Pre-K Data in Practice: How Does It Look in the Classroom?

Pre-K teachers spend six to seven hours each day with a group of students eager to explore the world around them. Each day, teachers facilitate a series of classroom activities that support each child’s development across multiple domains often set by the state’s learning standards, such as literacy and social-emotional learning. Teachers must be attentive to the changing interests and needs of individual students and at the same time able to engage the whole classroom community. They also need to keep track of how every individual students’ skills are changing over time, which requires them to be fully present throughout the day.

Lead teachers at Kennedy Children’s Center (KCC), an early childhood program serving preschoolers with developmental disabilities in New York City, shared how data are always being collected through formal and informal observations throughout the day. Arelys Marmolejo, a lead teacher at KCC, describes, “Collecting data is an integral part of our daily teacher routines. Working in a preschool program with students with special needs…[it] can be challenging at times in order to collect data, especially for a novice teacher. Many times it can be hard to write an observation in the moment, due to children needing a lot of individualized support and attention, so we have to wait till the end of the day to input the information in the platform.”

This information can be critical to helping teachers tailor instruction and identify students who qualify for special education services or 1:1 paraprofessionals. All students at KCC have individualized education plans, so data are used to ensure students are receiving the appropriate type and frequency of services or to advocate for additional resources.

The value of having an online data platform that houses data about skill progression is that teachers have access to real-time information about their students, making individualized instruction and lesson planning more accessible for the teacher.

However, as Marmolejo alluded to earlier, while teachers understand the importance of data collection, entering the data takes time. Marmolejo further elaborates how the process of inputting data “relies mainly on the [lead] teacher. We [would] benefit from getting help to train teacher assistants in order to help the [lead] teachers with the load of daily data collection.” In addition, Betzaida Narvaez, another lead teacher at KCC, describes how encountering challenges with the technology adds to the time it takes “to input information into the system, aside from the different responsibilities we have in the classroom throughout the day. Collecting and documenting information cannot be done in a timely fashion. Teachers' time is limited, therefore paperwork needs to be completed at home.”

In addition, KCC teachers described how these platforms may not be integrated with assessment and observational data from other services that a child receives, such as occupational and speech language services. As a result, making sure data is consistently shared among a student’s entire support team depends on the capacity and willingness of all the staff involved to work together and facilitate ongoing communication outside of the online data platform.

When it comes to sharing this information with families, data is used at every touchpoint to facilitate communication about a child’s progress. Families attending KCC meet with teachers formally twice a year and receive quarterly progress updates. Before these meetings and updates happen, KCC teachers translate numbers and charts provided by the online data platform into a narrative that is more accessible and easier to understand. Teachers learn to do this through their teacher preparation programs in addition to, as Sorviel Carrasquillo, another lead teacher at KCC, described, being “immersed in the classroom…so you need both. They go hand in hand. The theory and reality.”

In an ideal scenario, teachers are able to capture samples of student progress during the school day and have time set aside to input data and reflect with other staff members on ways to improve instruction moving forward. Teachers understand the value of data and will often work beyond their typical hours to record this information. Even if the pre-K program has a supportive data culture, a teacher’s time is limited, calling into question the long-term sustainability of these practices and emphasizing the need for improved data systems that work better for the ones who are responsible for collecting the information.