Support Student Data Use

Coaches can help teachers empower their pupils to set their own, goals, make plans for success and to measure their progress. Pupils need learning data that they can understand in order to do this.

This ISTE Standard for Coaches 4.6c is quite simple and ISTE explains that ‘coaches should partner with educators to empower students to use a wide variety of data sources regarding students such as academic data that supports planning and goal setting, formative and summative assessments, attendance etc.’ 

Teachers can spend hours writing school reports and marking assessments but the effort is pointless if it does not lead to an improvement from the pupil. Coaching is about helping teachers to coach pupils, or coaching pupils directly so that pupils can set their own goals and make plans for achieving them, based on feedback they have been given.

Every term pupils may receive an incredible amount of data on themselves: feedback on essays, attendance reports, effort grades, skills descriptors, assessment marks etc. All this data may be difficult for a pupil to understand, or for them to draw conclusions from, in order to plan for improvements to their learning.

Coaching can help pupils become more independent and motivated to improve. Technology can support pupil developments by presenting data in ways that are easy for pupils to understand and relate to. Some pupils may be able to use Excel to track their performance but others may need simpler tools like Padlet for creating their own pupil dashboard. Power Apps also can be used to make a simple platform. for recording skills and attainment and for setting goals that is child-friendly.