With the growth of tech-driven instructional possibilities, school systems have an increasingly urgent responsibility for schools to continuously assess and improve student data-protection practices. Attai, a project director for the Consortium for School Networking, outlines a program designed to help education leaders master the fundamentals of…

A crucial site of bias in classrooms is class discussions. A new free web-based tool developed by university researchers can help teachers actively monitor how their biases are affecting students in real-time.

The "Every Student Succeeds Act" requires that student's test scores be disaggregated by racial characteristics. Nevertheless, the author's recent study suggests that K-12 school principals may not intentionally think about race when they collect, interpret, analyze, and make decisions about data. By not disaggregating data by race,…

The Clayton Christiansen Institute maintains a database of more than 400 schools across the United States that have implemented some form of blended learning, which combines online learning with brick-and-mortar classrooms. Data the Institute has collected over the past six months suggests three trends as this model continues to evolve and mature.…

In addition to excelling in subjects such as science, math, arts, and social studies, students must also develop skills like resiliency, adaptability, and collaboration in order to truly succeed in the world. But how do schools effectively measure those skills when they so often rely on standardized assessments? This article provides a thorough…

Schools are awash in data, and teachers are being asked to gather data in a myriad of high-tech and low-tech ways. But gathering is not analyzing, and without analysis there is little reason to gather the data in the first place. Teachers need data-collection systems that lend themselves to rapid analysis and action. This article presents several…

Surveys show rates of sexual harassment and misogyny among students are high in U.S. secondary schools--yet most schools fail to deal with this problem. Many educators would like to intervene when they hear students use degrading or sexualized language about girls (or LGBTQ youth) or harass them, but don't know how to do so effectively. The…

Technology makes it easier than ever for educators to generate meaningful, ongoing data to inform their teaching, track student progress, and personalize learning. When the author began to explore how she could use technology to quickly assess student skills, data became exciting and took on a new role in her teaching practice. Now she uses data…

We know that students cannot learn if they are not in school, and that students with economic challenges miss school more frequently than other students. What obstacles create this attendance gap, and how can school districts provide the supports to improve attendance for these students? The authors of this article, who work with the Texas…

If your professional learning seems stalled, maybe you could put yourself and your colleagues in the driver's seat of professional development. The authors describe a professional learning approach that gives teachers both a say in what they focus their learning on and a chance to practice and refine teaching strategies that they hope to…

Despite repeated calls for educators to get more instructional mileage out of the assessment data they have at hand, two deterrents typically stand in the way of most educators' effective use of test data. First, there's a missing "realization", and second, there's a missing "skill". Educators who possess both this realization and this skill will…

The Penn-Delco School District in Pennsylvania uses a walk-through process focused on looking at student work and talking with individual students. The purpose is to ascertain what those students are able to express about their own learning. At the beginning of each year, a committee of teachers at each of the district's schools meets to identify…

The purposes of the study reported here were: to identify criteria for curriculum development that are crucial, functional, and observable; and to test these criteria in existing school systems. (Author)

Presents an argument for schools developing a number of curriculum and instruction questions that critically question the place of information technology in school programs. What information is of worth and for what purposes? (MD)

Educators involved in strategic planning can use environmental scanning techniques to anticipate social, economic, political, and technological changes that will affect their schools. Compared to more traditional data gathering, environmental scanning is wider in scope and more concerned with anticipating the future and studying the interaction of…