How to Democratise Your Data | A Conversation with Chris Scorer

Most schools are sitting on an absolute goldmine of data that could transform student outcomes. But so many are not using it effectively. Today, data expert Chris Scora reveals how school leaders can unlock this potential without adding to teacher workload. Stay tuned to discover what democratizing data really means in your school.

Hey everyone, I'm Shane Leaning. And welcome to Global Ed Leaders, the chat-topping leadership podcast for international schools. I'm an organizational coach and in this show I get to know the teachers, leaders and innovators making a difference in education around the world. Before we jump into the conversation today, I'm delighted that this episode is supported by the International Curriculum Association.

Stay tuned to learn more. Now, my guest today is Chris Scora. If you're thinking, I recognize that name, that's because back in episode 70, I've already spoken to Chris. It was such a good conversation.

We decided to record two at the same time. So this is the second one. Now, Chris is an education consultant. He works with many major school groups around the world.

And he is the guy I turn to if I need support with data. So, of course, this is what we talked about today. If you remember the last episode, we recorded from a pub. So you're gonna hear some of that pub noise in the background.

I think it adds to the conversation. He's a great guy. You're going to learn a lot from him. Let's jump right in.

Democratizing anything is about bringing something to the people. And there's that concept, this sort of, you know, democracy that some people live by. Demos is the Greek word for people. So the idea of bringing data to the stakeholders is essentially what we're talking about.

And I think that if historically, if you look at how data is used in schools, it's often the preserve of leadership or even board level. And it's a little bit of a compliance task for teachers and those that choke face, if you like. So on that basis, if we can move that so that data is something that teachers will use on a day-to-day basis and so on, then that's going to have a positive impact in the classroom. But going beyond that, it's not just about teachers.

It also includes access to parents, students and those stakeholders within that. And if we can broaden that out, then we get the maximum impact of that data. It's interesting. There's a study by Friar in 2017.

It tracks baseline data against lifetime outcomes, life chances. And it was quite a big longitudinal study. And it says that there's no greater indicator of positive life chances than good quality baseline data, followed by effective interventions. And those interventions include teachers, include parents.

They're implemented by the students and the schools. So you put all of that together and these things can actually echo into eternity, for want of a better phrase. So that's really interesting. So they've found a correlation between if you've got good quality data early on, that just by having that data, not acting like, well, I guess there's an assumption that there's...

You've got to have the interventions to go with it, but you can't have effective interventions if you don't have quality data and it's not being accessed by teachers or parents or students. So the idea is that if it remains an SLT preserve, then in actual fact, those interventions are very rarely enacted. If you're going to make the best use of data, and we've got lots of it, we're very good at collecting it, if you're going to make the best use of that, you need to bring it to the attention of the teachers, of the parents and the pupils. And that's the idea of democratizing data, widening the participation and making sure that people have got access to it and making sure that people use it.

And that becomes a more complicated leadership and management process. It's hugely complicated and hugely challenging. And Chris, you've been in this data world for quite a while, so kind of like living this and working with many schools on the ground with their data. So are you finding a disconnect?

Are you finding that actually data is not democratized? Absolutely. What you tend to find is you have a fragmented data landscape within a school. So they might be using platforms from different places, different areas of the school might use different platforms or different parameters as to how they collect and manage that data.

So that's one of the issues that you find. So you're removing a little bit of consistency there. So when you arrive in a school, you'll find pockets of good practice, pockets of okay practice, and then have pockets of no practice at all, even within that. So that's where you come up against the first barrier of accessing data.

The other issue that you've got is the teachers particularly, who are the ones that implement a lot of what's going on in a classroom. The teachers are busy. They've got an awful lot on, and as a result, the data collection and data management, it's a compliance task, and it's not something that they're necessarily ready to engage with in its entirety as an everyday, because it's an extra layer of work for them. So there are things that you can do with that too.

But that fragmented scenario, that lack of consistency, and that situation where teachers have got too much to do, creates a situation where data is not necessarily engaged with. If the teachers aren't engaging with it, the pupils aren't going to be able to, nor are the parents. So what happens is, it reverts to a data manager, or data lead within a school. It's done for compliance purposes, but you've got all this information, and it's such a missed opportunity because it's so valuable, and so useful, and so time-saving if it's used properly.

You miss that opportunity, and you're not putting it to work. You've got this asset, and you're not using it. And not just one asset, but multiple assets. I think listeners to this are spread across the world, and they have multiple experiences, but I think one common aspect of schools across the world is they're quite data-rich now.

