Visualizing Student Support Data with Google Sheets

 In the beginning

I joined the [formerly-called] SEN team last year. The team was using anecdotal records for their data collection. The issue was that it was kind of a black box -immediately I wondered how I would know if the strategies I was using with students in my care were helping them reach their goals.

Last year, I helped the team reimagine some ways to collect data on student behavior through the use of rubrics, checklists, and goal trackers. We also had teachers write anecdotal notes about students while observing their behavior.

This year, the school created a new position, inclusion support coordinator. The first thing she did when she came in was to ask how we could collect data from teachers more easily. I was elated to hear this and suggested we use a Google Form that could be easily bookmarked to the browser, so that's what we did. She pushed teachers to use it when they suspected academic or behavioral issues with students. We also did away with the former ways of collecting data to try to save teachers' time.

The form responses before visualization.

With the data collected from the Form, we started by filtering the responses into the different programs; PYP, MYP, and DP. This was good, but after a month, we could see that it was hard to read. I also started asking my coordinator and principals what kind of data they look at when viewing it, and I started thinking about how to take their feedback, what I knew about what I would want to see as a homeroom teacher, and I started thinking of how. I could make this all visual. 

In my head, we would see the current weeks' totals along with the top five students. I also had this idea of a student lookup in my head.

The idea I had brewing in my head was a Google Form that could be easily bookmarked. In my head, we would collate the responses, and these would become the updated form question responses.

I had this other idea that we would have a lookup of student with the goals and the support plan. 

My demo of a student lookup 

Over winter break, as I spent the days at my in-laws house, I got to work making a dashboard. 

For this dashboard, I wanted a few things, data visualization, simple, more data, and better visualizations - right now, there's a lot of text.

Going forward, this exercise should show that data needs to be consolidated and accessible. 

Here's what it looks like.

Then I broke it. I committed the cardinal sin of editing the response sheet. After editing the response sheet, it no longer connected with the dashboard I made. 

The good thing is that I have a better idea of what I want to do next year.