Protocols for Scaling the Assessment Data Mountain

Each fall, educators are met with mountains of numbers – too much to digest all at once!  In addition to the standardized test scores from last spring, we’re busy collecting back-to-school benchmarks and individual inventories. The key for avoiding data overwhelm is to look for useful patterns. I’ve found that using clear protocols helps teams identify these patterns, moving beyond numbers and into purposeful conversations. Last week’s post offers options for structured analysis that lead to potential root causes. Below I offer protocols for finding solutions that respond to these causes.
 
Chalk Talk
One of my go-to tools for seeking solutions is the Chalk Talk Protocol. This is a flexible protocol, useful in many contexts, and one of those is for examining data. Here are the steps:

·        To prepare, write each underlying cause that has been identified in the center of a chart or large sheet of bulletin board paper—one cause per sheet. (For example, if your data review pointed to large intervention groups as a possible factor, that goes in the center of one sheet.)

·        Place the charts around the room, on tables or hanging on the wall.

·        Using colored markers so they can track their thinking, teachers move silently from paper to paper, jotting ideas, drawing arrows between related thoughts, and using their pens to noiselessly argue and challenge ideas they feel need rethinking.

This approach makes sure all voices are “heard” while keeping a lively pace—many conversations happen at once. (Pro tip: Divide the number of participants by 5 to figure out how many sheets will give you the best flow. If you have fewer topics than that, duplicate some so groups stay small and ideas keep moving.) By the time everyone has rotated through the different charts and then circled back to comment on what others have added, you’ll have a rich, collective idea bank.
 
Next, have participants pick their favorite ideas from the charts and write them down, one per post-it note. After that, you can make the number of ideas more manageable by having teachers talk at their table or with a partner to narrow their post-its down to one or two per person.
 
Realms of Concern / Realms of Influence Protocol
At this point, your group still has too many possible solutions. Using the Realms of Concern / Realms of Influence Protocol helps us separate what we wish we could change from what we can change, zeroing in on actionable solutions. On chart paper or a big piece of bulletin board paper, draw 3 large, concentric circles, labelled like this:

Ask teachers to describe the difference between these two realms, or give non-education examples of something in each realm to help folks start to process. Then, ask teachers to come forward and place their sticky notes on the appropriate spot in the target. The stickies in the realm of influence are now your potential actionable solutions.

 
The time it takes for Chalk Talk, stickies, and Realms of Concern may feel formulaic – but I guarantee that the outcomes that surface will be worth the effort.
 
(Check back next week for ideas on turning  potential  solutions into  active  ones!)
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:

Collecting coaching data to demonstrate impact:
 
https://www.smartbrief.com/original/coaching-for-impact-starts-with-collecting-data
 
 
Offering opportunities for students to keep thinking:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/alert-mistakes-in-progress/
 
 
Helping students overcome learned helplessness:
 
https://www.edutopia.org/article/guiding-students-overcome-learned-helplessness
 
 
An entertaining video with advice to first-year teachers:
 
https://video.edweek.org/detail/video/5574068218001/second-year-teachers-share-some-advice-for-rookies
 
 
This podcast episode about how new teachers can find great mentors:
 
https://www.teachingchannel.com/blog/podcast-43
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
Want more coaching tips? Check out my book, Differentiated Mentoring & Coaching in Education: From Preservice Teacher to Expert Practitioner, available from Teachers College Press!  I’m so excited to share it with you! You can use the code: FDNS25 for 20% off. Click  here  and I’ll email you the free Book Group Study Guide that includes questions, prompts, and activities you can use as you share the book with colleagues.  I hope you’ll love this book as much as I loved making it for you!
 

From Data to Action: Structures for Exploring Assessment Results Together

How can instructional coaches help teachers make sense of the mountains of assessment data that have been collected?
 
As the school year gets underway, teaching teams are tasked with using assessment data to guide whole group and small group instruction and identify intervention needs. Don’t try to digest all the numbers at once! Discussion protocols – structured processes to focus communication – can encourage effective collaboration during data discussions. Below I’ll describe several protocols that, when used together, support structured discussions about data.
 