There seems to be more and more and more, but I guess what you're saying is it's just, it sits there, and it's not being used correctly. No, we collect data. We tend not to put it to use as well as it might be, for lots of different reasons. Sometimes it's complicated stuff, sometimes it's not so complicated, but all of those things feed into the fact that we don't put the data to use.

Yeah. And that's a missed opportunity for me. Yes. I can see both of you.

So what's the challenge that's stopping this democratisation? What's stopping people from kind of getting to that point where you think they need to be? It's a leadership choice. Well, a series of leadership choices, to be more accurate.

The first one is that you've got to design your data landscape within a school. You've got to have a vision. It's easy to sort of rub along and not upset people because they're using a particular platform that works for them. It's in isolation in one part of the school.

But actually, as a leader within a school, you've got to decide what your vision for that school is and how you bring that together, and what that landscape's going to look like and what it's designed to achieve. A lot of schools split the responsibilities across the school between pastoral and academic, for example. Yeah. Now, that's administratively very convenient.

But it's not something that, you know, a child's not having an academic or a pastoral day. A child is just having a day and there'll be a mix of all of those things swirling around. I think Matthew Savage talks about the windy environment that kids find themselves in, day in and out. And I quite like that idea.

And I think that when we're looking at data, it's often easy to look at it from our own perspective as teachers and administrators. If we can start to look at it from what it's trying to achieve and set some key objectives as to what we're trying to do with that, then that's the first thing. You may decide to buy all data from one particular platform. You may decide to integrate things.

However it is, you do it. You need a set of parameters and you need to create that data landscape with your school's objectives in place. And I recognise that international schools particularly have a wide range of priorities. But there's a choice to be made.

And if you can see this data as being viable and useful to you, then you need to create that vision. Once that decision's been made, you've then got to implement that and create that across your school. That's probably the trickiest part of the whole process. Yeah. Well, it is. It's complex.

I'm curious then, like, where do people usually fall down? Like, do you find, like, there's particular places that people trip up when trying to do this? Yeah. I think the first stage is that the data leads are very reluctant to share data widely because of the risks involved.

There's the whole issue of data security, data regulation. In the UK and Europe, we have GDPR. There are similar rules coming in in China around data protection and so forth. And I think the rest of the world carries similar sort of rules and regulations around that.

What that does is it locks data down and schools are reluctant to share it. And there's a recognition as well that teachers can make mistakes, share too much, draw incorrect conclusions, things like that. What do you mean by that? I'm interested.

Like, what do you mean sharing too much? Well, quite often schools struggle when they share data with parents because they haven't necessarily educated their parents as to what that data actually means. So, a lot of assessment data, baseline data, parents will want to coach their youngsters before they do the test, and they will struggle with what it actually means. In the West, we see baseline data as diagnostic.

That's a harder thing to sell in Asia because there's that concept that results are driven primarily from hard work over and above innate ability. And that's a cultural issue for the schools to overcome. So, if you share that data with your parents set before they're ready to hear it, you're going to end up with quite a problem to deal with as SLT. That's something in the schools that I work with.

I think that's what comes up time and time again. And there's always, like, this tension between what do we share? And with some schools going, we don't share, it's for us. This is data, it's for us.

And then we just share. And some schools going, let's just share everything. And almost both approaches end up in real pickles because parents rightly want to, they want to know if you're assessing or if you're making a judgment that I'm going to get some of that information. Like, I deserve it, it's my child.

But at the same time, there is, I think you said it's educating parents, but many schools don't know where to start bringing them on. When you first teach a class, my subject was economics. Week one of year 12, A level economics or IB economics is very different to week 15 of year 13 because your approach is different. There's more scaffolding, there's more support.

There's a little less sort of sharing of information with them. And you tend to guide them and walk them through that a bit more in week one. You get to the following year, your input is relatively minimal and the youngsters will follow their own track. It's like that.

First of all, with your staff, you need to provide them with a safe environment to work with data, engage with it. Maybe make some mistakes and accept that those mistakes will happen. Mitigate for them. Don't criticize too much when they happen.

Support and help. And the journey with staff needs to happen first because they're the agents of what you're doing with your school data. But equally, that journey can happen with parents too. And again, that's going to be a slow process.

There will always be a residual level of parents that want to engage with the data on the way they see it rather than the way you see it. There'll be cultural barriers and problems with that. But the more you work with that, the closer you get to the result that you're after. You'll never get perfect, and that's fine.

