Texas ColorBands ™ is helping school districts across South Texas achieve new levels of student growth and performance. Here are some of the most commonly asked questions about the Texas ColorBands system and how your school can benefit from this innovative progress monitoring system.
Q: What is Texas ColorBands?
A: Texas ColorBands is an educational consulting company dedicated to improving student growth and academic performance. Our founder, Gloria Rivera, is a life-long educator and former school principal who has worked with hundreds of teachers to enhance student learning through in-depth progress monitoring and unique data analysis strategies.
Q: What grades levels use Texas ColorBands?
A: The Texas ColorBands system is appropriate for grades levels 3 and up! Our framework is designed in such a way that it tracks student progress from grades 3 – 8 and EOC assessed area. This data can be used to continually push students toward their greatest potential.
Q: How does it work?
A: The ColorBands system integrates with a school’s current data system (such as DMAC or Eduphoria) in a way that innovatively examines data systems and builds the capacity of instructional leaders and staff in practices that support instructional decision making and impact student learning.
Q: How is Texas ColorBands different from other progress monitoring systems?
A: Though the ColorBands System promotes a simple approach to progress-monitoring, it is far from simplistic and goes well beyond the common practices of data disaggregation and reporting. ColorBands is actionable, especially in the classroom, and enables administrators, teachers, students, and even parents to fully understand where to focus efforts in order to see growth.
Q: How does Texas ColorBands track progress?
A: Texas ColorBands utilizes a color-coded system aligned to the A-F Accountability System to indicate various levels of rigor toward college readiness and growth for every student and every student group. These rigor levels can be used to plan for differentiated instruction during PLCs and to customize instructional groups, create goals, and help students, teachers, and parents understand student progress through a uniform lens. An exciting component is the use of the student ScoreBoardTM that allows students to learn how to examine their own data and set learning goals in every STAAR-assessed area.
Q: How much does Texas ColorBands cost?
A: Texas ColorBands operates through a combination of educational training and a unique progress monitoring system. It is a process that can essentially recharge a campus through capacity building of campus leadership and instructional teams. Customization for every campus is recommended, with varying levels of foundational support. Texas ColorBands offer face-to-face or virtual professional development, implementation support and leadership/instructional coaching based on a campus’ goals. We recommend that an initial virtual meeting with the campus or district leadership contacts be held to establish professional learning outcomes for the schools. Due to this, costs may vary. Please contact us for pricing at (956) 289-9921 or at gloria@texascolorbands.com.
Q: How does Texas ColorBands work with districts?
A: ColorBands consultants work with district personnel to establish a blueprint for districtwide data use. ColorBands convert raw state and interim data into intelligent, transparent, and comprehensible reporting that encourages educated decision making at all levels. From individual student and classroom reports, through department, campus, and even district readouts, ColorBands provides districts with actionable information necessary to steer a district in an upward direction.
Q: How does Texas ColorBands work with school improvement campuses and districts?
A: Several ColorBands consultants have experience working as PSPs, Professional Service Providers, with the former School Improvement Network. We
work with the District Coordinator of School Improvement, DCSI, the Campus Leadership Teams, CLTs, and other campus instructional teams to establish a protocol and common language for data use while building ongoing leadership capacity within the school. By building campus capacity, ColorBands convert the campus’ raw state and interim data into intelligent, transparent, and comprehensible reporting that makes data very comprehensible and actionable at the PLC level.
School improvement teams learn to use innovative interim and benchmark data review protocols to make Tier I, II and III decisions. They also review impact of interventions led initially by consultants and then by the PLC leaders themselves (ongoing leadership capacity building), pivoting to adjust based on data and continue informing decisions on multiple sources of data. We model for the leaders and PLCs how to set up instructional groups for Domain 2 (academic growth) and Domain 3 (student groups) by TEKS, by performance levels, and by “places of most potential to get out of school improvement.”
Our resolve is to provide districts and schools with simple, actionable processes and information necessary to help steer them out of school improvement in a continuous upward direction.
Q: Is Texas ColorBands proven?
A: Thousands of students have been positively impacted by the Texas ColorBands system. From school administration to first-year teachers and parents, Texas ColorBands is designed to resonate with each figure in a student’s learning journey. Read about how one school district used Texas ColorBands to improve student learning here.
