At TPS, we value data as a means to better understanding our students, informing our practice and documenting our growth. However, in a small school, with a single class for each grade level, percentages don't always tell an accurate or informative story, so we've created our own systems to provide easily accessible, real-time data for individual students. Teachers routinely utilize these customized solutions to contextualize a single piece of data within a bigger picture and to look for patterns and trends. These tools provide for the documentation of individualized strengths and goals for every student at TPS as well as quantitative data such as test scores.

Ongoing Conferencing & Assessment: In the design of The Project School, our founders made an intentional choice to forgo the assigning of letter grades in the student assessment process. Instead, our teachers are comprehensively assessing - on an on-going basis - our students' work and growth as readers, authors, mathematicians, artists, scientists, and community members. As part of this assessment, our teachers meet regularly and individually with each student (multiple times each semester), as well as together with students and their parents/guardians (a minimum of 2 times/academic year). Student and parent/guardian voices are integral to both the goal setting and assessment process. Required family conferences take place in the fall and the spring, but teachers are always available to meet with parents/guardians throughout the year as needed. Teachers provide families with twice/annual written substantive narratives about who their child is a reader, writer, mathematician, scientist, artist and community member.

Standardized assessment tools serve as one of many resources to provide data for helping us to best support students as individual learners, as well as to understand overall academic trends. We never wish for our students to feel judged based on the results of their standardized test scores. Test scores represent only one very small component of the myriad ways in which we can best assess and support them. We feel very strongly that standardized tests should never be a driving force in the design or implementation of curriculum. We never "teach to the test." Rather, in the days just leading up to a standardized test, we engage with test taking as a genre, just as we teach other genres of literature. We believe that helping our students to acquire positive, stress-free, general test-taking strategies provides them with a tool for life. The result of our students' test scores is validation that our compartmentalized strategy for talking about and teaching test-taking is effective and positive for our students, although we believe that the Indiana score for our school does not define who we are as a heart-mind-voice program.

Use of Technology to Support Both Students & Faculty: TPS has created a Data Analyst & Documentarian position in order to systematize the use of data, with a focus on student growth. We have launched a comprehensive, collaborative platform for the building of student multimedia portfolios, accessible to families. We have customized and standardized unit planning tools to reflect school-wide goals and philosophy. We have created a web-based staff resource database to archive teacher-developed curriculum. We have created a communications template for family conferences. We have implemented “student-at-a-glance” documents as a repository for multiple forms of student data. We have collected and analyzed student data related to school climate, academic engagement, and teacher expectations, in order to best meet the social and emotional needs of students.

All of the tools we have created (as well as the Data Analyst & Documentarian position) are a direct response to our renewal process from 5 years ago. We reflected on the outstanding feedback we received regarding our use of data and need for systems for sustainability, and took to heart the commitment to create systems and structures that would more effectively support our staff, while also enhancing the experience for students and families. We are extremely excited by all of the advancements we have made, with tools specific to the needs of our school community, personalized to match our mission, vision and values. The tools we have created are all housed within tools that were already in use by our faculty. We have utilized free online operations, such as Google, to build these tools, in order to do more with less in terms of our limited technology budget. We have built internal capacity, without the need to purchase software or hardware, or to pay unaffordable annual fees; we are truly learning how to do this ourselves in order to best serve our students, support our staff, and honor our limited budget. The data we are now collecting allows us to individualize and differentiate our students, and therefore to provide specific interventions designed to support each student. All data we collect feeds into not only the teacher-used tools, but also into the progress reporting mechanisms that are shared with families, creating transparency for everyone involved in the life of the student. In essence, what we have created is a scaffold of tools that creates an IEP for every child we serve in our school, no matter the assets and challenges they bring to the classroom each day.