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.
I came across this fascinating article from the The New Yorker that really speaks volumes about how careful we have to be when it comes to using and visualizing data. Whenever you try to force the real world to do something that can be counted, unintended consequences abound. The COVID pandemic demonstrated just how vulnerable the world can be when you don’t have good statistics, and the US Presidential election filled our newspapers with polls and projections, all meant to slake our thirst for insight. The same applies to education where knowing what to measure, but also why you want to measure it, is the primary hurdle to tackle. We all have a tendency to naturally trust data as it aims to represent something we are observing. However there are times when simply even solid data is not enough for decision making. That’s why the context, the aim, and the balance between quantitative and qualitative data is so important. As the article states: “The great psychologist Daniel Kahneman, w...
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