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• Trigger

There will always be a trigger to begin the cycle. Asking questions is a good way to trigger the process. What clues can you find in data? Do you have any hunches?

Where will your trigger questions come from? Some of them will be very simple.

• How good/poor is …?
• What aspects of … are good/poor?
• Is … actually changing?
• How is … changing?
• Is … better than last year?
• How can … be improved?
• Why is … good/poor?
• What targets are reasonable for …?
• What factors influence the situation for …?
• What would happen if we …?
• Are we surprised by these results?
• Is there an apparent discrepancy here?

Some of these questions can be described as summative. Others are formative.

Summative questions are about end-of-process results, often suitable for reporting and accountability. Many summative questions will relate to the goals and targets in a school’s strategic plan for improving student achievement – or to goals set within teaching departments or faculties.

Some will aim at evaluating a policy or procedure, especially if there has been a change.

We have been running 60-minute periods for 5 years now. What effect has the change had?

Most of these questions will be obvious and decided in advance – especially if strategic goals have been decided on the basis of analysing data.

A target in the school’s annual plan is for all year 9 boys to improve their writing level by at least one level using asTTle testing (for example, from 4B to 4A). Have all year 9 boys improved by at least one asTTle level in writing?

Of course, achieving targets like this relies on deciding how to improve how we teach writing – that’s what formative questions are all about …

Formative questions are intended to provide more immediate feedback to improve teaching and learning, so they are probably more specific. Some will come from routine consideration of available data and evidence or as a consequence of internal or external reviews: national assessment results, asTTle results for a cohort, information from contributing schools, ERO reports, etc.

The data suggest our students are achieving well in A, but less well in B. What can we do about that?

This question should lead the school to look back at its school processes data.

A significant proportion of our school leavers enrol in vocational programmes at polytechnic or on-job. How well do our school programmes prepare those students?

Many trigger questions come from hunches.

I suspect this poor performance is being caused by … Is this true?

The colloquial term hunch is used here to acknowledge how intuitive teachers can be. Hunches are inevitable and extremely useful. In fact most hunches are based on sound professional experience and observation. Like detectives, teachers base hunches on professional observations. Of course, until they have been tested against evidence, they remain hunches.

Some hunches will be based on a hypothesis or a speculation about a possible change.

We reckon results will improve if we put more effort into … Is this likely?

I think we’d get better results from this module if we added … Is there any evidence to support this idea?

The table below is a set of results for year 12 students in one subject. Most teachers would start to get hunches from even a cursory read of the table. Until careful analysis is done, it’s best to pose these hunches as questions:

Is the class as a whole doing better in internally assessed standards than in externally assessed standards*? If so, why?

Are the better students (with many excellence results) also doing less well in external assessments? If so, why?

Is there any relationship between numbers of absences and achievement levels? It seems not.

*indicates externally assessed

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