Welcome Back!

Driving to London today was a good omen. The sun was shining, the window was down, music was playing and the smells of spring were all around. What better day to re-connect with and rejuvenate our professional relationships. Once again, many thanks to Jan for organizing the day. Listening to everything that is going on is very exciting and certainly a long way from where we
were a year ago (see last entry). Debbie Green and I spent a few minutes chatting after the session and thought that this might be a good time to re-introduce this blogging format as a vehicle to share ideas, strategies and practices that support character development. It really is fairly easy to use...simply comment or if worse comes to worse drop me an email stephen.rensink@yrdsb.edu.on.ca and/or attached file if you have something you would like to post as a resource and I will ensure that it gets placed on the blog. With that in mind it would be great to be able to post all of your amazing logos and slogans somewhere on this page. At the same time, there are other technologies readily available in most if not all Boards that we can use to share ideas, collaborate on projects and training sessions happening in each of our Boards. These technologies are very simple to use and in most cases only require access to a computer and a high speed internet connection. If any of you are interested in exploring this further let Debbie and I know and we will work on putting something together.

A few words on data collection. There is no denying that we work in a data driven profession. I was happy to hear Jan bring forward the notion of data driven inquiry vs. data driven decision making. What a rich way to think of data. Just think of the impact this way of thinking would have on our purpose for collecting, what we collect, how we collect data etc. With that said I might offer a few questions (in no particular order) for consideration when thinking about collecting data (some have already been mentioned above). Many of the questions below were things I heard around the table today.

1. What is our purpose for collecting data in the first place?
2. Do we have a plan for sharing results of the collection?
3. What kind of data are we collecting? (quantitative/qualitative/artifacts)
4. Will our initial collection need to be followed up with a secondary collection (i.e.
focus groups, forums etc.)
5. How will we "treat" the data? How do we plan to use the results?
6. How will we go about collecting the data?
7. Who are we collecting data for? and, Who are we collecting data from?

I think these are key questions that need to be answered even before we set out on the task of creating the collection tool(s).

In York Region, as mentioned, we have done some preliminary research on identifying the "markers" (indicators) of implementation. If anyone is interested in hearing more about the process we employed please call or email. We have also supported a number of schools in the collection of data to inform everything from school climate to effectiveness of a variety of initiatives to ESP (Empowered Student Partnerships). A number of our schools have also used the "Tell the from Me" tool focus on students). If you would like to hear more about that I can certainly facilitate that. Finally, you might be interested to know that the Centre for the 4th and 5th R's (see link on the right) has a large number of inventories/instruments on their site. You might find these helpful as you consider the question of data over the next few weeks.

Great to see some familiar faces today. Even better to meet some new ones. Looking forward to seeing you on the blog!

Steve