Best practices to run a data meeting that improves student outcomes
After speaking to dozens of the partner schools and education leaders, we’ve collected a best practice data meeting structure as a great starting point for any team. Here is the general timing:
A point of tension in data meetings is how much to focus on the short term goal of reteaching an individual lesson / putting in place individual student supports, versus the longer term goal of building teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. We recommend about a 50-50 prioritization between short term student supports and building teacher capacity and automaticity in reviewing work so that they can make these types of curriculum decisions in the moment.
For this reason, we recommend that student work analysis should be largely teacher driven, with the coach only intervening to support when needed.
Here’s a breakdown of each component of the meeting in greater detail:
As a team: Decide which assignment/standard the meeting will focus on
Coach: Pull the aligned standard, have an idea of what you want the teacher to pull out of it, and ensure the standard you’ve chosen for the week aligns to an area of growth for the class
Teacher: Pull 6-9 work samples, share with coach 24 hours in advance of meeting
Procedure: Using EdLight’s data meeting feature, the teacher can capture pictures of work during or after class using our mobile app. Uploading work to the meeting will generate an email to the coach and team with the work samples.
Purpose: The first purpose is to build the curricular knowledge of the teachers. This, in turn, increases rigor by norming on grade-level work non-negotiables.
Procedure: The first component of the meeting is to align on what an exemplar should look like for the student work for the assignment being reviewed. That starts with breaking down the Common Core or State standard into student and teacher-friendly language. At this point, you look at the Exemplar student work and norm on what the criteria for success are for the assignment. A best practice here is to use a know/show chart to determine what knowledge students need to master the assignment, and what strategies they would need to show us in order to demonstrate mastery. This process should feel collaborative, and teammates should think aloud together to generate this.
Purpose: The purpose of looking at student work -- as opposed to numerical data -- is to build the monitoring fluency of the teacher. Taking the time to do this outside of the classroom helps you identify gaps and trends you might have missed at a cursory glance during class.
Pre-Work: Coaches should look at work prior to the meeting and pre-categorize the student work into three categories so they can have a mental exemplar for teachers. The coach should also determine which task to focus on - one high-leverage task to monitor or a component of the whole assignment. You can link the EdLight assignment to see further samples to support a point.
Procedure: Give 2-3 minutes to review student work silently and independently first. The thinking questions are:
It is important that this is silent and independent and the teacher speaks first after the silent few minutes. This gives the coach an understanding of the strength of their work analysis muscles. If the teacher misses the trending gap, the coach should lead them towards identifying it.
Start by celebrating the wins and growth in the skill together. Then, norm on gaps in conceptual understanding and strategy implementation. Gaps can take the form of misunderstandings - but they can also at times be individual or related to effort/work completion. When this is the case, discuss how to raise the bar and follow up with these special cases. In the case that tutoring is needed, create a group on EdLight and assign it to the appropriate small group facilitator.
Leave 7-10 minutes at the end to practice a scripted model, or co-plan the re-teach depending on the direction that is decided upon during the meeting. When there is time, practice that model orally, or provide feedback for improvement on it. Coaches might want to prepare a script as well to compare to the teachers to ensure rigor is high enough.
The same way you follow up with a revision on student work, coaches should follow up on next steps of a data meeting. This can mean having the teacher record themselves during a lesson, or sharing student work as a result of that lesson.
What we’ve outlined above is just a starting point for a weekly data meeting structure. By joining EdLight’s community you have access to experts in the field who have proven results with teachers and students running data meetings and specific professional development for your leadership and team on effectively running data meetings. We hope you give our structure a try, and please let us know if we missed anything!
Interested in using EdLight for data meetings with your team? Our platform allows you to have a communication stream where these work samples live, and a collaborative place to take notes and log next steps. Send us a note at info@edlight.com for more information.
Interested in using EdLight Instructional Coaches with your team? We’d also be happy to share a recording of an EdLight-Run Student Data Meeting. Send us a note at info@edlight.com
Master Educator @ EdLight, PBC. Deeply interested in the way feedback and data can drive learning.
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