The Wildflower Within

Define It. Track It. Monitor It.

Once you’ve developed your Campus Improvement Plan and identified the strategies you’re going to use to move your campus forward, there’s another really important question:

How are you going to know if any of it is actually working?

Some things are obvious.

Your culture and climate team might track discipline referrals, attendance, student surveys, parent surveys, or other data that tells you how people are experiencing your school.

Academically, we know we’re going to look at the big things—STAAR, TELPAS, district assessments.

But what about everything in between?

Because one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a principal is that the work that determines those big outcomes happens long before those scores ever come back.

And THAT is the work I needed a system to see.

I Made a Lot of Assumptions as a New Principal

This is another one of those things I definitely did NOT have figured out my first year.

Before becoming a principal, I had been a classroom teacher, instructional coach, and assistant principal. There were instructional practices that had become automatic to me, and without realizing it, I assumed they were automatic for everybody else too.

They weren’t.

I might say something like:

“Students need to be fluent in their sight words.”

In my mind, that was perfectly clear.

Except…what does fluent actually mean?

Is it 70%?

100%?

Do students only need to read the words?

Should they be able to write them too?

I started realizing that I was communicating expectations without actually defining them.

And that taught me something I carry with me now:

You cannot assume that everyone holds the same definition of excellence that you do.

As the principal, you have to make that definition clear.

For us, for example, sight-word fluency means 100% proficiency in both reading and writing the words we’ve identified for that grade level.

But even that wasn’t enough.

If students need to master a certain number of words by the end of the year, what should they know by August? October? January?

That’s when my thinking really started shifting.

I didn’t just need end-of-year expectations.

I needed checkpoints along the way.

That’s How My Master Data Tracker Was Born

If you can’t tell by now, I LOVE an Excel sheet. 😂

But there is actually a reason for it.

One of my biggest pet peeves as a principal is having important information everywhere.

A teacher has one spreadsheet. An interventionist has another. A resource teacher has something else. Someone has data in a folder somewhere.

Then we sit down for an MTSS meeting, ARD, LPAC, 504 meeting, or instructional conversation and everybody is trying to figure out where the information lives.

Nope.

I want the people responsible for supporting students to have appropriate access to the information they need.

So I created a Master Data Tracker.

It’s one Excel workbook with a tab for every teacher. Within those tabs are tables outlining the skills we’re monitoring, the expectations for the year, and the checkpoints students should be reaching along the way.

And I want to be clear about something:

I’m building the framework. I’m not entering every student’s data.

My work happens primarily upfront.

I have to determine what we’re going to track, define mastery, establish the progression, and build the structure.

Once that framework exists, teachers are responsible for maintaining the information for their students.

They’re assessing students.

They’re entering their data.

They’re watching their progress.

And they’re using that information to make instructional decisions.

That’s how it should be.

The Framework Shouldn’t Be Built in a Vacuum

Being the principal doesn’t mean I sit in my office, decide everything everyone is going to do, build a spreadsheet, and hand it over.

We’re not dictators. 😂

My instructional leadership team helps me think through these expectations. Depending on what we’re developing, grade-level chairs, teacher leaders, coaches, interventionists, and other people closest to the work can provide valuable feedback too.

Is this progression appropriate?

Does this checkpoint make sense?

Are we missing something?

Are we asking teachers to track something that isn’t actually useful?

That feedback matters.

It doesn’t mean every expectation is optional or that every campus decision has to be made by committee. Ultimately, I am responsible for setting the direction of the campus.

But I’ve learned that the people closest to the work can help make the system stronger.

Leadership sets the direction. Collaboration strengthens the path.

What I Track Depends on the Grade Level

Another important part of the tracker is that everybody isn’t tracking the exact same thing.

The question is always:

What do these students need to master now to be successful with what comes next?

With my littles—K–2—that means I’m watching foundational skills very closely.

Alphabetic knowledge.

Letter sounds.

Sight-word fluency.

Reading progress.

Number recognition.

Foundational addition and subtraction.

And TELPAS progress is a big one for us too.

I serve a high population of emergent bilingual students, and over time I started noticing that too many students weren’t progressing beyond the intermediate composite level.

That matters.

Language development isn’t separate from academic achievement. Students need increasingly sophisticated academic language to read complex text, explain their thinking, write effectively, and access increasingly difficult content.

So I tell my K–2 teachers:

TELPAS is your state test.

Not literally in the accountability sense, of course. What I mean is that I want my primary teachers to understand the importance of their role in developing language before students ever reach their first STAAR administration.

I want to see growth in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Because K–2 is building the foundation that everything else will sit on.

Then, as students move into grades 3–5, some of what we’re monitoring changes.

Now I’m looking at things like multiplication and division fluency, performance on our STAAR-aligned reading passages, math problem sets, science work, and other indicators connected to grade-level expectations.

STAAR is the outcome. I need to see the indicators leading up to it.

