Pub. 11 2021-2022 Issue 2

9 The idea was that if I could write a rigorous interim assessment designed to measure how well students mastered six to eight weeks’ worth of content, then those assessments would give me a road map to where our students needed to go. I pulled in the other nine sixth-grade teachers at my school, and we got to work. The second half of this plan was specific to the data. Our sixth-grade cohort sat around a large table and talked about which questions our students missed, why we thought they missed them, and (most importantly) what we were going to do about it. That year the average math proficiency on the old state assessment (CRT) rose from 28% to 65% (my own class was 88%). Results like that don’t come often. This was to be the end of the achievement gap! Unfortunately for the students of this school district, the end of the achievement gap was not on the way. Several teachers were uncomfortable with sharing their class’s performance with the team, and the administrators thought it was too much work to get everyone to take the tests and develop a re-teaching plan. The whole experiment was scrapped by district administrators … so I decided to write a charter. I found a group of like-minded educators, and we started Wallace Stegner Academy — less than a mile away from our old school. The entire premise was that we would use data to drive our instruction, and we would close the achievement gap once and for all. Starting a charter school is no easy task, and I won’t say that there weren’t bumps along the road. However, we consistently double the proficiency of the schools around us. This is despite serving a population of over 70% of students who live in poverty. Our exact system of using data has evolved and improved over the years. We no longer use interim assessments to the degree we once did. Instead, we use exit tickets. Here is how it works: • Daily exit tickets are written for the entire year and are given to teachers on the first day of school. There are daily exit tickets for all three tested subjects (science, math, and language arts). These define the rigor and provide a road map for instruction. • Exit tickets include rigorous test items that were used on state assessments in Texas, New York, or Massachusetts. These states release a large number of their summative assessment items each year. • Results for every student are entered into a Google Sheet daily so that everyone on the team can see how every student and class performed on every item. • All teachers in each grade level along with the principal, form a “data team” that meets twice per week (we have common prep times to allow for this). • Data teams review the data, develop re-teaching plans (for whole class or small groups), and discuss the upcoming exit tickets. We’ve found that this degree of data-focused attention provides a level of accountability and rigor that would otherwise be missing. Our goal is not to discuss what standards have been covered; our goal is to discuss what our students have learned. This system provides a foundation for that mindset, and (with blood, sweat, and tears) we’ll close the achievement gap.

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