Data Conversation Forum

Data Conversation

Data Conversation

by Lesley Hagelgans -
Number of replies: 0

What DataDirector assessment reports you brought to the conversation? I found the school assessment report to be the most helpful. I have four sections of Language Arts, and this report was the most helpful to represent all students.  This helped me see where students needed to most help overall.  Like many other people who teach English and are taking this course, my students struggle with applying reading strategies independently to improve their comprehension of a story thus their correlating with their ability (or lack of) to make inferences about the text as well.

The depth of the conversation. Was it mostly surface level ("this percent of my kids were proficient")? Or did your conversation get into possible causes for proficiency/ non-proficiency?  Vicki teaches seventh grade Science and lives in Marshall with her three kids.  I teach eighth grade Language Arts and live in Union City with my two kids.  Both of us have husband who own their own business, and both of us are very involved with various school committees.  That being said, time was not on our side.  We conducted our conversation whenever we could steal a few minutes to chat before, during or after a meeting and also through email.  We took the same approach to administering the test by printing off bubble sheets.  We both had the same problems scanning the bubble sheets and doubted the efficiency of the process.  Finally, we did talk about the results of the data and causes.  Both of us found that students had done well on formative assessments (homework, discussions, etc.) leading up to the quiz (in my case) or summative assessment (in her case),  but left to working independently students struggled.  The students thrived when the facilitation of knowledge included a lot of scaffolding, but without that support, the students struggled.  Both Vicki and I talked about using the retake process to address the needs of students who were not proficient.

 Did you discuss changes that were made / could be made based on the data? Yes.

What supports you need to make the data conversation go more smoothly. Time

What roadblocks you encountered. Time and the scanner

Something to consider here as well could be the processes your district has in place for a data conversation. Is there a set protocol for these types of conversations? For example, do you start with a "What did you learn from your data?" type question or is it entirely lead by administration? I'm curious about this because the format of these types of conversations can be drastically different across buildings and districts.  At this time our district does not have a set protocol for data conversations.  I had the privilege of working with a new teacher this year who only taught 2 sections of Language Arts.  Jessica (the new teacher) and I naturally fell into this habit of discussing assessments, data and interventions 2-3 times a week.  We always started with looking at our LDM units to see what skills were addressed in the power standards for that unit.  We had a philosophical discussion about pretests/postests and what is important to measure.  Giving a pretest/postest over content is going to give every student a chance to show significant growth (assuming they know nothing of the content), but using pre and post assessments that measure growth of a skill is altogether different.  Jessica and I agreed that assessments that showed growth in skill were more valuable than content.  With that in mind, 2/3 of our  comprehension assessments this year had a makeover.  Then we took the Middle School's grading scale and transferred that to a proficiency scale that we used to track student growth in reading and writing throughout the year.  The driving question in conversations that I had with Jessica became "How does that show growth?"  So how does all of this relate to this class?  Jessica and I exported all of our assessment data from Zangle into Excel to create reports that show proficiency.  I can see the potential for Data Director to save me a ton of time because it can create the reports for me from the bubble sheets.  Yet the bubble sheets were problematic as well, but I piloted some clickers from Turning Technologies at the end of May that have the potential to solve the bubble sheet problem.