Foundational Skills Do NOT Mean Lower Expectations

I need to stop here because this is something I had to learn myself.

There was a time when I worried that focusing too much on foundational skills meant I wasn’t holding high enough expectations.

We’re supposed to be doing rigorous, grade-level work.

And we absolutely should be.

But then I started watching what was happening when students didn’t have the foundation.

Imagine asking a student to analyze a complex text when they’re using an enormous amount of mental energy just trying to read the words.

Or asking a student to solve a multi-step math problem when they’re still stopping to calculate basic multiplication facts.

Yes, they’re sitting in front of grade-level material.

But how much cognitive capacity do they actually have left for the higher-level thinking we’re asking them to do?

That’s when it clicked for me.

Tracking foundational skills wasn’t lowering the bar. It was giving students what they needed to reach it.

So we do both.

We spiral foundational skills every day through warm-ups and fluency practice, and then we get into the rigorous, grade-level work our standards demand.

I want students’ cognitive energy available for the THINKING.

I don’t want them spending all of it trying to access the basic skills they need in order to think.

Automaticity creates capacity for complexity.

That’s why I track these things.

Not because my expectations are low.

Because they’re high.

If I’m Asking Teachers to Track It, It Needs a Purpose

This is also really important to me.

Teachers already have enough to do.

I am not interested in collecting data just because we can collect it.

If I’m asking teachers to spend time entering something into our Master Data Tracker, I should be able to explain why it matters.

There needs to be a clear connection:

What we’re tracking → what students need to master → what comes next.

Otherwise, I’ve just created paperwork.

And the goal is NOT paperwork.

The goal is visibility.

Because when the right information is in one place, teachers can see their students more clearly. Interventionists and specialists can see where support is needed. My instructional leadership team can see patterns. And I can look across the campus and start seeing things we might miss if everybody were working from separate systems.

Obviously, student information has to be protected, and access should always follow your district’s requirements and applicable student privacy laws. How you structure permissions may look different depending on the platform you’re using.

But the principle remains:

The people responsible for supporting students should have appropriate access to the information they need to support them.

But How Do You Know the Data Is Accurate?

Fair question.

Because here’s another thing I’ve learned:

You have to monitor the monitoring. 😂

Unfortunately, I’ve had situations where information entered into a tracker didn’t match what students could actually demonstrate.

So we built another checkpoint into the system.

Every nine weeks, members of my instructional leadership team help conduct spot checks on some of the skills we’re tracking.

If we’re tracking sight-word fluency, we might independently check sight words.

If we’re tracking multiplication and division fluency, we can check that too.

In the upper grades, I’m also looking at student work.

Show me how students are solving the problems.

Let me see their daily work.

Let me see the math problem sets or their ISNs.

Because a number in a spreadsheet can tell me what happened.

Student work starts helping me understand why.

And honestly, THAT could be a whole other blog post. 😂

I’m Big on Systems for a Reason

If you’ve been following this series, you’re probably starting to notice something about me:

I am BIG on systems.

Especially working on a turnaround campus, I’ve learned there is simply too much important work for everything to depend on the principal.

And I don’t believe it should.

My job isn’t to personally maintain every piece of this system.

My job is to create the architecture that allows the system to work.

I build the initial framework.

My ILT and teacher leaders help strengthen it.

Teachers own and maintain their student data.

Interventionists and specialists use that information.

My leadership team helps verify it.

And collectively, we use it to make better decisions for students.

That’s what shared leadership looks like to me.

Because if a system falls apart the minute the principal stops personally touching every part of it…

it probably wasn’t much of a system to begin with.

What I Wish I Had Understood Earlier

My first year, I thought communicating an expectation was enough.

Now I know there are a few more steps.

Define it.

What exactly does success look like?

Track it.

What evidence will tell us whether students are getting there?

Monitor it.

Is the information accurate? Are students actually progressing?

And then use what you learn to determine what happens next.

That’s really what my Master Data Tracker gives us.

Not another spreadsheet.

Visibility.

I don’t want to find out in May that something didn’t work.

I want to know in September.

October.

January.

While we still have time to change something.

Because by the time those big end-of-year results arrive, the work that produced them has already happened.

The work happens in between.

And that’s exactly what we need to be watching.

Want to See How I Organize It?

For obvious reasons, I can’t share our actual working Excel file because it contains student information.

But I did create a visual that shows how I organize my Master Data Tracker, including the different tabs I’ve built into the system and the types of information we’re monitoring across the campus.

If you’d like to see it, head over to my Instagram and comment TRACKER on the Master Data Tracker post, and I’ll send it to you. 🖤

It’s not meant to be a ready-made template—it’s simply a look at how I’ve organized my thinking after years of building and refining this system.

And if it gives you an idea you can take back and make work for your own campus, even better.

🖤 Keep Becoming.
— Julie | The Wildflower Within