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Talbot County unveils interactive school-improvement dashboard to align schools with strategic plan
Summary
District presenters described a new dashboard and rubric intended to standardize needs assessments, SMART E goals, and artifact collection across eight schools; rollout began July 2024 and the district intends ongoing monitoring and support.
Dr. Einhorn presented the district's new school-improvement dashboard to the Talbot County Board of Education on Nov. 17, describing a multi-stakeholder process to replace the older Word-based plan with an interactive tool and a four-point rubric.
The committee that designed the dashboard met beginning in May 2024 and rolled out a draft in July 2024, Dr. Einhorn said. The platform requires each school to identify its school-improvement-team members (leadership, teacher leaders, parents and, where appropriate, community members), complete a data-driven needs assessment and set SMART E goals that specify which student groups are furthest from proficiency.
"When a school improvement process is implemented well, the plans that are developed serve kind of as a road map for the work that the school is gonna do to improve outcomes for students," Dr. Einhorn said, outlining how schools will use MCAP, MAP and classroom assessments as monitoring indicators and how teachers’ practices will be tied to school goals.
The district stressed timelines: MCAP data arrive in mid-July, teachers return in August and schools aim to complete needs assessments by early September so teachers can set Student Learning Objectives aligned to school goals. The dashboard also contains an artifacts section where schools upload evidence of professional learning and implementation so the district can identify which practices move outcomes and where additional support is needed.
Dr. Einhorn said the district created a four-level rubric (developing, approaching, meeting, exceeding) to provide formative feedback and identify professional learning priorities. The board asked about community presentation of the work and about avoiding perceptions that identifying low-performing student groups is "dumbing things down;" presenters said naming groups is necessary to target strategies without taking resources from others.
District staff said they would make the dashboard available to the board and bring principals back midyear to present progress and examples of strategies and actions. The board voiced support for including teachers and parents on school improvement teams and asked for examples of strategies the schools intend to use.
Next steps: board members will review the dashboard when the district demonstrates the district and school views; the district will provide examples of strategies and artifacts during the next reporting cycle.
