Last week, Laura Hansen and Margie Johnson from MNPS' Information Management and Decision Support department presented 5 sessions at the 2016 STATS DC conference.  This year's theme was, "Better Data from the Inside Out," with sessions about a variety of topics related to data, including data collection, data management, data privacy, data quality, data standards, and data use practices.  If you are interested in learning more about this conference, please go to http://ies.ed.gov/whatsnew/conferences/?id=2531.

Laura Hansen served on a NCES Forum Workgroup that unveiled a new publication around Student Data Privacy, and can be found here: https://nces.ed.gov/forum/pub_2016096.asp. She also presented 3 conference sessions:

• Make Data Work for Students: Opportunities in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
• Student Data Privacy Consortium—A Common Contract Framework
• EDUCaTION wiThout d@tA sdradnat$

Margie Johnson and Mary Laurens Seely, from MNPS' Research, Assessment, and Evaluation department, are part of a national Data Use Standards Working Group for educators.  One session Margie presented was about the workgroup's publication of  PK-12 Data Use Standards for Educators (https://slds.grads360.org/#program/data-use-standards).

Margie also presented about the MNPS REL Appalachia partnership work around collaborative inquiry entitled, Best Practice for Enhancing Collaborative Data Use in Schools.

To learn more about the sessions and access materials, please go to http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/2016-nces-stats-dc-presentations.html.

We would love to hear about the data work you and/or your team is doing.  Please feel free to contact Margie Johnson at margie.johnson@mnps.org to share your story or to get support around data use.

On July 8, 2016, the JE Moss Elementary leadership team convened to begin the 2016-2017 SIP process.  The 3 ½ hour planning session was planned by Anthony Febles, executive principal, Ms. Abigail Reynolds, JE Moss’ SIP facilitator, and Margie Johnson, business intelligence coordinator.  The session was facilitated by Margie Johnson using the collaborative inquiry process from Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman.

 Activating and Engaging
The session began with the leadership team engaging in Looking Back and Looking Ahead.  Individually, they completed the chart about how teachers worked together when they were in school, how teachers work together now, and how they envision teachers working together.  After sharing in small groups, a whole group discussion compiled their multiple perspectives and great ideas.

Exploring and Discovering
Before establishing an SIP goal 5, the JE Moss leadership team made observations of multiple sources of data, including TELL survey, Teacher Attendance, and Teacher Retention data.  This phase of the process is all about going slow to go fast. During this phase of the process, small groups collaborated to take a deep dive into making observations only about the data.  They were to avoid making inferences and conclusions.  The pictures represent their observations from the multiple data sets.
 

Another exploring and discovering session we did was to take a look at core values.  We began by engaging in a Mountain and Valleys activity to identify personal values.  These values where then shared with the whole group.  A team values questionnaire was used to identify a rough draft of JE Moss’ core values.  The team decided to revisit and finalize the core values in the next leadership meeting.

Organizing and Integrating
Using the current vision and mission statements, the session ended with the JE Moss leadership team using the above data to inform the creation of revised Vision and Mission statements.  The below pictures represent each groups’ vision and mission statement. Again, the team decided to come back at a later date to finalize the statements.

Needless to say, JE Moss is well on their way to staring the 2016-2017 school year off with vision, mission, and core values, which will inform their SIP process.  I can’t wait to work with JE Moss again on July 25th to finalize this work and develop SIP goals for supporting student success.

If you would like to access the materials used for the meeting, please go to http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/je-moss-elementary-leadership-team-meeting.html

If you are interested in collaboration support, please feel free to contact Margie Johnson at margie.johnson@mnps.org.