Why I chose this:
Interested to see what other co-ops are doing to help with school review and improvement. Also, it's being presented by the Director of ESSDACK, Mike Cook.
What I learned:
The EPS tool was developed by CORE Education in New Zealand.
GPS for where your school is headed.
Three main components:
- Philosophical Frameworks (What you believe and why)
- Strategies and Structures
- Community and Culture
The middle color section shows your 50th percentile in each category. Information is gathered from surveys. To me, this is similar to BrightBytes, but on a broader scale than "just" technology.
Each section has 4 tasks/questions to answer, which are broken into: Robustness, Collectivity, Consistency, and Congruence.
Ideally, you want data grouped together and at the highly developed end of the spectrum.
Data wheels show overall views of School Leadership, Teachers, Support Staff, Community, and Students.
Be careful not to use "educational-ese" when formulating the questions. Educate the community in the terminology. The tool itself begins to change the vernacular of the community.
Important to involve members from each area and have conversations to plan strategically. Ultimately, decide what is important. From there, develop plans to address issues.
You run the surveys a couple times a year, not once every five years.
Superintendent/School admins can determine what questions are in the survey and what is being measured.
Can use sliders to compare where the school currently sits and where the 'ideal' sits.
Can use Wordle to take the open-responses answers and discover the most frequently-used terms and have the people find the terms used (or NOT used). "Why is 'respect' so small?" "Why are negative words larger?"
ESSDACK can help get the program started in your ESC. This is a sustaining program - long-term, analyzing. Year-long agreement, but can survey as many times, in as many ways, as you want. Schools interested should contact their ESA about getting the program set up.
Cost is based per-student plus set-up fees per building. Between $1-$2 per student, depending on district size.
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