Going Deeper with Data

We have been using data more than ever to understand our student's progress and reflect on our teaching. Benchmark assessments, formative assessments, mid-module assessments, progress monitoring, and unit assessments all tell a story about the gaps in student learning. Teaching to fill the gaps - teaching to mastery - is still a mystery to many of us. Digging deep enough to use that data to see a clearer picture into children's understanding and misconceptions is powerful. Planning proactively - saying "because I know this about this student, I will be prepared with this strategy" - is so different than reacting to what a child's gaps in understanding may be and re-stating or re-explaining. Really teaching to mastery is about student understanding and having students prove how they understand a concept or skill in many different ways. Simply put - it is deeper, not wider.

Going deeper to fill gaps in student learning requires a deep understanding of the standards, our students, and the specific competencies and foundational skills that our students must have to achieve mastery. This is very different than re-teaching by providing students with similar questions or problems (or parallel tasks) in order to achieve mastery because it involves a deeper analysis to determine what is missing in the students' understanding of the standard. If we take standard, for example RL 5.3 which states "Compare and contrast two or more characters, settings, or events in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., how characters interact)," In order to teach to mastery of this standard, we must know what the competencies and skills are that make up this standard. There is no process or short cut that we can give students to master this kind of deep thinking. Students must be able to identify character traits, determine text details that identify the setting, make inferences, identify cause and effect, understand rich vocabulary, identify similarities and differences, and use details to understand the context of dialogue and narration. This takes practice and classroom structures that support this type of thought and analysis.

 In a Reader's Workshop model, teachers model metacognition and text analysis in order to build the capacity for students to think deeply and carry on their own dialogue. In the video clip below, you see how the teacher models both the kind of thinking he expects around the standards and his expectations for students to carry on this kind of dialogue on their own.

 

Click here to view video directly.

Our expectations as teachers and the structures that we implement to support student learning will lead to the type of learners we produce. Our understanding of the standards and the competencies and skills that our students must have in order to achieve mastery will impact the way we plan and the way we use data to teach for mastery. If we understand our students, our data, and the standards, we can produce amazing results in student achievement that will have a lasting impact on our students' lives.