Enabling school leaders, teachers and students to achieve wisdom from interrogating data is a recent mind shift for educational leaders. This mind shift is important, as our ‘technology rich knowledge’ economy of the 21st century churns data and information at breakneck speed. There are challenges for school leaders in the way this information is shaped, organised and embedded into a school. Knowledge becomes wisdom when the information is shared and becomes meaningful in the school context. Knowledge becomes wisdom when there is active engagement in constructing and reconstructing knowledge.
Accountability has become the maxim of public education and data holds an important place in school and system improvement. Thinking about the quality of the data, what it might mean and how it can be used to drive school improvement, helps us to create habits of inquiry and then to turn information into meaningful plans and actions.
Using data and the wisdom gained from data to inform teaching and learning plans is a new way of thinking for many schools. Many negative perceptions about the use of statistics and data as a means of compliance and public accountability abound in our schools. The perceived issue of ‘accountablism’ or surveillance can be used daily by teachers as a negative blocker to actively disengage with data and blame it as an extra load on teachers’ already precious time.
As educational leaders we need to relentlessly engage in conversations with staff that shift these perceptions. This can be achieved by making time to involve others in engaging with the data to create new and shared meaning. The writers acknowledge that this is a change agenda requiring the most serious and explicit attention.
Using data to create wisdom to drive inquiry into school improvement can be likened to weaving a tapestry. To create a tapestry, the weaver has to picture the colours, patterns, textures and the way the warp and weft will change to create an orderly patterned fabric. What the final product will look like has to be planned by thinking about the way the colours match, the type of threads and the size of the loom.
The metaphor of weaving a tapestry can be likened to school leaders using data in context to create wisdom. Leaders need to make choices about the use of colour and threads (which data and information about student achievement will be interrogated), organise relationships in patterns in the weave pattern (becoming data literate - engaging others in sense making of the data) and use different size looms to create different sized tapestries (inquiring into data to create goals and targets against classroom, school, cluster and system expectations). The tapestry of school achievement needs to be sewn together over time by all to create collective meaning and commitment – engaging the heart and mind together.
Creating a workplace where everyone is a weaver of the tapestry - where data is at the heart of all staffroom conversation and classroom practice involves a shift in perception for the whole school over a long period of time. To overcome the negative perceptions about data entry and surveillance and the ‘They are forcing us to enter all this data’ thinking, the school leader needs to act on three prerogatives:
Modelling data-literate leadership
Western culture is becoming more and more dependent on making sense of statistics to inform decision making. As leaders in our society, schools need to develop a positive attitude to knowledge management. To actively begin engagement with school data (to explore colour possibilities in the weaving pattern) school leaders need to actively explore negative mental pictures about data surveillance and acknowledge that these frustrating pictures exist. To assist thinking and gain clarity working with a critical colleague can be useful in challenging perceptions in a non judgemental way.
Developing a positive mindset to the habit of collecting and interpreting evidence to inform decision making is vital to the skill set of today’s school leaders. Leaders need to have an attitude of needing to know more, and collect and interpret evidence that advances personal understanding and decision-making. Modelling the attitude of an inquiring mind and keeping data and improvement the focus of all conversations is a conscious choice. Assembling data into meaningful data sets and communicating key messages to the audience is an important skill set for leaders. Persuading the school community to engage collaboratively and purposefully with the data is a challenge for leaders.
Engaging others in shared meaning and practice
Creating time and space for focused conversations about student achievement and learning goals and targets is a pre requisite for engaging others in conversations about the interpretation of data. Leaders have the challenge of convincing the school community of the merits of using data for productive change and to create the conditions in which data can become an integral part of school decision making (Earl and Katz, 2007, p.7).
Engaging others in conversations about learner centred improvement is essential to shifting a schools focus on school improvement based on knowledge from data. Organised professional development time with parallel learning leaders in the school is a worthwhile investment for any school leader. Inclusive relationships underpin the success of this strategy as the heart and head are engaged together. Making sense of data and using it to create shared meaning and ways to improve practice creates a sense of urgency and shifts the focus relentlessly from the ‘what?’ factor to the ‘what now?’ factor. Collaborative interrogation of data creates a sense of purpose in answering the moral challenges of education. Individuals in a team will hold different mental images of what the data means. It will need to be reflected on and argued before shared meaning can be created around it and plans formulated as a result. The writers advocate mentoring of parallel leaders in consultation with the principal to interrogate data and to establish learner centred school goals initially. These data savvy leaders can lead smaller school teams to further make sense of the data and to use their leadership skills to influence through conversation, thereby skilling the leaders as two way mentors.
The pattern of the weaving in each school will vary in terms of student achievement and according to data related to different school contexts. Data analysis and finding a line of inquiry and setting learning goals in an urban Darwin school will vary markedly from a remote school in an isolated NT community.
Setting realistic targets for student achievement
All student learning goals are contextual within each school class and whole school context. Each school can be likened to a small weaving loom with the system accountability being the huge industrial weaving loom. Setting high expectations needs to be at the forefront of every school leaders thinking. Asking focused questions about realistic achievement for students at each individual school is important.
Recently, at an urban primary school in Darwin, reading achievement data at each grade level was analysed by the leadership team and parallel leaders to find out where the critical mass of student reading achievement lay, what the lines of enquiry were and what teaching and learning strategies could be used to move individual students and groups of students towards achievement of target goals. The shared meaning that came from these focused conversations was that the school needed to aim much higher than benchmark levels or C for school reading targets. These types of conversations created high clarity and unity in purpose and high levels of trust (engaged the head and the heart).
Keeping the rigor of conversation about student achievement data needs to be at the forefront of planned performance conversations with school leaders and teachers. Classroom walk-throughs, where explicit teaching of strategies that lead to learner centred goal achievement can be the shared focus of a conversation and where the teacher offers information about students, the school data, goal setting and achievement is an excellent strategy to achieve this rigor. In is a means through which information can be explored and matched with the picture that is in the leader’s head. The outcome is a consensus making and a shared sense of purpose and direction.
Conclusively, the moral imperative is there for school leaders to focus on data and knowledge with wisdom and insight and to create the need for others to engage in data analysis wisely. The mission is clear; to make data the most compelling force in school improvement agendas, so that internal accountability matches external conforming accountability.
Discuss presentationReferences
Earl, L and Katz, S (2007). Leading schools in a data rich world. Aporia Consulting
http://www.eed.state.ak.us/nclb/2008wc/Focus_On_Leadership.pdf
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ms Maree Bredhauer is Principal of Girraween Primary School, in Girraween (near Darwin), Northern Territory, Australia. Ms Liz Veel is Principal of Nightcliff Primary School, in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.