How Instructional Coaches Can Help Teachers Use Data More Effectively

Can data foster hope? This is a question I brought home with me after attending the “Teaching, Learning, Coaching” conference offered by the Instructional Coaching Group. I spent one day in a workshop with Jim Knight, discussing his recent book Data Rules. In my job as an instructional coach at a K–6 elementary school, it seemed like people would run away when the conversation turned to data. Since the conference, creating systemic schoolwide systems for collecting and analyzing data to benefit teachers has become one of my primary tasks.

These systems are now at the heart of some of the meaningful changes happening in our school for teachers and students. Data can bring hope, especially when it shows we are on the right path to achieving student growth.

Benchmark and Diagnostic Assessments

Each school in our district uses standardized assessments such as STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting; for math) and DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills; for literacy) three times a year (fall, winter, and spring) to determine whether students are performing at grade-level expectations. Coaches work closely with classroom teachers to administer more specific diagnostic assessments (such as the LETRS Phonics and Word-Reading Survey) to students who do not meet benchmark expectations.

These deeper dives help us get to know our students better as learners and give teachers the information they need to set goals and determine interventions. Our district coaches advised us to assess these students more frequently to ensure that they were responding to these interventions and making progress.

Progress monitoring. We decided to progress monitor (PM) students who were not meeting benchmark expectations every two weeks in reading and every four weeks in math, using the same DIBELS and STAR assessments. I made a schoolwide PM schedule to keep us on track. During these PM check-ins, teachers show students the growth they are making so that students can feel proud of their hard work. Teachers also use this information to adjust student interventions along the way if there is not an upward trend in data points.

Doing a quick PM check-in only takes a few minutes, but the information is valuable when it tells us how students are responding to interventions. I assist teachers in collecting and entering data into our systems to make this task more manageable.

Team meetings. Then I gather all the PM data and bring it to our weekly grade-level team meetings so that we can reflect on the results. We look at the scores to monitor student progress toward goals and decide whether the designed interventions are effective based on our observations of student work and the direction of students’ data points. We look closely at the responders and nonresponders so that we can change course if needed. This intervention tracker helps each grade-level team keep track of their work and student results. 

Schoolwide data meetings. All of this information is compiled and discussed at data meetings held three times a year with grade-level teams and district leaders. Literacy and math coaches, teachers, academic support staff, and administrators meet to review the data we have collected, celebrate successes, problem-solve challenges, and monitor schoolwide growth toward district goals. We take what we learn from these meetings to set goals for professional learning.

What have we learned?

These systems have helped make the data informative, easy to gather, and vital to our conversations about student growth. Centering our conversations on objective data encourages us to base our decisions on measurable progress and not make assumptions about students. Sometimes the data will show us that a student who appears to be doing well in classwork actually lacks a specific skill. Then we can use that information to make a clear path forward to support that student’s growth. It helps us examine student achievement more closely and accurately. As Jim Knight told us, ”It makes the invisible visible.” It helps us see things we may have overlooked.

Data brings hope when we see consistent student progress, which builds confidence and collective efficacy for teachers. Recently, a team met to look at a DIBELS Zones of Growth chart that measures how many months of progress a student made from fall to winter. We were shocked to see that a student who needed intensive support in reading in the fall had made the equivalent of 22 months of growth, which placed her near the benchmark expectation. What contributed to this success? The data helped us reflect on a new program the teacher was using for instruction and measure its effectiveness.

It doesn’t always work like this. Sometimes, a child’s data points do not move even after significant interventions. This information helps the team examine the child’s needs more closely and grapple with what could be done differently. We recently moved a child to another intervention group because the data showed she was struggling with fluency, and we knew she needed a smaller group that was specifically working on fluency skills. We used our PM data to guide us in choosing a different intervention that would best support this child’s growth.

As teachers become more comfortable interpreting data and seeing its value, their conversations become more reflective, and they are more willing to change course when needed. In her poem “Yes! No!” Mary Oliver says, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Data helps us pay attention to our students, monitor progress over time, and make adjustments along the way. It is one of many tools that help us get to know our students more deeply and bring hope when we see that we’re on the right path to their success.