Part VIII of the Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Arthur VanderVeen, Chief of Innovation, New York City Department of Education:

… it is astoundingly difficult to impact day-to-day classroom practices. And unless we design data systems with a primary goal of improving classroom teaching and learning, our investments will show little return.

This closing thought expressed in the Five Design Principles for Smarter Data Systems appropriately reminds us that unless we impact the instructional core that is at the heart of teaching learning we will never realize the benefits of our investments in instructional data systems.

In 2007 New York City launched an ambitious effort to develop an instructional data system, the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS), that integrates annual state test data with daily attendance, course grades, district interim assessments, past transcripts, credit accumulation, ELL status, IEP status, biographical data, and contact information–all into a single dashboard that gives every teacher and administrator in the city a comprehensive and real-time view of his or her students’ current and past achievement data.

The system includes a data analytics package that enables teachers and administrators to slice and dice the data in dozens of ways. Schools can identify students who are struggling as measured by any of these measures and target data-informed strategies and interventions to meet their needs. The system is now being extended to include tools to enable teachers to add classroom grades and quizzes and other local data that schools want to add to their profile of students’ performance and learning needs (e.g., behavioral incidents, club or sports participation).

An extension of the system, ARIS Parent Link, makes all of this same data available to parents, and teachers are now beginning to conduct parent-teacher conferences around a substantive discussion of each child’s current achievements and challenges.

Getting the right data to teachers and administrators as soon as it’s available is itself a real challenge–ARIS integrates data from nearly a dozen source systems, both internal and external to the NYC DOE. But the real challenge is helping teachers use this data to inform instruction: diagnosing specific gaps in knowledge and skills, grouping students effectively based on these diagnoses, identifying and selecting instructional strategies and resources to address those needs, implementing selected strategies, monitoring effects, and revising instructional decisions based on continuously updated formative assessment data. This is a tremendously complex task for any one teacher to manage with a classroom full of students with widely varying abilities and learning needs. Developing this capacity among teachers and administrators is the real work required to make next-generation, student-centered instructional data systems worth the investment.

To address this challenge, New York City launched a multi-year, system-wide initiative to develop teachers’ assessment and data literacies and to support teams of teachers in using data to diagnose and address students’ learning needs. The Children First Intensive (CFI) supports teams of teachers in each school that collaboratively analyze data, identify struggling students who share a common learning challenge, and engage students in understanding the data, setting accelerated achievement goals, and designing appropriate instructional strategies. Teachers and students then implement the strategies, monitor outcomes, and correct course as needed. Within the first year of implementation, all 1,500 NYC schools had established an “inquiry team” engaged in this process. Now, three years later, over 60 percent of teachers in New York City are engaged in inquiry.

Implementing a program of this scale and intensity has required a significant investment of time and resources–schools are supported by seasoned educators who know how to help schools develop the culture and the skills to use data to inform and differentiate instruction. A teacher or administrator at each school is also trained as a data specialist to support teachers throughout the full cycle of data informed inquiry.

Investing in teachers’ and administrators’ capacity to use data to diagnose individual students’ learning needs and differentiate instruction is critical, but technology can help. Through the School of One and other pilots within the NYC Innovation Zone, we are working with technology, curriculum, assessment, and research partners to advance the state of the art of computer adaptive instruction that can help teachers manage the complex tasks of personalizing instruction to advance student learning at each student’s optimal pace. We believe that when combined together, data intelligent teachers, data intelligent students, and data intelligent technologies will help us all finally realize the real benefits of all this data.