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LAC School Spotlight - International School of Beijing

International School of Beijing
(by Ruth Poulsen, Director of Curriculum and Assessment, ISB)

THE SCHOOL
Number of students: 1700
Grades: EY-12
Number of faculty: 200
Curriculum: IB DP, Common Core
Accredited by: CIS
Joined LAC in 2019 School Year 

THE CHALLENGE
What was the challenge the school was facing?
ISB is very rich in the amount of data we collect, but we found that a challenge was that we were housing that data in various places. LAC gave us one place to start visualizing all of our data in one place.

Why was LAC chosen?
We started with another company at first, but LAC’s visualizations were much cleaner and easier to understand. We really loved the individual student reports which visualize various kinds of data side by side.

HOW IS THE LAC PLATFORM BEING USED NOW
Who uses the platform at the school?

  • Our leadership team looks at schoolwide data together twice a year, once in October and once in June.
  • Teacher leaders in various subject areas look at programmatic data once or twice per year.
  • Individual teachers look at the LAC portal data 1- 3 times per year, depending on their subject area and grade level.

How often and at what critical times of the year is it being used the most?
In Elementary school, teachers do Beginning of year, Middle of year, and end of year data meetings. In Secondary, this is more like twice a year. 

What are the ways in which data and the platform are being used by teachers and leadership?
We often use the “Here’s What, So What, Now What” protocol to reflect on the data in order to name patterns and consider multiple possible inferences before taking any action.

What is the impact, how has it changed the culture/ conversations/ work, etc.?
Growing a culture of data reflection and responsive teaching is a major challenge. Teachers are much more likely to see the benefit of talking about student data now that they have had several impactful experiences where they can see how useful data can be in planning instruction that meets the needs of their students.

What key decisions are being made with the use of data and the platform?
We consider programmatic decisions based on macro data and responsive instructional decisions based on individual student and class data.

WHAT ARE THE WAYS IN WHICH YOU SEE THE SCHOOL USING DATA IN THE FUTURE?

One of our major challenges is deepening our capacity for responsive teaching--and that’s not usually based on data that goes into LAC portal, but rather is small formative checks that then teachers use to adjust their instruction. But experiencing the larger data meetings run by the teachers leaders and Office of Learning are one step that can help teachers build their capacity to apply this in smaller, more pervasive ways, so we plan to continue to build these systems and structures.




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