Kathryn Parker Boudett

A revised and updated edition presents field-tested strategies to foster equity, inclusion, and continuous improvement in educational practice In this third edition of Data Wise, Kathryn Parker Boudett and Candice Bocala update the research-based eight-step collaborative inquiry process and demonstrate how it can be used to build more equitable schools. As Boudett and Bocala define it, equity occurs when each student has access to rigorous learning opportunities and is provided with the support they need to be successful. Therefore, improvement work is equity work. This new edition provides a step-by-step guide for how teachers, counselors, and school leaders can address inequities and improve learning outcomes for all students. It shows how the evidence-focused analysis of the Data Wise improvement process, coupled with the disciplined way of thinking known as the ACE Habits of Mind (a shared commitment to action, assessment, and adjustment intentional collaboration and a relentless focus on evidence), can foster mindset shifts and fundamentally change the way educators work. Data Wise is a world-renowned approach that has been used to address challenges not only in K– 2 classrooms but also in higher education, professional learning, and administrative settings. This essential work delivers solid, relevant guidance for integrating data inquiry into institutional practice.

Actionable and adaptable guidance for extending the proven Data Wise process from the classroom to entire school systems. In System Wise, Adam Parrott-Sheffer, Carmen Williams, David Rease, Jr., and Kathryn Parker Boudett provide a blueprint to scale up the Data Wise process for continuous improvement, extending it from classrooms and schools to broader educational contexts. The System Wise approach highlights the adaptability of the Data Wise protocols, which promote agency among students and teachers, data literacy among educators, and capacity building within organizations to achieve better learning outcomes system wide. Using real-world stories, the authors demonstrate how their data-driven model for system-level continuous improvement can respond to the specific needs and challenges of different learning communities and types of schools. They encourage team leaders, principals, and district administrators to root their leadership within the ACE habits of mind (which focus on action, collaboration, and evidence) and to work in partnership with teachers to bring coherence and symmetry to instruction throughout an educational system. The book includes detailed descriptions of strategic tasks, accompanied by examples, planning checklists, and implementation templates, to help educational teams manage continuous organization-wide improvement. This highly useful work empowers educators to align values, strategy, and resources to create the conditions in which equitable schools can be built and sustained. The practices and approaches of System Wise will be immediately applicable to any large-scale challenges educational leaders seek to solve.

What’s the scarcest resource in schools? Almost any educator will answer, “Time.” The lack of time for colleagues to work together is one of the biggest barriers to improving teaching and learning. All too often, educators also say that the biggest waste of time ismeetings. People in schools attend dozens, if not hundreds, of meetings a year. How can that time be used wisely?This book, by two editors of Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning,attempts to bring about a fundamental shift in how educators think about the meetings they attend. The authors make the case that these gatherings are potentially the most important venue where adult and organizational learning can take place in schools, and that making more effective use of this time is an important key to increasing student achievement.In Meeting Wise, the authors show why planning meetings is a high-leverage strategy for changing how people work together in the service of school improvement. To this end, they have created a meeting-planning “checklist” to develop a common language for discussing and improving the quality of meetings. In addition, they provide guidelines for readers on “wise facilitating” and “wise participating,” and also include “top tips” and “common dilemmas.”Simple, succinct, and practical, Meeting Wise is designed to be read and applied at every level of the educational enterprise, from district leadership meetings and professional developmentsessions to teacher-team meetings and even teachers’ meetings with parents and students.

What’s the scarcest resource in schools? Almost any educator will answer, “Time.” The lack of time for colleagues to work together is one of the biggest barriers to improving teaching and learning. All too often, educators also say that the biggest waste of time ismeetings. People in schools attend dozens, if not hundreds, of meetings a year. How can that time be used wisely?This book, by two editors of Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning,attempts to bring about a fundamental shift in how educators think about the meetings they attend. The authors make the case that these gatherings are potentially the most important venue where adult and organizational learning can take place in schools, and that making more effective use of this time is an important key to increasing student achievement.In Meeting Wise, the authors show why planning meetings is a high-leverage strategy for changing how people work together in the service of school improvement. To this end, they have created a meeting-planning “checklist” to develop a common language for discussing and improving the quality of meetings. In addition, they provide guidelines for readers on “wise facilitating” and “wise participating,” and also include “top tips” and “common dilemmas.”Simple, succinct, and practical, Meeting Wise is designed to be read and applied at every level of the educational enterprise, from district leadership meetings and professional developmentsessions to teacher-team meetings and even teachers’ meetings with parents and students.

Based on Data Wise and Data Wise in Action, Key Elements of Observing Practice offers insight into one of the most challenging steps in capturing data about school performance: observing and analyzing instructional practice.A central premise of the Data Wise approach is that teams of educators must have a good understanding of what instruction looks like in order to improve it. The most direct approach to developing this collective knowledge is to have teachers observe one another’s practice. However, many schools do not have a collegial culture in which examining instruction feels supportive rather than threatening, and most teachers do not have the skills to describe teaching in a fine-grained, evidence-based way.This DVD and Facilitator’s Guide provide school leaders with a set of tools for developing teachers’ capacity to learn from their own practice.The DVD features a 20-minute film that follows members of one school team as they apply the five key elements of observing instruction. It also contains five sections that offer viewers a closer look at each element. Brief videos providing an overview of the Data Wise improvement process and a summary of the eight steps of the Data Wise cycle are also included.The Facilitator’s Guide provides meeting agendas, protocols, and discussion questions to help principals, academic coaches, and other providers of professional development use the video segments to structure their conversations with colleagues about observing practice.The complete program involves a series of eight meetings, each of which runs forty to seventy minutes. This package includes one DVD and one Facilitator's Guide. There is a reduced rate for five copies of this package available for schools and training. (See above.)