If you watched the Showtime series, Weeds, you’re familiar with Malvina Reynolds’s song, Little Boxes. Data collection sheets, like the suburbs, are full of little boxes. However, unlike in the suburbs, it’s not acceptable for the little boxes to be all the same.
Data collection is a highly personal–I daresay intimate–process. Everybody’s looking for a shortcut for amazing data collection forms. The idea of finding a prefabricated form, printing it out, and using it sounds amazing…and time-saving. One less thing to do, right?
Sorry. I hate prefab data collection forms. With a passion. I’m on a quest to rid the world of them.
Because they don’t tell you anything of value.
If you’ve written a thoughtful behavior goal for your student, a prefab form shouldn’t be able to capture the essence of that goal or monitor it in a way that truly reflects what you’re trying to help the student achieve. If your goal is so generic that a prefab form is adequate, you need to rethink it.
Work habits rubrics are my personal pet peeve. First off, they’re highly generic. Secondly, if you’ve done an FBA, you’re really worried about one, big behavior related to classroom performance (usually task completion). I don’t see the point in placing a generalized focus on several data points, when only one is the real concern. I’d like to burn every work habits rubric someone sends me (I could create a massive bonfire).
On my own forms, I use a certain amount of “template” in my forms for the layout and the terminology. However, I like to make sure that I have a very customized approach to defining the target behaviors the data collector should be observing.
Because goals and data collection are such a priority, I’ve had George create a new section on enraged2engaged.com devoted just to goal-writing and data collection. I’ve included some examples of forms I’ve made. I encourage you to look at them (make sure you download them to see how they really look…the formatting is a little skewed/weird if you just look at the form on the website itself), then go forth and create something awesome.
