background, where you can see the individual student. And so when you see macro data and you see these large clusters, you can actually drill down either in the data or in your mind or both to be able to see, like what are those small pieces? If it's that, you know, student outliers, or if it's a certain, you know, content piece, or something like you can see the smaller pieces in the bigger picture.

I'm so curious, like, do you have any hints or ideas like, like, how you can just kind of see it that way? Because a lot of the building leaders that I work with come from primarily general education, and they're used to just looking at macro data and identifying the outlier, so that other people can support the outlier. But that's not your perspective, which is awesome. Like, how have you gotten here? And like, what would you recommend to other folks that are trying to make sense of this the way that you just naturally do?

Well, that's funny that you bring up the special ed piece, because when I think of goals, I always think of an IEP goal. Like whether it's a school improvement goal or a team goal, I always think about, okay, what is the overarching goal for the student? And then what are the action steps really? And the benchmarks. So I always think of it as like a progression toward a bigger goal. And I'm thinking about it kind of like on a constant basis, depending on what teams are working on which goal. I think we really need to think about bite-sized goals and think about immediate goals and long-term goals. I also think that the people who are working on the goals need to be working with the students in the area where you're working on the goal. So the team members and their work are super important because when we think about the action steps, the actions that you're taking to make progress truly have to be flexible in a way. If it's not working, you have to come back to the team, and you have to be able to adjust your action step for the next data protocol.

So, having the right people on your team, ensuring that you have frequent check-ins to see if the data is moving, and then pivoting to see what's not working, so that you can pivot the action step or the steps that you're taking to work towards that goal. And I think patience is really important in reaching out to those resources. We often forget that, you know, in a district or in a school, there are plenty of resources available.

It's just a matter of accessing those resources and looking at it from more of a holistic perspective as to what's working and what's not.

Yeah, I, yes, I cannot echo that more because I think in education we're constantly trying to do more with less, and sometimes we get focused on what we don't have that we forget that we can actually use what we do have to its fullest capacity. I'm really curious. It kind of like is, I, I know that's sort of the, the perspective that you take with this when you're looking at trying to make those adjustments so you're, you know, looking at the data, you're getting the right people at the right tables to try to make sense of the right things to move in the right direction. You know, all of that stuff is moving.

How do you actually walk with teams to figure out, okay, so we're going to make those adjustments, or what are those adjustments? Or like, even I'm thinking sometimes I'm partnered with teams that maybe just have really tiny toolboxes and we just need more tools, or we need to learn something ourselves so that we can, you know, perpetuate different student outcomes. Like, how do you walk that with your people?

I think you just nailed it. I think that oftentimes when we are not achieving the goal that we intend to, it is an automatic response to say, Well, we don't have enough staff for that, or, well, we need this person's role to be hired to do this work. And I often hear that with the MTSS framework. MTSS is not, is not a person who does everything. It's a framework and it's a system. Right. And everyone's doing it.

So ultimately, I think that it comes down to having a discussion about changing adult practices. And that's really hard, especially when you are working with a group of individuals who have been doing it for a long time. They might not be very open to sharing personal experiences and trying new strategies. But adult practices, I think, that the is number one factor when it comes to student achievement and making progress towards goals.

If we start to practice, if we start to do things a little differently, and if it works, and we continue to develop and provide professional learning to do things a little differently, so that we're using the best strategy as possible for that goal. That's really the key, and that's the hardest thing. Having adults change what they're doing and do it a little differently.

Yeah, absolutely. So before we wrap up today, I'm curious if you can share any examples of where maybe you've worked with teams that thought they were making sense of assessment data, but it was maybe not the conclusions that you can draw from that, or they thought they were analyzing their instructional practices, but maybe they were doing something different. Do you have any examples of things that maybe people thought they were leveraging this high, this high leverage practice, but maybe in reality they were kind of missing the mark?

One thing that's been really difficult for our team has been attendance. And I'm going to use this example because this is never-ending work. Attendance has definitely been a struggle since the pandemic. It's gotten significantly worse. And there's a lot of attendance data, and the data is very straightforward. Either they're here or they're not here. And our team has been working on attendance for the whole year. And we have a truancy specialist. We work very closely with the Regional Office of Education, and we do know that punitive measures do not work for our families.

I do have to say that when looking at attendance, we really had to look at our tier one practices more than anything. Just because when kids are not coming to the building, no matter how many home visits we made, it really didn't make an impact on increasing the students who really had difficulties coming to school for whatever reason. So again, we look at the data, but we have to dive even deeper to look at and kind of disaggregate the data to look at, okay, this kid's not coming to school because they might be having home issues or the student has to work, or this student is not coming to school because they're choosing not to come to school because of X, Y, and Z reasons. So even with the data that we have, we really had to break it down to why they were not coming to school in order to make action steps. So again, creating teams within teams to look at more data because it is really complex. So when we look at complex data, when we look at, like, people's behaviors as to why that's impacting the data that we look at, you may have to dive a little deeper and look at the anecdotal data to be able to make those decisions for teams.

Yeah, thank you for calling that forward. Even when data seems so clean and direct, and it's just they're here, they're not here. Like something that's so simple. It is rarely that simple. Anytime we were looking at the performance of any form. If it doesn't matter if it's behavioral or if it's academic, any type of performance, it is never going to be captured in the numbers. There's always the actual story around the numbers. So then that's what's informing that decision-making and where you go from there. So thank you for always bringing that perspective to the table and having this conversation with me today about this high-leverage practice.

No problem.