The value of keeping relevant

Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday July 18, 2022 06:00

At institutional level, it should drive instructional practices and motivate targeted interventions aimed at creating a rich teaching and learning environment. Therefore, evidence -based decision-making should naturally gain currency and characterise every learning institution seeking to raise student achievement levels.

Ideally, finding data to shape the character of classroom instruction should not be a big hustle.

This is because all schools are drowning in a pool of data. However, the stark reality on the ground is that many schools particularly chronically low achieving schools, seldomly use data to guide their practices and interventions.

Far too many schools in our jurisdiction and elsewhere have a negative perception towards data. Data analysis is viewed as a laborious and taxing additional responsibility, which distracts schools from the core business of teaching and learning. The schools also find the demand for data by external end users as an overwhelming experience.

The data fatigue challenge stems from the fact that schools have limitations surrounding collection, storage and retrieval of data.

In the absence of a culture of evidence-based decision-making, schools develop and normalise the habit of heavily relying on assumptions and conjecture. Assumptions are often misleading. There is an urgent need to reverse this unfortunate scenario, to usher and cultivate a new dispensation where data drives decisions and interventions.

And the role of school principals in the transformation process cannot be over emphasised. How well a school can do in organising data to develop an effective Education Management Information System (EMIS) depends on school governance. All schools (at least in our jurisdiction) boast a well-qualified teaching force. But the presence of qualified teachers cannot on its own guarantee good performance. Appropriate deployment or utlisation of the teaching force is critical in ensuring that a school towers head and shoulders over its peers.

The school principal is the game changer responsible for providing the enabling environment. Success in EMIS begins with collapsing silos and discarding a negative and unproductive work culture. Building an effective EMIS requires a collaborative culture. Teachers don’t have to battle with data and navigate the terrain as isolated individual entities. Writing on the importance of harnessing the collective energies and wisdom of all teachers, Kathryn Parker Boudett from the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Data Wise observed that “when schools create a collaborative culture around data use – when they use data not to point fingers but to inform collective decisions – creating equitable outcomes for students becomes a community’s shared purpose.”

To gain their full cooperation and participation, teachers need an assurance that the data management exercises are not witch-hunting or fault finding missions. It is the duty of school principals to create more friendlier and positive attitudes towards data by impressing upon teachers that data enhances the greater good of team building and while also improving student-learning outcomes. Schools with strong collaborative cultures and robust instructional practices regularly organise data carousels. Data carousels are data sessions where information on students’ assessments is displayed on charts and teachers gather as a team to closely examine the data.

The discussions are characterised by a relaxed and less intimidating atmosphere. It is a team building platform in which teachers together walk through the data to appreciate common trends, celebrate gains (big or small), collectively agree on things they need to dispense with and together develop an evidence-based action plan. There is surely a need to put data at the epicentre of everything schools are doing. Keeping relevant data enables the education sector to measure with some degree of accuracy performance in areas of access, equity, and quality while also enhancing accountability.