Journey From Data Into Instruction: How Teacher Teams Engage in Data-Driven Inquiry

• In Event: 43.032 - Relationships of Policy and Teacher Learning

Abstract

Data-driven inquiry has become a popular form of teacher collaboration, yet the impact of such interventions is decidedly mixed, raising questions about how teachers adjust their instruction in response to data. This study follows three grade level teams engaged in data inquiry in order to understand the processes through which teachers design instructional responses to student-learning challenges identified in data. I find that one team was able to deploy instructional responses that addressed the learning gaps noticed in data while the other two teams were not. I hypothesize that differences in instructional knowledge and whether teams’ discourse focused on instruction or curriculum may explain these results. Furthermore, teachers made individual, not team, decisions about which instructional adjustments to adopt.

Author

• Johanna Barmore, WestEd