EDLD 5333 - Week 2 Discussion Post

• Share the approach your campus has taken to train the staff in effective data use, or explain how you would manage this challenge if you were the principal/instructional leader.

My head principal holds a doctorate in education and currently teaches classes in educational leadership at an area university. One fact about my campus is that we have had some serious training on data. Disaggregation, delineation, quartiles, quintiles, indexes, charts, graphs, and designations; these monikers, and even others, float up and down the halls of our campus like the wind. In July we have a week of training to earn comp days…and we talked about data. In August we have the compulsory pre-semester in-service where we discussed data. At both settings we had death-by-powerpoint presentations, guest speakers from our region’s service center, handouts that would make the Brazilian rain forest shed a tear, and talks from our superintendent, principal, assistant principal, counselor, diagnostician, federal programs director, special education director, and migrant coordinator. Each teacher at our campus is assigned to a PLC as a part of their daily schedule. We meet three days a week in the PLCs, on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday (Wednesday is to meet with our Tribal Council (we are the Chieftains and Squaws) which is like the old home rooms, and Friday is a free day to work on grades and lesson plans for the coming week) with Monday being set aside for RTI issues and Tuesday dedicated to data disaggregation and review. Under NCLB we would be in Phase 1, Year 2, so there is plenty to study. Under the new Texas Assessment System we are good in all four indexes. 

Each staff member is assigned two or three students that are engaged in RTI. We spent the month of September filling out cards that reside in our student’s cumulative folders as a tracking mechanism from PreK-current date (my campus is a high school). Each teacher meets with their students on an informal basis mostly serving as an encourager to help motivate the students to succeed. These students are all assigned to mandatory tutoring from 3:30-4:15 PM, one day per week for each area that they have not passed an EOC test in. The PLC-assigned teachers do not attend these sessions, but act as another level of support, staying with the students until they graduate. I personally meet with my students around two or three times a week, and their parents twice a month.

Each PLC has poured over every stitch of data available to our campus in a variety of formats. My personal PLC is comprised of myself (fine arts & coaching), the UIL coordinator, a science teacher, history teacher, computer teacher, and a SpEd teacher. We went through the Performance Index Framework, 2013 Accountability System QuickLook, 2013 Accountability Summary, and the 2013 Safeguards and Calculation Reports on multiple occasions to see where we might be able to find deficiencies in our teaching.