This conversation with Dr. Katie Kuhn and Elizabeth Slater offers a real look at community schools student support, and how people leading with clarity and care make a difference. Their stories show what becomes possible when schools and community partners share the work of helping young people feel safe, seen, and ready to learn.
This post is about finding a better way to use school data—one that centers action, not just analysis. Because the truth is, our best intentions don’t live in our spreadsheets. They live in the steps we take once the data tells us something needs to change.
Developing your team’s solution-oriented data mindset depends largely on how well a solution-your data connects to goals that you and your team truly care about. Leaders who use data successfully frame data with the same language they use to describe the positive change they are working towards in every other part of their work. Simply put, unless the data you are using connects to something that matters, no graph, chart, or table will ever communicate something helpful.
Earlier this year, I came across Dr. Sharla Horton-William’s article “How School Leaders Reinforce Supremacy through discipline and Behavior Expectations.” In it, Dr. Horton-Williams put words to a rumbling that had been going on in my mind and in my heart for a while. As an education consultant who supports schools with systemic approaches to social, emotional, and academic achievement, one of my primary tools has been Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS). At the heart of PBIS is the idea that if schools can articulate 3-5 positively stated behavioral expectations and teach students how these expectations look, feel, and sound in every setting area in the school, then students are more likely to demonstrate positive behavior.
When a system is organized in ways that benefit white people and harm people of color, the system is racist. The best time to dismantle racism is before people of color are harmed. As leaders of caring organizations, we must live their values out loud to purposefully unmask and dismantle racism at all levels of our work. One powerful approach to uncovering systemic racism is to list your systems and know your numbers.
Caring professionals possess a deep, personal commitment to those they serve. Generally, their desire to help students and clients succeed fosters an equally powerful desire to do their best work. While leaders want data to support their staff (unless that data is presented carefully), meetings about data typically have the opposite effect.
While most school leaders view reviewing student data in professional learning communities (PLCs) to be essential, most teachers view these meetings as a waste of time. (Gates Foundation, 2014). Here are three objections to data that I hear frequently from teachers that I encourage all leaders like you to validate and explore. As always, if you’d like to know more about this or any other content on the blog, click here and let me know how to get in touch.
I frequently lead professional learning on how to use data effectively, most recently with Youth On Their Own, a Tucson-based nonprofit that supports youth without a permanent place to live in graduating high school. Over the years, I’ve collected a few topics that tend to be effective for whole-staff trainings, and others that have transformed teams of teachers and individual educators in 1:1 coaching sessions. I also have worked with some amazing administrators to support their use of data as well. If your school is thinking about explicit training in using data, the topics below will be helpful.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, shares that we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. As a literacy coach, I was always on the hunt for routines that could bear the weight of big data. Here are some strategies to build into your systems for data meetings.
According to a review of Data Literacy of Educators: Making it Count in Teacher Preparation and Practice in the Harvard Educational Review, data literacy in education is the ability to create actionable instruction based on the collection and examination of student data such as attendance, grades, test scores, behavior, and motivation.
