Principal Pat Wroten

TIES Principals Data Academy helped Orono Middle School Principal Pat Wroten do exactly what it was aimed at — get a handle on how to use data as a building administrator.

The academy “was a very positive experience for me,” she said. “One of the things that attracted me to the academy is that we have been engaged in a continuous improvement process in looking at data and what’s happening in our district, buildings, classrooms and with individual students. The academy helped me learn what questions you ask and what are the sources of data.” 

“I learned how to use data to help me as a building administrator look at how children are progressing in Math 6 and Enriched Math 6 curriculum and determine if our curriculum and instruction were matching the learning needs of all students.”

With the techniques she learned in the Data Academy, she was able to take the data the school had been collecting and break it down so she could see groups of students and how they performed in Math 6 and Enriched Math 6 sections. That has led her and her staff to explore ways to differentiate the curriculum and instructional delivery to better meet the learning needs of sixth-graders in math. As the master schedule is developed for the 2007-2008 school year, this data will be used to determine the type and number of course sections that will be developed for sixth-grade math.

Framing conversations around data

Her Data Academy experience helped Wroten frame the “collaborative conversations around student performance data” that she and her staff must have, she said. “We were doing pieces of it,” she said, “but having gone to the academy gave me the umbrella piece, the way to pull it all together.”

She appreciated the insights she gained at the academy into the possibilities for data-driven decision-making available through tools such as the TIES Enterprise Performance Management System powered by Cognos. “The academy was a chance to find out what some of those tools could do for me and to learn what questions to ask.”

Learning from other principals

Wroten also valued the opportunity to learn from colleagues during the academy. “The initiatives of fellow attendees really helped. I could see that now that we were getting that kind of trend data on students, we could look at what others have done with it. It was very encouraging because it can be overwhelming. But others (at the academy) had been able to refine it, and we could just pick it up from that point.”

Wroten wanted to compare the fall to spring growth rates of students in her Enriched Math 6 and Math 6 courses, as well as the progress across students in the Math 6 courses. She felt that not all students were benefiting equally from the curriculum. This table displays how Wroten drilled down to examine growth rates for students between Math 6 and Enriched Math 6 and how she further drilled down to compare growth rates for students in Math 6. Students in Math 6 were divided into four groups based on their initial math score in the fall (less than 230, 230-235, 235-245, and 245 and above). Wroten found that students who started out the year with higher levels of performance tended to grow much more than those who began in the fall with lower performance. And regression to the mean is not a factor, because if it were, you would expect the opposite to be true. This analysis led to a clear, measurable definition of the problem. After implementing the staff’s plan for responding to this issue, Wroten will analyze these data again to measure the impact of these new initiatives.