Data Driven Instruction

So week 4 is coming to a close, and by the end of the day tomorrow I'll have at least 7 points of data on each of the students in my class (with the exception of the one new student who started at the end of last week - I'll have 3 for her) and they're all going into this very fancy excel spreadsheet that TFA has drawn up (that my entire school now uses) that color codes each student's standing in relationship to the class goal that you set. It's all part of "data driven instruction", which is the hot new thing in education. I have no idea how the tracker does what it does (I'm not very good with excel) but I love it.

I know a lot of people aren't crazy about the idea of looking solely at scores on assessments to determine what we're doing in our classrooms, you know, the holistic child approach. And while I fully believe that you can't put your blinders on and look just at the numbers, I'm also wholeheartedly invested in the theory and practice of data driven instruction. By breaking down each student's performance into a series of scores, you can see not only which students are doing well and which are struggling, but also specific areas of strength and weakness. I can see that because my student doesn't have a strong grip on place value and number sense, they don't do well in comparing and ordering numbers because those are skills that require an understanding of place value. This way, I don't go back to comparing and ordering before touching on place value and number sense; I could beat them over the head with how to compare numbers but if they don't know that 100 is worth more than 10, they're never going to know how to tell that 438 is worth more than 399.

Anyway, I'm writing this while sitting in grad class at UNC-Charlotte (shhhh...don't tell the professor) so my thoughts are not very put together or well articulated. But I'll close out with a story about the best part of my day:
Let me first say that my students do NOT get along well with one another. It's a rare half hour that goes past without someone calling someone else a name, or the passing of a shouting match, or someone kicking someone else. That said, I'm bound and determined to teach them how to work together, because it's centrally important to their development as students and people. So today I split my students into groups of 3 with one reading textbook per group (since I only have 7 textbooks for my class of 21), told them that they should take turns reading out loud, that they should read through the entire story, that they should complete a T-chart contrasting life in the United States and life in Korea (the book was about a girl who moves from Korea to the US), and that they had 30 minutes to do so. I let their group choose where in the room they would sit, with the understanding that they should not be close enough to any other group to talk to them. I set the timer and sent them on their merry way, and I walked around the room, expecting the typical behavior management nightmare that occurs every time we do group work. Instead, I saw my students working on task the entire time, with completed products that genuinely impressed me.

Those surprised moments of sheer joy are why I teach for equality.