Using Excel for Dynamic Inquiry

At the end of June, the Southeast DSAC Literacy Specialist and I had the good fortune to work with a group of teachers who were part of a district "Literacy Intervention Team." Their immediate goal was to explore the growth and performance of their 6th grade students who had participated in the previous year's targeted literacy intervention efforts.

I assisted the group in developing a large Excel spreadsheet which contained all the relevant student data, and we spent time exploring this data dynamically, asking questions such as:

• How did our intervention students perform on this year's MCAS test? What type of growth did we see in these students? How did they perform on local assessments (SRI, DRA-2, etc.)
  


• Were there students who were not included in our intervention efforts who scored Warning/Failing on the MCAS? Who were they and why were they not included in intervention efforts last year?
  


• What about the performance of students whose were initially identified last summer for intervention, but did not participate? (parents "opted out" of literacy intervention or other reasons)

The team's extremely rich conversations that day were able to move to the next level because of the ability to explore the data in a dynamic way, digging deeper as the conversation progressed.

As a result of this work (and previous work/conversations in districts), I would like to offer a workshop entitled "Using Excel for Dynamic Inquiry" so that districts/schools may develop their own dynamic tools for looking at data.

Please take a few minutes to participate in a short survey to indicate your interest in such a workshop, and feel free to forward the survey to others in your district who may be interested. Thank you for your feedback!

SURVEY LINK:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFRpWjR4UjJqcl9QOXMzai1ZaTZoR0E6MQ