Recapping Our Work With the Staff at MetWest High School

MetWest High School — a partnership between the Oakland Unified School District (Oakland, Calif.) and the Big Picture Learning Network — prepares its students to recognize and take advantage of all the resources that can further their personal well being, as well as the well being of their communities.

Here at Eagle Rock, our Professional Development Center has been working with MetWest for two years now — with associate director Dan Condon as the lead — on ways that the school can use relevant, key data indicators to guide them in their work.

In particular, MetWest is interested in using data to support existing efforts with respect to their students:

• Real world thinking
• Critical thinking
• Social and emotional intelligences
• Literacy and communication
• Resistance to oppression / social change agents / promoters of social change

Our most recent engagement with MetWest took place in mid-August and revolved around helping the staff identify which data is important, and therefore which data to collect. Specifically, we took their staff through a collaborative process that included:

• Reflecting on the school’s roots, drivers and critical events since its founding 12 years ago.

• Engaging in a text-based protocol around Ronald S. Thomas’ Education Week article My nine truths of data analysis.

• Teaching the team about lead and lag measures related to aim statements.

• Helping the staff to engage with data already collected as part of the school’s data-based inquiry process.

We concluded the August session by asking MetWest’s teams to prototype projects they will engage in prior to our next work with them on Oct. 10, in Oakland.

If you would like to know more about our work with MetWest or how your school or community program can use data to support existing or future efforts, contact me — Dan Condon — by emailing DCondon at EagleRockSchool dot org.

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About The Author:  Dan Condon is an education activist who currently serves as  associate director of professional development at the Eagle Rock School & Professional Development Center. Dan’s writing has been featured online in The Huffington Post and in print in the 2014 National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) Yearbook that’s entitled Engaging Youth in Schools: Empirically-Based Models to Guide Future Innovations.