This week's assignments all revolved around using data to evaluate the performance of your school or business. This is a key point, as if you do not have data, you might not even be looking at the right problem. One way I have heard it expressed is "The problem you name is the problem you solve". If you do not use data to correctly identify an issue that your school is experiencing, you might spend a lot of time working on the wrong issue.
I am very familiar with doing data based analysis from a project perspective, but since I am not a teacher, I did not have access to the same level of detailed data for the training in our business. That right there is a problem, and one that I will start looking to solve. We need to do a better job of measuring the effectiveness of the training we give, and measure that effectiveness over time. I know very specifically what we spent on training, but we have much less data on whether that training was worthwhile. Did we get our money's worth?
When it came time to do the Virtual Data Retreat, I decided to pretend I was a high school teacher from the Hamilton school district, which is where I live. Fortunately there is a wealth of data available about the performance of our public schools. I had never given much thought to how our school district performs, but thanks to the government websites provided in class, I was able to find many statistics. In fact my biggest problem was learning to comb through the pike of information and find the statistics that really apply to the questions. Once I had good data though it was easy to look through and find trends, such as the math and science proficiency scores are lagging behind the rest of the subjects, and had been for a number of years. With this information I could now "name the problem", specifically that we needed to improve our science and math scores. To this end I recommended that we visit other schools that have better records in this areas and learn from their success. Their ideas can help improve the function of our school.
When it comes to the simulated data retreat I don't know how I would've been able to attempt this without being a teacher in the classroom. Kudos to you. I was almost overwhelmed by the amount of data that I was able to find on my middle school that I teach at.
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to let you know that I really appreciate the perspective of an adult educator. That is one thing that I have to always remember. Even though I might be in a classroom, I still have a lot to learn and I never know where I might learn it. Thanks for the insights you have provided during this cohort so far.
I agree that data can be used to evaluate. The more important step is to create change based on the needs that you identify from the data. The administration has multiple roles. They need to be good not only at evaluating data, but also figuring out how to make change occur. How do we take the steps to correct the problem that that data identified?
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ReplyDeleteOnce again, I thought that your post was very thoughtful and insightful. I do think that it would be beneficial for any business to keep detailed statistics in as many categories as possible. How do you think would be the best way to go about something like this? Possibly by tracking the success of the employee, or would overall productivity by sufficient?
John, I think it is great that you have identified a need to track more data related to the effectiveness of your training program within your business. What are some areas that you might focus on to begin gathering that data? Will you use surveys, performance evaluations, etc? I would be interested to learn about what you come up with because I think it is pretty straight forward how to track improvement with students; I'm not sure we have the same type of evaluative data readily available in the business world.
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