Debasish Mridha
Plus/delta tool. For schools, teachers, students and teams to be successful, continuous improvement is necessary. However, far too often schools fail to achieve the benefits of change because they don’t know what to change or where to start. The Plus/Delta assessment and feedback tool is quick and effective for both individuals and groups. This brainstorm-type format creates a comfortable atmosphere for openness and honesty. As an added benefit, when people give feedback, they often experience a sense of responsibility to the changes and solutions to their feedback.
Having a school establish a culture of accountability is the first step toward the vision of what stakeholders want their school to become in the future. An educational institution where everyone learns: students, teachers, administrators, and the community; where testing is conducted to understand the learning process and skill building of its students, where research is conducted to help students reach their full potential; where teachers calculate the best course of action to help students succeed; where administrators are instructional leaders and build capacity among teachers; and where the community takes an active role in the future of its young people. In order to have accountability, a school must have high expectations! All teachers will have expectations that, with the right support, all students will be successful in the classroom. Students will value education and know that talent alone will not breed success. That success comes from hard work and continuing to improve. Schools can accomplish this through the use of data notebooks. Data notebooks (or folders) support students in becoming co-producers of their learning. They help students organize processes for learning. The notebook generally contains a student’s mission, goals and action plans to support classroom and personal learning. Data notebooks may contain:
• Individual mission statements, goals/objectives, and action plans
• Charts or graphs to self-monitor and document progress
• Subject objectives to guide goal setting
• Formative assessments to document progress (classroom assessments, MAPP tests, etc.)
• Applications of quality tools and the PDSA cycle to guide process thinking
• Opportunities for two-way communication with parents
Data notebooks or folders empower students to become accountable for their learning. By writing goals/objectives based on actual course or subject objectives, students have control over their pace of learning. Goals/objectives are also written by students to capture short-term gains to motivate themselves to achieve long-range goals. As with classroom data centers, analyzing what is working or not working provides timely feedback to the student to correct the course of action, as needed. The notebook also documents progress that can predict course grades, providing “no surprises” at the end of each school quarter or semester. The development of data notebooks/folders mirrors the process for creating classroom data:
• Students write their individual mission statements based on their own needs, aligned with the classroom mission as closely as possible.
• Students formulate their personal goals/objectives and action plans based on curricular and stakeholders’ expectations and individual needs and missions.
• Students create data charts to monitor progress of each goal/objective.
• The contents of the data notebook may also include subject or course expectations and goals/objectives.
• Students may also include quality tools to determine “drivers” and “preventers” in achieving goals and PDSA models to redirect learning processes.
• A section of the notebook is devoted to parent communication to keep parents informed on at least a quarterly basis and also provide parents with the opportunity for input.
• Example of student work to show progress toward goals.
The Prepared Student 