Here’s something I never thought I’d care about…

When I first started teaching, I had no awareness or interest in making my work more efficient or connecting it to other folks or parts of the school. I was an isolated, super enthusiastic young teacher with burnout written all over him. When I began working as the Director of Studies and Professional Development at the Latin School of Chicago, I had the very good fortune of hiring a guy named Mike Kegler from the University of Chicago. He’s a unicorn: Part teacher, part project manager, and part data scientist. Mike taught me the importance of systems thinking and how to build processes that make everyone’s life easier and more connected to the mission of the school.

So here are some projects I’ve worked on with great teams of people. We refined existing work processes and then built systems that collect, analyze, visualize, and archive important academic/institutional information. If you have better ideas or you’re own projects, please reach out to me so we can share/steal.

 

  • We built a digital, asynchronous learning platform for current and new faculty members to learn the curricular planning model Understanding by Design (UbD). We applied adult learning principles to the learning platform, built an efficient way to generate UbD curricular plans, archive and collaborate on the plans, and merge data in a dynamic data dashboard to inform academic program decisions.

  • We built a comprehensive asynchronous learning platform to train faculty in Mastery Learning. We employed mastery learning principles in designing a diverse menu of learning materials — some homegrown and some not — and a range of assessment tasks. For follow-up, we designed templates to facilitate incorporating a Mastery Learning approach into UbD plans.

  • We built a comprehensive, digital system for facilitating the intake of students needing academic support. The initial form process automatically populated a learning profile to enable ongoing communication between learning specialists and faculty. On the back end of the system, we inserted a dynamic data dashboard to monitor the learning needs of the students. With an aggregate picture of learning needs, we then adjusted our professional development strategy regarding teaching strategies.

  • We designed a light and quick survey process for students to indicate their current level of academic progress and social-emotional health. The results were merged into school-wide and individual teacher dashboards that allowed teachers to initiate important student conversations and helped the school see a current picture of student success and wellness.

  • We designed a completely digital system for identifying, approving, and peer-reviewing off-campus professional development programs. As usual, funneled all data into a dynamic data dashboard to help us adjust our strategic objectives.

  • We built a synchronous/asynchronous digital learning platform to train faculty and staff on how to design high-quality programs of all kinds that lead to measurable outcomes.

  • A hybrid team of academic leaders and Board members designed a 360 survey for all community members tied to specific strategic priorities. We used Tableau to build a fully filterable data dashboard that allowed school leaders and Board members to execute their management/fiduciary responsibilities via customized visualizations of a massive data set.