The most valuable field experience in this course was the Data Overview. This experience provided me with the opportunity to take on many of the responsibilities of a data coach. I had to begin by gathering all relevant data related to my school. Then I had to analyze the data and drill down to aggregated and disaggregated data in order to find trends that exist within the school. Finally, I created a presentation that shared a visual all of the trends that I had identified. After creating visuals, I was able to share my observations and inferences from the data. I was able to identify possible student learning problems and create discussion questions that would get stakeholders taking about the data. This is all an important step for utilizing data to promote school improvement.
Moving forward, I plan to share the data overview previously created with several stakeholders at my school. This will begin a discussion about trends that I have noticed and allow them to make their own observations and inferences from the data. I hope to be able to work with a team of individuals to further analyze a variety of types of data in order to identify our schools strengths and student learning problems. All of this work by the team will create a school wide data culture that is able to utilize data to further improve our school. One major challenge that I anticipate is related to the amount of time that it will take to follow through with the action plans. The action plan contains many steps and it will be difficult to find people who would like to take on this large of a role in addition to their current duties. All of these actions will be beneficial for the further improvement of the school.