How the To&Through Middle Grades Network Uses Data to Improve Student Experiences and Educator Practice

• In Event: Transforming Students' Daily Experience of School: Using Student Experience Data to Improve Educators' Classroom Practice

Abstract

This session will highlight how two schools in the To&Through Middle Grades Network (MGN) used data from the Elevate survey to strengthen relationships, improve student outcomes and experiences, and shift educator practice. More specifically, it will highlight the change ideas that educators tested at their respective schools to improve meaningful work and teacher caring in the eyes of middle grades students.
The MGN partners with cohorts of Chicago Public Schools to create more equitable and supportive educational environments where middle grades students thrive. The network aims to increase the number of students with attendance at or above 90% and GPAs at or above 3.0 through a meaningful increase in students' sense of belonging.
Participating schools redefine the middle grades experience by using qualitative and quantitative data to understand student experiences, develop a problem of practice, and test change ideas that positively impact the experiences and outcomes of middle grades students. The work of the network is grounded in adolescent development research such as the Foundations for Young Adult Success and Teaching Adolescents to be Learners and the importance of giving middle grades students voice in and ongoing opportunities to co-design their educational experiences. The process involves bi-weekly team meetings in which schools analyze data with support from their MGN coach. The goal is to use data to both understand the impact of their change ideas in order to improve student's sense of belonging and Elementary On-Track rates. The team works together to find themes, design follow up questions or activities (including sharing this information with students), and making decisions about the effectiveness of their change idea.
After analyzing the response data from the student experience surveys administered at a multitude of schools, MGN has been able to help schools with what has been shown to be a pervasive issue in classrooms: students feeling as though the curriculum does not constitute meaningful work or relate to students’ real life. In response to these findings, many educators in the MGN began incorporating systematic instructional changes such as asking explicit questions at the end of lessons about how students could use this information, giving students choices in assignments, framing the lesson using real life examples, or introducing new materials that connected to different parts of students’ identities. By adopting an approach to instructional improvement that was responsive to student experience data, educators across the network saw that students were more engaged in the learning and had better outcomes not only academically but socially and emotionally.

Author

• Ashley Nicole Leonard, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author