Use this presentable slide to help prepare groups to reflect on results while also avoiding these four common synthesis pitfalls:
- Defensive
- Dismissive
- Dejected
- Downplay the negative
Video: Looking at Data With High Tech High
High Tech High (HTH) is a network of twelve schools in San Diego County. Since 2011, HTH has used YouthTruth to gather student feedback to inform instructional, leadership, and school model changes. Watch HTH network leaders model best practices for thinking about student feedback in this video.
3 Guiding Questions from Jen Wilka
Education Week Article by YouthTruth: 3 Questions to Guide Your Use of Student Feedback
Jen Wilka is executive director at YouthTruth
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
Educators have an ever-increasing stream of data at their fingertips, but knowing how to use this data to improve learning and teaching — how to make it less overwhelming, more useful, and part of an effective collaborative process — can be challenging.
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.
The Affinity and Question Formulation Technique Protocols
Data Wise, edited by Kathryn Parker Boudett, Elizabeth A. City, and Richard J. Murnane, is a step-by-step guide to using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. We’re highlighting two of our favorite and most-used protocols to help you and your teams make meaning from survey results:
- 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
Learning from Data is a tool to guide groups of teachers discovering what students, educators, and the public understand and how they are thinking. The tool, developed by Eric Buchovecky, is based in part on the work of the Leadership for Urban Mathematics Project and the Assessment Communities of Teachers Project. Use this protocol for:
- 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
Respect: Looks like/Sounds like
Use this worksheet to help set norms for high-quality listening with groups of students.
