How to Organize Your Session in a Way That Makes Data Tracking EASY

Hi there and happy Friday!

Welcome to Week 2 of our data-tracking series! If you are new around here, welcome! We are Ascend SMARTER Intervention and it is our mission to make evidence-based, effective literacy intervention accessible to students and educators everywhere.

We know that data and data-driven instruction are CRITICAL to effective intervention so a few weeks ago we asked if you all would be interested in free training around the subject of taking and using data in your lessons. The response was an overwhelming yes. Instead of just one training, we decided to make this an entire series!

If you haven’t checked out the first part of this 4-part training, >>click here<< to check out part 1: Determining Which Data Needs to be Tracked.

Once you have determined which data needs to be tracked….

…the easiest way to make sure that you can effectively track this data is to organize your sessions in a way that makes this easy.

Before we jump into how to organize your sessions, we want to talk about some of the mistakes we see (and have made!) regarding setting up your sessions, and what we should be doing instead.

What To Do and What Not To Do When Data-Tracking

Don’t: have ambiguous/weak goals that are difficult to track.

For example, don’t write a goal that says “Student will read 70% of unfamiliar words in 2 out of 3 trials.”

• What does “unfamiliar words” mean? Are these nonsense words? Words that have phonograms/patterns the student has not been explicitly taught? Are they red words or sight words? Not only do we not understand what the goal is getting at, but we also have no idea what materials/activities we need to be able to track it!

• This goal doesn’t show mastery. 70% in only 2 of 3 trials does not prove that the child has mastered a skill.

Instead: Write clearly outlined goals that are easy to track!

• Make sure the goal has a clear yes/no framework or has a rubric attached to it so that you know at that moment whether or not a student should receive credit for a correct answer! If the goal centers around something like, “Did the child read the word correctly, yes or no?” This will be much easier for you to track and report on.

• Set yourself up to have easy math calculations. If a child needs to have at least 80% accuracy, don’t give them 7 trials and have to divide their correct responses by 7. We recommend tracking 5 or 10 trails because they are easy to calculate the child’s percent accuracy from! (4 correct responses out of 5 is a lot easier to track than 6 correct responses out of 7!).

Don’t: Skip the Planning!

Often, we will see folks write great goals and trust that their program/activities will get students to where they need to be. However, if we want data tracking to be easy and for our students to succeed, we can’t just hope that once we get to a progress monitoring period that we will have everything that we need.

Instead: Plan ahead and set goals for what students need!

When you know what data you need to track and determine goals around that, make sure that you plan your activities to match and set yourself up to be able to track everything you need!

• You may be tracking different data points for different students. This means that you will need to have different activities lined up to be able to track each student’s needs.

• Make sure you are targeting the students’ specific needs when writing goals. If Johnny is struggling with phonological awareness, he will need a goal around that while another child may need more targeted help with fluency. Make sure the goals fit the child in front of you.

• Make sure you are mindful of what goals will actually get students closer to their end goal of being able to read, take meaning from the text, and write a well-written response. Not every skill is going to be a driver to get students closer to this end goal. (I.e. rhyming won’t be as helpful as other phonological awareness skills like blending/segmenting).

Don’t: Wait until a progress monitoring period to analyze the data in front of you.

Instead: use the data you track weekly to error correct and inform your sessions!

We will get into this more in Part 3 of our Data-Tracking series, but one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to take data and sit on it. Instead of waiting for a progress monitoring period to analyze your data, we should use this data to inform our intervention each day/week.

Putting this all together:

When we look at these '“dos and don’ts,” we have found that the easiest and most effective way to organize our sessions looks like this.

Lessons should flow through a hierarchy, starting with Phonological Awareness and hitting on all five core components of literacy. We will run through this through a reading lens, and then again through a writing lens for each phonogram and rule we target.

For example, if we are working on the -CK phonogram, we will start with phonological awareness activities that center around that phonogram. We will start with things like syllable and phoneme blending because those will drive us to our -CK phonics instruction (i.e. “What word do the sounds /r/, /o/, /k/ make?” will help prep the student for reading “rock.” After phonics, we will work through vocabulary skills. This might look like asking a student to provide three different definitions for the word “rock.” We will move into fluency work and target -CK words at the sentence, paragraph, and eventually passage level, and then target comprehension.

Then, we will work through that same hierarchy through a writing lens. For phonological awareness, we will target segmenting (what sounds do you hear in “rock?”) to help prime the brain for spelling. Then, we will work through spelling as a phonics task. We will follow phonics instruction with vocabulary work (sort the words you just spelled into nouns, verbs, and adjectives), before targeting fluency and comprehension (different writing styles - narrative, informational, opinion, etc).

When you set up lessons in a way that makes data-tracking easy, you can be sure that you will always gather the data you need without having to spend time thinking about it. You can set up your data-tracking sheets to follow the flow of your lessons.

This is also great for groups because students receive all of the necessary instruction, but you can be sure you have activities to target all of the different goals you have for the different kids in your group.

Working through this hierarchy is also better for students because they get used to the flow of the activities. Have you ever had a student who struggles with the transition from activity to activity? Having the same structure every time, allows students to anticipate the flow, see how the activities flow together (i.e. how the segmenting tasks in phonological awareness connect to the auditory drill and spelling), and it requires less time to explain the different activities.

Without a lesson organized to match the data you need to track, you are going to waste time in your intervention explaining things over and over again, you risk missing opportunities to gather data, and your data tracking is going to be a mess (think post-its all over your desk, scribbles everywhere kind of a mess. #we’veallbeenthere).

If you want to be sure that you are able to easily incorporate all of these data-tracking strategies into your instruction, then be sure to grab our free Data Tracking System. This tool will help make data tracking easy and help you keep your session data organized.

Once you have everything set up to gather data, finding out how to analyze the data and use it to help your students is the critical next step. Check out part 3 of our data tracking series, and analyze your data to make decisions on the next steps for students.