Chris is a deputy head teacher at a primary school in East Lothian. He attended the Data Literacy professional learning course and has both directly adapted material and approaches from the course. He has also shared with other colleagues who in turn use and modify them, leading to ‘ripple effects’ of adaptation and evolution within the school.
Chris highlighted the slow-reveal graphs as a standout element from the course, ‘they are useful even when we’re sharing ‘boring’ progress and achievement data’. It really gives a different viewpoint on what you’re looking at right from the outset.
In addition to the slow reveal graphs, among the practical resources he has used are the Dragonistics cards (‘probably 100 times!’)* and the Data Explorer Cards and he regularly brings classes to escape room events as shared by the team. With the handbook and ways of looking at graphs and data, ‘it really was beneficial because it showed the most simplistic ways of learning about visualisation of data’. With Primary 6, for example, he has already used the approach to help them use data on different countries from world fact books; it lets them ‘look at the information in an interesting way’.
‘The Data Literacy course showed how data can be taught in a in a more interesting way and make it more accessible to a lot of learners. That really was what I got from it, but also, from my professional side as a leader, it gave me an awful lot to return to staff with and upskill them.’
With this in mind, Chris took a pragmatic, pro-active approach to sharing with other teachers at his school.
They started with little ice-breakers at the start of collegiate time, then began to set aside more dedicated collegiate sessions to sharing data literacy approaches, introducing colleagues to the resources, illustrating the practical, hands-on nature of them.
The key take away was that ‘it was the hands-on nature, it is more likely to be adopted if you can show a teacher that their collegiate time will directly impact their teaching’. The ripple effect happened as a ‘a sort of staged process, where a partner would see a resource that was being used like the Dragonistics cards, or some of these slow reveal graphs would be part of their planning. They would then share the resource. The keenness, shall we say, of the teachers was naturally picking up other people. So that small ripple effect I think would happen in any school.’… We were lucky enough to have a team that focused on this as a professional inquiry, which then meant that we could run with it and the goal was to spread it across the school.’
So what started as one colleague attending the Data Literacy professional learning course led to ripples of data literacy teaching across a whole school.
‘From a personal point of view, I got a huge amount out of it – from a professional point of view, even more so.
* Inspired by the Dragonistics cards, we have created our own Robot Cards. You can download them at Robot Cards – Data Education in Schools.