Data-Driven Instruction When Data Is This Year's Focus: What to Collect, Who Collects It, and How It Reaches a Meeting

Somewhere in August a principal stands in front of the staff and says that this year the building is going to focus on data: collecting it, looking at it, and using it to help students. Most teachers have heard that sentence before. The ones who have been teaching for twenty years have heard it four or five times, and they can tell you how it usually ends: a new spreadsheet, a data wall in the workroom, two data meetings in October, and by February everyone is back to what they were doing.

The initiative does not fail because teachers resist data. It fails because "data" was never defined, so everyone collects something different, the collection is extra work on top of the real work, and nothing that was collected reaches a decision. This post is a plan for one building to get those three things right.

Start with the decisions, not the data

Data-driven instruction, in the sense Paul Bambrick-Santoyo gave the phrase in Driven by Data, is a cycle: assess, analyze, act. Interim assessments every six to eight weeks, an analysis meeting on the results, a re-teaching plan. That cycle is good and most schools that try it see something from it.

But it runs on one kind of data, interim assessment scores, and it runs six times a year. The decisions a school makes about a struggling student happen weekly: does the Tier 2 group continue, is the behavior plan working, has the family been told, is this student ready for a referral. Those decisions need a different, more frequent layer of data, and that layer is what most "data initiatives" are actually reaching for without saying so.

So before anyone opens a spreadsheet, write down the five or six decisions the building makes about individual students and when it makes them. Something like:

• Weekly: which students are going quiet or dipping, and who follows up.
• Every two to three weeks: does each Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention continue, change, or end.
• Monthly: which families need a conversation, and what do we show them.
• Per IEP cycle: is the goal on track, and what is the evidence.
• Per referral: did we try the right things, for long enough, with fidelity.

Every piece of data you collect should feed at least one of those. Anything that does not is a report, and reports are what February is made of.

What to collect

Four kinds of record cover nearly every decision on that list. The point of naming them is to stop collecting a fifth and sixth kind that no decision needs.

Goal data. For any student with a measured goal, academic or behavioral, a data point on the goal at the cadence the plan calls for: trials correct, frequency of the behavior, minutes on task, a yes or no on the skill. The IEP progress monitoring guide covers the measurement types; the same types work for a Tier 2 reading goal as for an IEP goal.

Incidents with context. For behavior, what happened, what came before it, and what came after. An ABC record takes a minute to log and is the only kind of behavior data that tells you why, which is the only thing a plan can act on.

What was delivered. Which intervention ran, how many minutes, how many times this week. Which accommodation was provided on which days. This is the record nobody keeps and everybody needs, because the question at the referral meeting is always "did we actually do it," and "we meant to" is not a data point. Accommodation fidelity is the clearest example.

Observations. The sentence a teacher would say in the hallway: "He read the whole passage without stopping today." Dated, attributed, attached to the student. Observations are what make the numbers mean something at the meeting, and they are the thing families actually read.

That is the list. Attendance and interim assessments live in your SIS and your assessment platform already; leave them there and pull them in when a decision needs them. Do not ask teachers to re-type either.

Who collects it

The person who saw it, at the time they saw it, in the room where it happened. Every other arrangement loses data on the way.

This sounds obvious and it is the rule most initiatives break first, because the initiative gets assigned to a coordinator, and the coordinator builds a tracker, and the tracker lives on her laptop, and so teachers hand her sticky notes on Fridays. By November she is transcribing and the sticky notes are two weeks old.

In practice "the person who saw it" means:

• The classroom teacher logs goal data and observations for her own students.
• The para or aide who runs the intervention logs the session: it happened, for this long, with this result.
• The interventionist or special education teacher logs the goal probe.
• The counselor logs her own notes, in a place the rest of the team cannot read.

This only works if logging takes less time than the sticky note. Ten seconds on a phone or a Chromebook tab, with the student and the goal already set up, is the ceiling. A tool that requires opening a laptop, finding the spreadsheet, and scrolling to the right row will lose to the notebook in the second week; why teachers go back to paper is the whole case study.

How often

Set the cadence per decision, not per tool. Goal data at whatever the plan says, usually two or three times a week for a Tier 3 goal and weekly for Tier 2. Delivery, every time the intervention runs. Incidents, every time. Observations, whenever one is worth writing down, which for most teachers settles at one or two a day across the class.

Then enforce one cadence that is not about students: a short weekly look. Fifteen minutes, same time each week, the support team and whoever leads the initiative, with one list in front of them: who has gone quiet, who dipped, who has a meeting coming. That list should be generated, not compiled. If someone has to spend Thursday afternoon building it, it will not survive the first busy Thursday.

How it reaches a meeting

The last mile is where most initiatives quietly stop. The data exists, in the tracker or the notebooks, and the meeting happens, and the two do not meet, because getting from one to the other means somebody reconstructing nine weeks of entries into a summary the night before.

The fix is to make the meeting output a view of the record rather than a document built from it. For an IEP review, the goal trend, the recent data points, the accommodations delivered, and the observations, selected by the case manager and reviewed before anything is exported. For an MTSS meeting, the intervention timeline and the response. For a family conference, the plain-language version of the same evidence, in the family's language, with the teacher choosing what to include.

Two rules make this honest. The team reviews the output before it leaves the building; nothing goes to a family or a meeting unseen. And the output cites the record: every number in the packet is a data point somebody logged on a date, so when the meeting asks "where does that come from," the answer is on the screen.

What to stop collecting

Every data initiative should retire something, or it is purely additive and teachers will be right to resent it.

Candidates, in rough order of how often they turn up:

• The weekly behavior report card that is filled in on Friday from memory.
• The "data binder" that is assembled for the walkthrough and not opened otherwise.
• Any tracker that duplicates a number the SIS already holds.
• The hallway data wall with student names on it, for FERPA reasons as much as for workload.
• The end-of-quarter narrative that re-describes the data in paragraphs.

If the record is kept as it happens, every one of those becomes either a view of the record or unnecessary.

A six-week start for one building

Week 1. Write the decision list. Pick the four record types. Choose where the record lives; one place, tied to the student rather than to the adult who made the entry, with roles so the counselor's notes stay hers and the principal sees coverage rather than content. What teachers should see versus the support team is a useful way to think about the roles.

Week 2. Set up the support team first: the special education teachers, the interventionists, the counselor, the coordinator. Six to ten people. Students they share get set up once. This is the team that already does the work; they are the pilot whether you call it that or not.

Weeks 3 and 4. Log. Goal data, delivery, incidents, observations. Do not look at dashboards yet. The habit is the deliverable.

Week 5. First weekly look, fifteen minutes, from the generated list. Fix whatever made the list wrong: a goal set up badly, a student missing, a para who did not get access.

Week 6. Run one meeting from the record. An IEP progress review or an MTSS check, whichever comes first. Note what the team had to reconstruct by hand, and set that up so it is not reconstructed next time.

After six weeks you have a team logging, a weekly list, and one meeting that ran from the record. That is a data initiative that will still be running in February. Expand to classroom teachers from there, one grade level at a time, when the support team can show the grade level what it got out of it.