Each year, the National Center for Education Statistics hosts the STATS DC Data Conference.  This year's conference was held in Washington D.C. on August 1-3.  Two MNPS employees presented at this conference.

Laura Hansen, MNPS Director of Information Management and Decision Support, was part of a expert panel on Wednesday, August 2nd entitled, A Tense Marriage: Governing the Relationships Among Data Interoperability, Security, and Privacy.  This session discussed the tension between balancing the needs to support students and teacher in experiencing high quality learning experiences while maintaining appropriate barriers and privacy protections for students.

Dr. Margie Johnson, MNPS Collaborative Inquiry Coordinator, co-presented with Dr. Stephanie Wilkerson, president of Magnolia Consulting, on Wednesday, August 2nd about MNPS' journey to implementing collaborative inquiry data use practices throughout the district.  The session entitled, A District's Journey of Implementing Effective Data Use Practices, shared MNPS's data journey toward developing and implementing the Data-Informed Decision-making Ecosystem, of which collaborative inquiry is the heart of the ecosystem and serves as a guide for empowering educators to use data, no matter the source, for making informed decisions.  Tools developed to support the implementation of the ecosystem, including the Teacher Data Use Survey and MNPS IC Map for Collaborative Inquiry were shared with participants.  The PowerPoint for this session is available HERE.

(Stephanie and I also have a published article mentioned in the PowerPoint.  If you would like a copy of it, please email me requesting a copy.)

The presentations from the conference should be available online soon.  If you want to check out their website, you can access it at http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/collaboration-corner-blog/ci-update-do-you-understand-the-words-coming-out-of-my-mouth.

If you need any support with collaborative inquiry and/or have a story to tell, please contact Margie Johnson at [email protected].

I had the honor and opportunity to represent MNPS’ Collaborative inquiry work and a Multi-State Data Use Standards working group at the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement conference this past weekend. 
 
While following the conference hashtag, #ICSEI2017, on Twitter, one of my colleagues from Belgium shared the above quote.  Needless to say, I loved it and completely agree with it.
 
I remember June 4, 2014 when a diverse group of 41 educators and community partners across the district came together to begin discussing data use and the barriers to having effective data use practices in MNPS.  Several barriers (at least 33) were identified at this time.  Using a consensus building protocol, we narrowed the focus to the top 3, which were:

• lack of a common language
• lack of trust throughout the organization
• lack of leadership modeling (“walking the walk”)
  

After identifying these barriers, logic models were developed to create road maps for overcoming the barriers.  These roadmaps have served to inform the collaborative inquiry work for the past 3 years.

To address the common language issue, a committee was convened throughout 2015 to develop the MNPS Innovation Configuration (IC) Map for Collaborative Inquiry and was revised after 4 months of implementation where 5 middle schools (Haynes, Margaret Allen, Two Rivers, West End, and Wright Middle Preps) provided feedback to make it better.
 
Another committee was convened during 2015 to develop an evaluation plan for collaborative inquiry.  If we expected schools to use data for making informed decisions, then we needed to “walk the walk.”  A Teacher Data Use Survey, interviews, focus groups, and observations were used to collect data to answer the below questions:

• How and where is collaborative inquiry occurring in MNPS schools and with what fidelity?
• How does the culture of MNPS support collaborative inquiry and promote the integration of collaborative inquiry as essential to the work of the district?
• What preparation and support needed to implement collaborative inquiry are teachers and administrators receiving?
• Is collaborative inquiry making a difference for teaching and learning in MNPS?

Access the MNPS Collaborative Inquiry Evaluation Infographic HERE.  Read more about the complete evaluation plan HERE.
 
The MNPS Collaborative Inquiry has only been able to get as far as it has because we are doing it together.  If you have a collaborative inquiry success story to share OR need any collaborative inquiry support, please feel free to contact Margie Johnson at [email protected].

More exciting things happening this week in the world of collaborative inquiry.  Remember, there's no checklist for collaborative inquiry as it is a cultural norm for the way we work together to honor, value, and leverage the expertise within MNPS.

 A what???  That's what I usually hear when I say the words, "Innovation Configuration" to people.   What is it?  Why do I care?  How could I possibly use it?

To help answer those questions, REL Appalachia created two videos to add to our Collaborative Inquiry Toolkit.  You can find them on the About page of our toolkit: http://www.mnpscollaboration.org/about.html. 

The 2016 Nashville Analytics Summit was hosted at the Omni Hotel with more than 400 participants from various organizations in the Nashville area.  The Summit focuses on a fundamental issue in organizations today: how to effectively leverage analytics.

Dr. Margie Johnson presented a 90 minute workshop on August 11th sharing about the MNPS data warehouse, its implementation and lessons learned, particularly the development of the Data-Informed Decision Making Ecosystem.  The ecosystem is the framework used by MNPS for building the capacity of employees to use data for making informed decisions.  To access the workshop materials, please click on one of the below pictures.

Vote now to send MNPS to the SXSWedu 2017 conference in Austin, TX! We have two innovative session ideas we want to share with our education community, but we need your vote to make that happen.

Implementation Road Map to Expected Results - Learn about a cool tool for implementing education initiatives!  Discover how educators and researchers can use it to define and guide implementation of practices that lead to expected results. Click here to vote: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/64916

Walk Your Talk: The Teacher Data Use Survey - Learn about a new tool designed to assess teacher data use and the supports that make it happen along with a user-friendly tool for reporting TDUS data. Click here to vote: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/64502

By voting for MNPS' conference proposals, you let the SXSWedu proposal reviewers know that people want to hear more about MNPS' innovative work that is making a difference in students' lives.

VOTING ENDS SEPT 2nd.

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 [email protected] to share your story or to get support around data use.