And there will be the occasional difficult conversation with parents that maybe misunderstand what you're trying to do with a particular assessment, whether that's Cambridge, whether it's Cat 4, Century Tech, whoever it is, they'll misunderstand what you're trying to do with that. And that's okay. You can keep having those conversations. That's part of the role of leadership.

It's to monitor and maintain those relationships with parents. It's not a one-and-done workshop where you go, hey, parents, here's our system. This is how our reports look, and you think, you know, box ticked, right? In some of my roles within the industry, we take schools on a sort of three- to five-year journey.

That would include parents, that would include staff, and it would include leadership. And that journey would go from when they started using particular assessments and collecting particular data and building their landscape right the way through to those really nuanced users of that data and what they can deliver and what they can't and things like that. Yeah. So, to bring it back to teachers, like, I know some teachers, you know, they get presented, you know, you've got to start interpreting your own data, tracking your own data.

They go, no, no, no, not my job. I just want, you know, leave me alone. And I think that resistance can be quite common when someone's trying to democratise a data process and say, look, we've got this rich data in front of us, use it. So, I assume, in your kind of work, you've come across this resistance.

Yeah. Like, how do you overcome that as a leader? Okay. The first thing is, it's for you to prioritise it as something that's important within your school.

By that, I mean, don't just slap it on top of everything else that the teachers have got to do in their day-to-day. It's got to be a priority for you over and above other stuff that's maybe less important. Deimplementation needs to happen as well, right, for other things. Yeah, for sure.

And then you move on from that, and you've got to think about the staff that you've got within your school. That starts with your recruitment. Talk to your potential candidates about their attitude today, to how they work with it, what they've done, how familiar they are with it, before they even come into your school. So, you've got an idea of what's coming in.

In terms of overcoming the actual resistance on a day-to-day basis, it depends a little bit where your cohort of staff are. One of the best teachers I worked with in Italy, when you mentioned data and spreadsheets, her blood would run cold, you'd see her face go grey, I shan't mention her name, but she was terrified of it. And she always had the idea that she knew her students. And that's an absolutely fair point.

So, we need to get past the idea that it's instead of teacher judgement. And what we need to do is we need to give teachers a safe space to look at, think about, consider, and ask about the data that you have in hand. The same as we do in a class. If we're teaching youngsters, we give them a safe space, we let them explore, we don't shoot them down at their first mistake, second mistake or third mistake even.

We let them run with those ideas and we try to direct that a little bit. Give teachers a safe space to work with, give them a little bit of fairly straightforward data, put them in a room with people that are in the same level of hierarchy as they are, give them some parameters or scaffolding if you need to, and let them start to run with that and ask questions and see patterns. And one of the things that will come out of that is the idea that they will see things that affirm their judgements. And that breaks down the either-or concept.

It moves them towards that affirmation. And within that, there's something that's really important to bear in mind. As teachers, we make judgements over the course of our school year. Those judgements direct children along particular trajectories.

Data can help you understand where a child is much sooner. It can give you the confidence in your own judgement, taking it from a hunch to something a little more robust, and you can do that sooner. Now, if you can course correct for a student earlier, what you're actually doing is you're saving everyone trauma and hassle and stress and anxiety, parent, child and you, because you're making smaller corrections more regularly and that's better for everybody. I want to take a moment to tell you about the International Curriculum Conference that is coming up from the International Curriculum Association.

This will be held from the 11th to the 13th of November in 2024 in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. It is so exciting. The theme of this is Global Perspectives, Local Impact, and I was at their conference last year. I can't recommend it highly enough.

This is a focal point for the global community of schools, part of the International Curriculum Association. There is going to be amazing keynote speakers and a wide range of school-led workshops delivered by classroom teachers sharing their practice and experience. Seriously, with the incredible insights and showcasing of learning, I really do recommend the International Curriculum Conference because it offers a unique level of enrichment connection and learning for all. If you're interested, check out the link in the show notes to register.

Please go there. It's going to be great. I really like how you make it about this kind of safe process and you talk a lot about intuition because that is legitimate, like people have intuition and I guess the worry is people go, data's coming in, that's replacing my intuition of how I know the students who are in front of me and what I know about them. But what you're saying is this can actually kind of support that if done in the right way.

