Video: Amplified Personal Learning and Student Outcomes
Data. Those four little letters hold the key to the world. And nowhere is that truer than in the world of the school district.
In this presentation at the Learning Counsel’s Chicago area Learning Leadership Symposium, you’ll hear from Dr. Paul O’Malley, Superintendent of Butler School District 53 and Ray Harth, Chief Executive Officer at the Heliox Group. Dr. O’Malley’s district is in the throes of a three-year process to organize its data in a depository where they’re able to place all their information, and measure the performance of their students. They wanted a single platform that would be the most impactful for their students, especially the younger ones, who are competing against many different types of platforms.
“We want to make sure it has that personalized touch,” said Dr. O’Malley, “and we have the formative, the summative, as well as the other benchmarks or assessments that we need to measure our students. And of course, we need to differentiate, because not all students are learning at the same rate. Not all students have the same skills, and not all students are the same, as we’ve experienced quite regularly. We want to make sure that we’re wiser in our data, which requires quite a bit of professional development for our teachers because it is data informed instruction that, that we have put in place more so than ever before. We also have the social emotional learning piece, especially coming out of COVID. It’s critically important that we have the necessary data when it comes to the emotional wellbeing of our students; we don’t want them to be overwhelmed from the anxiety and the stressors that they were exposed to over the last two years.”
“Otis is a learning management system, at its core,” said Harth. “The idea behind it is to take the data and put it all into one particular place, so you’re compiling data from different third-party data sources. This gives staff, administrators and eventually parents a kind of streamline access to data to have one portal that we can go and access that particular data. One of the big strengths of Otis is that we can visualize data. Data visualizations that they’ve built into the system, so that you can actually go to a dashboard, look at that information in a very clean fashion. The other thing that we’re doing at Butler is being able to set different performance goals.”
“That of course leads to creating a different personalized learning for the students that we have and that we serve,” said O’Malley. “The nice thing is that we will be able to measure different progress, to be able to see where students are headed, where students may be at a risk, and other measures that we may put in place to give the power to the teachers to empower them to do the great jobs they do as teachers.”
With his finger now firmly on the pulse of his students, Superintendent O’Malley finds that true personalized learning, perhaps for the first time, is becoming a reality. And with that, happier, healthier students have a true pathway forward to increased outcomes.
It all goes back to data, and the district’s ability to capture, identify and release the power in that data. Butler School District 53 knows, thanks to their partnership with Ray Harth and the Heliox Group. And by watching the video, you’ll learn how data can improve learning outcomes in your district as well.
