Using Social and Emotional Data to Promote a Positive School Culture

I came across this great article on Edutopia by Victoria Curry and Mike Setaro on how school leaders can combine traditional data with social and emotional data to get a full picture of the school experience of students and staff. It’s centered around Warm data that gives both dimension and measure to an individual’s and group’s social and emotional status. Opposite to Cool data points, that are a series of structural data sets such as enrollment, attendance, and academic proficiency that typically are the bedrock of school-based analytics. They talk about various examples of Warm data points among them on a matrix with different degrees of pleasantness and energy before engaging in learning (inspired by Mark Brackett’s work). These points can and should be captured, measured and visualized. The insights from this data should be of utmost importance for leaders to find strategies that capture and leverage information related to SEL and interpersonal skills. Harnessing this level of understanding of interpersonal relationships can lead to many development that can support the students, whether that’s an advisory group, counselling support, flipped classrooms, improving the MTSS system that may already exist or finally correlating these to the Cool data points mentioned earlier. Gleaning real-time social and emotional information from students regularly and visualized in an intuitive, timely and accessible way is a necessary part of building the practice of utilizing warm data. Please have a read of the full article here for even more information such as how you can encourage a warm data focus at your school.