Before I began this course, I had not worked with data in this manner before nor had I spent a lot of time analyzing data. I was a bit concerned about this when I began the course as I felt a bit off my game. I also had a hard time because the end product was not clear at the beginning of the class. However, once I began working with my team and we continued to add more and more materials to our process the end result of the data project became a bit clearer.

The other part of this project that at times was difficult was working with a subject matter that I do not teach. Math was never one of my favorite subjects as a kid in school, it always resorted to a lot of frustration and tears. 🙂 So, when we decided as a team to work with math as our subject I was a little leary as I wasn’t sure I would be able to contribute a lot. Although, I soon discovered that my knowledgeable math teammate was very easy to work with and I did not need my lacking math skills. I was able to help my team in other ways.

I enjoyed the end of the data project more than anything as it was helpful to see what was lacking and what needed to be added to the action plan in order to ensure student success. I also feel that I will use my new data skills this next year in school by learning to make adjustments to lessons, assignments, unit plans and more.

Thanks

Final Data Presentation

I met with another classmate on Saturday evening to discuss each of our team data projects that we have worked on throughout this term. This meeting was helpful in that I gained another new perspective as to how another team did their data project. We each spent time going over what our teams did, all of the part of the data project and how it turned out. I appreciated my new partners perspective on my own team’s project as it helped me think of some questions and information that I had not thought of before.

Data Meeting #5 Presentation

After four data meetings, this one seemed to be a little easier than the others. I think we are all starting to get the hang of things and feel a little more comfortable with what we are doing and need to do. We also did a better job of dividing up the work for this meeting and working to have everything done beforehand. It wasn’t perfect but it was better. I also believe that at the beginning since we weren’t sure what the outcome was that it also made it a bit more difficult to understand at times.

While I have felt a bit clumsy at times going through the data meetings, I do feel that I have learned a lot and can work on applying new skills to my teaching this next year. 
Team 3 Data Meeting #4

It seems that we are now becoming a bit more proficient in our data meetings. This data meeting was conducted over 2 days but it was a bit easier as we are becoming a little better at figuring out what we need to do. I think we were all a bit confused as to the directions for this last meeting but once we worked together to figure out what we needed to do it went well.

I am not the best at times in my ability to work backwards as this is what I feel we are doing. I am great at creating backwards type lessons but working with data in this way is new to me and has been a bit of a struggle. However, the further we get in the process the more I am able to see the bigger picture of what we are working towards.

Our data meeting #3 presentation is at the bottom of this post.

Thanks

This morning we met as a team to go over our required information for the second meeting. We each brought some artifacts to the meeting to discuss. We also looked at each other’s artifacts in the artifact tracking sheet and discussed our learning gap or instructional gap ratings.

Since we are all in different subject areas it is interesting to see how each of us looks at an example lesson plan. Our lesson plans are all different and when we rated them in the tracking sheet we each came up with items we thought were missing because we are not accustomed to looking at lesson plans in different subject areas.

After working through all of the artifacts and discussing them in relation to the tracking sheet, we were able to decide which subject area and grade level we are now going to focus. We also discussed our exploratory questions and will move forward with the subject of Math, grade 12, calculus. After making that decision, we worked on our next steps and deciding on what other artifacts we needed to include.

Working and learning about the data has been quite interesting but I have also found it to be quite challenging especially in that we seem to be working backwards.

Data Meeting #2 Presentation

Our first data meeting was conducted Saturday evening. It was helpful to have this meeting to see how others in my group are working on their data. I have not had a lot of experience working with data and charts over my many years of teaching, so to learn how to work with it and to learn how to create charts in order to analyze the data has been helpful.

Before attending the first data meeting, I had spent time working on creating charts in order to analyze the scores of my students and how they related to the objectives. I wanted to create a few more charts of the data but I was unable to figure out how to do what I wanted to do. At times I have my limits with how much I can do with Excel even after I do many tutorial searches to help me out. I did find the creation of the data charts very helpful in that I was able to notice some patterns as to how my students did with the work that they completed. I was also able to learn to wonder about the results related to certain students.

During the data meeting it was interesting to see how we each approached the assignment quite differently. I also learned quite a bit from the team member who works with mathematics and how much he was able to do with the data chart. This was quite helpful to learn how to create a few different kinds of charts for the future. It was also helpful to learn a bit more as to how to analyze the data in ways that I had not thought of previously.

Since I am not a math teacher but a Spanish teacher, I have realized that I look at the data quite differently than someone who is used to looking at numbers on a regular basis. I think in the future this will help me in my teaching practice in many ways. First, I think it will help with the creation of assessments and/or assignments for my students. Second, I believe it will help me to work more with the students who struggle and recognize the pattern of their possible struggles. Lastly, I believe that it will help me to learn how to understand students and their scores a bit better.

Since this was only the first data meeting and the beginning of learning how to look at and analyze data I believe that I still have a lot to learn. However, I do believe that by the end of working with data in this course I will have some new tools to add to my teaching practice in order to continue to grow and learn as a teacher.

Data Meeting #1 – Presentation