Best Practices for Using Insights

This article provides an overview of the new Insights tool from Panorama and discusses best practices for using the tool to engage in data-based decision-making.

Insights Overview 

Insights is designed to facilitate more effective and efficient data-based decision-making for teams. We know from research that clearly defining students’ strengths and challenges is both a key element of impactful problem solving as well as a real challenge for educators.

Insights generates precise summaries that outline challenges and positive trends appearing in each student’s integrated data sources. Educators are provided with a description on each student’s profile that concisely summarizes both the challenges the learner is facing as well as strengths. 

In this way, Insights acts as a data analyst for educators—parsing lots of data at once and accurately describing trends so that educators can spend more time engaging in the important work of thoughtfully planning and providing data-driven support to students.

The Research Behind Insights

The new “Insights” tool is rooted in an evidence-based problem solving approach (known as Team-Initiated Problem Solving, or TIPS) that is focused on identifying and addressing individual student challenges in their early stages. Clearly and precisely describing student challenges is a key practice embedded within the TIPS approach that has been shown to help educators better match interventions to student needs and impact outcomes.

Core data-based decision-making practices embedded within the TIPS model include:

• Identify and defining problems with precision;

• Hypothesizing underlying root causes;

• Planning and implementing interventions, and;

• Evaluation intervention implementation and outcomes.

Panorama Insights focuses on the preliminary steps of this process: identifying challenges and describing them with precision. Insights is deliberately designed to focus on these initial components to ensure that educators and Student Support Teams can move into root cause analysis and implementation with a strong understanding of trends. 

Using Insights

Consider the following examples of ways in which educators might use Insights to engage in effective and efficient data-based decision-making.

• As a classroom teacher, I need to gain quick, but precise insights about a student who is struggling in my class so that I can better infer the root cause of the challenges I’m seeing, and better differentiate instruction for the student

  • I especially need help identifying the precise academic skills that would be most impactful for me to focus on with this student (especially based on diagnostic/screening assessments)

  • I would also like to quickly know what attendance, behavior, or life skills challenges exist for this student if there are any, and what the trends or themes in that data are

  • Alongside each of the challenges, I want to know what relative strengths the student has, so that I can take an asset-based approach and leverage the student’s strengths in my approach

• As a member of a Student Support Team planning supports and interventions for a student, I need to gain the full context of where a student is at, and be able to clearly and precisely define the students’ strengths and challenges in order to have impactful data-based decision making conversations.

  • I need to dig a layer deeper into all of the data sources available to me to describe what is precisely happening with the student

  • I need to quickly gain context about patterns and trends in the student’s academics, behavior, and attendance

  • Alongside each of the challenges, I want to know what relative strengths the student has, so that I can take an asset-based approach and leverage their strengths in whatever supports or interventions I plan

Best Practices for Next Steps 

Using Insights to Take Action

Insights is designed to jumpstart the data-based decision-making process for educators and Student Support Teams. The summaries generated by Insights can be used to:

• Explore and hypothesize the underlying root cause of challenges (or strengths) further. Individual teachers and teams of educators (such as Student Support Teams) can use Insights to facilitate an efficient and precise understanding of students’ strengths and challenges.

• Inform differentiated instruction. Trends from Insights might inform ways that educators can tailor instruction to meet the unique needs of their students.

• Make a student referral. Educators can copy the Insights descriptions and edit them for use within a student referral to initiate the process of exploring formalized support. 

• Plan and implement interventions. The Insights summaries can be used within an intervention plan to describe a student’s challenges, data points highlighting the challenges, and strengths that might be relevant to the intervention or implementation plan.

• Communicate with families. Engage in authentic two-way communication with families by sharing context and information about a student’s positive trends and opportunities for improvement.

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