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Principals: Achieve Your Goals Through Data-Driven Assessments

by Jana Bennett

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As a principal, you're not only a strong, proven leader, but you're also a longtime educator. Your role is rooted in the improvement of learning and teaching and the continued advancement of your school.

To lead your school forward and progress student performance, what goals do you propose and set forth? Are these goals quantifiable?

Why Setting Measurable Goals is a Necessity

Each year, you establish numerous school-wide goals. While each school fosters unique needs and demands specific goals be set, most principals can agree that the following goals are fundamental:

  • Cultivate an exciting and supportive learning environment for all students.
  • Improve student achievement.
  • Promote purposeful teamwork between educators.
  • Advance educators’ professional development.
  • Improve communication with parents to boost parental involvement.

While these objectives are attainable and relevant, they’re not easily backed by data. The method of evaluation varies from school to school and is based on different standards and judgements.

When it comes to proving student achievement, however, specific, data-driven goals must be set. Without such targets, there’s no real way for principals to quantifiably demonstrate the effectiveness of instruction and intervention and show how every student is improving.

Indeed, “we cannot improve at scale what we cannot measure,” as noted by The Harvard Educational Review.1

Setting measurable goals provides principals with metrics that:

  • Capture students’ performance and progress
  • Identify students who are struggling
  • Inform instruction and/or intervention
  • Monitor progress
  • Highlight success

The basis for setting and achieving scalable goals stems from frequent student assessments, such as benchmarking and student progress monitoring.

Start Achieving These 3 Goals with a Proven Data-Driven Assessment System

As today's educational landscape becomes more data-centric, the goals and processes you facilitate for your school must shift in tandem.

The fundamental goals we touched on at the beginning of the blog post are indefinitely appropriate to work toward. It’s when these initiatives are met with goals that seek to evaluate students’ key performance indicators – like skill competencies, assessment scores, and overall growth and improvement – that your students and educators can chart incredible progress.

When a robust, data-driven assessment process is in place, measuring student KPIs are more attainable than ever and empower you to set goals like:

  1. Implement frequent assessment initiatives that lead to continual data collection and analysis.
  2. Establish clear plans and measurable goals for each student utilizing student performance data.
  3. Improve students' reading and math comprehension skills and exceed end-of-year targets.

Are you setting clear, measurable goals for your school? On the aimswebTMPlus all-in-one benchmarking and progress monitoring assessment system, demonstrating real-time student achievement school-wide becomes quick, easy, and undeniably valid.

Learn how you can lead your educators and students forward with a proven assessment, data management, and reporting system for grades K-8.

Resources:

1 Bryk, Anthony, S., Gomez, Louis, M., Grunrow, Alicia, Lemahieu. Harvard Educational Review. “Learning to Improve. How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better.” Accessed April 9, 2017. http://hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-85-number-4/herbooknote/learning-to-improve.