2.7: Analyst

Educators understand and use data to drive their instruction and support students in achieving their learning goals. Educators:

a. Provide alternative ways for students to demonstrate competency and reflect on their learning using technology.
b. Use technology to design and implement a variety of formative and summative assessments that accommodate learner needs, provide timely feedback to students and inform instructions.
c. Use assessment data to guide progress and communicate with students, parents and education stakeholders to build student self-direction.

Educator 7: Analyst puts an emphasis on being open to different demonstrations of competencies while gathering formative/summative assessments in order to use that data to guide instruction and support learning goals. When first learning about the Analyst standard, it made me immediately think about my time as a student teacher, learning about the basic aspects of a lesson plan… activating prior knowledge, introducing a topic, giving content, independent practice, and finishing with an exit ticket/reflection process. Sure there are some alternatives but in general, this is how I learned to teach a lesson.

One of the biggest challenges for me while teaching was staying on top of the constant need to grade daily exit tickets to have a firm grasp on my students’ understanding levels. I had this vision of an exit ticket as a printed half sheet of paper that asked a few core questions that students would be able to answer and I would then later grade and be able to completely gauge if my students “got” what they were supposed to from my lesson. However, these little half sheets of paper really started to multiply my daily to-do’s and honestly did not give me as much information as I intended them too. Being introduced to this standard helped me to understand that I should be providing multiple ways for students to demonstrate their understanding of a topic, but also that these formative assessment methods can utilize technology instead of just paper and pencil. This brought me to researching different types of technological tools that could accomplish my goal of using assessment data to guide progress. Read more about my post here: Tools for Analyzing Formative Assessment.