As anyone working in the education system or putting a child through it can attest, data is a critical component.
But when longtime education staffers Alissa Calandra and Kelsey Kercheval began a review of how The Baby Fold's Hammitt School collected data for its students, they realized that despite their system recording numerous data points for all of its students, there was one big piece missing.
"We realized that our previous data system really focused on negative behaviors: It was counting the frequency of negative behavior, like talking without raising your hand or getting out of your place where you're supposed to be in," Kercheval said in an interview for WGLT's Sound Ideas. "We were counting all of these negative behaviors, but we really weren't looking underneath the behavior to why it was occurring."
Calandra and Kercheval are both program coordinators for Hammitt School, a non-public special education school that serves 20 counties within 60 miles of Bloomington-Normal. Its educators serve a K-21 student body with diverse educational and social or emotional needs and — ideally — the data they collect helps them better serve their students in a personal way.
The new system Calandra and Kercheval helped to develop aims to bolster that effort.
Focuses on social emotional development and executive functioning are key to the new system, which launched in a pilot program at Hammitt School in April. Calandra said it provides a sort of map in which educators compare their students' current executive functioning skills and social emotional development to where they might be expected to be given their age. The process of brain development guided the system's development, she added.
"With our students at Hammitt School, what we see is that there tends to be a difference between a student's chronological age and their emotional age and executive functioning skills — where they should be chronologically versus where they're functioning on a day-to-day level," Calandra said. "We use that information to really tailor our expectations of the students and it also gives us a map for what skills we really need to focus on and teach so that we can have them develop up through that next level."
The new system also factors in what educators may do to help a student: Instead of only tracking negatives, it also tracks the ways behaviors might be addressed. If a teacher determines that a student might be acting out because they are seeking connection, tracking interventions can help determine whether or not a students' underlying need is being met.
"What we might do is [decide] every morning we're going to have breakfast with this kid and we're going to see what happens," Kercheval said. "What the new system allows us to do is to see, 'OK, I started having breakfast with this kid every morning on Aug. 15. Have we seen any change?' That leads to really fast decision-making. Our old system... didn't give us that immediate feedback and this allows staff to make quicker decisions."
Although the new system hasn't been in place that long, Kercheval said some parents have already noticed a difference.
"One of the parents' feedback was, 'This is the most understood I've ever felt that my child has been,'" she said. "There have been a lot of praises that they really feel like it is positive while also emphasizing the deficits that the students have and giving us a clear path for where we need to go."
Calandra also said the implementation of the new system has narrowed the focus for teachers to a few, different skills to work on for each student — the skills that are going to "help them most in their day-to-day living, where we'll be able to see the most growth, where they'll be able to feel the most progress."
Feedback from the school's teachers — the people who do the data collection — has also been positive, the two program coordinators said, though there was an initial learning curve when the new system rolled out. Parents are also able to see the targeted and more in-depth information from the new system in their children's individualized education plans, or IEPs, an organization spokesperson said.
There are still details being finalized, but the hope is that the new system could be rolled out to entities outside of Hammitt School eventually. Kercheval said that could include foster care programs or other places that serve children or students with similar needs to those served at The Baby Fold's school.
"It's very much a system that could be applicable across environments — it's not specific to what we're doing here because it's all based around where the student is functioning," she said. "We're using it from our youngest kid to our oldest kid and it fits them all just as well."