I wonder, actually, now I'm thinking, have you seen examples where teachers have engaged with data? I wonder if that's an intuition-improving loop that actually once they start seeing these more early signs, they start to notice it in their practice and it actually enhances their own ability to spot things as they come on. I think that if it builds that confidence, then that's going to speed things up, sharpen things up for sure. And equally, where there's a discrepancy between your hunch and the data, it makes you delve a little bit deeper and reflect on that.

Well, OK, I wouldn't have seen that. Let's have a think about that. And it's quite often, youngsters are really good at masking things. In Asia, there's the concept of loss of face and kids are good at hiding stuff.

There's a great podcast by a guy called Nick Jensen about wellbeing and kids hiding the truth behind how they feel. He had a small school in New Zealand, 40-odd pupils and he thought he knew them all really well and turned out that there was all sorts of baggage there that they had no idea about because the kids were good at hiding stuff. And I think that, you know, from time to time, there's none of us are infallible. And the idea that we shouldn't be looking at this because we've got judgment and intuition that's of value is crazy, really.

We should be. We should be checking and balancing all of those things and seeing if our intuition is on the money. And if it is, great. That gives us the confidence to address those issues.

You know, if it's wellbeing data, that can be a really tricky conversation. You might shy away from that because you're not 100% confident to address it. And it might just give you the confidence to jump in and take that and move that forward. And that's quite important stuff.

But equally, if you look at something and it's not matching up with what you think, well, maybe what you think is not quite where it needs to be and that's worth looking at too. You know, maybe you've not misunderstood something or... And sometimes the opposite, I guess, as well. Sometimes you might highlight where the data has got a problem.

For sure. Yeah, absolutely. And the data is not infallible, which is why you have lots and lots of data points. You know, and those discrepancies can tell you an awful lot.

What I love about this conversation is we're still talking around a professional respect and a dialogue rather than data directs. It's like data informs you as a professional. It doesn't have to be your replacement or do the thinking for you. It's you as the professional who is in the seat doing the thinking, utilising this as one of your tools, one of your many tools.

And until it stops being a compliance task and starts being a teacher tool, we'll never kind of get it being used properly. And we collect all this data, we show offset ISI, all of the inspector bodies around the world. But we don't necessarily use it day to day in our thinking with our children. And when we consider how important that is, if you go back to that study with Friar, we're not just dealing with what's happening in our GCSE class over the course of two years or our A level IB class.

This is life chances going into adulthood. It's important to remember the gravitas of what we do as teachers and school leaders. We're shaping the lives of youngsters as they head off into the adult world and affecting what direction their life takes. That's an awesome responsibility.

And if we can do a little bit of training and upscale ourselves around how to make that better and how to be better at that, then I think that's probably a worthy thing to be doing. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And it's certainly a thing that I want to upscale myself in as well because I do empathise with a legitimate fear around data. And I don't teach at the minute, but even utilising my podcast analytics data and things like that, I know I could be doing better to get to know my audience better and serving them better through this tour.

Well, when I first started teaching, I walked into my first teaching job in Leicester and there was a set of, it was chem data in my pigeonhole. It was in September. It was still there in July the following year. I'd never looked at it.

I had no idea what it was. And no one had sat me down and talked about it. It was valuable data, except the fact that it wasn't being used by the teacher. It wasn't until I did my master's degree and got to grips with something a little more engaged that I started to see where this could go and how valuable it was.

But you don't need a master's degree. Absolutely not. You just need to pick up the data and start to look at it and try to understand what it means and have a school leader or leaders that are prepared to help you engage with that. For sure.

So let's take like a bit of a wider picture then, like looking forward, because data's in its strictly linked now with technology. So things are evolving fast. I mean, what do you see as the kind of role of data like evolving over the next few years? Like, do you think it's going to be a conversation we keep having?

Yeah, I do. You'll hear a lot about AI and how that will work. I think that's a debate for a little bit further in the future. I don't think schools are quite ready to engage with that because they're not necessarily engaging with what they've already got.

I think in terms of school leaders, there needs to be a little bit of a reflection on what we're trying to achieve with school data. It's more than compliance. It's more than reporting. And, you know, are we really getting this data down to classroom level?

And are we sharing it with parents? And are we sharing it with the children? And they're all tricky things to do and to get right, and there'll be mistakes along the way for all schools. But I think if we get to grips with that, then we can start to deal with the future around the development of that.

You're going to have a lot of different edtech platforms coming out. Some will use certain levels of AI, some won't, some will provide you with raw data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that the decision around what edtech platforms you use, what data you use, becomes a whole lot easier once you decide what you're trying to achieve, what's realistic with your staff cohort and your parent cohort, and then you try to move towards that. If you come at it from the point of view of looking at the edtech first, you'll just get swamped with all sorts of different bits and pieces and things like that, and what it all means and how it all fits together.