One of the protocols I’ve used is the National School Reform’s protocol for examining the data. Working in small groups, teachers are given a set of data to consider. Multiple rounds are introduced by the facilitator, asking teachers questions that encourage them to look at the data differently, first by responding silently in writing and then through discussion in their small group. During round 1, teachers record and discuss what the data tells them at first blush. What jumps out and seems significant? What surprises them? What patterns are noted? During round 2, teachers make inferences about the data. What is it telling us? What is it not telling us? They look beyond obvious relationships. Round 3 is a time to look for celebrations. What good news is there in the data?
 
These celebrations are a good place to pause the protocol. Take a break (or come back another day for a fresh start). Pausing on a happy high can fuel the important next steps.
 
Come back for Round 4, which looks at the flip side of celebrations. What problems of practice might be underlying this data? This round of cause-and-effect thinking can be overwhelming. You might devote a whole meeting to just this step and unpack it a bit if the data warrants a deeper dive to identify possible sources of the problem, It’s only when we really get to the cause that effective solutions start to surface. A combination of a fishbone analysis and the 5 Whys protocol can get your team’s thinking going in the right direction.
The Fishbone is a structured team process for identifying underlying factors or causes of an event. The product of the team’s work is a cause/effect diagram that might look something like this:
 
[PHOTO]
 
Or this, if you’ve got a group of creative teachers!
 
[PHOTO]
(These Fishbone diagrams unpack a problem not related to student achievement, but you get the idea!)
 
Fishbones help us consider lots of alternate causes and sort ideas into useful categories.
 
Here are the steps in the process.  Working in small groups, ask:
 
1.    What is the problem/effect? Be clear & specific. Be careful not to define the problem in terms of a solution!  Write this at the head of the fish.
2.    What might be the major categories of causes of the problem? (for example, materials, policy factors, people/staff factors, etc.). Write these on the large skeletal bones.
3.    Brainstorm possible causes for each category. These are the smaller bones.
4.    For each cause, ask, “Why does this happen?” Write these sub-causes as branches on your diagram.
 
Asking “Why?” multiple times along the way can ensure deep causal thinking rather than more obvious solutions that get too-easily tagged. In the fishbone analysis, it means adding sub-causes to the “bone structure” through fine-grained analysis.
 
Here’s how the 5 Why’s Protocol works: Someone states what they think is a cause. For example, if I ask someone why they were late for work, they might answer, “I was late for work because I ran out of gas.” Asking, “Why did you run out of gas?” reveals yet another layer to the problem: “I ran out of gas because I didn’t buy any on my way to work.” “Why didn’t you buy any on your way to work?” you might ask. “Because I didn’t have any money!” “Why didn’t you have any money?” “Because I bought these gorgeous shoes last night!” might be the response. “Why?” “Because when I see a gorgeous pair of shoes, I just have to have them even though I already have a closet full of shoes!”
 
Aha! Now we have revealed that the root cause of being late to work is a shoe fetish! Without the 5 Whys protocol, we would never have known! Of course, 5 is not a magic number. The point is, go deep enough to get at real answers to the question. The final “Why” should lead to a root-cause statement that helps the team take action.
 
The fishbone analysis, accompanied by the 5 Why’s, encourages a deeper consideration of the data and a focus on underlying problems. When we see dips in the data of student achievement, it’s most effective to solve directly-stated problems rather than proposing solutions to surface-level issues.
 
Finally, it’s time for the 5^th and final round of the protocol for examining the data. During this round, the group describes their key conclusions and recommendations. Taking this layer-by-layer approach stops us from jumping to unwarranted conclusions about assessment data.
 
If tackling assessment data feels like an overwhelming task, a structured analysis approach can make all the difference. By using discussion protocols, teaching teams can focus on what matters most, listen to each other’s insights, and move from simply reviewing numbers to making informed decisions that benefit students. Thoughtful collaboration turns mountains of data into clear, actionable steps for instruction and intervention.
 
(More ideas for peeling back the layers of assessment data coming next week!)
 
