Is your Classroom Data reliable?
Are you keeping accurate and ethical data?
Thank You to all who accepted my invitation to School Goals Work on Substack!
In the weeks and months ahead, I will be posting on all aspects of in-school professional development and how you can experience great change with Effective Practice Management.
If you are not a teacher, or in education, the rules for Goal Setting, Prioritization and Time Management apply to you as well. Today, let’s begin with the most important part of all effective classroom practice management (No, it is not winning the bulletin board prize!) It is DATA!
Throughout my teaching career, I have drawn parallels to my career as a doctor as there are many common themes between the two. They are:
Teachers and doctors spend a good deal of time teaching, both content to students and about health to patients. After all, the word “doctor” means “teacher” in Latin.
Teachers and doctors provide a valuable service to the community.
Teachers and doctors enter their fields with selfless motives.
Teachers and doctors deal with volumes of data that they use to drive productivity in their respective workplaces.
Well… not number 4. While both collect troves of data from our students and patients, only doctors – and every other professional – use this valuable material, this gold, to increase productivity and efficiency. In other words, all other professionals run data-driven practices while teachers say they run data-driven practices (classrooms), but in reality, they do not.
In any truly data-driven practice (aka classroom) you need to have
lots of data.
accurate data.
honest data.
But in classrooms, while we have LOTS OF DATA, we are only using it for a small portion of its potential. And if we are truthful, much of this data is neither accurate nor honest.
Our data is not always accurate because we are not always honest with it. Data is massaged (I love it when teachers say that!) grades are changed, extra credit becomes a band-aid, and excuses are commonplace (for both student and teacher!) While this is not true for all teachers, we have all seen it much more than should be the case. How often are teachers meticulous about recording a student’s failing grades throughout the school year, only to swoop in at the 11th hour and give him or her a 65% instead of a 32% so they won’t have to deal with administration asking if they have documented all 17 steps necessary to have avoided said failure? Come on, be honest.
In business, the expression is “Your fee, is your fee, is your fee!” In education, we must adapt that to be “Your grade, is your grade, is your grade”, because your grades are your data, and if you fudge them, then you have no real data. Nada. I know many teachers offer students extra credit at the end of a semester to raise the students’ grades, but I don’t understand it. What was going on all year that necessitates an artificial bump in a classes’ overall average? How did we get there? Low grades? Difficult tests? Missing homework? Once you offer extra credit to raise (artificially inflate) student’s grades, you automatically invalidate the class data. That data is now bogus and unusable, because classes’ passing grades are no longer in alignment with your curriculum. The student’s passing science grade is now a result of some unrelated extra credit paper about nothing remotely related to science. While we are the top of the food chain of professions, ours is the only one where we can falsify data and there will be few, if any, consequences. But if you were a doctor…
It would be like having a doctor remind you to have an extra cup of coffee before he checks the status of your low blood pressure so you can be accepted for an insurance policy. Bingo! Your notes read that the blood pressure is now fine. The underlying problem remains, and the data is void.
Or say a doctor is sued for not providing treatment that he has billed out for, and is reimbursed for it. To cover his tracks, he goes back in his records, changes his notes to (falsely) show he did provide a certain treatment. Bingo! Billing “error” fixed! The original problem remains, and the data is void.
Not only are the records corrupted, data is worthless, but these doctors stand an excellent chance of losing their license or going to jail. Doctor’s records are legal documents and carry a tremendous amount of importance. A person’s life may depend on them being accurate. Shouldn’t the same be true for school records?
But what happens about corrupt or worthless student grades? So your student (or 100 students) are given the opportunity, after failing your science class, to write a 2-page essay on the importance of developing good study habits that promises them a passing grade. What happens? Not a damn thing. Your administration will not fault you, your colleagues will think it a genius idea (and use it) and parents are thrilled that their little darlings passed your science class – not by learning the content, but by writing some irrelevant paper having nothing to do with cell structure or dichotomous classification. Heck, I’ve had colleagues tell me they never give any grade below 90% and the administration knows this and loves them! What kind of bizarre pedagogical nightmarish world are we living in??
Or how about attendance? Picture this. Jimmy arrives late to your class by only two minutes, so you do not mark him late. Yes, this happens way too often. During your lunch, your principal calls your room to ask if Jimmy was late to your class. You don’t remember, so you look at your records and see he was on time as you forgot he was late, and you marked him on time. You ask why? The principal tells you another child was pushed down the stairs immediately after the bell. He is in the hospital with a concussion and another student says he saw Jimmy push him and run towards your class. You said he was on time. What do you do? Tell the principal you falsified attendance records? A teacher’s records and data are just as important as any other professional’s records and data. So let’s start treating them that way.
Back to the extra credit essays. We grade them (that was easy, they all get a 100%) submit the new and improved grades and walk away like nothing ever happened.
But we still can’t figure out why nobody takes school, attendance, preparedness, and most of all grades seriously!
And if any other professional were to cook the books as teachers do (Is there a better way to say this?) it would result in serious consequences. Never mind that we are trying to prepare them for the real world, and this will not be accepted out here.
Are there other teachers who agree with this being totally wrong, illegal and in need of change? It is wrong, but there are some very smart and fun solutions for this.
And speaking of cooking the academic books, what about social promotion? It is defined by us as “just to get them out of the classroom”. Yes, it is unethical and should be reported to the proper authorities, but when that proper authority is your supervisor and her mandate is that no child is to fail your class where do you go then - if you value your job? And it happens every day in schools across the country. Is this all “fixable”? Yes!
Put this in perspective. Can you imagine a doctor telling a sick patient he is cured and does not need to return to his office, just because he wants him or her out of the office because they are a whining hypochondriac? Medical Social Promotion? Goodbye medical license (or at least suspended).
*Disclaimer – As a practice management consultant, my job is to work with teachers to identify and quantify specific issues related to practice management and to implement solutions to these problems. So please, do not take what I have said, am saying or will say in the future as being negative or “anti-teacher” – because it is not. I love teaching and teachers, but they need help and I want to help them become even better. To do so will make some teachers uncomfortable, but that change is unavoidable. Change is never easy. According to Michael Mehlberg, business strategist and organizational freak, “Self-improvement requires change. It requires us to do things we’re not familiar with, that we’re uncomfortable with.”
Change is uncomfortable, but if you don’t change, you cannot grow!
Teachers do not like change, mainly because most of the required changes thrust upon them (during every PD!) usually involves one more nothing-burger moving towards the redundant and ridiculous end of the educational professional development spectrum. We are fed up, so let’s do something, but remember this change will not come easily.
My posts will not be routine teacher pep talks. You need to begin thinking outside of your box – way outside. I need you to abandon the thinking that you are different than the other professionals out there, like surgeons, lawyers, dentist and all other professionals. You are not different, you are better! For where would they be without teachers. To begin, you must change the paradigm thinking that “We are different because we shape young minds.” Unfortunately, for many schools and students, we have all seen that shaping process on hiatus the past several years. Do you know who also shapes young minds? Doctors, dentists, accountants and every other specialist or authority figure that young people come in contact with. How about psychiatrists or psychologists? They shape young minds, too. So with this in mind, it only makes sense that you must be better than all the rest combined! As Albert Einstein said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” Let’s see how much you can change.
By making changes in how we run our classrooms using Goal Setting, Prioritization, Time Management and Scripting we can convert all this bad data into rock solid “data-driving” data!
The first step, and my next post, will show you how to get clean, accurate and useful data that can be used in your data-driven classroom.