There are reports that U.S. schools are dealing with yet another teacher shortage. It seems that many districts are facing the challenges of trying to fill classrooms with qualified teachers—with no easy fix in the horizon. This is a significant shift from when teachers were being laid off 10 years ago, including the years after … Continue reading Why Are Teachers Quitting? Finding Ways to Deal with Recruitment & Retention
Educators are starting to see that the traditional student information system (SIS) is no longer cutting it. There’s an ongoing shift towards systems that are modernized and focused on comprehensive student growth, with features to truly engage districts and promote student success. Typically, the SIS is defined to address (but is not limited to) seven … Continue reading Addressing the Focus, Data & Usability of a Modern SIS
Classrooms consist of a broad array of diverse learners. Each student comes to school with diverse learning needs, and teachers are being asked to satisfy those needs based on various factors: a student’s home language and culture, student prerequisite skills and knowledge, and learning styles. To support teachers in delivering a high-quality instructional program that … Continue reading Steps for Teachers & Site Leaders to Apply Differentiated Instruction
The Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) community is home to a variety of identities and ethnic groups. But most of the time when the media mentions the AAPI community, they truncate it to mean specifically East Asians. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are the most commonly referred to demographics when discussing Asian identity in the … Continue reading Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders (AAPI): The Need for Data Disaggregation
When it comes to measuring teacher effectiveness, educators often wonder how students are performing in relation to their peers. How do they know which students are achieving higher relative to their academic peers? How do they determine if certain students are progressing at a higher rate relative to other students? In today’s classroom, it’s … Continue reading Measuring Student Learning with Student Growth Percentiles & Student Growth Targets
Many educators talk often about wanting to incorporate an assessment system into their instruction, but aren’t quite sure where to start. When it comes to building a student achievement system, the task could seem daunting: How often to conduct data analysis? How to approach developing standards schedules? How to build quality assessments? These are just … Continue reading Developing a Student Achievement System? Here’s How.
The research of John Hattie created great interest in 2009 when he published Visible Learning. In the book, he compares the statistical measure of “effect size” to the impact of a variety of influences on students’ achievement such as class size, holidays, feedback, and learning strategies. Hattie’s study was designed as a “meta-meta-study” that collects, compares, … Continue reading The “Effect Size” in Educational Research: What is it & How to Use it?
If school leaders want to lead the charge in improving student performance, they must be fluent in the use of data as a leadership tool. The assumption is that when school leaders are knowledgeable about data use, they can more effectively review their existing capacities, identify weaknesses, and better chart plans for improvement. In fact, … Continue reading Six Steps for School Leaders to Use Data Effectively
One of the biggest challenges teachers and students face when returning to school after summer vacation is the loss of learning during the break. The lack of academic focus can negatively impact a student’s learning, resulting in summer learning loss, also known as brain drain. The reality is that students come back to school losing important information … Continue reading How to Prevent Student Learning Loss During the Summer
I like to think that using data while teaching is like using a GPS while driving. When you’re using a GPS, you enter the final destination. It’s the place you want to get to. Along the way, the GPS will say things like “Turn left…turn right…exit here,” and based on this new information, you adjust … Continue reading Setting Up a Data-Driven Culture