Data Coach for Teachers

Awardees: Luis Duarte (HGSE) and Nadine Rubinstein (HGSE)

Summary: Teachers and administrators in public schools are under significant pressure to conduct “data driven instruction” and “data driven school improvement.” In other words, teachers and administrators need to use student-level data (test scores, interim assessments, attendance, socio-emotional learning data, disciplinary data, and more) to decide how they will adjust their practice day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year. This is a good thing–in any organization, you would want decisions to be made based on data! However, there are few tools that educators can turn to to help them with this process. In many instances, teachers and/or administrators spend hours putting together spreadsheets or “trackers,” creating data systems, and uploading or transferring data from various sources into a central location. Time is being wasted while educators compile and analyze the data; this time could be much better spent action-planning based on what the data shows.