HILL helps schools develop a sustainable process of transparent data analysis to drive intervention and instruction on a daily basis:

Using Assessment to Drive Instruction

Data should permeate all aspects of school-wide literacy reform.  HILL offers professional development that promotes routines that foster data-driven instruction for the purpose of improving student learning.  Principals learn to facilitate data meetings on a regular basis; teachers learn to participate in grade-level data meetings; and individual teachers benefit from one-on-one meetings with the literacy coach and/or principal. Data-meeting protocols provide the structure and procedures for the data meeting that can be used in a highly effective manner over a multi-year literacy change initiative. The protocols serve the purpose of keeping everyone on-task, keeping the focus on student data, and ensuring that the discussion explicitly links the data to instruction.  Data meetings provide the foundation for educators to plan and implement high quality instruction to students with diverse needs.

Data Meeting Protocols

Having a good system for collecting, organizing and managing the use of assessment data is crucial in sustaining effective classroom, school and district practices.  Data Meeting Protocols are a set of tools designed to assist educators to conduct data meetings, group students for differentiated instruction, link groups to appropriate interventions and identify skills that need to be addressed in small groups.  There are four levels of meetings that explicitly walk educators through the process of how many students in each grade level require either intensive or strategic reading intervention with a gradual release focus for sustainability.  Data Meeting Protocols provide the following:

• Tools for  analyzing and grouping students for instruction
• A systematic process for conducting school-based data meetings
• Plans for designing interventions for addressing student needs
• On-going data collection, diagnostic assessments and progress monitoring tools

Data Meeting Protocols can help literacy leaders use assessment data in charting a course toward systemwide reading improvement.  The process has six steps:

Step 1: Determine how many students in each grade level fall into intensive, strategic, and     benchmark categories based on a measure of oral reading fluency.

Step 2: Identify how many students reach the benchmark level on oral reading fluency but score below benchmark on reading comprehension assessments.

Step 3: Identify how many students score below benchmark on both oral reading fluency and tests of language comprehension or vocabulary.

Step 4: Identify personnel and programs for intervention instruction.

Step 5: Group individual students across classrooms within each grade level.

Step 6: Monitor student progress, making modifications to instruction and instructional groups as necessary.