What to Do When Grade Level Data Is Disappointing

Once a month on a Tuesday afternoon, the dining hall tables at Aspen Elementary School in New Mexico are separated by grade level—for the teachers, not the students.

Principal Liz Janusz is trying something new this year to drive improvements across entire grades. Rather than focusing on individual teachers, she’s essentially adopting the philosophy that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” When reading or math scores, for example, are low across a grade, Janusz works to make sure that she’s adequately supporting all of that grade’s teachers. And she wants to do so without losing track of how other grades are doing.

In the past, grade-level meetings were spread throughout the classrooms, which hampered Janusz’s ability to work with all her teams. If one grade level needed more support, they might get her full attention for a whole meeting, but that inevitably left other teams in the lurch.

Now, everyone from pre-K to grade six meets in the dining hall. Professional learning community (PLC) meetings are led by Janusz and her assistant principal, who are able to work their way around the space as teacher teams address grade-level work. Support staff have more flexibility to jump around, too. Grade levels that need more attention still get it, but within a more cohesive structure that invites collaboration without singling people out. “I’m right there in the room if someone has a question,” Janusz said.

Restructuring PLCs is just one way to attempt to improve grade-level scores. At other schools, principals have opted for rapid, action-oriented solutions to underwhelming data. They’ve also come up with creative interventions and communication strategies that allow teachers and administrators to lend a hand across grade levels and subjects—which, in turn, produces much stronger grade-level teams and even better scores.

Start With the Data—and Quickly Shift to Solutions

“Data doesn’t lie,” said Michael Perry, principal of Greenville Middle School in Georgia. He doesn’t try to withhold or downplay low scores. When he meets with grade levels, he’s upfront about where teams are coming up short, but then he’s quick to shift the conversation to potential solutions. Perry likes to ask his teams, “What do you feel you need for this to improve?” rather than asserting, “This needs to improve.”

Janusz poses a near-identical query: “If I can give you any support or training, what is the one thing you need from me?” She tries to be purposeful about how she presents data, which she describes as a “starting point” and a “glimpse.” She doesn’t want to embarrass anyone when she pulls up scores in front of colleagues, so she doesn’t dwell on the numbers for long. “If they see you making an action plan for what you’re going to do with the data, and here’s why, then they start to feel a little better,” she said. “Otherwise, they’re not going to like those conversations and they’re going to distrust you.”

Janusz also created a spreadsheet for grade-level teams to input their data. At the bottom is a box labeled “common errors.” Teachers list the patterns they’re noticing among students and then talk them through. It’s a helpful bonding exercise—teachers can commiserate about issues they have in common and then move to action steps, as opposed to scrutinizing individual classes that have lower scores.

Take Full Advantage of the Expertise in the Building

To keep tabs on data and hear directly from teachers who know how things are going among their peers, Mike Kramer, principal of Bondurant-Farrar Intermediate School in Iowa, recommends assigning representatives. Bondurant-Farrar covers fifth and sixth grade, and each grade has two reps; there’s also one more for special education. When Kramer spots gaps in math, science, or literacy data, he consults with the grade-level reps and the rest of his leadership team. “Teacher by teacher, classroom by classroom, and then team by team, they look at not only their overall class results for proficiency on local and state standards, but also how a subgroup performed,” he said.

Perry has worked on reversing his school’s low reading scores by assigning grade-level leads who meet with the leadership team every two weeks. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Perry’s administrative team oversees PLCs that are grouped by content. When we spoke, his science team was preparing to review Kloud-12 video footage from their classrooms, then give each other feedback.

Perry is also a believer in having educators learn more about the academic needs of students who are outside of their assigned grade level or area of expertise. He wants his sixth-grade math teacher to understand students’ eighth-grade literacy goals, for instance. “It’s no longer just, ‘You teach math and that’s all you do,’” Perry said. “It’s everyone’s responsibility to help improve our reading. It’s everyone’s responsibility to help improve our math.” While these interventions are sometimes designed with individual teachers in mind, they have a much larger impact as part of what Perry calls a “layered approach” to boosting grade-level scores.

