Many years ago, I was sitting in the Columbus, Ohio, airport after presenting at the National Reading Recovery conference. I eavesdropped on a conversation across the aisle, and that’s how I met Maryann McBride, a Reading Recovery Teacher Leader from Virginia. She was showing Excel data about Reading Recovery students to a group of teachers sitting next to her. From that first encounter, I discovered that Maryann is an amazing storyteller. She can even make a spreadsheet sound exciting, and this particular one made a profound impression on me. Maryann was collecting weekly data on Reading Recovery students’ text level and writing vocabulary from all the teachers she supported in her huge district. Maryann had started to use that data to pinpoint students who might not accelerate, even though they’d been in their intervention program just a few weeks. The data helped her make decisions about when more support was needed. I thought this might work for my site. My geographically diverse western Massachusetts region ranged from a small disadvantaged urban district to tiny hill-town schools in the Berkshire mountains. I used Maryann’s techniques to help my team drastically improve our ability to support teachers.

The important thing about data is that we use it to help us make informed decisions. Too often data is used just to judge success or failure. Many teachers have shared their experiences with me over the years, and I’m excited to pass their data-driven methods on to you.

Let’s start with one from Amy Ferris, who collected data and used it to improve individual student reading and writing opportunities. Amy is a literacy interventionist in a kindergarten-only school in Richmond, Kentucky. A large number of their students come to school with meager letter knowledge. This past summer, Amy attended Jan Richardson’s and my Literacy Footprints Institute. Amy’s school also began using the Literacy Footprints guided reading system that Jan and I developed. In the video below, Amy shares the data that she and her colleagues began to collect this fall and the results they are getting using Literacy Footprints strategies. I love the outside-the-box thinking that Amy and her team are using and I think you will too!

If you’d like to see the letter tracing technique that Amy talks about, check out Jan Richardson’s demonstration of it on in the ABC Book video on literacyfootprints.com. You can also find the student-sized ABC book used in the video on pioneervalleybooks.com.

I hope Amy’s story inspires you and your team to look at your data and think about what you can learn from it. What changes might you make to improve your students’ access to and knowledge of literacy?