For this week's assignments, we were asked to dive in to the data sources that are available to assist with gauging a school's success versus other schools in the district, other districts and state averages. We were tasked with looking up our school and then conducting a virtual data retreat to discuss the results and use the analysis to improve the school.
While all of this is hypothetical for me, the non-teacher, I can see how this is a useful exercise. Also, I have done my share of data retreats in my own profession (though we never specifically gave them that particular moniker!). We have a database called Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement (MISLE) in which we enter all of the pertinent information regarding commercial vessels that we inspect or conduct marine investigations on. This database is searchable to an extent. The Coast Guard also introduced the Coast Guard Business Intelligence (CGBI) system that pulls/queries the data from MISLE and other CG databases. Back in January we pulled all of the data for the previous year in order to analyze it for the purposes of developing our business plan (called the Operational Planning Directive or OPD). To create the OPD we had several meetings in which we dissected the data and mined it as much as we could to get to presentable, repeatable and actionable results that we could point to when it came time to allocate our resources for the year. We looked at things such as what is the most common deficiency noted during the examination of towing vessels. This sort of data manipulation led us to create a list of the top five items to check into during our towing vessel checks. This is an ongoing process and the return on investment is not yet realized. But we are monitoring it!
From the meetings portion of this week's assignments... if anyone would like a little bit more experience with reading people's facial expressions (non-verbal clues) check out the work of Dr. Ekman, the person that the show "Lie to Me" is loosely based on.... Thanks for the reminder on this one John W!
We were also asked to read Chapters 2 & 3 of our text and answer the associated questions from the study guide.
I love how the military has an acronym for everything! The process you describe sounds like it could adapted for use in identifying areas in need of improvement in schools based on data analysis, rather than anecdotal evidence or the whims of a few vocal members of the school community promoting their own pet projects. We've talked a lot about compiling data, but not much about presenting it and making decisions based on it. Who makes the final decision on those recommendations?
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