Welcome back! This is the first Talk-OH-Tuesday of the 2024-2025 school year. A little housekeeping first. Please feel free to pass this along to colleagues. If an email address needs to be added or updated, reach out to charshryock@gmail.com. You may see some guest bloggers this year - or maybe you would like to stretch your wings a little and be a guest writer for Talk-OH-Tuesday - let me know!
If you watched the Olympics and the Paralympics this summer, you heard a lot of data stories around hours of training, record setting times, medal counts, crowd attendance, and temperatures. How are your own data storytelling skills? This is the right time of year to identify the data that you will use throughout the school year to tell stories of growth, achievement, inclusivity, adaptability, and change. Data stories can also be the spark that drives innovation, informs budget decisions, and maximizes staffing. Students also need data storytelling skills, beginning with the ability to use data to set goals and monitor their progress.
There are 3 keys to telling an impactful data story. First, identify the audience who needs to hear this story. It might be board members, administrators, teachers, staff, parents or the broader community. Next, what is the greater good or big picture that will be the larger context for the story. Finally, select appropriate data. I know this seems like an obvious step, yet being intentional about what data to best tell a story can make or break its impact. This may include selecting data from multiple sources to tell a more complete or compelling story. And, represent the data visually - excel spreadsheets and data tables do not tell an engaging story.
Here are some of the most recent data sources that are available to districts - and suggestions for how they may be used to tell effective data stories.
Attendance Data: Sources include the chronic absence reporting on the District Report Card - and in more detail in the Advanced Reports (Released September 13), teacher attendance data found in the Equitable Access Report, and student tardy and absence data found in the Student Information System (SIS). Attendance data can help tell the story of student and staff engagement. It can also be used to pinpoint gaps in resources and supports for students who fall into subgroups by gender, economic status, learning disability, race/ethnicity, and English learner status.
Released Items - Item Analysis Data - OST/EOC: Sources include the Item Analysis Report found in the Ohio State Testing Centralized Reporting System (CRS), and the OST/EOC results included in the District Report Card - Advanced Reports. Released items can help tell a number of stories. First, they can help to describe the overall strengths and challenges of a group of students, which is useful to the teachers of the incoming students. And, if you look at patterns in the item analysis data over a number of years, it can tell the story of strengths and gaps within instructional materials and learning opportunities at a grade level, including a balance or imbalance of depth of knowledge levels. Helping students and parents to decode the data story that student score reports can tell is also an important part of students being able to monitor their own learning process.
Enrollment Data - Sources include the Student Information System (SIS), ODDEX - the system that tracks students in CCP courses and students who are moving across districts, and the District Report Card. Enrollment trends drive budgets, staffing, course offerings, and can be related to student engagement. Digging into enrollment data within CCP, AP or CTE programs can tell the story of student planning post high school. Looking at enrollment trends across district subgroups can help tell the larger story of the community or the diversity/inclusivity of the school district and district supports.
No matter what data story you decide to tell, be sure to own your story! Include next steps that will come as a result of the story and be sure to credit the staff members and students whose work is reflected in the story. And, don’t forget that Generative AI can be a powerful partner in data storytelling.
Resources To Spark Your Thinking
NPR 2024 Student Podcast Challenge Finalists - This is a different kind of story telling, and includes some amazing students across all grade levels. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/30/g-s1-19902/student-podcast-challenge-2024-finalists
Harvard Business Review -How To Effectively Tell A Story With Data https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/data-storytelling
Canva - Data Visualization For Students (all schools have access to Canva for education at no cost ) https://www.canva.com/learn/data-visualisation-for-students/
Yale Library - Common Types of Data Visualization https://guides.library.yale.edu/datavisualization/types
Ohio Regional Data Leads Created Tool for Discussing Item Analysis - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J_BRQKwOKopQv0UXsUlY32-vfAZC1yX5KmtXuU4Nff0/edit?usp=sharing