Congratulations! It’s the second week of school. You are finally getting into content. You actually know some of your kids’ names. You are currently on top of things, since you haven’t given too much work that needs to be graded yet. You are feeling (a little) less exhausted than you did last week.
So, think way back to pre-service week (sometimes called pre-school). What did you hear the most?
Here is an unofficial list of the words you heard a billion times before school started:
New
- Procedure
- Protocol
- Data
- literacy
- Differentiate
- Active assailant
- Text
- Struggling
- Relationship
- Focused
- Marzano
I didn’t get to spend pre-service week with you all, but it’s possible at at some schools, the #1 word on that list (in terms of usage) was data.
How to access your data, where does your data come from, how we’re going to move the data, what the data tells us, how to gather data .... That word seems to come up a LOT!
So, let’s think through some of that data and some of the questions that come up with it.
Where do I get data?
Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere!
No, seriously, you can get data from Portal and PM. You can get data from your gradebook. But, you can get data from every interaction with a kid, from every time you read his or her work, from every conversation with a parent, a guardian, a concurrent teacher or a former teacher. You can get data when you survey your kids about their learning styles and Data is everywhere.
What do I do with state and district testing data?
Read it, and try to form an overall picture of the kid. Has he or she been a consistent low reader for several years, or did he or she just have a lousy day or a rough year? Has he or she generally done better in math or in reading?
Remember, all that stuff is actually “autopsy data”. It’s all dead. It was taken months ago and is not longer a current picture of the kid. It’s important to lean what happened last year. But it is JUST AS important to collect more data now, and learn where the kid id now. Today!
How do I get new data?
You should be the prime data-collector for your course. You should get data through tests, quizzes, and projects, of course. But you also take informal data every time you do a formative assessment. You can get valuable, up-to-the-minute, in-the-middle-of-it data by reading quickwrites, listening to turn and talks, mentally noting where kids go during a “four corners” activity, or glancing at their text marking.
Formative Assessment should be taken all the time, ideally every day but at least a couple of times a week. It should only take a minute or two.
If you aren’t a formative assessment ninja, I highly suggest that you start intentionally planning for formatively assessing your kids every day.
Checking their classwork or homework is only useful if the work was intentionally planned as a formative assessment. You want to make sure it’s something they can’t effectively copy from each other. Make sure it’s something that has more than one answer (“What year was the Declaration of Independence written?” “1776”. Bam. Done.) Make sure it tells you about their learning, not just their compliance with your directions.
The two best lists of Formative Assessment Strategies I know are here:
Or, check out the Formative Assessments or Formative Tasks in your Social Studies 2018-19 Curriculum Guides. There’s some REALLY good stuff in there (although I am admittedly biased)
Now is the time, as you start working in actual content, to get in the good habit of formatively assessing all the time. A couple times a week. Maybe every day?
How have you been formatively assessing? Where do you need help with data? How many other pieces of data can help you better understand your kids? Now, how can you use all those pieces of information to better teach your kids? As always, I love to hear from you! Email me newmantr@pcsb.org
-Tracy
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