Editor’s Note: This is one of a series of profiles of the Wisconsin Idea in action. See past profiles we have published.

For Rich Halverson, teaching always came pretty easily. But when he found himself as principal of a Catholic high school in Chicago by the age of 30, he quickly realized that leading a school was “much, much more difficult.”

People on the outside looking in don’t always realize that’s the case, says Halverson, a UW–Madison education leadership and policy analysis professor who has focused much of his research on what makes for good leadership in schools and how leaders help improve teaching in the classroom.

“There’s a lot of education research that tells teachers and administrators where they are failing or what they should be doing instead,” he says. “I’m trying to capture the story of what it’s like to lead a school where all kids can learn, from the perspective of the people who are in the school.”

Halverson says his role as a researcher is to capture and share the expertise that leaders are using in the field so that interested practitioners “understand how to improve teaching and learning from where they currently stand.”

Halverson, who received a prestigious early career grant from the National Science Foundation in 2003, is focusing his work on examining how schools are approaching the tough standards established by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

No Child Left Behind requires states to test all students in reading and mathematics in grades three through eight and once in high school. Schools whose students do not make yearly progress and fail to meet proficiency standards face possible sanctions, including closure. While supporters and opponents of the high stakes accountability testing continue to debate the merits, Halverson and his team are tackling what he considers the toughest problem facing schools in the era of No Child Left Behind: how do leaders help teachers use data to improve student learning?

Halverson’s research group works to identify methods, policies and programs—which he refers to as “artifacts”—that teachers and leaders create to use data effectively. One of his main findings so far is school responses to No Child Left Behind are shifting the landscape of day–to–day operations.

The five–year study looks at nine different Wisconsin schools—rural, suburban and urban—where his team spent about a year each attending meetings, conducting interviews and doing surveys to capture how those schools use data.

“We do all of our research in Wisconsin. I’ve really been influenced by the Wisconsin Idea and I think that as a public university, our first goal as UW researchers should be to understand what’s going on in our own backyard,” he says.

One of the schools in Halverson’s study is Mendota Elementary, located on Madison’s north side, where test scores are at or above the school district average despite the fact that 70 percent of students receive free and reduced–price lunches. Mendota received federal funds aimed at helping high–risk students in high poverty areas.

Jeff Grigg and Jeff Watson, UW–Madison researchers in Halverson’s group, have taken a closer look at Mendota’s Respect and Responsibility (R&R) intervention program, which relies on spreadsheets to track and record data on student behavior and is a model for how leadership can impact the classroom environment. Mendota Principal Sandra Gunderson reviews the information during weekly meetings with her administrative team, which identifies emerging issues in the school and develops ways to share both academic and behavioral information with teachers. Gunderson’s team crafts an intervention process—in consultation with both parents and teachers—for chronic cases of misbehavior.

The R&R program gave Mendota school leaders the information needed to help teachers make the right adjustments in the classroom, move beyond test scores and get a handle on the overall education of students, Halverson’s research group has found.

“It’s been really reinforcing for the teachers to have Rich’s study going on at our school because it really verifies and exemplifies the work the teachers do every day,” Gunderson says. “And there’s been such a payoff for the school in helping us understand how we work.”

The school also does in–depth analysis of how students perform on every question on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam—the required state test—to provide teachers with examples of the kinds of problems students are having trouble solving.

“We say ‘what strategies can we use right now to teach those concepts?’” Gunderson says. “They have the information about where kids are not doing well in a particular unit.”

Other schools in Halverson’s study have built homegrown tools for figuring out where students are struggling. One rural school developed a low–tech system with plastic buckets and binders to hold the information teachers need to work with students, including student notebooks,

lesson plans, the book the student is using and daily teacher observations. The school’s literacy specialist transfers the information from the buckets and from other assessment tools into binders, a record that helps school leaders make decisions about focusing school resources. The records are also shared with parents, who can see the growth of their child’s reading abilities. Some other schools Halverson is studying use commercially developed tests or programs to regularly assess how students are progressing according to learning standards.

“Schools that are able to turn those accountability pressures into reasons for faculty interaction, reasons for faculty to reconsider their practices, have a clue about how to meet the standards,” Halverson says. “Whereas the schools that continue to resist No Child Left Behind … often don’t have the knowledge of how to develop the school–wide capacity to use data. It’s not that schools don’t want to change, it’s that they often don’t know what to do.”

Halverson and his research team plan to make their data collection and analysis tools available for free online; tools include a social networking survey to give school officials a “map” of professional interaction in their building, so they can see what kind of sharing of information goes on and diagnose their own capacity to use data for instruction.

“I think these are powerful tools for people in the schools to have, so they can ask questions like ‘why don’t we talk to each other about science instruction?’ and be able to identify who can serve as the point person for science,” he says.

Halverson anticipates that information technologies will play a central role in how leaders share knowledge of what is working in their schools. He is a founding member of the interdisciplinary Games, Learning and Society research group at UW–Madison where he works to adapt video game technologies for professional learning. Researchers in his group have recently built the first version of a teacher evaluation video analysis game. Players can look at examples of teaching and rate teachers in terms of categories to help them get a sense of what they should look for when they go into a classroom to assess teaching.

While school leaders can use the evaluation game program, Halverson says it could also benefit policymakers, by letting people who either criticize or praise schools see the complexity of day–to–day school practices in the classroom.

First and foremost, Halverson wants his findings to be relevant to other school leaders around the state.

“If you’re a principal in a school, an assistant principal, a superintendent, you need to be able to apply research findings to your specific context,” he says. “The ultimate goal of my research is to develop representations of practice that people can use. I’m very sensitive to constructing frameworks and writing papers so that people who are in the field can look at that and say ‘that captures how we see the world, and we can see how we might do better to improve teaching and learning in our schools.’”