Data and the Board

As part of my role as School Leader I have had to attend Woolf Fisher data days alongside the Principal. Part of learning to understand and read the data is also being able to share the data with others.

Earlier in the year, I ran a staff meeting going over the Reading, Math and Junior data. I had assisted the Literacy Leader in sharing the Writing Data in her own session so I didn't need to share the Writing Data.

The staff meeting was a positive time, helping us focus as staff on what we need to do to improve how we teach different areas in order to help our students accelerate even more of their learning. Being able to lead the discussion, give the teachers a chance to really look at the data and draw their own conclusions from the data and discuss thoughts, ideas and solutions together.

Data is hard. Once you get past actually reading and understanding it, it can feel a bit overwhelming. There are lots of questions you need to ask about data. With this sort of data, it is also a snapshot in time and so it can be hard to know what comes into shape the data. It also can be confronting as a teacher to see raw data that tells you that your students aren't doing as well as you would want them to be doing. Especially when you are looking at a whole year's worth of data. When they plateau or even go backwards it isn't great. What do you do about that as a teacher, team or staff?

Following on from this staff meeting I was asked to present literacy data to the board. I did this on Tuesday the 24th of September. It had been a few months since the staff meeting so it took a bit of time to re-visit the data from early in the year and work out what is important for the Board to know. 

I produced the following presentation for the board and we spent 15 minutes going over it.

Again, it was confronting showing our board that currently many of our students are failing in literacy. They asked questions around why this might be, particularly with the difference between the Year 2 massive gains and the extremely low achievement of the Year 3 - 5 students. A few members of the board were quick to say it was because of the devices. This might be the case, but there is also a lot of other things that could have affected their learning; developmental levels, high needs of class, teaching methods, timing of tests, type of tests and the abilities to sit these types of tests, teachers competency, paper vs computer, attitude to tests ... the list could go on.

It is my belief that we can only do what we can do, making sure our students have exposure to these tests, create a growth mindset around tests, teach the skills to best sit these type of tests, make sure it is at the same time as the other schools are sitting them (so we compare like with like) but most of all recognise that for some of this data it is only one piece. A PTA Reading Test is one test on one day and our Linc-Ed data allows for a larger range of information to help shape the level our students are at. However, it is important to know how we are going and what we are doing with our teaching in the classroom. We don't want to teach to the test because that doesn't benefit students in the long run.

But what other things can we do to create a classroom where our students can achieve no matter what the activity or assessment? That's our job as teachers and it is the job of the Board to make sure we are asking these questions.