I just read Seth Godin’s latest blog post on Dashboards. In it, he says:
Years ago, I had an automatic transmission car with a tachometer. Why I needed to know my RPMs when I couldn’t do a thing about it is beyond me.
In local education we seem to collect a lot of data that we really can’t do anything about. At the end of the year, sometime in the summer, we learn what our TCAP scores were for our kids. We learn their Average Yearly Progress (AYP) and calculate our TVAAS. For what?
All this data shows us is how we did with a group of kids we will never see again. If we change our instruction based on these numbers, how do we know what we’re doing is going to impact the kids we have in the coming year? The data is interesting, but it is useless (unless our goal is to pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves what a great job we did).
As a classroom teacher I need different data. Here are pieces of data I am interested in:
How Good Are My Assessments? If I am using assessments to track student progress, it would be good to know if the assessment is any good or not. After all, “Garbage In/Garbage Out” as the saying goes. It isn’t enough to say my assessment is too easy if everyone got an A or too hard if everyone failed. I need to know what is going on inside the assessment. On question 13, how many students (across all classes) chose a particular distractor? (I will post later on the structure of multiple choice questions and how to get kids to increase test scores when they don’t know the material.) If one distractor didn’t get any responses, it is faulty and should be replaced. That will make my assessment better.
What Am I Assessing? We spend so much time in language arts classes going over good writing skills. Those skills are very, very important to be successful in life. But on our state assessment there are very few questions about writing. It is nearly all related to reading. If I am teaching grammar, how can I tie what I’m doing into student reading skills? Math is another subject that is hard to assess properly. If we are doing worksheets with tons of math problems, we simply are not preparing kids for the state math assessment. Our state test focuses on two things primarily: Reading skills and Calculator skills. If the students know these two things, they don’t need to know math. Last year I had a student showing another how to solve a very complicated algebra problem using her calculator. I asked if she could solve the problem on paper without the calculator. “Are you kidding?” was her response. She had no idea, but she was teaching math in my classroom.
Where Are My Kids At Today? This is hard to quantify. I don’t need to know where they are at with the skills or objectives we are studying. I will assess that in other ways. I need to know if they are fully present in my classroom. What happened last night? What happened this morning? Did Johnny get breakfast? Is Suzie still having problems with her boyfriend? What happened between homeroom and 4th period that caused Billy to be so angry? This is data. It is powerful data. It tells you whether to press forward or back off.
How Do My Kids Learn Compared To How I Teach? I will be the first to admit that when I started teaching I used the tried and true lecture method. With 7th grades. Diagramming sentences. Yeah. I know. That’s how I learned, so that’s how I teach. Kids today don’t learn that way. Their brains are not wired that way. They don’t learn sequentially, but we love to teach things in a strict order. Kids are used to pushing buttons on the Internet and getting taken to whatever interests them. Take that button away and they are zombies. So how do I teach? How do I get kids involved? Data tells me the answer. I have to ask questions. As my friend, Lee Kolbert, puts at the end of each of her blogs, “Ask questions! Ask lots of questions!”
There is so much data, and so many ways to collect data. Are we looking at something that can change the way we teach? Or, like the old tachometer Seth Godin talked about, are we looking at data about which we can do absolutely nothing.
What data are you collecting? How are you using it?