By Jedd Cohen, Seth Woodworth, and Josh Wairi
Getting “On the Same Page”: We can all see the data together, from any location
Update December 2011: this post was written this fall, when we expected to pilot the three dashboard views. Due to an undesired lag in final technological development, the “individual view” pilot has been delayed; we may do a small pilot of the “admin view” and “teacher view” this winter. Regardless, code has been created that pulls data out of Somerville’s Student Information System for quick viewing and can be put to use in any such “dashboard” project.
An idea common across Oneville’s projects has been: “A communication gap equals a gap in student service.” In diverse districts across the country, educators are often unable to share comprehensive student data, due to the high cost of cutting-edge student data systems. Families, for their part, are often unsure how to find all the relevant data on their children, and how to communicate with schools about it.
Over the past two years in our “dashboard” project, we – local technologists, teachers, researchers — have been working with families, afterschool providers, principals, and central administration in the Somerville School District to help make sure that key people can go to a single place – on the web – to find comprehensive data (as appropriate) for each student, class of students, and the entire school. We’ve been working together to design tools that not only display data, but also launch a focused conversation among stakeholders involved about how to support each student.
Three resulting dashboard views are open source web applications designed to link the family, teachers, principal, and afterschool providers to support each student’s success. Considering who usefully sees what data on children has been core to the dashboard project. We’ve created three views: an “admin view” for principals, which shows data on all students in the school; a “teacher view,” which shows each teacher data on the students in his or her class; and an “individual view,” designed to link teachers, afterschool providers, and families in communication about the details of an individual student’s profile. We’ll pilot each of these views at Somerville’s Healey School this fall: We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views with 5th grade teacher Josh Wairi and his students, and we’ll pilot the admin view with Principal Purnima Vadhera.
Details: What do the dashboards look like?
The admin and teacher views appear in the form of a colorful chart that allows sorting by up to four columns at a time. Original design model: an Excel spreadsheet made for the Healey School by Greg Nadeau, local parent! Based on feedback from former principal Jason DeFalco, we added: years at Healey, score growth on the MAP, ELL status, MEPA scores, IEP status, and afterschool program name:
Admin view (click image to enlarge)
Based on conversations with new Healey Principal Purnima Vadhera, we’ll also add average attendance over the past several weeks, to compare to the current week’s attendance, and 504 status. We may still add MCAS score and growth, MAP writing score and growth, and DIBELS and MELA-O scores. The updated admin view also creates scatter plots and bar graphs to display the relation between demographics and other data, i.e., achievement or attendance.
The admin and teacher views look like charts, displaying the same types of data for many students. The individual view is organized like a slideshow: Clicking on different tabs at the top of the page allow the viewer to see and comment on different parts of each student’s profile.
The narrative structure, as well as many decisions about exactly what to display in this view, came out of numerous brainstorming meetings last spring with author and Healey teacher Josh Wairi. We’ll pilot the individual and teacher views in his class in the fall. The individual view presents data such as attendance, grades, MCAS and MAP test scores and growth, and teacher comments – each type of data on its own page accessible by tabs at the top. (Most of this data is in Somerville’s “student information system,” just more scattered; we wanted to get it easily all in one place for a teacher and family/providers to see.) We’ve also created an interactive online version of Somerville’s K-6 report card, which parents are used to getting on a static piece of paper. We plan to add each student’s yearbook photo and data on allotted support services. Next to each ‘chunk’ of student data, “comment/question” boxes provide a space for the parent or afterschool provider to comment on the data by entering text that gets sent to the homeroom teacher’s email:
Individual view (click image to enlarge)
On the “Comments” page, the parent or afterschool provider can request that the teacher reply to their comments or make an appointment with them. Parents can specify any new contact info and convenient meeting times. After receiving these comments, the homeroom teacher can forward any relevant parts to the appropriate subject area teachers. (Josh feels that homeroom teachers would like to take the lead in responding to and informing other teachers about families’ comments.)
The Parent Connectors will help to make the user interface available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole (and we’ll use the district’s own translation for the report card). For more ongoing translation (email messages sent to and from parents, parent-teacher conferences, the summary comments on the dashboard), we’re adding links to Google Translate and to the Parent Connector calendar for setting up meetings with interpreters.
