Friday, August 5, 2016

Be a Data Explorer

Are you vexed by student achievement data that doesn’t meet the muster? Get ready for some exploration! Successful solutions require thorough investigation, and that investigation works best as a collaborative activity. Your faculty will be more likely to buy into the solution if they were on the answer exploration expedition!

If you’ve used protocols for digging into the data, identifying causes, and looking for the issues underlying those causes, you’ve surfaced topics that are ripe for exploration. The Chalk Talk Protocol can come in handy again. Write topics that were identified as underlying causes in the middle of a big sheet of bulletin board paper, one per sheet. For example, your analysis may have revealed class schedules as a potential underlying cause of low student achievement data. Write this topic in the middle of the paper and do the same with the other possible causes that have been uncovered. Teachers silently move from topic to topic, jotting down thoughts, drawing arrows to connect similar ideas, and challenging ideas they feel are problematic. This protocol allows for multiple perspectives to be shared and all voices to be “heard.” It’s also efficient, since many conversations are occurring at the same time. (Tip: Divide the number of participants by 5 to get the # of sheets of paper that would work best. If you have fewer topics than that, you can divide the group in two and have duplicates of each topic. When groups are too large or too small, the written conversation is not as fluent.) Give everyone a chance to visit every topic and revisit to see where the conversation has gone. This process gets lots of possible solutions on the table.

With these possible solutions floating around in your heads, break into small groups and use the Peeling the Onion Protocol to flesh out ideas. In each group, the “Keeper of the Problem” poses the problem as it appears to them now. Other group members ask clarifying questions, paraphrase the problem, explore underlying assumptions, raise questions, and think about possible next steps.

Close on the heels of this protocol, we talk with partners about what we’ve heard. I like the Wagon Wheels Protocol for this, and I structure specific questions for the dialogues, with one question related to each of the topics listed during the Chalk Talk. We include the “Going Deeper” step of the protocol, giving participants one sticky note for each topic so that they can list their favorite idea.

By now our thinking is really deep……and sometimes tooooooo broad. So we narrow our potential solutions to the actionable using the Realms of Concern/Realms of Influence protocol. For each topic, we place the sticky notes we’ve generated in the right place on the target:



With a clear delineation of which solutions are potentially within our reach, it’s time to prioritize. Criteria used for sorting might be funding, time (Which could be done by the end of the semester? By the end of the year?), etc. Once we have our actionable list, we do a dot vote; each participant receives a few garage-sale dot stickers and places them next to the solutions they favor. The winners become the topic of discussion for focus groups, who meet and flesh out these ideas. Groups present their proposals. The final step asks for commitment. Participants reflect in writing about the difference they can make in this problem. Then they commit vocally to one action. A time is set to return and report.

The process described over the past 4 blog posts is time-consuming and can be condensed. Pick and choose those protocols that best fit your context, knowing that time you invest up front in determining the right solutions reduces time wasted in unfruitful change.

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

Classroom organization that supports collaboration:



Building a class culture of respect:



Sorting student work to plan for instructional next steps:



How-to Science Videos:



Empathy book clubs – teaching compassion through books:



That’s it for this week. Happy Coaching!


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