Over those three years, the school saw a huge shift in the achievement of students. The data teams focused on a narrow goal, but it had a broad impact as students were able to apply their understanding in the narrow focus to more aspects of the curriculum. The data teams began to see better differentiation through the process of determining which students had what kinds of needs, so all students were being more successful than they had previously been.
Landmark elementary saw two main obstacles in their implementation of data teams. The first was the amount of time they had to dedicate to the process. It took a total of eight hours over the course of a month to complete the first full process! As the teams learned how to work more productively as a data team, their meetings were able to become more efficient, and they were eventually able to shift their focus from collecting data to analyzing the data.
The second obstacle was the inability to continuously focus on the new initiative of data teams. They would start making positive progress, but then other things got in the way. Budget cuts led to stress, which removed the focus from data teams. It was easy to fall back into old habits. The building kept hitting a "cotton candy wall" and bouncing back to their old ways.
I have seen this happen to myself, my collaborative PLC, and my building as a whole. I have struggled with keeping the new techniques that are taught to me by Learning Sciences International in the forefront of my mind. I know the strategies and can implement them into most lessons, but sometimes I fall into the old routines I've developed, even though I've only had a few years to develop those routines. I can only imagine how difficult it is for more veteran teachers to change the way they've taught for many years. My PLC also struggles with "staying the course." Similar to what Landmark Elementary teachers did at the beginning of their implementation of data teams, we will set goals that end up being too unrealistic. When students don't meet those goals, we abandon them in favor of new goals rather than continuing to work toward them. We eventually forget completely about the goals we set early in the semester.
If time had been spent using Howard Gardner's Factors to Change People's Thinking (DuFour, Chapter 8), the teachers may have begun thinking about the data team process as critical to student achievement. When stress levels are high, teachers focus on the essential things they need to help their students succeed and forget about the extra "frills." When data teaming is an essential, it remains part of the focus no matter how much stress is present.
One things that worked well for Landmark Elementary is that they were able to take the time to develop the strategies that worked the best for their students. At my school, we are being told what strategies to use in order to be compliant with Schools for Rigor. My PLC is usually a high-functioning team, so I believe that we would be able to come up with different strategies, test them, and tweak them until we were seeing outstanding growth from our students. I do feel that we have put a lot of time into learning the Schools for Rigor strategies and implementing them, but as we get better at them, it takes less of our time. Landmark Elementary saw similar outcomes of their implementation of data teams.
While my PLC is usually high-functioning, we have most certainly had days where we were not operating to our full potential. This typically happened when our priorities for our meeting were not aligned with each other. I feel that the structure of the data team meeting could help us focus and align our priorities. Having more meetings where we are high-functioning would be great because I leave those meetings feeling inspired and motivated rather than frustrated and burnt out.
The benefit that arose from data teams at Landmark Elementary that I'm most affected by is that teachers and administrators became more accountable to each other and to the students. We want our students to hold themselves and each other accountable for their learning, but we often forget that we need to hold ourselves and our colleagues accountable for helping students succeed at a high level.
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