Aug 26, 2025
In today’s data-rich environment, quick, focused conversations about students’ work and goals known as “data chats” can build relationships and boost academic achievement.
Hamilton County Schools in Florida has made data chats a cornerstone of the district’s data-driven culture. The small Title 1 district in Jasper has a K-12 enrollment of 1,650. A quarter of its students are English learners, and 21.9% come from households with incomes below the poverty level.
Over the past two years, the district has achieved significant progress on its state accountability report. In the 2023-24 school year, its elementary school had the largest third-grade proficiency increase in the state with a 15 percentage point jump in reading scores.
One of the most enthusiastic proponents of the data-driven culture at Hamilton County Schools is Director of Teaching and Learning Chris Combass. He encourages teachers to meet regularly with students for data chats to review progress, set goals, and celebrate improvements. “If you continue to have conversations with students, it really creates ownership of their learning,” Combass said.
At the high school level, which serves grades six through 12, teachers have data chats with students once a month as well as after progress monitoring testing.
In one sixth-grade math classroom, 94% of students showed learning gains by the end of the 2023-24 school year as a result of their teacher’s approach, which strongly embraced data chats—an example that Combass emphasized is simple and replicable.
Ingredients for a data chat
To prepare for these quick conversations, teachers gather information about the student’s performance, whether from local or state standardized assessments, performance-based assessments, or monitoring progress toward a goal. With Otus, these types of student data are centralized to make accessing the insights easy and efficient for educators.
It’s important for data chats to be private, one-on-one conversations. They start with both the teacher and the student reviewing the information together. Prompts for the student might include:
- “What are your thoughts about this score?”
- “What does this data tell us?”
- “What would you like to improve?”
- “How can you make that happen?”
Teachers can reflect with students about successes or stumbles and explore the possible reasons for them, followed by a look ahead toward achievable goals with action steps for moving in the right direction.
Finally, the teacher and student each sign a data chat report or tracking sheet to signify their agreement on next steps and the student’s commitment to carrying out the plan. These forms are designed and formatted to be age appropriate, and they typically include the metrics that were discussed plus sections for student reflection, goal setting, and follow-up actions.
Families can be brought into the conversation through the Otus portal, using features such as the portfolio to track their child’s learning goals. Teachers can also send home notes or emails that summarize recent scores, explain what they mean, and describe students’ next steps. AI Insights can help teachers streamline these communications, guiding them to quickly generate messages around progress that can be shared with families as a starting point for conversations.
Building on data chats
Data chats are a building block toward making sense of today’s data-rich environment, where the amount of information for decision-making can feel overwhelming at every level.
When performance results are collected, compiled, and shared in meaningful ways, the growth doesn’t stop with individual students. These examples from around the U.S. illustrate where simple conversations about data can lead.
State testing improvements
An administrator in Warwick, Rhode Island, described data chats as “an educational power move” and a factor in improving her district’s state test scores at several elementary schools. By giving students timely and specific feedback, the data chats created intrinsic motivation. Students worked harder when they focused on individual goals. The state test gains were a welcome byproduct.
Increased self-efficacy
A recent study in Los Angeles about bringing joy into the classroom included data chats among the ways to enhance teachers’ and students’ sense of self-efficacy toward their own goals. For students, data chats proved useful for reflecting on their own situations and how well they were implementing strategies to ensure success. Teachers reported data chats were a valued strategy for classroom management.
Community conversations
Nashville Public Schools have been utilizing data chats in classrooms since 2015 to strengthen relationships and family engagement. Today the district’s Open Data Portal offers a public platform where stakeholders can explore, visualize, and analyze data that is updated each quarter. The portal is intentionally transparent in an effort to build awareness and trust within the community.
Social and emotional boosts
Data chats and rapid check-ins are part of the intentional use of data within the Personalization for Academic and Social Emotional Learning system developed as part of a multi-year partnership among educational institutions in Florida. Its goal is to improve high school students’ academic and emotional outcomes by fostering supportive, personalized adult-student relationships.
“Our teachers have really bought into the concept of data chats over the past couple of years because they firmly believe, we all do, that the more you talk about data with students, with staff, with parents, the more ownership you're going to have.”
Chris Combass
Director of Teaching and Learning
,
Hamilton County Schools (FL)
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