Data Team Basics
Data teams in my school district are regular meetings among the special education staff (Special Education Teachers, Speech-Language Pathologists, School Psychologists [Me!], and administrators). We get together once a month and discuss all the data we collect on students to help each other find solutions for students who are struggling. We present our data on these struggling students and together find evidence-based interventions or teaching methods to increase the academic or behavioral performance of those students. Our team has been meeting together for 8 years and runs like a well-oiled machine.
Here is the official information about Data Teams:
Data team meetings unfold in five steps:
Our meetings last for 90 minutes. We spend the first 20-30 minutes with housekeeping (establishing norms and reviewing the agenda), problem-solving about our progress as a team, and then I, as our data leader, provide new interventions for the teachers to consider for struggling students at this data team or at data teams in the future. We spend the remaining 60-70 minutes discussing students, and, as a group, coming up with interventions. Each teacher presents their student(s) and then the rest of the group goes scrambling through our reference books or the internet looking for appropriate interventions. It is the goal of the team that each teacher leaves with a plan of how they are going to increase the academic or
behavioral progress of their student(s).
Data team members have roles to help divide responsibility and engage. Roles include:
On the importance of listening to your team:
After a few years, we had a meeting and I forgot to establish the roles. At the end of the meeting, I outed myself, but the team said that they felt it was one of our best meetings. They felt freed by not having to worry if they were fulfilling their roles appropriately. The team said that the roles had become distracting. They were getting hung up on making sure they played their roles well and were actually less engaged. In the following meetings, we limited the roles to the bare essentials; Data Leader, Time Keeper, and Recorder.
Everyone else was an Engaged Participant. That worked better for us.
