Reaching Struggling Learners
Reaching Struggling Learners
#84: Mastering the Power of Data to Advocate for Student Support
Unlock the full potential of educational data with me. This episode, I peel back the curtain on how numbers and charts become the undeniable champions for student support. We delve into the art of turning data into a persuasive narrative that can sway even the most budget-conscious administrators. Experience the power of data through my own stories, as I showcase how I've leveraged statistics to secure better resources, interventions, and accommodations for my students.
Learn to craft compelling data presentations that make your case irrefutable. Whether you're facing academic hurdles like sight word fluency or behavioral challenges, I'll demonstrate the transformative impact that clear, visual data can have during those critical meetings. You'll see firsthand how the right graph can speak volumes, opening doors for the necessary support your students deserve. Join me for a journey through the maze of educational bureaucracy, armed with the most powerful tool at a teacher's disposal—data.
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For a lot of teachers, data really is a four-letter word, and you know what? I think that's really sad Because, honestly, data is probably my best friend when it comes to teaching and when I want something from my administrators or I want a specific result from a meeting that I'm attending, data really is my secret weapon and this week I want to talk to you about how it can be yours too. Hi, I'm Jessica Curtis of Teaching Struggling Learners. I'm a boy mom and a veteran teacher. You're listening to the Reaching Struggling Learners podcast, where we talk all about helping students succeed academically, socially and behaviorally. Thank you so much for tuning in. Much for tuning in.
Speaker 1:So for years I have been talking about advocating for the benefits of data, data collection, progress, monitoring, all I mean. There's a lot of different words for it, but the benefits of data just a few of them are that data helps with planning, it helps with communication, it helps with a lot of different things, but most importantly, to me at least, it's how we advocate for our students and meaning. That's how I've argued to get new or better interventions or services, accommodations, modifications, lots of different placements, all sorts of different things for my students, and data really is my secret weapon. When it comes down to it I guess it's not so secret now, but it's true it's all about making sure that you're presenting the data and doing it in an effective way. It's one thing to stand and sit, I guess, in a meeting and say, you know, 80% of my students need help with, I'll just say, fluency, sight word fluency. I'll just stick with sight words. It's a completely different thing to show it in a graph. It makes more sense to people who aren't sitting in your classroom and who aren't especially to administrators. When they're sitting in meetings, they're not thinking about the 18 or 25 students that are specifically sitting in your classroom. They don't see the little frustrated faces of your specific students when they can't get these words down. The administrators are thinking about the big picture. You gotta communicate to them with graphs so that you can show no, no, here's the big picture. 80% of my students can't do this skill and we need an intervention for it. And so using graphs just makes it so easy to make your case for or against something and also, again, it makes it really hard to argue or deny it.
Speaker 1:It's really easy for a, I'll say, administrator. You walk into their, you know, walk in to their office and say, hey, I need a program that's going to help me do a better job of teaching sight words to my students and they go okay, why? Why isn't what you're using working? Are you using it right? I don't think you're using it right. We already you have it. It's embedded in the curriculum. You know that we gave you half of and you don't have all the copies and you have to share it with your grade level. But yeah, it's all embedded in there.
Speaker 1:What evidence do you? Why do you need? Why do you need something more? That's not. There's no money in the budget for that. I've sat in meetings with that. I've mishmashed a couple together, but I can remember specific administrators saying all of those things over the years. But when you come in with data, with that little graph that shows that 80% of your students don't they can't do sight words, it's really, really, really hard for them to say there's no room in the budget for that.
Speaker 1:It's really hard to argue that no administrator wants to say no to an obvious need. They really don't, even the worst administrators that you have and I have had some doozies over the years. I will be honest If I went to them with my data, especially data over time, and showed this, for example, this student behaviorally. I do not have the resources to support this student effectively and here's what I have done and this is the result and the reality is that I do not have the manpower to do that, to support this student in the way that this student needs. It's really, really hard for even the administrators who don't like you and don't they don't, they don't like you, they don't like you, they don't like you, they don't want you in their school, for whatever reason. It's really hard for them to say no. When you are bringing such conclusive, objective data to them, they can't say, well, you're not trying hard enough, no. Here's the long list of things that I did and this is the impact on the graph. You see, it's not enough. You can't argue with that. And I love going in. I'll be honest, I love going into meetings, even with the people that don't like me. I love going in knowing they can't say no to me. It's just I get. Maybe I'm a horrible person, but I really like that.
Speaker 1:So you know, with academics it's easy to think of examples. You know we. There's so many ideas out there that we know that our students need support. We know that Presenting that in a way that they can't say no to that's really the secret sauce when it comes down to advocating for our students, for our students. You can't argue with the fact that the students have lost 45 hours this school year so far of lost instructional time because this student over here doesn't have the support that they need and they're causing major disruptions to the classroom. You can't argue with that. Yeah, we got to do something. We got to do some supports. We have to do something. We forget a lot of the time in situations like that how data can help us advocate with behaviors.
Speaker 1:I kind of gave you an example earlier, but I was able to advocate, to argue for a better placement for a student whose behaviors had improved. They had they had improved For academics. This student was in my classroom and for behaviors, but he had done so much work and his behaviors were almost non-existent. They were at a range that were it was. I mean, quite frankly, the students in the gen ed classrooms were more poorly behaved than my student. His academics were through the roof. He was on grade level, if not above, but because he had a history of behaviors, he was in a self-contained room.
