Using data to make informed decisions both in the classroom and in the front office is nothing new. Students have been taking standardized assessments for decades. Schools have also tracked attendance, disciplinary incidents, and formative assessments for years. The issue for most schools is not a lack of data, but having too much data to be able to synthesize it and make it actionable.
In order to capture all of this data, schools and districts are using several different platforms and databases to track and report important student information. Schools have become data rich, information poor. School leaders have dozens of different data points on several different systems they need to sift through in order to begin to put together action plans for individual students or whole school improvement. Most of the time, these platforms are decided on at the district level and employed across local schools in the same manner, with the same data, and the same view. It is important to note that not all schools within the same district need to look at the same data in the same way. Furthermore, these systems have become more and more complicated over the years, with many school leaders struggling to utilize them at a high level, or even at all.
More data doesn’t always mean better results.
Sifting through dozens of types of data can be time consuming, frustrating, and at the end of the day, ineffective when trying to move the school improvement needle forward. Having access to data is useless unless you know what you are looking at and how to use it. Data needs to serve as a compass, not as a scatter chart, in order to point school leaders in the right direction.
The first step to improving the data analysis experience is to utilize a dashboard that displays real time information about the school at that given time. School data dashboards need to be personalized to meet the unique needs of each school and not have schools use a carbon copy of every other school that uses the same platform. For example: a small, rural high school should be looking at different data points than an urban, elementary school.
Being able to customize a data dashboard helps to support the MTSS process by displaying relevant information and data about students. This data can be triangulated so that educators can determine the root cause of an issue and stop trying to just treat the symptoms. A child who is struggling academically will not progress by placing them in intervention classes when the true issue is their school attendance, or lack thereof.
There are dozens of school data solutions out there, many of which provide schools with boilerplate dashboards and data collection fields. One platform that breaks the mold and provides schools with customized dashboards is xSoTec. xSoTec builds District-Wide Custom Solutions and Competency-Based Learning Built on Google Sheets. Whether you are looking for a restorative behavior system, an enrollment system, attendance system, competency-Based Learning Gradebooks, or a personalized learning system, xSoTec works directly with schools and districts to design and implement customized data dashboards to provide educators with actionable data.
The Principal’s Desk was founded by Dr. David Franklin. Dr. Franklin is an award winning school administrator, education professor, curriculum designer, published author and presenter at national and international education conferences. He is also the co-author of “Can Every School Succeed” and the upcoming release: “Advice From The Principal’s Desk”.
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