Knowing all the work that families and schools face on a daily basis, we’ve designed these tools to spark specific kinds of interaction around particular chunks of student data. How people use the tools will be up to them – but rather than have the tools just “display” data, we wanted the individual view, in particular, to also prompt and encourage communication about data.
Feedback and next steps:
We’ve asked for feedback on the tool throughout, showing it to administrators, families, and afterschool providers, including focused interviews with parents and students from Josh’s own class. In recent interviews, several immigrant parents emphasized the way the individual view dashboard sparks parent involvement: Smiling, one said, “Parents are not just left out of the school. With this, you are bringing them in, sucking them into the school curriculum!” When asked whether the dashboard might feel like extra work, another parent articulated his/her vision of parent involvement: “Not extra – you have children, you spend time to communicate. The more time you spend, the better students do.” One English-speaking parent with three children at the school explained that the dashboard’s comment and scheduling features solved a long-standing problem for her: After being a Healey parent for 11 years, she has only ever had time to meet with each of her children’s core academic teachers during PTA nights, but never the specialty teachers, e.g., music, art, support room teachers. Our dashboard enables and encourages parents like her to submit their questions, requests for meetings, and updated contact info to the student’s homeroom teacher, who will forward it to the specials teachers. Another parent was especially enthusiastic about online access: “I do everything on the computer now.” And another immigrant parent said he does “everything” on his smart phone!
In a recent meeting with OneVille staff, Principal Vadhera described the potential value of the integrated dashboard tools, in contrast to the old system of requesting info from many different people: “Right now, in just five minutes, I have seen a complete picture of the kid. Without even checking in with folks [other staff]. Normally, I would have to wait for them to get back to me, and bring charts and graphs to meetings. What a great way to launch conversation.”
Online access to this data could also help close an even more basic communication gap, as Vadhera noted: “Even having this [family dashboard] up there [online] for parents to go back to,” helps when “the report card didn’t get in the backpack, or whatever.” Clearly, no proverbial dogs will eat it once it’s online.
Students with IEPs and 504 plans sometimes need accommodations on the MCAS, and Purnima often spends “hours” going over the paper lists and checking with the teachers that students’ needs have been met. Our tool allows her to sort by IEP and 504 plans, so that all these students appear together, “so we don’t have moments when things fall through the cracks.”
Purnima and Josh both suggested that the dashboards could enhance teamwork among educators at Healey: In staff team meetings, access to each view could allow teachers and administrators to collaboratively assess a student’s needs, design targeted interventions, and, if desired, record their plan by submitting it as subject-specific comments that get archived in the homeroom (lead) teacher’s email. Such team conversations could involve the school’s “student support team” – a standing group of educators that evaluates struggling students – or each student’s individualized group of supporters, e.g. their homeroom teacher, Special Ed or ELL specialists, and reading/math resource room staff. Josh explained that another advantage to the individual view is that it could allow him to present a single student’s data in one of these team meetings without revealing all the other students’ grades unnecessarily (a breach of confidentiality).
We hope that these dashboards could be useful enough to help ensure that students’ needs are met, spark collaboration among educators, and catch on. As Principal Vadhera explained about our dashboards, “A lot of ideas start like THIS (gestures big with hands). And then they fail. This is a guinea pig, Josh can always share back, move forward in small increments. Maybe teachers would just want to get on board with this!”
We face the same challenges with the individual view as anyone working to enhance collaboration around students across barriers of income, racial/ethnic background, language difference and tech literacy. Not all parents have home access to computers and internet (though phones with internet access are increasingly popular), and some parents are not functionally literate in their home language. The same work schedules that make parent-teacher meetings hard also make it hard for some parents to coordinate their schedules with the computer labs at local libraries or in the housing projects where some families live.
We hope to work with the PTA this year to create basic computer and email training for Healey parents who need this support. We’ll be reaching out to parents in Mr. Wairi’s new class about how to support them to access the Internet. Several years from now, the proliferation of smartphones and iphones will likely shrink this challenge dramatically, making it easier than ever for partners to join the conversation about student data.