This week at our weekly leadership meeting we discussed a research article about an American school who number crunched student achievement over a 3 year period. This article really set us up for the weekly staff meeting where we were investigating the question: If research suggests the greatest variance in student outcomes is between classes in the same school what did our data of student achievement tell us at half year about the students in our classes?

Like the school in the article I copied all the achievement data for each individual class in graph form from the various dimensions in English and Math. We collated the graphs in VELS levels so that individuals and teams could examine the data for similarities and differences between classes. We posed two questions were there any differences and what might we want to do about that to improve student performance in the second semester.

Of course this activity needed some retelling of our morale purpose; raise the bar - close the gap, some restating of our belief that all students can learn, some norm setting about a no blame approach but own the results and some purpose - making lateral public accountabilities to each other to improve.

Where did we end up after 45 minutes - some assessment process glitches [ a perhaps safer view with teams tightening some processes] and some committments to look with a closer lense at some more “successful” classrooms and pose some deeper questions about if and what instructional practices led to these results.

A brave new step in the use of data to improve performance and reduce variance between classes. 

The picture above represents a message our Assistant Principal Sarah gained from a recent professional learning course - the quote comes from a CEO of a fortune 500 country “When things are going well I look out the window however when things are going poorly I look in the mirror” - we have to own our results and improve.