- Defensive
- Dismissive
- Dejected
- Downplay the negative

Making Meaning from the Data
The 4 D's
3 Guiding Questions from Jen Wilka
Education Week Article by YouthTruth: 3 Questions to Guide Your Use of Student Feedback

Education is one of the few industries, perhaps the only one, in which everyone has a firsthand experience and a valid opinion. That translates into lots of ideas from various stakeholders about what should be done differently to improve schools. But why is it that the ideas of the people we’re ultimately trying to serve, and arguably those most affected — the students — tend to be the last voices heard and acted upon?
Part of the reason is that it’s not always easy to use student feedback productively — or at all!
While there are many ways to get student feedback, the focus of our work at YouthTruth, a national nonprofit based in San Francisco, is through surveys. Here are three ideas and key questions to help get the most out of student feedback for school improvement.
Using the Ladder of Inference


Data Gallery Walk Facilitation Guide
Data Equity Walk
The Education Trust—West’s Data Equity Walk can be used to dive into your school or district’s data to explore gaps between how different groups experience school.

Diving into the data
The Affinity and Question Formulation Technique Protocols
- The Question Formulation Technique – useful for helping a group of people fully explore an issue before jumping in to a discussion
- The Affinity Protocol – useful for facilitating a group hypothesizing session to explore what may underlie an identified issue in order to work towards solutions

Learning from Data Protocol
- Setting norms and getting started with data reflection
- Describing your data and gathering information
- Interpreting your data and question generation
- Planning next steps and strategies


For Students: Respect
Respect: Looks like/Sounds like
Use this worksheet to help set norms for high-quality listening with groups of students.
