Data-Driven Inquiry

Data-driven inquiry helps teachers and school leaders invest energy where it has the greatest impact. By keeping everyone’s attention on student performance data, inquiry fosters a culture of public practice and shared responsibility for student success. Inquiry is a systematic way of responding to gaps in student learning. School teams participate in many inquiry cycles over the course of a school year. In each cycle, teams plan and implement small changes in practice that they hypothesize will lead to big gains in learning.

Over several years, BPE refined an inquiry approach, supporting school teams to:

• analyze a variety of student data to uncover patterns in classroom and school practices that allow performance gaps to persist.

• identify a group of target students, set specific goals for improvement, implement small changes in practice, and refine the approach until goals are met.

• build on successful work with target students so that evidence rather than instinct informs decisions about school policies, use of resources, curriculum, and other practices that affect all students.

• identify their own professional learning needs and seek support where needed.

• develop teachers’ and administrators’ capacity to improve outcomes for struggling students and lead school-wide change.

Inquiry has become a part of how we do our work at BPE. No longer a separate program, our inquiry approach is embedded in support for teachers and partner schools.

Boston’s inquiry initiative was a partnership of BPE and the Boston Public Schools, supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Walmart Foundation, and the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation. The approach was adapted from the work of New Visions for New Schools and CUNY's Baruch College in New York City.