We’re creating a world where every teacher

– knows if what they’re doing in the classroom is working, and for whom
– has the opportunity to learn from colleagues who’ve produced inspiring results with similar students in their content areas

Perhaps surprisingly, we bring more questions than answers. We don’t promise silver bullets, but we guarantee our data products and facilitation protocols will lead principals and teachers to ask and answer good questions regarding the quality of their instruction and how to improve it.

1) Our visualizations answer the questions essential to self-reflection and continuous improvement of core instruction. Some examples include:

• Is my core instruction effective?
• Which groups of students are benefitting most and least from my instruction?
• Which of my students might benefit from micro-interventions?

2) Our target audience is always teachers. Even when we’re providing training to principals, academic coaches and district administrators, we’re preparing them for productive, empowering, problem-solving conversations with teachers.

3) We don’t sell dashboards. Rather, we provide each teacher with a personalized print-ready progress monitoring portfolio after each diagnostic period that includes classroom-level profiles, growth rates by subgroup, and individual student conference forms populated with three years of progress monitoring, state assessment, course grades, and attendance data.

4) We present progress monitoring data in context of the state accountability system, so teachers aren’t left to wonder their contribution to the school’s annual grade or rating.

5) We report progress toward school improvement and deliberate practice SMART goals in terms of percentages of students who are growing quickly enough to move toward proficiency and beyond, regardless of where they started.

6) We engage K-2 teachers as full partners in school improvement by providing as much clarity around their student growth rates as is afforded to teachers in state-tested grades.

7) We encourage teachers and principals to learn from the positive outliers in their midst. Great instruction is happening in classrooms (with demographics similar to yours) all over the country—our visualizations identify where it is likely to be found.

8) We provide insight into whether students receiving specific interventions are growing more quickly than those that are not, allowing for meaningful conversations around ROI.

Consider the following:

– Are your teachers and principals able to identify grade-level teams and individual teachers from whom they would like to learn (i.e., those in your district or across the state generating some of the highest observed learning rates with students that look just like theirs)?

– Are your principals and teachers able to articulate which metric tells them whether students are growing quickly enough?

– Do your teachers and principals routinely use percentile rankings from their progress monitoring assessments to determine if their core instruction is effective?

– Are your teachers and principals routinely determining whether learning rates are equitable across subgroups?

– Can your teachers and principals easily determine whether a student’s most recent progress monitoring or state assessment outcome is likely representative of the student’s true ability—influencing the appropriateness of tiered instruction and online learning path decisions?

If the answer to any of the above is no, we can help!

–   Integrity
–   Joy, humor, and humility
–   Learning with purpose
–   Humane confrontations with reality
–   Teacher and principal autonomy