Anita Wansley, principal of Northeast Elementary School in Mississippi, has her own version of this intervention: a remediation period where teachers work with each other’s students. “If one teacher is really great at phonics, let’s have students who struggle in phonics go to her during that time,” Wansley said. “If another teacher is really great at pushing our high-scoring students, let’s send students to that teacher.” As Wansley tells her staff, “Grade level gets reported, not a single teacher, so you’re helping to move the entire grade. If there’s a teacher on the team who is still learning, still improving their skills, that’s part of being on a team.”

Be Willing to Restructure Your PLCs

If school leaders aren’t flexible about their own systems and structures, it can imply that they’re solely blaming teachers for poor scores. The reality is often somewhere in the middle, said Wansley. “Yes, teachers have the biggest impact, but we in administration also need to be sure that we’re looking at how we grade and some of our expectations,” she noted.

Over the last few years, Wansley has restructured her intervention strategies to improve grade-level results. Previously, Northeast Elementary designated a lead teacher, who gave feedback to the administrative team but didn’t consult much with the academic intervention team.

Wansley felt that there needed to be more of a continuum: teacher-leaders who support specific grade levels and perform academic interventions. Now, there’s a lead teacher/interventionist for kindergarten through second grade, and another for third and fourth grades. “Having somebody who’s working with students at the Tier 3 level but is also coaching teachers on Tier 1 instruction has really helped inform me about what’s going on in classrooms,” Wansley said. “They give me feedback about problem areas—being able to say, ‘This assessment isn’t really helping us understand what the students have mastered,’ or, ‘This piece of curriculum is being inconsistently implemented.’”

Principals can also restructure their PLCs. Janusz’s decision to gather all grade-level PLCs in the dining hall came after a few years of other tweaks. During her second year as principal of Aspen Elementary, she shifted away from what she referred to as “PLC lite,” where grade-level meetings tended to only cover basic logistics and scheduling. “There wasn’t a whole lot of structure, and there weren’t norms to keep the conversation student- and data-focused,” she said. “We’ve been working really hard at becoming consistent from grade level to grade level.”

Janusz has teams work within Richard DuFour’s framework for PLCs, asking themselves:

1. What do we want our students to know?
2. How will we know when they’ve learned it?
3. What are we going to do if they don’t learn it?
4. What are we going to do for the students who have already mastered it?

Teachers have responded positively to Janusz’s gradual changes to Aspen Elementary’s PLCs. The school’s teacher retention rate has risen to 92 percent; schoolwide math proficiency has jumped from 27 percent to 59 percent.

Focus on Collaborative accountability

No amount of data analysis or interventions will translate unless they’re undergirded by a consistent message from leadership. When the data is disappointing, Wansley says, tough feedback is called for—delivered with tact and understanding.

“I am not a principal who says, ‘Here’s what I need you to do,’ and that’s it,” she said. “I present it as: ‘Here’s why we need to make a change.’ When someone is resistant, I encourage them to vent to me. I ask, ‘Can we try this for a couple of weeks, see where we’re at, and then reflect?’”

While she doesn’t shy away from giving this feedback, Wansley believes it’s often best delivered by teachers, not administrators. Kramer agrees. Each group of teachers at his school is expected to track assessments and standards data, and “there are no hurt feelings when somebody’s data is low,” he said. “It’s been really encouraging to see that collaborative nature and a lack of people feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m on display for everybody else.’”

Janusz encourages teachers with low scores to share how they taught a lesson or administered an assessment. The goal is to debrief about possible shortcomings for the benefit of the rest of the grade’s teachers. Her grade levels aren’t worried about being scrutinized because they’ve developed “more of a collegial collaboration, rather than just looking at the numbers and who was the best,” she said.

In an ideal environment, collegiality and accountability go hand in hand. Wansley tells her staff that “if there’s a teacher on a team who’s not pulling their weight or is not prepared, then as a team member, I’m expecting you to help hold that person accountable.” As teachers have adopted that mindset, they’ve become more accountable to themselves, too. During a recent grade-level PLC meeting, a kindergarten instructor identified a reading skill that she was having trouble teaching and asked if she could watch her colleagues teach it. Wansley was thrilled—the interaction was a clear sign that her school is building a “culture where you’re not on an island,” she said.