This week, you might want to take a look at:

How and why to support and hold onto experienced teachers:

https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-heres-how-we-hold-on-to-experienced-teachers-give-them-the-support-they-need/
 
Decorations vs. anchor charts:
 
https://www.responsiveclassroom.org/clearing-the-way-for-new-growth/
 
 
Starting the year with picture books to build math identities:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/fostering-math-identities-with-picture-books/ 
 
 
Ideas for helping students who are in the fight or flight mode:
 
https://www.teachingchannel.com/blog/fight-flight-freeze
 
 
Mentors need new teachers (not just vise versa):
 
https://ncte.org/blog/2020/01/mentors-need-new-teachers/
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
Want more coaching tips? Check out my book, Differentiated Mentoring & Coaching in Education: From Preservice Teacher to Expert Practitioner, available from Teachers College Press!  I’m so excited to share it with you! You can use the code: FDNS25 for 20% off. Click  here  and I’ll email you the free Book Group Study Guide that includes questions, prompts, and activities you can use as you share the book with colleagues.  I hope you’ll love this book as much as I loved making it for you!

Instructional Coaching Rhythms

When preparing for the school year, coaches may start thinking about coaching cycles – who they’ll serve with them, what measurements they’ll have, and what the cycles will look like. There’s a place for work that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. .In coaching, that includes setting a specific goal, measuring progress, and celebrating when the target is reached. And, just like with teaching, there’s also a need for coaches, and coaching, to be flexible.
 
What if, as coaches, we thought more about being opportunistic? What if, as we think about our use of the 5 GIR coaching moves (model, recommend, question, affirm, and praise) we consider coaching rhythms, rather than cycles?  The pattern of these 5 moves is determined by teachers’ needs, flowing in real-time response to the teacher and the teacher-selected focus for the conversation.
 
To effectively support teachers while ensuring students get the instruction they need, coaches need to be nimble - light on their feet – improvising among the 5 coaching moves. We adjust the tempo and intensity of support.
 
I was talking this week with Kristen, who is an exceptional coach. She told me that in her early work as a coach, she was very well-prepared for the coaching work, going into each conversation with a clear plan, even having questions and recommendations written down. It went all right, she said, but she felt something was off. Then, during a coaching meeting, a teacher made a comment that changed the way she coached. The teacher said, “It feels like you're continuing a conversation from the past. But I'm not in that same place anymore.” Kristen said this teacher’s comment stuck with her and helped her realize that effective coaching requires us to meet teachers in the current space.
 
We can use the 5 moves in the GIR model in response to the teacher. The appropriate support will guide, challenge, or validate. The squiggly line in the GIR model shows that coaching isn’t a linear process – it’s a fluid one. Instructional improvement is contextual, so coaching is a cha-cha. We will step forward and back, and there will be lifts and dips along the way. We know that the upward sloping line in the GIR model indicates growth, but the cha-cha of coaching includes small steps back, too. When it seems needed, don’t hesitate to lean on a move that offers more support, like modeling or recommending. If one move doesn’t bear fruit, we can lean back and try an approach that provides more scaffolding.
 
We have to be limber; if we lead too strongly, sticking too long with a move when it’s not needed, we are over-scaffolding; this reduces teachers’ agency and motivation. We know how to lead by paying careful attention to the teacher and the context. We are ready to reposition, to find a match between the support needed by the teacher and the support offered by each of the 5 coaching moves. This is the rhythm of responsive coaching.

This week, you might want to take a look at:

Get ready for back-to-school (a 16-min. podcast episode):
 
https://stickyhope.com/28-schools-starting-are-you-ready/
 
 
Making it “our” classroom:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/who-owns-the-room/
 
 
Significant 72: Three impactful days for starting the school year:
 
https://choiceliteracy.com/article/fresh-starts-through-community-building/
 
 
How collaboration works:
 
https://www.edutopia.org/video/teacher-collaboration-matching-complementary-strengths
 
 
6 Co-Teaching models (not just for SpEd):
 
https://barkleypd.com/blog/coaching-co-teaching/
 
That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!
 
Want more coaching tips? Check out my book, Differentiated Mentoring & Coaching in Education: From Preservice Teacher to Expert Practitioner, available from Teachers College Press!  I’m so excited to share it with you! You can use the code: FDNS25 for 20% off or EBOOKS for 33% off digital copies (thru Aug. 4, 2025). Click  here  and I’ll email you the free Book Group Study Guide that includes questions, prompts, and activities you can use as you share the book with colleagues.  I hope you’ll love this book as much as I loved making it for you!