A major purpose of the monitoring plan is to put in place a system for the ongoing collection of data aligned with the content standard indicators/objectives you are responsible for teaching. You can't analyze data you don't have. And it is not useful to analyze data that is not aligned with your learning outcomes. Once you have the data, you are ready to analyze it.
How will you discuss it?
One of the best ways for principals to provide clear expectations for what they want staff to do is to model the process. Leading a data dialogue effectively requires a focus, data, guiding questions, and an understanding of the collaborative inquiry process. Data-driven dialogue assists teams in making shared meaning of data, in surfacing multiple perspectives, in separating data from inference, and in making data-driven decisions. Though the data are key to the dialogue, the process of collaborative inquiry drives the results. When leading the data dialogue, you will find the Seven Norms of Collaborative Work, developed by Laura Lipton and Bruce Welman, to be helpful to the process.
You use the same questions to discuss the data as you did to analyze it. The discussion allows you to see how students in other classrooms are doing and to hear what other strategies teachers are using to move students to proficient.
- Which content standard indicator(s) was the teacher assessing?
- What percent of students demonstrated proficiency?
- What implications does that have for instruction?
- Which students have not demonstrated that they can do this?
- What diagnostic information did an examination of student work provide?
- Based on individual student performance, what do I need to do next to move the student to proficiency?
- Based on the class performance, what re-teaching do I need to do?
- After reassessing, did my students demonstrate proficiency?
- Is my re-teaching or other intervention resulting in improved student performance?
- When we compare performance by subgroups (e.g., by racial group, gender, students with disabilities, ESL students, or students in the free and reduced meals program), do we see any groups not performing as well as the whole group? If so, what are we going to do about that?
- Do we have any students who are not attaining proficiency across indicators?
- What diagnostic information do we have about them to inform instruction?
- What interventions have we tried? What interventions do we plan to try next?