Get your data landscape and move that forward and then look at those different platforms and the values within them. Yeah. I wonder, do you think, with technology advancing with data systems getting more innovative and having more intelligence with artificial intelligence, at the minute you're talking about the teacher being at the center of the data and that being really important that they're engaged with it, do you think we're going to get to a point where the teacher doesn't, where they're just directed by like a data engine? I think there's a risk that if we don't implement it properly, that certainly could happen, and you'll possibly find that in lesser schools, dare I say it, that will be the case.

I think the better schools will always, always, always keep the teachers at the center of that decision-making process. I've got this romantic notion that the teaching and education happens in the sort of magic space between people. I think that if you keep that in mind, teaching and learning is predicated on relationships and that interaction, and it's not about resources being passed out to youngsters. Some of the best lessons I've seen have been poorly resourced, poorly planned, and they've been delivered amazingly, and then equally I've seen well-planned, well-resourced lessons that fell very flat.

And I think it's that relationship that's important, inspiring, helping youngsters grow, giving people trust, all of those kind of things. And I think that provided the teacher remains at the forefront of what's happening in classrooms, and we don't let the technology take over, it can be a useful thing to augment their judgment, but that will never, ever happen unless the teachers are skilled and understand the data that they're working with. That's the risk, isn't it? I think that's a risk with technology, just full stop, that I've talked about a lot recently.

As AI develops, there is a genuine concern that get it with companies like Google getting involved in the education space, for example, that teachers, if they are not engaged in driving this conversation, it will be had somewhere else, and platforms will be developed without the teacher in mind. Absolutely. So we've got a responsibility right now as educators to kind of get deep into this, kind of explore this and understand it, because then we can drive the conversation. And within that decision around your data landscape as a school leader, find out what teachers really could use.

That's a process. That's not a quick process either. Find out what works for them and find out how that could actually manifest itself in the classroom. You know, bringing some of your younger teachers, dare I say it, and see what they've got to offer, because they're probably the innovators within your school doing some really interesting stuff.

Yeah. Well, that's a really good starting point. Lean on your younger teachers to start, see what they're thinking and what they're energised about. Absolutely.

Yeah. So what else? Like, to draw this to a close, like, a school leader's going, do you know what? I want to democratise with data in a school.

I want to get started. Like, where's a good place, like, just an easy place for them to get going? I would create those safe spaces with the data that you've got, first and foremost, looking at what you're actually working with. Create those safe spaces for your teachers.

Have time allocated within your CPD or your inset and prioritise it and see what conclusions come up. And from those conclusions, you can then feed into what the next steps might be. That might include shaping your data landscape. If you pass the data out to your teachers that you already have and they say it's disparate or it doesn't connect properly, then that's a great leverage to move forward and to say, well, OK, let's make this cohere and put it in concert with itself across the school and we'll start to build that scenario.

It kind of needs to be bottom up rather than top down. Otherwise, you'll mitigate the buy-in and you also need to recognise that there will be some risks along the way. And I'd probably look to try and identify, quantify and safeguard against some of those risks as I went as a leader because they can be a little open-ended if you do get it really badly wrong. You know what really resonated with me from this conversation was Chris's idea about creating safe spaces for teachers to engage with data.

Rather than focusing on just forcing that data adoption, schools should create an environment where teachers can explore, make mistakes and gradually build confidence with data, much like we do with our students. I also found it such powerful insight about how data shouldn't replace teacher intuition. It should enhance it. When data and teacher judgements align, it builds confidence in our decisions and when they don't align, it prompts that deeper investigation.

Both scenarios benefit the students. I think the most profound thing, though, that came out of this conversation for me was linking this to student life chances. It's not just about compliance. It's not just about short-term tracking.

The data we collect and how we use it can impact students' trajectories well into adulthood and that's a responsibility we need to take seriously. You can find more information about Chris and also his brilliant article on democratizing data in the show notes. Global Ed Leaders is hosted by me, Shane Leaning. Huge thanks to my show editor, Pete McGill, and to original music by Guillerme Silva.

And thanks so much to you for tuning in today. As ever, if we don't speak before, I'll see you here next week. Remember to find out more about the International curriculum Association and that fantastic international curriculum conference in November. Check out the links in the show notes.