I'm a department head. Where do I start?

As the head of a department, you can easily monitor different teachers and courses within your department. One of the first things to do is to confirm that the right courses are assigned to your department. Schoolrunner automatically sorts courses into departments, but may not catch and assign every course. However, it's easy to assign or re-assign departments to courses.

Categorize Courses Into Departments

Every course has its own course page within Schoolrunner. One of the easiest ways to get to a course page is to simply type the name of the course into the Quick Search and click on the results. Once you're on the course page, click the "edit" link next to the course name. On the following screen, you'll be able to select which department the course should belong to. Schoolrunner has the following options for departments: Computer Science, Elective, English, Foreign Language, Math, Science, and Social Studies.

You can get a good view of all your courses and departments on the Analysis page. Load the "Assessments" dataset, and then click into the pivot table. Choose "Department" for "Left" and "Course" for "Left Breakout".

View Different Gradebooks

By using Gradebook, you can get an overview of student performance in different courses. Just choose which course, section(s), and grading period you want to look at. Be sure to toggle between the three different Gradebook views. Timeline view is best for looking at individual assessments (and also for giving you an idea of how many assessments have been logged in total). Bucket view is best for seeing how students performed on different methodology buckets (quizzes, classwork, formative assessments, etc.). And Standard view is best for looking at student performance on standards.

Academic Results for Your Department

The Analysis page is one of Schoolrunner's most powerful features. You can use it to create reports of student performance within your department. You can also compare student performance within your department to other departments at your school. To filter for just your department, use the "Department" dropdown in the "Results Filter" menu for any academic dataset. Learn more here. If you want to compare your department to other departments, load data without using the "Department" filter but choose "Department" for your breakout option. This will list out results according to department.

Save, View, and Share Reports

Once you've configured a useful analysis report, go ahead and save it. Once you've saved a report, you have easy access to it at any time, plus you can send it out to other people who might find it useful, like the teachers in your department or other department heads.