Deborah Grover

Deborah Grover is an Educational Consultant and Director of Beagle Innovations Ltd. Deborah is an experienced educator and speaker and has developed the beagle® approach and software application to allow assessment data to drive instruction. She delivers professional learning to schools to improve practice in assessment, literacy achievement and learner support.

If it’s not measured, it doesn’t exist!

This presentation is aimed at educators who are looking for solutions to inequity in literacy achievement. Find out how 25 schools in the Shine Literacy Project, used the beagle® software application, to transform their formative assessment data into powerful insights that improved their teaching practice. beagle® measured the impact of instruction, providing evidence that explicit code instruction has the greatest impact on literacy achievement.

Great readers aren’t created by the wave of a magic wand! Reading competency is the outcome of a systematic process that should include explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Some are lucky enough to become competent readers with little effort, but others get left behind with profound consequences.
To close the globally widening gap and inequity in literacy achievement that is a product of our current approach to literacy instruction, we have to do something different – NOW!

Using only summative assessment data to report on outcomes, does little to improve outcomes. It’s the ‘why’ that tells us how to change the ‘what’ for ‘who’ and for that we need formative assessment data so gaps in learning are identified – what’s measured is managed!

Working collaboratively with 25 schools in the Shine Literacy Project in New Zealand, we identified four barriers to equity in literacy achievement – the purpose of assessment, assessment practice, poor teacher knowledge and lack of engagement with data to drive instruction.

To meet the purpose of improving teachers’ teaching and students’ learning, the Code-Ed resources and the beagle® software application, were implemented in all schools. beagle® offers solutions to the identified barriers to success. Transforming the data from the Code-ed formative assessments that underpin reading competency, beagle® provided teachers with rich visual profiles and instructional planning (embedded by the Response to Intervention framework) to drive their classroom teaching practice.

As well as providing a valuable tool that supported teachers to enhance their practice and improve their learners’ outcomes, beagle® aggregated the data across all schools in the Shine Literacy Project and measured the impact of data driven instruction using John Hattie’s effect size shift calculations. beagle® helped raise student achievement by over three times the normal rate of learning over consecutive years. Now that’s life changing!