Whetting Your School's Appetite for Data

The Power of Data

Data is powerful! With data-driven decision making, you are able to:

• Make decisions surrounding curriculum, instruction, and assessment with greater precision and clarity.
• Measure program effectiveness, show trends, and measure student progress.
• Communicate progress and explain strategies to others.
• Determine professional development needs that impact teaching and learning.
• Plan effective school improvement and set achievable school improvement goals.
• Identify and capitalize on strengths.

Many people have the experience of collecting data for someone else, with no benefit to them. Showing people how USEFUL data can be for THEMSELVES helps enlist them in the work of gathering the data.

You’ll Know You’ve Arrived When…

• Staff members share an experience of looking at their own data about a single question to see what it can tell them and discuss its usefulness.
• Staff members discuss the implications of their own data about a single question and identify a strategic plan for responding.
• Staff members agree on one kind of additional data that will be useful to them in making decisions.
• Stakeholders are willing to collect and analyze additional local school data for strategic planning.

Getting More Mileage From Working With Data

Data can benefit your school’s efforts to meet the requirements of initiatives such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Education YES! The following shows how data can help:

• NCLB requires districts or schools receiving Educational Technology State Grants to spend at least 25 percent on high-quality professional development in the integration of technology into curriculum and instruction.”
• Setting up Excel databases will allow a school to manage the background information related to the Indicators of Engagement, Indicators of Instructional Quality, and Indicators of Learning Opportunity. Education YES! requires schools to self report their performance in these areas each year.
• The creation of school databases will allow for local collection and management of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) standardized test and district test results, so a school can track individual student and class data over time.

A Process to Encourage Interest

A step-by-step guide to “whetting appetites” for using data to drive schoolwide decision making is available at www.michigan.gov/schoolimprovement. Look for the MI-MAP tool kit.

For more information, contact: Linda Forward, (517) 241-4285, forwardl@michigan.gov or visit www.michigan.gov/osi.

Source: Michigan Department of Education’s Office of School Improvement.