EF1: Educators establish a collaborative process for collecting data
The first Essential Function of Educators establish a collaborative process for collecting data is addressed in the first component of the GAINS acronym: Gather, and helps answer the question, “is there a problem?” Teams gather together as a collaborative team, following good meeting protocols, and gather data that answers questions relevant to important school goals. More information about collaborative teaming can be found in the DESE Collaborative Team Course on the VLP.
Schools and districts collect a lot of data! This raises two important questions: is it the right data, and are they using the data to improve outcomes for students. The right data is driven by the mission of the school, important student outcomes driven by that mission, and questions the team has about the status of or progress toward these important student outcomes. Are students in school? Are students learning to read? Are students following behavior expectations? Each of these questions helps the team to identify the right data to collect and periodically review.
Possible data sources for common questions related to behavioral outcomes include:
- Office discipline referrals and related contextual information (ODRs)
- Staff managed/minor unexpected behavior incidents
- Attendance
- School climate
- Behavioral outcomes disaggregated by demographic subgroups
Notice that these are all student outcomes. Everything a school does is to promote positive outcomes for students. That said, there will be times when a District Leadership Team (DLT), a Building Leadership Team (BLT), or a Collaborative Team (CT) will solve problems related to improving implementation of systems and practices. In these cases, a short-term data cycle may treat implementation data as both implementation data and outcome data. In these cases, the team should not lose sight of the fact that the team is taking these short-term actions to improve long term student outcomes.
EF2: Educators implement a process for examining and interpreting data
The second Essential Function, Educators implement a process for examining and interpreting data is summarized in the second component of the GAINS acronym: Analyze, and answers the questions “what is the problem?” and “why is the problem happening?”
By identifying important outcomes for students, and monitoring data associated with these goals, teams can quickly identify opportunities to improve these outcomes for students.
The team then analyzes the data to define the context surrounding the problem, determine affected subgroups, and identify possible causes of the problem. Information about specific strategies for analyzing data are provided in the lessons that follow.
