Using Data to Inform Teachers’ Professional Development
By: Barbara Shuey
In this age of accountability and academic competition, valid information about teacher practice and classroom instruction is as crucial as student assessment data.
As Christian schools strive to compete for students, school administrators face the challenges of determining what training teachers need in order to help their students be academically successful and ascertaining whether current professional development efforts are meeting their objectives. This information is also especially valuable in reporting progress to various school funders.
Since improved student achievement is a direct result of targeted and sustained engagement over time, instructional leaders need solid data that they can use in the interim to show that a school is moving in the right direction, and that they are being good stewards of the grantors' financial resources.
Also, since students excel in classrooms with the best teachers, schools naturally want to identify existing best practices within the building and replicate them to other classrooms. Even when schools are doing well in terms of student achievement, educators often can find new ways to break out of the traditional instructional "box" and move from good to great.
Seeing the Big Picture
Besides the traditional year-end teacher evaluation, frequent classroom walkthroughs give instructional leaders a snapshot of teacher practices in the classroom.
Rather than focusing on an individual teacher's performance, walkthroughs are used to collect trend data on instructional and classroom practices for a subject area, grade level, or throughout a school. The process is a quick, efficient, cost-effective way to obtain data, inform professional development, and boost teacher accountability.
Walkthroughs are quickly executed, each generally taking five minutes. Administrators can easily incorporate "walking" into their daily or weekly schedules, collecting data on teacher practice to be reflected at monthly staff meetings
What to Look For
The classroom elements and practices that administrators can monitor are varied. In general, instructional leaders use a rubric devised around indicators of effective practice in areas such as the curriculum, instruction, learners, classroom environment, and whether the teacher addresses different learning needs. These indicators are organized as a checklist that can either be collected electronically on a handheld device or by paper and pencil.
Educators can opt to develop their own criteria for effective classroom practices and decide on specific "look-fors" to help them identify the criteria during observations.
For example, a Christian school may include practices that support a school's religious identity, such as when the Archdiocese of Philadelphia created "look-fors" to identify time for prayer in the classroom.
Improvement via Analysis
If schools have improvement plans, analyzing walkthrough data will help ensure that educators are making progress toward their goals. The walkthrough process provides a framework for reflective discussions, data analysis, action planning, and the progress monitoring that follows.
After completing a round of classroom walks, school leaders can generate a report of the collected data to track how often they observe a best practice.
For example, if they want to improve math instruction, they may want to target the use of hands-on material or manipulatives in instruction. Initial walks may find teachers are using manipulatives 10 percent of the time.
The next step involves analyzing the data in reflective conversations with the staff to determining whether that rate is sufficient or whether a plan needs to be devised to increase it. In addition, instructional leaders can also create reports comparing practices in specific content areas or across grade levels, schools, or subjects.
Another benefit of walkthroughs is that schools are able to standardize the language they use to describe core practices in order to collect accurate data. That means administrators and teachers can begin discussing and agreeing on evidence of effective instructional strategies, sharing best practices and deepening their content knowledge.
Open, Impartial Discussion & Collaboration
Using and sharing the data collected in classroom walks builds mutual trust and a collaborative partnership approach to improving student performance. Often, school leaders share the results of their walks at staff meetings, allowing teachers to reflect and collaborate on the data. Instructional leaders facilitate conversations with their staff around the data to identify problems, celebrate success, set goals, and focus on the resources needed to help teachers achieve their goals.
This approach, in addition to traditional observation and evaluation, gives schools the ability to monitor their progress throughout the year and adjust accordingly. It also takes the focus away from individual performance to combined excellence.
Steering a True Course
Walkthroughs do not take the place of formal evaluations, but they do provide benchmark data for professional development planning and monitoring of progress. Just as teachers model learning strategies for their students, school leaders should model the effective use of data in decision-making for their staff.
Schools utilizing "real time" data on teacher practices to inform their professional development report growth in effective classroom strategies and, ultimately, higher student achievement.
Barbara Shuey is account executive for Teachscape, Inc., www.teachscape.com.
