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Observation Count by Teacher Report

MAKING SENSE OF THE DATA

The observation count data in the table reveals trends and patterns suggesting response to instruction. Higher or lower numbers of observations in a rubric level of criteria may be interpreted in more than one way. 

• The higher or lower numbers may indicate the actual response to instruction on those days. 

• The higher or lower numbers might also indicate the opportunity provided or not provided by the learning design for students to demonstrate the criteria.

  • Teachers should reflect on the learning designed for that lesson.

    • Did students have an opportunity in the lesson to demonstrate the observable criteria in the engagement rubric? 

    • Did students have an opportunity in the lesson to demonstrate the observable criteria in the academic rubric?

Teachers and teams should consider the instructional design that was planned for the observation days to interpret the data in a meaningful way.

Common Questions and Concerns

I see high counts of observations in low rubric levels

Reflect on the following points:

• Did students have the opportunity to demonstrate the observable criteria of engagement or academics in which you are seeing the low numbers? 

• Consider how students experienced the learning designed in your instructional plans. What unseen barriers to engagement and academics may have prevented students from engaging or performing academically at the higher rubric levels?

I see a spread of observations about equal across all rubric levels

Reflect on the following points:

• Did ALL students have the opportunity to demonstrate the observable criteria of engagement or academics? 

• From the student perspective, which students do you feel encountered barriers in the learning design?  

• If you feel ALL students had the opportunity to demonstrate the observable criteria of engagement or academics, consider how students experienced the learning designed in your instructional plans. What unseen barriers to engagement and academics may have prevented some students from engaging or performing academically at the higher rubric levels?

I see high counts of observations in the 3 and 4 rubric levels

Reflect on the following points:

• The learning designed could be resulting in high levels of engagement and/or achievement in the criteria of those rubrics. Celebrate putting something into place that is helping students learn!

• Reflect on the instructional design for the days that you collected data. 

  • Would you expect ALL students to be highly engaged and/or academically advanced given the lesson on the observation day? 

    • If not, you may want to reconsider your approach to rating your students. It may be helpful to think why rating students with high rubric levels is important to you as part of a team doing action research plan-do-study-act implementation trials.

I didn’t have the opportunity to collect criteria observations.

It is important to design lessons to provide yourself the explicit opportunity to collect observations on the agreed-upon criteria. That may mean planning to collect data during particular lessons or making slight modifications to lessons so they include the opportunity to collect observations on criteria.

You may find collecting all engagement and/or academic criteria during one lesson difficult. The team can agree that we can split observations across different lessons. For example, I might be able to collect “Initiates and completes instructional tasks” on a Monday, but won’t collect “Participates in discussions” until the Wednesday lesson.

Some of my students are not at school every day or have dropped my class. 

Option 1: Reducing the number of indicator students is an option if there is not enough time to choose new students to observe. Strive to collect as much data across as many indicator students as possible.

Option 2: If there is enough time to collect baseline data on new students, identify other students to observe.

I couldn’t collect three observations in each of the criteria. 

Our goal is to collect three or more observations across all the criteria during each trial. That may not be feasible for each criterion in each trial. Try your best to collect as much as possible, balancing both engagement and academic observations.