- 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.
