100 Posts in 100 Days
In the last several months during the course of some coaching conversations, I’ve had “coachees” ask me some questions that have pushed me to be the person reflecting and to be explicit about some of my approaches, decision-making, and strategies. One of them even said, “Are you going to write about that in your 100 Posts in 100 Days?” 😊 This is the fourth Q&A inspired by these conversations.
A teacher at my school is taking a course this summer on assessment leadership. In preparation for her course, she interviewed me about my thoughts around assessment. We discussed many aspects of assessment. I can’t remember the exact questions that she asked, but generally, we talked about:
Q: What do school leaders need to know about assessment?
A: There are troves of books on assessment, assessment literacy, and assessment leadership. The list of things for school leaders to know about this topic is well studied, researched, and long. What I shared in my conversation with this teacher is that
As a school leader, I use assessment differently than I did as a classroom teacher. Here are two things I think about a lot as a school leader using assessment data that weren’t necessarily on my mind as a classroom teacher.
- Data is a communication tool and you need to learn the language of data. How you display, share, and talk about data matters. There is an acronym: DRIP, that stands for “data rich, information poor”. I’ve been part of a number of conversations where the amount of data was so large and the breadth of topics so wide that it was challenging to know where focus or what was important. We had a lot of data, but trouble interpreting it in order to take action. Learning the language of data includes:
- Ask a question. Determining the question that you want the data to answer helps to sort and organize the information.
- Learn how to display the data. Visual displays are really helpful to sharing information. There are ways to illustrate change over time, to compare and contrast, to show proportions, and to simply communicate results. Make your display match your purpose.
- When talking about data, describe how to “read” the visual display. Orient your audience to what is being communicated so that they can spend their time thinking about the information rather than wondering what they are lookin at.
- Small pieces at a time. I’ve found that people are generally interested in talking about and making sense of data/assessment results. But when too much is shared at once, everyone wants to talk about something different and the conversation is all over the place. If you are a school leader bringing data to a group, provide them small amounts at a time that they can really discuss and make sense of.
2. Be prepared to enter into discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion when you start using data. Data, especially disaggregated, becomes a tool to confirm or disconfirm ideas you have about your school. When you start looking at groups and subgroups, questions emerge about how specific groups are performing and how they are feeling. You will see differences. You will see results that are disparate from your own perception. This will bring up a number of questions and a need for honest reflection. Be prepared yourself and be prepared to help groups as they make sense of information; information that might push them to re-consider deeply held beliefs. If you are a teacher moving into school leadership and developing your own assessment literacy skills, I encourage you couple that learning with how to lead groups to have difficult conversations through a DEI lens.