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Monthly Newsletter
August 2021
What Our Members Are Saying

ISS International School has recently joined the LAC community and our membership has already enabled us to review, monitor, and improve our approaches to student learning and engagement. The LAC platform has enabled us to clearly visualize our historical and current student data in a format that is relevant, innovative, and easy for faculty, students, and parents to understand. Assisting the whole school to learn from and enrich our teaching and learning processes.

Our faculty have benefited from the opportunities the LAC platform provides us in offering a tool to enhance our internal and external assessment data analysis. The data and trends the LAC platform visualizes have been imperative in our drive to make collaboration and effective decision-making central to the development and continual improvement of our teaching and learning.

The competencies of the LAC team, aligned with their experience of working with other schools around the world, has offered us the support and expertise required in implementing our new data analysis system effectively and within a short time frame. I highly recommend LAC and their team to any school looking to make their student data analysis more effective for their learning community.
Vanessa Adamberry
Former K-12 Feedback and Assessment Coordinator
ISS International School Singapore
Dear LAC Members,

Welcome to our August LAC Newsletter! We are getting closer to the end of the summer break and I hope you all had a great break and were able to recharge your batteries. The LAC team has been working throughout the summer on migrating current schools to the new platform (schools that have joined the LAC in the past few months are already in the new platform), rolling over students for the new school year, and making all relevant updates to get us ready for the 2021-22 school year. We are very excited because as you can see above our new LAC Logo is making its debut!

Making the most of your learning data assets requires building and growing a culture of data use. Helping our LAC member schools build these cultures is our priority. Many schools are just starting to build a culture while others are at various stages of the journey. Research shows us that leadership is a key enabler in transforming a school’s data use culture. One of the critical building blocks is identifying the Academic and Technical Leads that guide this process. Schools that joined the LAC over the past year (2020-21 SY) identified one or more Academic and Technical Leads. The Leads work directly with us to set up their school’s LAC sites and use the visualizations with their teachers. We empower them to create, build, and grow cultures of data use. If your school joined the LAC prior to the 2020-21 school year, please complete this form to identify these key positions at your school. 

We are also beginning our preparations for our 4th Virtual Meetup scheduled for 25th of September. More details about the sessions will follow in the September Newsletter!

LAC Data Literacy Tier 2 workshops - ‘Advancing in Data Literacy’ are now published on our LAC Learning Space! You can access these workshops on demand along with the Navigators that we have prepared for each Module. Tier 2 workshops provide information about the different engines and guidance and protocols to gain insights. The engines include Student Data Profile, Student Data Explorer, Standards-Based Grades, Academic Grades, MAP family of engines, and the IB. Workshops on other engines will continue to be added to Tier 2.

Please remember that we have also launched our LAC Blog where you can read articles about Learning Analytics and beyond! You can find more details below!

All the best, stay safe!

Piotr Olczak
Director of Learning Analytics
Consilience Education Foundation
LAC Blog
The latest entry in the LAC Blog is about a short video that dives into how the Humboldt Elementary School has decided to engage Parents by using data.


You can also read previous posts including:
  • Atlas Protocol on how to structure and conduct the conversation about data.
  • “Using Data to Support Teacher and Student Growth” - an article about a video posted on Edutopia
  • LAC School Spotlight - International School of Beijing by Ruth Poulsen, Director of Curriculum and Assessment at International School of Beijing
  • “Wellbeing, Relationships and Teaching as a Caring Profession?” Very poignant article for the current conversations taking place on Wellbeing and its place in the school culture, especially among International Schools.
  • ‘Designing Best-Fit Classes with the Class Placement Engine’ by by Ben Hacking , Deputy Principal at the Vienna International School
  • Data Journey: Discovering Learning Analytics at Zurich International School’ by Andrew Blair, Head of IT Services and Solutions at Zurich International School
  • Making Student Data Part of the Conversation!’ A case study of how Humboldt Elementary, a school once on the verge of being labeled under-performing, turned to data to move the bar on student success.
  • LAC School Spotlight - American School of Bucharest’ by Andrew Pontius, IB MYP Coordinator, and Fiona Moss, Secondary Vice Principal at American International School of Bucharest
  • How International School of Phnom Penh uses data to inform decision-making within the Student Support Team’ by Jonathan Smedes, Director of Learning, Teaching, Innovation and Impact at International School of Phnom Penh
  • Building and Leading a School Culture that Values Data Informed Dialogue to Improve Student Learning’ by Megan Brazil, Elementary School Principal, UNIS-Hanoi
Learning Data Audits
In order to effectively manage data assets and fully realize their potential, any school must first be aware of the location, condition and value of its data. Conducting an audit will provide this information, raising awareness of collection strengths, highlighting areas of improvement as well as potential data issues to improve overall strategy. An audit will highlight duplication of efforts and areas that require additional investment, allowing any school to optimize its resources. It will also highlight shortfalls in data creation and control practices, suggesting changes to minimize the potential risks. Broadly speaking, auditing school’s data assets yields the following benefits:
  • prioritization of resources which leads to efficiency savings
  • ability to manage risks associated with data loss and misuse
  • increasing the value of data assets through improved access and reuse
  • enabling effective and efficient learning analytics and data visualization for data-informed decision making

Full information can be found here

If you are interested in conducting such a Learning Data Audit at your school, please contact Piotr.
Engine of the Month - Standard Based Grades Explorer
This engine lets the user explore and reveal the equity in grading, distribution of grades, and student performance by grade level, subject, gender or teacher. In essence, it allows you to see the proportion of awarded grades to or by particular groups at your school. The center piece of this engine is a chord diagram combined with dynamic histograms and bar charts to allow the user full interactivity in exploring the latest set of grade data.
If you would like to add this engine to your school’s LAC site, please contact Piotr.
Data Literacy - Building a Culture of Data Use

Great article from eSchools News on how Students' networks carry them beyond school and into the workforce. Building and strengthening students’ networks helps to support student well-being and expand their sense of future possible selves, according to researchers at the Clayton Christensen Institute who have released a new playbook with strategies to create strong student relationships.
The playbook offers five steps for building and strengthening students’ networks, and its recommendations and activities are guided by decades of research on the power of relationships, new, innovative designs, and emerging measures from the field. Using the five steps as a roadmap, education leaders can take a systematic approach to equitably fostering positive and diverse relationships across their schools and programs.
Useful Links
Consilience is a non-profit, global education innovation company that supports institutions and educators to transform teaching and learning. We provide leadership training and professional development in the areas of Innovation Leadership, Technology Integration, Maker Learning, Online Learning and Learning Analytics. For more information about our work, please visit our website: www.consiliencelearning.org 
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