Tracking Accelerated Instruction

For Texas Districts trying to meet the requirements of House Bill 1416, one element is for students in accelerated instruction to have 15 to 30 hours of instruction in the subject they struggled in, based on student response. We’ve talked about how schools can create time for accelerated instruction, and how to schedule students, but how can schools keep track of how many minutes of that 30 hrs a student has met, and how much they have left?

Some schools may be using spreadsheets to enter this data and keep track of it. For Enriching Students® users, there is a simpler solution that involves scheduling students with a custom appointment type, and running reports.

How can schools make tracking accelerated instruction time easier? This starts with a step taken by an Enriching Students® admin user.

Appointment Types are used within Enriching Students to identify what kind of appointment a teacher is scheduling with a student. For example, are they being scheduled for extra help, enrichment, or in this case, accelerated instruction. A school can have an unlimited number of appointment types.

So, creating an appointment type specifically for accelerated instruction would be the first step. Logged into their account, an admin would go to the Admin link in the navigation, and then select Manage Appointment Types. On this page they could add new appointment types so that they would reflect the time each student spends in accelerated instruction.

On the Appointment Types page, the admin would add a new appointment type by entering a description, as you see in the image below. They would need to make sure ‘Is Active?’ is selected, and save, in order for this new appointment type to be available when teachers are scheduling.

Some teachers may spend varying lengths of time with students during the time the students meet with them for accelerated instruction. So an admin could creating accelerated instruction appointment types with 15 minutes, 10 minutes, and so on.

Once these appointment types have been saved, any teacher in the school can create an appointment for accelerated instruction and at the same time track the minutes a student is spending in each subject area.

In addition, a school could use attendance types to track this time, although using an appointment type is the recommended method. But how can you actually track this time, without having to manually enter it into a spreadsheet? That’s where reports come in.

Now that you know how to take attendance, how does this help you keep track of how many minutes a student has spent in accelerated instruction, out of the required hours?

Of course, it will take a number of sessions for a student to meet that time requirement. Regularly running and downloading reports will help a school, and District, keep track of this kind of data.

But to do this, it’s important to remember that there needs to be a time period defined in the appointment type names, as in the previous example.

One way to track this data is to have an Enriching Students® admin user set up a report on the Export Data page. This is a page accessible only to admins.

Logged into their account, an admin would access this page by selecting Admin in the navigation, and then Export Data.

To run a report, first they would need to set up a ‘data definition’. This basically means that they would identify the specific data they want the report to pull, for a selected date range. To do this they would select the ‘Create Data Definition’ button, and go to a page to set up the data they want to collect.

What is important to know for Districts implementing HB 1416, is how this can help them report supplemental accelerated instruction time for students. So on the Data Definition page, an admin would want to select the dates they want data for, and be sure to select the appointment types under ‘Data Filters’. Whichever appointment types they want to have displayed in the report should be the ones they select. For example, they could select all of the AI appointment types, or maybe they want a list of all students who attended AI for 30 minutes. In that case, they would select the corresponding appointment type, as you can see in the image below.

They would then want to choose at least these data fields: Student FirstName, Student Last Name, Instructor First Name, Instructor Last Name, Course Name, and Appointment Type. Basically, by selecting these fields the report would show who the student was scheduled to, for which course, and how long they spent there.

Other fields could be added as well, depending on what data the school wants to see in the report. If attendance types are also being used as an indicator for what accelerated instruction is, for example, an admin would add the Attendance Description field, and likely choose to add that attendance type under Data Filters.

See an example of the data fields are set up for a report in the image below.

Once the admin has added all of the data fields, they need to select ‘Save’ at the bottom of the page. Saving the data definition will allow an admin to edit it in the future, and keep exporting it again and again, without recreating it. Then, back on the Export Data page, they can select Actions next to that report, and then ‘Export’. The report will be downloaded as a CSV file.

An example of what this file would look like can be seen below.

This report could be printed, or imported to another source. Specifically if a school runs a report for each appointment type, it would be easy to add the minutes. The data filters can be used to make reports even more specific, for example only viewing students in a specific graduation year, on a specific day.

Enriching Students® offers a number of other reporting features that may be useful for schools, many that are available to teachers as well as admins. One note about this — it is up to each school which reports, if any, they want teachers to be able to create. An admin has the ability to set these permissions. These reports can be found on the Analysis page.

For example, if a school chooses to use appointment types to track time, on this page in the Attendance section, there is an option to run a report for Daily Attendance.

This is an approach a school could use, but we recommend you use appointment type method.

In another example, students may be reluctant or unsure of how to check their schedule, and may be frequently absent for accelerated instruction.

To find out which students have not logged in to their Enriching Students account, a teacher could run the Students Never Logged On report under ‘Students.’

These features can help your Texas School District implement HB 1416 in a way that makes it easier to meet student needs. View the other articles in our HB 1416 guide here.