The Digital Educator 2 | Page 5

1. Building the Foundation of Collaborative Inquiry

A crucial step in foundation building is for School Based Inquiry Teams to examine and reflect on their school’s demographic data and assess their school’s capacity to create a data culture that supports the learning for all students.

2. Identify Student Learning Problems

School Based Inquiry Teams develop data literacy by examining multiple sources of student-learning data. The outcome of this is a clearly articulated student-learning problem and targeted goals that can be supported by multiple data sources.

3. Verify Causes of the Student Learning Problems

Examining possible causes of student-learning problems, instructional practices, and relevant research-based policies and practices that ensure solving the student-learning problem.

4. Generate Solutions for the Student Learning Problems

SBITs will draw upon best-practices and apply logic-model thinking to generate valid solutions to improve student performance.

5. Implement Solutions; Monitor for and Achieve Results

SBITs help classroom teachers implement new practices that solve student-learning problems. The team gathers data to monitor implementation and results and identifies any mid-course corrections that may be needed.

Source: BPS Office of Strategic Alignment and Innovation Newsletter, Issue 4

The Data Driven Instruction Process

The most recent of these implementations, Illuminate, debuted this fall in the BPS. Illuminate is the online system the District uses to create and manage the delivery of District and school assessments. Illuminate was selected by BPS over a number of other systems due to the system’s ability to deliver many types of assessments, its flexibly, strong data reporting capabilities, and its easy-to-use web interface.

BPS teachers and administrators are already seeing early benefits from the new system. Between October and November of this school year, over 50,000 student assessments were completed using Illuminate with nearly 40,000 of the assessments being completed wholly online. This has provided a rich data set (District, School and Student), especially from the first round of math and ELA common formative assessments.

Data Driven Instruction and Inquiry (DDI) is a precise and systematic approach to improving student learning throughout the year. The inquiry cycle of data-driven instruction includes assessment, analysis, and action and is a key framework for school-wide support of all student success. - www.engageny.org

A real benefit that our stakeholders have found especially helpful is when an assessment is completed online, the results are instantly available on the BPS Illuminate website. This makes the instructional response to the data even faster. Further, when these assessment results are used in conjunction with the other available data sets from Infinite Campus and EdVantage, this provides stakeholders a solid foundation toward the DDI process of assessment, analysis, and action.

More information and helpful tips for all of our IT systems, including the BPS Illuminate Assessment Management System, can be found on the BPS website.

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