I’ve been struggling with how to write this post until I read Bud the Teacher’s post, Data Dashboards; suddenly things started to fall into place a bit more.

My struggle is this. Every year our district sets goals. Here’s this year’s building goal for my school:

During the 2012-2013 school year, at least 80% now in 3^rd and 4^th grade and who are performing below benchmark will increase their standard score by a minimum of twelve points on the reading assessment.  The measure used will be the Iowa Assessment reading test.

In a few months we’ll be getting those data back that show whether we’ve met that goal or not. Teachers always fight a variety of emotions when these “data days” happen, ranging from depression to head-scratching puzzlement. Each year some kids make it and others don’t, and we never really know why. We suspect our most successful years are the result of setting lower goals, not necessarily better learning. Each year, it seems, teachers are left wondering how these goals have helped us change things in important ways? Some of us ask ourselves how our teaching lives could have become so circumscribed as to be about moving 80% of the students who struggle twelve standard points on the Iowa Assessment. If goals are a statement of purpose…? Ugh.

Along comes Bud and his book club read, The 4 Disciplines of Execution. Read his post to find out more of what his leadership team is doing, but what I took away was that educators can measure leading or lagging indicators. And that distinction helped me realize why we all feel so depressed on “data days” by both our failures AND our successes; we’re measuring a lagging indicator and we don’t know what effect our efforts have had on whether we reach the standardized test goal. Along with that, we suspect that standardized test scores don’t really tell us much about the complex humans we have in our classrooms.

Enter a new set of “leading” indicator-type measures, rather than the “lagging” student achievement measures. The book, Bud writes, argues for setting meaningful goals (the author calls them something like, “wildly important goals”, which sounds wildly impressive), then developing a set of leading indicators or measures and a mechanism (a scoreboard or dashboard) to keep track of them. Here’s an example. Imagine the meaningful goal we set was for students to become better readers who think deeply about what they are reading. (You could probably think of a better worded one!) Your next step is to think of things that you could track that would “lead” you toward that goal. It helps if you already know there is research and/or theory that backs up these as important.

Just thinking out loud here, but what about these as “leading” indicators that might move us toward our important goal of creating better readers and thinkers:

• Amount of reading time during the day, along with some sort of “effectiveness” measure, since time alone doesn’t exactly equate to high quality reading;
• A learning log or portfolio of ideas (blog, digital portfolios, whatever) — completed by the student and/or by a teacher — that documents student learning on specific “habits of mind” in order to demonstrate deep or metacognitive thinking. (FYI, I’m working on such a project now and will blog about it later!);
• A “flow-o-meter,” since getting lost in a book seems important. I’m sure it’s possible to keep track of this since it is lived experience. (By the way, I’ve never seen a kid who has found themselves lost in a book struggle as a reader for very long. I’ve rarely seen students who can’t get lost in a book make dramatic progress in reading.);
• A log of learning projects started and completed, since the ability to generate questions and sustain interest in learning seems to correlate to depth of learning. This kind of goal would also require us to set aside time to explore some kind of project-based learning.

Those are just a few ideas. Wouldn’t it be fun to think of what you’d keep track of? How you’d do that? How you could engage the students in keeping track of their own dashboard?

Something like this would be a much more concrete task to complete than moving kids on standardized test scores. Each of these leading indicators begs further conversation and research both of the reading and action kind. For example, we could explore improving instructional strategies around our independent reading time; how to set up learning tasks or improve classroom dynamics; how to set up learning “dashboards”, improve curricular goals, or whatever other important changes might result in higher “scores” on the “leading indicators.” Also, these would be more measurable in real-time than a standardized test score, so you’d know if you were making progress or not.

Finally, as a teacher it would be oh-so-much more fun to teach how to become a deeply engaged learner, to log their progress toward that goal, than to abstractly move 80% of the struggling students twelve standard points on the Iowa Assessment.

Thanks, Bud Hunt! I’ll be thinking more about goals and measurements and how they influence learning and teaching.