Combining Intuition and Data in Three Steps

Last year, while taking a class on data exploration, I learned a transformative data lesson. It happened during an assignment where I needed to analyze school funding. I followed all the steps: prepare the data, make the graphs, compare the averages, and write the report. I turned it in and waited for feedback from the instructor. It came a few days later and it changed the way I use data. 

The feedback was this: I followed all the steps correctly, but I didn't use my experience as a school psychologist and administrator to explain the data. Numbers without context from my experiences are just numbers. Or in the words of my instructor: "It's why we do our jobs and not robots." 

I learned this lesson during a complex data analysis. But even in more day-to-day styles of data use, bringing our professional experiences and knowledge to the analysis turns the numbers into actionable information. It helps us bring out the story in the data. It helps us get to the questions and decisions that matter for our students. 

Instructions

Apply your knowledge and experience to your data use with these steps: 

1. Imagine the moment when people generated the data. It might have been a student taking a quiz, a teacher taking a survey, or a principal observing a lesson. 

2. Ask yourself, What might have been happening when the person generated the data? You might answer with something like this: The student understood what they read. Staff were worried after the meeting. Or the students used the visual schedule to figure out where to go next.

3. Decide your next move. The idea here is to try something new, then look again to see how it turns out. It could look something like this: Reteach a lesson and check the quiz scores. Try a new activity at a staff meeting, then ask a teacher how they felt after. Or share what you saw in one classroom with another teacher who wants new ideas.