Friday, July 29, 2016

Deep Data Dives





If you’ve spent some time digging into student assessment data with your team or faculty, your group will be prepared to uncover causes. It’s only when we really get to the cause that effective solutions start to surface. A combination of the 5 Whys protocol and a fishbone analysis can get your thinking going in the right direction.

The Fishbone is a structured team process for identifying underlying factors or causes of an event. The product of the team’s work is a cause/effect diagram that might look something like this:




Or this, if you’ve got a group of creative teachers!



Fishbones help us consider lots of alternate causes and sort ideas into useful categories.

Here are the steps in the process. Working in small groups, ask:

1.    What is the problem/effect? Be clear & specific. Be careful not to define the problem in terms of a solution!  Write this at the head of the fish.
2.    What might be the major categories of causes of the problem? (for example, materials, policy factors, people/staff factors, etc.). Write these on the large skeletal bones.
3.    Brainstorm possible causes for each category. These are the smaller bones.
4.    For each cause, ask, “Why does this happen?” Write these sub-causes as branches on your diagram.

Similar to the interview process described in last week’s post, asking “Why?” multiple times along the way can ensure deep causal thinking rather than more obvious solutions that get too-easily tagged. In the fishbone analysis, it means adding sub-causes to the “bone structure” through fine-grained analysis.

Here’s how it works: Someone states what they think is a cause. For example, if I ask someone why they were late for work, they might answer, “I was late for work because I ran out of gas.” Asking, “Why did you run out of gas?” reveals yet another layer to the problem: “I ran out of gas because I didn’t buy any on my way to work.” “Why didn’t you buy any on your way to work?” you might ask. “Because I didn’t have any money!” “Why didn’t you have any money?” “Because I bought these gorgeous shoes last night!” might be the response. “Why?” “Because when I see a gorgeous pair of shoes, I just have to have them even though I already have a closet full of shoes!”



Aha! Now we have revealed that the root cause of being late to work is a shoe fetish! Without the 5 Whys protocol, we would never have known! Of course, 5 is not a magic number. The point is, go deep enough to get at real answers to the question. The final “Why” should lead to a root-cause statement that helps the team take action.

The fishbone analysis, accompanied by the 5 Why’s, encourages a deeper consideration of the data and a focus on underlying problems. When we see dips in the data of student achievement, it’s most effective to solve directly-stated problems rather than proposing solutions to surface-level issues.

(More ideas for peeling back the layers coming next week.)

This week, you might want to take a look at:

Rewinding to have hope at the beginning of a school year:



Incorporate movement while teaching about the water cycle:



The power of written conversations (good for PD and classrooms!):



Mentor texts with different organizational structures:


Apps for the low- or no-Internet classroom:



That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!


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