Culture and Climate in schools dramatically impacts teaching, learning and student achievement. Students need safe and supportive environments to learn. Educators need the same, to take professional risks to learn, grow and succeed. The right kind of data allows school leaders to measure those affective forces that strongly influence student and staff success. The Education Success Platform (ESP) is the tool to support this essential change work.
With ESP, leadership teams can collect, analyze and share data from perception surveys, culture and climate observation tools and focus groups. ESP allows for both quantitative and qualitative measurement through a variety of item types ranging from rating scales to multiple choice to short answer. Leadership teams can design their own surveys, input an existing open source option, or use surveys already in ESP developed by Demonstrated Success coaches. Items can be grouped in domain areas to inform how community members experience safety, engagement, belonging, environment, professional development, and instruction in school. Any survey can be copied and easily modified to create parallel items for students, staff, guardians, board members, and administrators, enabling leaders to compare and contrast different school community members’ perspectives for a complete 360 degree view. To complement perception survey data, school teams can leverage walk-through rubrics in ESP that measure observable conditions in school buildings such as maintenance, cleanliness, organization, prevalence of student artwork on walls, volume in hallways, and other variables related to the tone and mood of a school building or classroom.
ESP assures that culture and climate data is comprehensive and accurate. The dashboard reflects completion metrics so status can be tracked, and data sets completed. Hover text and embedded how-to videos assure that users understand forms and processes, so that data is accurate, valid and reliable. To further support reliability, notifications can be pre-scheduled to remind recipients to complete surveys, for improved response rates. Automatic charts and graphs allow users to interpret, communicate and respond to data clearly and efficiently. Data can be exported into excel and integrated with demographic and performance trends to explore relationships between student achievement and climate and culture.
ESP is completely secure and supports confidentiality. While surveys can be completed anonymously in ESP, the system can assure that there is only one submission per person to maintain equitable participation. For other purposes, surveys can be tied to the respondent. For example, communications such as parent permission can be linked to student access, allowing administrators to track which students are authorized to submit survey responses. Individuals can be assigned or given permissions to complete specific sections of surveys and observation tools, to support confidentiality and data safety.
ESP is designed with educators in mind. Videos and how-to documentation, in-person and virtual training are included with your ESP purchase. Initial training is provided by Demonstrated Success coaches who have sensitively and skillfully trained educators in data systems for over two decades. After initial training, ESP is straightforward enough for school teams to autonomously accomplish their goals at their own pace. However, the DS team always remains an email or phone call away for as-needed support.
To learn how ESP can help your school or district leverage data to strengthen climate and culture, contact Marissa Hooper, ESP Product Manager: Marissa.Hooper@DemonstratedSuccess.com