Super Hero Cape

Unlike my Monday Musing stated last week, I am the official “where is my _________” girl. In my home my motto is-Everything  has a place and everything in its place. There is no junk drawer in the kitchen. There is no catch it all basket in the foyer. Everything has a specific place where it belongs…….book bags on their hooks in the carport, phones and MacBooks have a charging station in the family room, stamps have a small basket in the first drawer beside the refrigerator, keys belong on the neatly placed hooks by the door-where you’ll conveniently find outgoing mail-you get the idea.  It is a fabulous system- yet I am the only one that follows it!

You see I live with boys. Book bags are left at the kitchen table after homework is done, keys are thrown on the pool table as they enter the house or left in the pants they were wearing when they throw them in the laundry basket. I am called upon when one of the boys in my house cannot locate ___________ (fill in the blank here with just about anything you can imagine).

Last week when we had our unexpected day off Monday due to the hurricane, I spent some much-needed hours working at JBE. Around 1pm, I received a phone call from Rosebro2 who was desperately searching for his homework folder. I immediately stepped into superhero mode asking a few questions like when did you have it last, what where you doing the last time you had it, etc. Within a minute, I had magically, over the phone, located his folder. His response, “How do you do that?”

As I got off the phone, took off my superhero cape, and reflected on that statement “how do you do that”, I realized that I can “do that” because I am a trained educator who uses data. The boys run around frantically searching place to place in obvious places while I stop and ask questions. I gather data. I also have schema like- where was the darned folder the last time he lost it. The other piece to this is trust. For instance, Rosebro2 once lost his phone. When I started the data collection phase, I realized that the data was skewed. Rosebro2 had taken his phone into his room-which is against our house rules-therefore making the data unreliable- because he wasn’t telling the truth. This is one reason why I love that we do so any many of our own beginning of the year testing-not only do we get to know our students, we also know the data is reliable. 

Now that we have almost completed our beginning of the year testing, it is now time to “do that”- it is time to analyze the data. Data is important. It helps tell us what our students know and don’t know. Yet, when we dig a little deeper we can figure out how to utilize strengths to develop skills, how to use students’ interests, and use our schema to use strategies that we’ve used with similar students to help our current students.  If we don’t use the data appropriately, we become like the Rosebros running around frantically searching in place to place (think Pinterest, Teacher pay teacher here) looking for solutions and praying it will work or at least keep them busy. Instead why not borrow my super hero cape and use the data to start asking those questions. How can I use this data to set up my small groups? Does this child have an attendance issue? Why is there such a huge gap in ELA and Math achievement and what can I do to lessen the gap? What skills are missing? Where do I need to start to meet my kids where they are rather than where I wanted them to be? As one of my favorite quotes states, ““The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.”