Chapter 4: Strengthening Collaborative Data Practices in Schools: The Need to Cultivate Development Perspectives and Diagnostic Approaches

In the last several decades, few educational improvement initiatives have received such persistent and widespread attention as the use of data in schools. The collaborative use of data by teacher teams¹ has become a widely popular approach for school-wide improvement. As O’Day and her colleagues’ (2011) report of New York City Department of Education policy suggests and as other scholars have concluded (Cosner, 2012; Little, 2012; Ripple & Buttram, 2013), collaborative data use is fast becoming an expected mechanism for school-wide improvement encountered by increasingly large numbers of schools throughout the US and abroad. And yet, research informing and supporting the enactment of collaborative data practices remains underdeveloped (Coburn & Turner, 2012b; Little, 2012).