Data Teams and Collective Educator Efficacy

A district’s partnership with the American Institutes for Research led to instructional coaches and teachers using data for better results

During my time as director of curriculum, instruction and assessments for a school district in southern Illinois, I frequently reported to our board of education, administrative team and teachers about district data contained in the state report card. Outside of some behavioral data, we rarely dug into other nonacademic data.

Due to our status as a low-performing school district, the district report cards, issued annually by the state education agency in Illinois, seldom were encouraging for us to review. The high-level data from the state assessments did not always lead to actionable next steps.

As a district administrative team, we opted not to overwhelm our teachers by inundating them with too much data, so our teachers had little impetus to analyze the information and make data-informed decisions that could positively impact student learning.