Conference Workshop Presented by Webster Pacific Consultant Daniel Saniski

Many schools possess extensive data, but struggle to produce insights that fuel student success. At Avenues: The World School, we have codified our goals by defining the essential skills of a graduate, and use a wide variety of data to measure these goals in a systematic fashion. Our dashboarding system, co-created with Webster Pacific, is used to report student performance and growth against these goals in real time, allowing us to visually measure success across many years, answer important research questions, and communicate effectively with diverse audiences. In this session, we’ll show how we use data visualization to create actionable insights from our data.

At Avenues we have codified a wide range of learning goals in traditional disciplines, bilingual development, and metacognitive skills measured through a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative data and turned these data into a dashboarding system. In this session we will review some of our data dashboards and their design requirements, which we’ve targeted for school leadership and faculty. Our dashboarding system, co-created with Webster Pacific LLC, is used daily for reporting on student assessment and allows us to measure success and answer important research questions across many years.

We will engage in case studies and discussions together, sharing examples from our work to highlight the processes required to manage data and turn data into insights. We will review how to determine the quality of available data, what other supplementary data may be needed, and how to put it together into a library of visualizations that users can explore to generate and answer their own questions. It is also critical to socialize the importance of data to get buy-in from teachers and administrators, and we will candidly discuss that process at Avenues. We will share successes and challenges we’ve had during our deployment and go through some of our methods for viewing proficiency and growth, collecting qualitative and quantitative measures, and how these measures inform decision making.

After discussing our process we will break into small groups so participants can brainstorm some of their own questions and possible data available to begin answering these questions. As a group, we will work through example research questions, identify potential data, and sketch out visualizations on paper. We will demonstrate some visualizations that highlight the best types of charts and graphs for different data and show how these drawings ultimately turn into powerful tools.

Conference Details:
2018 NAIS Annual Conference
Atlanta, GA, March 7-9 2018