Using Early Warning Systems to Change Teacher Conversation

Early Warning System(EWS) as a tool to transform schools. Teachers have been talking about students for a long time, but it often stopped at the complaining. Using an EWS to help identify at risk students and intervene on their behalf as soon as possible. An essential element to the Early Warning System is having metrics to help identify the students you need to intervene on immediately. We also had common planning time built in to the schedule to meet daily and a shared At my previous school we looked at Attendance, Behavior and Course Performance(ABC's). We put the students into three different groups within each ABC except behavior(2): at-risk(red), warning(yellow), good standing(green).
  1. Attendance
    1. Red: ADA < 85% 
    2. Yellow: ADA 86- 89.9%
    3. Green: ADA 90% >
  2. Behavior:
    1. Red- 1 or more suspensions
    2. Green- No suspensions
  3. Course Performance(ELA and Math grades)
    1. Red: F
    2. Yellow: C or D
    3. Green: A or B
In order to be put on the focus list for the quarter, you had to have an off-track indicator in two of the three areas unless your indicator is attendance. Attendance was an automatic. Once the focus list was generated students were discussed weekly at Early Warning Indicator meetings. EWI meetings consisted of grade level teams. Each teacher would bring the most current grades for the students being covered and the facilitator brought the most up to date behavior and attendance data. During these meetings students would be discussed in a productive manner always answering the question "what can we do for this student". The intervention would be championed by a staff member, monitored and reviewed in two weeks. 

During these meetings the tone of the conversation was changed. We were no longer just "venting" about our students and letting the conversation end there. We were talking about students in a productive manner always moving towards a solution of the problem. This process allowed us to identify off-track students as soon as they needed our help and get them back on track quickly. 

Comments

  1. ZachAugust 3, 2017 at 11:37 AM

    I really like this, I wanted to share the product "Learning Circle" that CCS uses that is very similar to this.

    The program tracks data through other systems (Infinite Campus - grades, attendance, etc) but also has points where you can enter your own data and interventions.

    I have no clue of the cost as it was a district wide program we had. Here is the link -> http://learning-circle.org/early-warning-indicator-system/

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  2. UnknownAugust 3, 2017 at 4:58 PM

    This is a great way to be proactive about problems. It is so much better for these issues to be addressed in the school building. The passive, and ineffective, approach is to just sit back and then deal with bigger problems at a later stage. A lot of Court filings about truancy particularly, could be averted by this approach where ownership of students and their problems is asserted at the building level.

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