A Snapshot in Time

When I weigh myself, I look at the scale and write down the weight that I see at that moment. Student assessments are similar. An assessment is a snapshot of the student's performance at that place and time. And then behaviors are the same. What I don't do is think of all the different weights in my life and write down the range of weights that I have weighed in my life.

When I was thinking about how to better analyze data we collect from our Student Support Data Collection form, I looked at the "Approximate time of day concerning behavior occurs" field. I have a lot of data in that field that looks like this: 

[Morning Class time 8:30 - 10:50, Morning Class time 10:50 - 12:00, Mid day class, Lunch - Lunch recess, Afternoon classes].

Data is always easier to work with when it is singular. One cell, one piece of data. I set up this form to try to make it easier for teachers to report on students, but by setting up the time field in this way, I have muddled the data set and have made analyzing data much harder. 

Next year, I am planning on reintroducing the data form in August and talking more about why data is collected in this way and how it works.

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.

What story is your data telling?

For our unit on Who We Are, the focus is on Health and Balance. We have been keeping a Health Journal so we could reflect on how diet, sleep, and exercise affect how we feel.

For the past few days, we have been graphing the data. Today I showed my students a sample graph for "my" sleep pattern I had made that showed a sharp increase in the amount of sleep I was getting.

One sharp student noticed it and asked what had happened to make the graph jump like it did. I said I didn't know - maybe I had learned how important sleep was just before it jumped. You could also see that the graph plateaued after the sharp increase.

I guided students through this one, but I wish I hadn't. It would have been interesting to see them try to think through it by themselves. Maybe I could have put them into groups so they had support.

We will have to revisit interpreting graphs sometime, but until then, I need to learn to back off and let the students do what they do best.

Teach Curation

Something hit me as I was bookmarking websites today, "I have a lot of tags that are not useful so I should go through sometime and fix them." Finding information and referring to it is something I use all the time. Looking at some of the tags I have used, I find many that are not so descriptive.

Then, for some reason, I wondered what students today do. I don't know why I went in that direction, but I realized (remembered?) that curation is a skill I should teach more.

Automotive Social 

Content by Mr Rohit Bhargava

Image by Welenia Studios 

via Flickr

Come to think of it, teaching how to organize a hard drive or Google Drive is another skill they should learn -- or at least learn different ways of organizing.