Create an Early Warning System and Give Your Teachers X-Ray Vision!

In the spirit of giving, what better gift to get your teachers than the gift of x-ray vision!

Obviously I’m not talking about Superman’s x-ray vision, but the type of x-ray vision that allows your teachers to see things about their students that they had previously been unable to see.

As an example of this teacher X-Ray vision, see the screen shot below:

In this example, we have used Illuminate Education’s Data And Assessment (DnA) package to create a customized “Early Warning System” to forecast a student’s potential to have difficulty completing high school.  In this system, the lower the overall score shown above the more likely they are to need additional intervention to successfully graduate.

In our model, a student receives a perfect score (100) if they (1) have not failed any classes, (2) have not been absent more than 3 days, and (3) have not had any behavior incidents.  Missing any of these targets will deduct points from their total score and move them further down the risk level, from “No Risk” to “Minimal Risk” to “Moderate Risk” and finally to “Extreme Risk”.  If enough points are deducted due to missing too many targets, they will show on an overall “At Risk” report.  Intervention Specialists will then flag their records and add them to Intervention Programs, also managed and tracked through Illuminate’s DnA program as seen above.  These scores are automatically calculated based on the data loaded into the system.  Further, each student is given her/his own detail report:

This detail report will show exactly how the student’s score was calculated.  This can be used for Intervention meetings, parent meetings, or meetings with the individual student to use for improvement plans.

There is no doubt that your district tracks multiple pieces of data on your kids, and this data is most likely sitting in three, four, five, or maybe six different systems (or piles on your desk).  Perhaps this is on your “to-do” list to share with your team at your next District/Building Admin leaders meeting.  But then what?  How does it get to teachers?  At what frequency?  How and when does it get to the very people who need it most?  For real x-ray vision, it needs to be front and center with the tools teachers use…like DnA’s teacher dashboard.  Below you will see the Early Warning System (called “On-Track” by DnA) alongside the teacher’s report of their student’s State Assessment data (OAA in Ohio).

So why not give your teachers the ability to “see” what they haven’t been able to see before?  Why not give them x-ray vision?

You’ll all feel like superheroes.

If you’d like to get more detail or see a demo of how Illuminate Education’s Data and Assessment platform can enable early warning systems, please shoot us an email!

This article was originally written by John LaPlante, Executive Director of ACCESS, on LinkedIn Pulse and is republished with his permission.

ACCESS is one of twenty-three Data Acquisition Sites licensed by the Ohio Department of Education. ACCESS is a membership organization, wholly owned by its member districts and governed by a Board of Directors elected by the membership. ACCESS serves 26 school districts in Columbiana and Mahoning County, two educational service centers, 20 non-public schools and two Special Education Regional Resource Centers.