During most half terms, I try and set aside a morning to update the “Making Sense of Data 0.9.6” booklet. Frustratingly, I still haven’t completed a “final first release 1.0” as I can not seem to keep up with ever changing Government policy. This summer hopefully…
Last Wednesday I was posed a very interesting question,
How, or perhaps where, do you see “data” impacting on your school, on pupil achievement and outcomes?
My first reflection was the ease with which such a broad term “data” was used and than my thoughts turned to answering the question.
Later that evening Tom Gayton commented
So much time must be spent on data analysis in education but more time/resources should be diverted on enabling people to understand/use it
— Tom Gayton (@GaytonTom) May 28, 2014
The challenge here is defining the conceptually broad and interconnected theme of data in schools into a pragmatic, stepped model of useable information (as Tom suggests). Of course, it is not that simple, as every school is unique and the steps are not equally divided.
Here is my first draft, believe it or not, took a couple of hours of thinking / moving boxes around on a Powerpoint slide. I am hoping that colleagues like Tom @GaytonTom, Peter @DataEducator and Chris @chrishildrew, our school improvement tweeters like Mary @MaryMyatt and Heather @Heatherleatt and data edugeeks like Charlotte @CharlotteSISRA, Mike @Mike_Bostock and FFT @FFTEdu will help me add, refine and/or improve it.
Whilst I appreciate the dangers of “group think,”
Tendency of the members of a group to yield to the desire for consensus or unanimity at the cost of considering alternative courses of action.
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