Dr. Tim O’Leary came to our school on January 28 and presented, to all teaching staff from ELC to Year 12, on the topic “From Insight to Impact: Improving Student Learning with Data”
In this presentation, Tim made the point that many schools are data rich but meaning poor. He exhorted us, as leaders of learning within our classrooms and influencers of learning within our collegial teams, to think carefully about the questions that we wish to answer in our data mining. And to make those questions directly, and purposefully, related to student learning.
What do we notice about our students’ learning? How can we collect better data about this? How then do we grow our students’ learning simultaneously as we grow our own understanding about our contributions to this learning growth through our behaviours when interacting with students, the language we employ and instructional planning?
Tim made the point, with great humour and humility, that we, as humans, can sometimes get in the way of our own learning. There are a number of cognitive biases, such as the Dunning-Kruger effect, that can contribute to us getting ‘stuck’ and the data we collect about our teaching impact can help us work through the barriers created by such biases.
Carefully mined data can lead us to truth. But not as a ‘gotcha’ for teachers. Teachers need to drive this exploration themselves and use the results as a way of improving learning. That is the goal.
Tim’s presentation was thought-provoking, engaging and evidence-informed. As a trained teacher himself, with years of experience in the classroom, he knows teachers and he knows how to talk with teachers.
Tim is very willing to work with schools to provide a customized presentation.
Highly recommended.