Speaker 1:Using data I was able to show hey, even in a classroom where other students are kicking off and having a hard time. This student really should have an opportunity to be in gen ed Over time again, because he didn't have behaviors in the gen ed classroom, we were able to get him into a placement where he could academically succeed because he'd gotten what he needed, you know, behaviorally, but he was able to do that. But I was able to reduce services for a student who didn't need these high level services. I was able to advocate for him to go out into more of an, you know, an inclusion or a gen ed setting because of the data. The flip side to that is I had another student who we really couldn't no-transcript. We had to work, I had to work really hard and I had to learn how to track that data. Now, once I learned how to do it, it was a breeze. Once I figured out how to do it and I'll tell you right now.
Speaker 1:People that are asking teachers to please give us anecdotal data I personally do not suggest violence, except maybe on them. Like I mean, I kind of want to punch them in the face Anecdotal data. So when you're a gen ed teacher or a special ed teacher, doesn't matter. Some behavior person says well, we need a lot of data. I want you to write down all the things that they did. They don't mean to write a note, they don't mean paragraph form, and if they do, they shouldn't be a behavior specialist person. Don't write a letter, don't write a novel every single day of all the things that the student did or does. That's not helpful. When they say, hey, we need to know how many, you know how many instances of behavior the student had.
Speaker 1:What you're going to do is you're going to get yourself a nice blank piece of paper and you're going to think real hard the night before and it's not going to be hard because you will already have the examples in your head and you're going to make a list of the things that the student does and you're going to you're going to categorize those things and most of the behaviors that you're going to see are going to be attention seeking. That's going to be stuff. That's going to be like. You know, they poke Billy so that Billy makes a sound, or they are, you know, tossing a ball up in the air, their pencil up in the air, tapping their pencil or all sorts of you know that kind of stuff. There's also aggressive behaviors where the student is, you know, throwing things directly at you. Know you the teacher? There's physical aggression towards people where you know they're trying to punch you in the face. There's those. But you're going to see that categories kind of show up right, and what you're going to do is you're going to choose those. You know two, maybe three, but usually two categories.
Speaker 1:You're going to take a piece of paper the next day and every time that that child throws a spit wad or throws a pencil or whatever it is, you're going to put a tally mark in that box. And every time that that child goes to hit another child, or they try to hit you or whatever it is, or they scream at you, whatever it is, you're going to put a tally mark in that box. You're not going to write a novel. You're not going to do it and at the end of the day you are going to put that data. You're going to write the date on there. You probably take a picture of it or make a copy of it and you're going to put that sheet of paper into the behavior person's mailbox at school and you're going to walk your happy butt home Because, congratulations, you just collected the behavior data.
Speaker 1:You did it, that's it. That's all they need. That's all they need. They need to know that that child decided to throw things 40 times, that that child flipped their desk three times today. That's what they need to know and they don't need to know every single the reason that they they threw the threw the pencil and what you did and how everybody responded. Because the fact is they're going to do one observation and they're going to see in your classroom what causes it, what the triggers are, and they're going to see what happens as a consequence.
Speaker 1:It's going to happen when it comes to data. Get your numbers down and those numbers Now. Don't fudge your data. That's the other thing. Yes, I have had teachers many a time fudge their data and it's kind of obvious. It's kind of it's really obvious when teachers are fudging their data. It always comes out, always, every single time it comes out, because you'll get the data from you know it's always, it's usually behavior data from you know it's always, it's usually behavior data. But where the child somehow managed to throw the same number of punches every day for a week or three days in a row. Statistically, that's not going to happen, I'll be honest. Or the child somehow has data for am, for the morning block, when the child didn't show up to school until lunchtime. Weird, right. So, and again, behavior, people, behavior specialists when they're collecting that data to you know, create reports and all that kind of stuff that shows up really fast, they figure it out really fast and it puts a questionable light on every other piece of data that you show. So just don't do that, just don't. It's easier to not. But aside from all of that, assuming that your data that you are collecting is accurate and you're professional, you're going to do what's right. You're going to put accurate data on that.
Speaker 1:Data is the key to advocating for your students. You know what your students need. The problem is that the decision makers don't understand. They communicate kind of like our parents. They communicate in a completely different way and the only way or I guess the best way maybe not the only way, but the best way to bridge that gap is through presenting data that they can't argue with, because, again, they can argue with just about anything else they really can. They're really good at it. Some administrators better than others or worse than others with that, I should say. But you can't argue with data. You can't argue with the amount of time lost, learning loss because this child was the classroom had to be evacuated because of a situation, or how many missing assignments the student has because they can't read the material, or I mean the possibilities are endless. So I really I want to encourage you to think about how you can use data really to tell your story. We talk a lot about what's going on in our classrooms and we give a lot of anecdotal data, but using data, cold, hard numbers and facts to tell your story, it ups your chances so much of getting what you need, getting what you want and, even more importantly, getting what your students need.
Speaker 1:So I want to encourage you this week and if you have questions, you can always text me or message me through, you know, facebook or Instagram, at Teaching Struggling Learners. I'm always there. You are more than welcome to ask me questions about this and I love helping out, especially if you've got some behavior stuff going on, because I mean, next month we're going into February and we know February is a rough month for behaviors and all that. So if you're, if you're having issues. You got questions, find me on Instagram, send me a message. I'll be glad to chat it up with you. So, um, all that being said, next week we're going to start talking about how to look at those present levels of our IEPs and how we can do a little bit better job of keeping them present, so that you know they make more sense. So until next time, may your coffee be strong, your students calm and, of course, your students progressing. Bye.