Like most school districts, we are data rich and we work hard not to be information poor.  Enter flashlight conversations.

Over the past couple of months we have integrated an approach focused on flashlight conversations to provide further depth and context to our data.  These flashlight conversations were inspired by Dr. Eleni Speron of ECRA Group who challenged us to use a flashlight, not a hammer, to investigate further regarding what these data are telling us and how we should respond to it.  This seemed like a productive approach so we tried it on for size. What we found were some telling themes regarding high growth attributes, as well as growth opportunities, both of which could positively impact our organization.

Our Structure

We did not conduct flashlight conversations with every team across the district.  Instead, we focused on about a dozen relative outliers whose students either demonstrated higher than expected growth or lower than expected growth.  These groups ranged from grade level content area teams to intervention teams to levelled/tracked courses. We looked at a variety of data points, but also used our ECRISS school intelligence platform provided by ECRA, to ultimately hone in on where we were seeing significant growth trends.

We structured each conversation around a set of questions that we hoped would provide meaningful context to our data:

  1. What do we see when we shine a flashlight on our data?
  2. What do we believe explains our data?
  3. What should we consider changing or replicating based on our results?
  4. What successes can we point to that provides evidence of our collective efficacy (i.e. we believe we cause learning)?

We then launched into the flashlight conversations, acknowledging the fact that there are a multitude of variables that impact student learning and growth.  The teams reflected, analyzed and hypothesized. I could not have been more impressed and proud with how each team approached these conversations – professional, student-centered, and focused on growth.  It may have been due to how the conversations were structured, but I think it was largely due to the quality of educators that were engaged in the conversations.

After meeting with all of the teams and synthesizing several hours of reflections and feedback some themes emerged that could be further broken down by high growth attributes and growth opportunities.  These themes included the rigor, high expectations, and responsive feedback and assessment.

Importance of Rigor – Depth over Breadth

High Growth Attributes – Our teams that were seeing higher than expected growth all identified different ways that they were promoting high levels of rigor with their students.  This included pushing students to select challenging texts, providing more opportunities for application, and giving students the independence to integrate their voice and interests in going deeper with a topic.  Also cited were assessments, where students were being asked to go beyond basic recall levels to further apply what they learned.

Growth Opportunities – Our teams that were seeing lower than expected growth identified some critical areas in regards to rigor and openly questioned the current levels of rigor in their instruction.  Important conversations were had in regards to going beyond speedily “covering the book” to prioritizing standards and focusing further on deeper levels of application. Some teams also discussed the impact of tracking students.  These tracking conversations included questions regarding whether or not we ‘hand-hold’ lower tracked students too much, the difficulty for students to move levels once identified for a track, whether or not we are we appropriately placing students, if we are tracking too early, and if we have too many levels.  

High Expectations – Floor for All and Ceiling for None

High Growth Attributes – Takeaways here included the importance of a guaranteed and viable curriculum which has helped to identify and eliminate gaps, promote a standards-based environment, and define consistent curriculum and resources across grade levels.  Student ownership of the standards was another theme and when students had structures that personalized their learning paths they could get the learning that they individually needed to progress to higher levels.

Growth Opportunities – Some teams acknowledged they needed to focus more on standard attainment as opposed to just forging ahead.  As we emphasize personalized learning in the district there was also a realization that this does not mean allowing students fall behind, but to provide a floor that they are expected to have their footing on through more structure (i.e. due dates and individualized instruction) when needed.  

Responsive Feedback and Assessment – Constant Recalibration

High Growth Attributes – Teams seeing high growth credited practices such as increasing formative assessments, more 1:1 conferencing with students, goal setting with students, and tracking homework instead of grading for completion.  They also shifted practices when it came to summative assessment scores doing more to drive grades as well as requiring reassessment for low scores, and only on the standards missed.

Growth Opportunities – Teams looking for higher growth acknowledged they needed to shift more to targeted instruction opportunities with students who most need it as opposed to whole group instruction.  The conversations also steered towards how we could better serve our students receiving intervention with a faster response time in identifying eligible students and reviewing our entrance and exit criteria to best serve those students that would benefit.

In Conclusion

These conversations have shown that our teams are asking all the right questions and are focusing their energy in the right places.  It is not hard to find the research to back them up.  Some of the following research snapshots reinforce their thinking in our identified areas and this list could be exponentially longer:

  • Importance of Rigor – The thoughts shared by our teams on tracking are further reinforced, in math specifically, by Jo Boaler in Mathematical Mindsets where she states that “the most successful countries are those that track by ability the latest and the least.”
  • High Expectations – In Visible Learning, John Hattie speaks to the importance of high teacher expectations (with a notable 0.43 effect size) and to “make them challenging, appropriate, and checkable such that all students are achieving what is deemed valuable.  To this we can add the potentially negative effects of students setting their own low expectations …and not being provided with high levels of confidence that they can exceed these expectations…”
  • Responsive Feedback and Assessment – Some of the biggest names in formative assessment, including Carol Ann Tomlinson and Larry Ainsworth point to Hattie’s research on the power of feedback and formative assessment on student growth with highly impressive effect sizes of 0.79 and 0.90, respectively.

This process has left us with a lot of important information to make us more information rich, not just data rich.  As we move forward we will keep best practices on the front burners in regards to rigor, expectations, feedback and assessment.  We will continue to look for opportunities to find evidence of our impact and collective teacher efficacy and look for ways to replicate those successes.  I encourage you to get out your flashlights and engage in these important conversations and I hope they are as productive, engaging, and meaningful as our conversations were.

 

References

Boaler, Jo.  Mathematical Mindsets. Jossey-Bass, 2016

Hattie, John. Visible Learning.  Routledge, 2009.