At Teach For America, it seems like we talk constantly about data, and this can be for the better (since we want to all be grounded in what is actually happening rather than our imaginations) or the worse (if it is taken out of context).  Because we are going to work together a lot while focused on your classroom data this year, we want to give you a transparent, no-nonsense explanation of how we’ll use the data you share with us. 

 

1. We will use your most recent class data in nearly every debrief. This helps to keep us focused on the end goal, and to ensure that we are focusing our efforts on fixing the biggest problems that hold your class back most. 

 

2. We will use your data to make sense of each cohort. Having a cohort of teachers is like having a classroom of students, only you don’t get to spend every day with each student. This means that you end up with lots of little bits of information about a lot of people--and this is really overwhelming. To make sure that we spend our time in the right classrooms addressing the right needs, we need to understand how everyone is doing. This is both anecdotally (from observation notes) and from the data you share with us.

 

3. Our regional leaders look at all of the Corps’ results together to understand how they should spend their time with us MTLDs. Managing a region is even more complicated than managing a cohort of teachers, so they use the data in much the same way--only at a bigger scale. For example, they look for trends across grade levels and subjects to find where additional support is needed.

 

4. National leaders look at the data at a very high level to adjust our cross-regional strategies. Every region operates with a lot of autonomy, but they also rely on a birds eye view across regions to learn from challenges and successes that other regions are experiencing.  

 

5. Our donors and grant-givers want to see where their money is going. Our region uses high level student achievement results to help donors understand the impact that we are making. Also, some grants (both local and federal) require that we tell them how many students we teach, what subjects and grades, etc.  Some even require high level student achievement results such as funding targeted at STEM.

 

We hope that this transparency helps to answer questions you had or maybe you didn’t know you had. Don’t hold back during the year--if it ever seems like someone is asking you to share data without a good reason that ultimately benefits our students, ask why.