Leveraging Student Achievement Data for Teachers’ Learning: The Facilitator’s Role

• In Event: Facilitating Teachers’ Learning: Practices That Support Math Teachers in Developing Ambitious Practice

Abstract

The use of student achievement data is often touted as a “best practice” for supporting teachers’ professional learning during teachers’ collaborative work time (e.g., DuFour, 2004). National, state, and district policymakers are increasingly supportive of data use interventions, and school district leaders have invested considerably in training school personnel to “use” student achievement data (Turner and Coburn, 2012). However, recent work has shown that the use of student data can be framed in a number of different ways, and these frames do not equally support teachers’ opportunities to learn (Booher-Jennings, 2005; Horn, Kane, and Wilson, 2013). Thus, “data use” is not inherently useful for supporting teachers’ professional learning. My research question, then, is: How can facilitators of collaborative workgroups support teachers’ professional learning through data use?

Research data came from a two-year study of six middle schools in two urban school districts, which were selected because district and school-based personnel recommended them as sites of strong math teacher collaboration. This analysis focuses on video data—which was collected over the course of one year in two middle schools. Located in the same urban district, both schools were under strong pressure to meet state achievement benchmarks because of previous failure to do so, as is revealed in interview data from district leaders, principals, coaches, and teachers. Thus, these middle schools are cases in which the use of data was value-laden and consequential. They are also cases in which facilitators had high-levels of content and pedagogical expertise, according to measures of both their views of high quality math instruction (VHQMI; Munter, 2009) and their views of students’ mathematical capabilities (VSMC; Jackson & Gibbons, 2013). Nonetheless, teachers had greater access to opportunities to learn (OTL; Gee, 2008) in one group.

To understand why, I use discourse analysis and grounded theory to make connections between findings coming out of video and interview data (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). This data set and method enables me to make connections between facilitators’ conversational processes and the larger context in which workgroups collaborate, in order to better understand teachers’ opportunities for learning as they use data. Preliminary findings suggest that facilitators support teachers’ opportunities for professional learning by:
1) Negotiating activity structures for data use with administrators
2) Creating shared access to representations of the classroom (e.g., teachers’ descriptions of the classroom, examples of student work)
3) Pressing for attention to student thinking about mathematical concepts
4) Connecting instructional repertoires to students’ mathematical thinking
5) Modeling responsive instructional repertoires

Implications include that perhaps the most valuable contribution a facilitator can make is to frame data use in ways that enable teachers to analyze student thinking and to connect instructional repertoires to that analysis. Without a frame for the use of student data that entails careful attention to what is happening in the classroom and to student thinking, other valuable practices—such as making connections between student thinking and ambitious instructional repertoires or modeling such repertoires—become untenable.

Author

• Britnie Delinger Kane, Vanderbilt University