Data-Driven Teaching Deserves a Dashboard

I want a teaching dashboard. I want to have access to all my data in a visual, logical, coherent format. I want to be able to select which section of data I view and manipulate those variables with simple, single clicks.

Dashboard Definition

(a sample dashboard from this blog)

"a graphical summary of various pieces of important information, typically used to give an overview of a business" -Google

In other  words, this is a way to measure performance, make conclusions about the results, and adjust accordingly.

 

Example

My dashboard clearly illustrates that blogs with directly related titles attract more readers than do my more creative titular efforts. The most aptly titled blog is earning the most reads. I have concluded that my readers (you, thank you) want to know the topic before they decide whether or not to invest the time. This is fair, and as the blogger, it is my job to be considerate of readers' needs. I will consciously title blogs with key words, and I will monitor the response through my dashboard. (Or you could just comment below to let me know how I'm doing... :-)

Dashboard Data in the Classroom

In education, we tend to act like business is our older sibling. Sometimes we ask to borrow stuff, sometimes we sneak it, and sometimes we buy similar things and pretend we thought of it ourselves. I will not try to establish the boundaries between business and education, but I would like to beg to borrow their dashboards (or steal them when business isn't looking).

I want to see a line graph displaying the attendance trend over time. I want to be able to segregate out by grade, subject, period, or even individual student. Or by day, or week. I want a color-coded pie chart demonstrating where students struggled most on FCAT by strand, and I want to be able to toggle from whole population to course to class to individual student from one menu. I want a place to collect, store, and display data I gather through classroom tests and even observations.

In a fantasy world, I would have one-click options for data-driven decisions. I want access to lesson plans, activities, and instructional materials for a specific Common Core standards based on my students' results.

I should be able to enter decisions as data points and see the response logically, objectively, and visually. If I notice that I have a much larger absenteeism rate on Mondays, I could start playing review games every Monday. I could enter that decision into a data point and track the trend. If attendance began improving on Mondays, I could continue with the planned activities. Conversely, if absenteeism rates increased further, I would know to adjust again in some other way. (For more advanced readers, please note that I am aware of causation vs. correlation and am simplifying for practical purposes. Although, if you wanted to comment about it...)

In order to collect, enter, and display the above data in any meaningful way would take dozens of hours away from my planning and preparing, hours that I do not have. I only have three options: postpone intense data analysis, make data-based decisions nearly blindly and hope, or send a fake text message to get business out of the house while I raid the closet.

Do you have any tools or strategies you use for data collection, entry, and management? Please comment below to let us know your process for making and monitoring data-based decisions.