Data is Your Friend!

In this blog series we will be working with Chris Loiselle, operations director at two successful virtual schools in Michigan, to learn about how his schools incorporate the use of data into their school improvement planning process.

Now that you have your SMART goal – in our case creating a 5% improvement in graduation rates – it’s time to do some research! This is probably the most important step you can take which will give you the greatest chance of reaching your goals. It also takes the most time.

This school utilizes Pulse as their primary student tracking tool. There are several benefits to using this tool that will not be covered in this blog, but the greatest reason it made sense for the school to transition to the use of the Pulse Student Support tool was because Pulse is capable of centrally tracking all engagement data in one area.

Now we are ready to begin presenting results to staff members, and centrally monitoring them. Pulse has a dashboard system built into it to help accomplish this task now, but for a long time this school prepared weekly dashboard reports through data exports from Pulse and Google Sheets.

One of the most important pieces of the project was creating incentive for staff to work to improve performance. This school developed a two phased approach. The first phase was creating an incentive plan.