Just as national and state standardized tests aren’t the be-all and end-all of academic performance, grades and test scores aren’t the full picture of how a student is truly doing.
For example, you might be noticing specific students, grades, cohorts, or groups of students exhibiting behavioral issues and as a result showing an increase in disciplinary actions. A quick look at academic history may show a correlation between that and falling grades as various studies suggest students with poor behavior often have difficulty with academics.
We know that teaching is one of the most complex human endeavors imaginable. Successful teachers create environments that supports learning for all. They do this by having procedural routines in place and they allow students to take ownership and responsibility for their learning and behavior. Finally, they have a comprehensive approach to discipline.
Setting Students Up for Success
How do we set our students up for both academic and behavioral success? Teachers who build a strong, positive climate that nurtures cooperation, responsibility, and self-discipline have shown higher academic performance.
Here are some techniques for providing a supportive, disciplined, and orderly classroom:
Build personal relationships
Positive, personal interactions with students are huge for creating a supportive environment such as making students feel they are noticed and acknowledged. Allowing open communication and celebrating achievements will, again, tell the student that their thoughts and ideas have value. Framing failures in a positive manner, such as “challenges” and “learning opportunities,” help them to feel respected.
Utilize a democratic classroom model
Students need firm boundaries, but they also need freedom within those boundaries. When possible, give your students a say in how things are done. This tells them their opinions and decisions are important, and that they have value. By giving them ownership, we get their active participation and support.
Examine the classroom learning environment
You may need to modify the classroom environment to alter or remove factors that trigger problem behaviors. Periodically, especially before and after holiday breaks, revisit and reinforce classroom behavior expectations with explicit instruction in appropriate behavior. You may also need to modify your learning spaces to motivate students as well as vary instructional strategies to increase academic success.
Teach and reinforce new skills to increase appropriate behavior
Students who continually push the boundaries and misbehave need to be taught replacement behaviors. Actively and explicitly teach students socially- and behaviorally-appropriate skills to replace the problem behaviors. You can help students with behavior problems learn the why, how, when, and where to use these new skills. In doing so, you can increase the opportunities for the student to exhibit appropriate behaviors and then provide immediate, constructive feedback for success.
Examine attendance trends and supports
Students who have chronic absenteeism or miss 10 percent or more of instructional days over a course of the year are associated with lower student academic achievement and higher dropout rates. Identify early and often your attendance trends by district, building, classroom and at the student level. Review the attendance supports available to meet the needs of your school context and needs of your students and families.
Getting the Full Story about Students
Of course, many educators will intuitively know to look for a connection already, even without data. The benefit of having a data analytic tool, though, is that you can quickly access details (dates, specific actions, etc.) without bringing extra people into the situation or spending time hunting down information. Plus, this can be used to create an objective, unbiased, and factual picture of what is happening and the action plan to address the situation which can then be communicated easily to appropriate stakeholders.
Beyond student behaviors themselves, building and district practices influence student learning. Education data analytics can look at spending patterns, projections, returns on investments, and more to help you budget effectively, so every child has an opportunity to thrive in their educational career.
Student Attendance. How are you ensuring students are attending school more regularly? A data-driven, data-informed, comprehensive approach begins with engaging students and families as well as preventing absences from adding up before students fall behind academically. The key is using chronic absence data as a diagnostic tool to identify where prevention and early intervention are needed.
Our Prism product can help you:
· Analyze attendance data at the district, building, section, or student level.
· Identify and monitor chronically absent students for early interventions.
Behavioral Incidents. How are you disaggregating data to identify school discipline concerns in your setting? Simply monitoring discipline data for all students will not reveal whether certain students or student groups receive discipline at higher or lower rates than others.
Our PRISM product can help you:
Track incident data for various student groups with the ability to explore what, where, who, and when. You can filter by:
· Referrals by problem behaviors or incident types/code
· Referrals by locations
· Referrals by time
· Referrals by student, and
· Resulting disciplinary actions.
You can examine your disciplinary actions to evaluate their effectiveness among individual students, sections, buildings, and the whole district. You can also create useful reports to support Child Study Teams in designing effective intervention strategies.
Actualize the Whole Child with Better Data
All good plans start with good data. Eidex PRISM provides you the data and computing power needed to successfully identify and meet the educational needs of each student. Honoring your need for a complete picture within each school and student, PRISM turns granular data analytics into actionable insights. The graphics are attractive and readable, and you can easily toggle data with interactive filters.
We live in a data-driven or data-informed culture, and these platforms can help you improve virtually everything from how you approach formative assessments to professional development for your staff.
If you’re ready to learn more about student and school data analytics and how Eidex can help, we’d love to talk with you! Please fill in the simple contact form on our site, or give us a call at (844) K12-DATA | (844) 512-3282.
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