You’ve gathered the data, now let’s put that information into action!
As soon as you complete your student assessments, you receive immediate access to the data. The Aperture System provides a breakdown of where an individual student is at with their social-emotional skills in addition to a classroom overview of skill levels. This means you can get started supporting students right away.
Let’s dive deeper into how Aperture data can support students at the individual level and classroom level.
Individual
The individualized approach may be good when working in small groups or 1:1 with a student to integrate intervention naturally into those teaching moments. It’s also great for when only a few students are recognized by the full DESSA as in need of instruction and the skills they are struggling with are different.
When you look at a student’s DESSA results you can explore more in-depth on the specific skills they are struggling with (“need for instruction”) and what skills they are really good at (“strengths”). From there you can outline resources and strategies in alignment with the student’s existing areas of strength to support their growth.
Students don’t want to always be told what they’re doing wrong. By rooting intervention in what students are already doing well, they’re more likely to succeed. With a strength-based approach students are still celebrated for what they’re doing well, and they’re encouraged to use the areas where they’re strong to develop the areas where they have room to grow.
With an individualized approach to intervention, each student’s specific needs are targeted and tailored to how they best learn, what their strengths are, and how they can practice their skills.
Classroom
The classroom view of your data gives insight into the overarching theme of the class. Maybe you’ve noticed that when you assign group projects or collaborative activities students struggle to work together. When you look at your classroom data you see that many students were flagged for need of instruction in relationship skills. Now that you have the data that shows more students are struggling with relationship skills than self-management, for example, you may think about ways to support the class’s growth in this area. It could be reaching out to a grade level a few above the one you teach and pairing your class up with peer mentors. For other grade levels it could be reading a book as a class or watching parts of movies to talk through how characters solved challenges through working together.
You can also use the data to tweak small things in universal instruction to increase focus on a particular skill that needs more support.
The great thing about SEL data is that it can also show you what’s working and what’s not working so you can troubleshoot any obstacles and make adjustments to improve effectiveness.
Regardless if this is your first or third rating, keep the momentum going! Capturing and analyzing data throughout the year helps you determine the progress students are making in strengthening their skills. The data also provides valuable insight into the impact of tailoring instruction.
Whether at the individualized level or classroom level (or both!) the more we focus on growing students’ strengths, the more we succeed! There are many ways to use SEL data to make an impact. Try out the different levels and see how your students respond and how they grow from the strategies.