DATA TEAM MINUTES FOR LOWERS
Date: 12/09/2011
Facilitator: Mrs. Marino
Recorder: Ms. Ndubuisi
In attendance
Ms. Hennen, Mr. Bryer, Mr. Swallen and Mrs. Marino, Mr.
Gene, and Ms. Ndubuisi
Steps in the DDDM Process
(Data Driven Decision
Making)
Step 4: Select Instructional Strategy
GLE/Focus Area
Establish a protocol for looking at student work and choose
a teaching strategy.
CFA skills are based on data from the NWEA tests.
Evidence/Alignment with SA
SIP (Stamford Academy
School Improvement Plan)
What happened at the
meeting?
-Mrs. Marino began the meeting by stating that as a
team we should establish a protocol for looking at
student work samples.
-She emphasized that all student work samples brought
to the data team meetings should directly relate to the
CFA skills that we are teaching.
-The following protocol was established:
1. Exemplar, median and low level work samples
should be brought to meetings.
2. We will analyze the student work samples and
give peer feedback to one another on student tasks and
performance.
-Next we moved on to a discussion on establishing a
clear and concise definition for Main Idea. As we
discussed this, some questions and suggestions arose.
1. Mrs. Marino asked if the topic is the same as the
main idea. She suggested that on a hierarchy, topic
would come before main idea. I concurred.
2. Mr. Swallen provided some anecdotal evidence
which showed that students were unable to distinguish
between topic and main idea.
3. We then decided to define main idea as the
essential points of a passage or text and use this as our
working definition.
-We decided as a team that we might have to go back
and make sure that students have a clear
understanding of the distinction between topic and
main idea.
-Mr. Swallen suggested that we could look at main idea
as being the gist.
-This led us to examine some instructional strategies
for teaching main idea.
1. Ms. Ndubuisi provided the team with a possible
strategy, known as Get the Gist. With this strategy,
students respond to questions of Who, When, What,
and Where, which will lead them to the gist or the main
idea of the reading.
2. After discussing this strategy, we concluded as a
team that while this strategy scaffolds students
towards understanding and finding the main idea of a
reading, it is not concrete enough.
3. Mr. Bryer shared a strategy from a textbook on
literacy. This strategy is known as Text Coding and it
requires students to go through some elaborate
process and ‘code the text’ to find the main idea.
4. We decided as a team that this strategy might be
most useful and beneficial to our students since its
challenges them cognitively.
- Lastly Mr. Swallen shared a pyramid graphic
organizer that he devised for teaching main idea. And
Mrs. Marino suggested that the format of the CFA be a 5
paragraph passage with a multiple choice main idea
question for each passage, and one overall main idea
short answer question.
Decisions Made
Working definition for main idea, protocol for looking at
student work samples and format for CFA pretest
Student Work Reviewed
None
Next Steps for next meeting
Think about what you know about data wall and the
different purposes for data walls (growth versus
recognition).