Many of us are very familiar with sitting in a large, darkened room with many other people while charts and graphs of decontextualized data are presented, speakers comment on the numbers saying, “We did well here,” “We fell behind here,” and so forth.

By using CL techniques such as 7S, Circle of Writers, or Skits, this abstract exercise can be transformed into an energetic dive into what those data say to the participants, not the presenters. Data, in a manageable format, but without pre-determined conclusions become the basis for productive group work and team processing.

An actual example of this occurred at a staff meeting in a middle school at the beginning of the school year. The principal started the meeting by showing pictures of many of the students who had been there the previous year. In small groups, the staff chatted about what they knew of those children and shared stories of their successes and challenges. The principal then showed the same pictures but with the students’ state test scores from the spring. All of the students shown had failed to meet the expected standard of performance. Now, with that information and the shared knowledge of the students, the staff worked in cooperative groups developing and collaborating on strategies for how to make the coming school year a success for these students. If the principal had just shown the data, the discussion would have been much less productive and certainly much less personalized.

Given meaningful data and the time to process them with colleagues, groups go through the stages of Bloom’s Taxonomy (see the unit Theories of Learning), moving together from remembering through understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, to creating. They can do this because they have internalized the information, be it test scores, budgets, staffing, or anything reduced to numbers, and can come up with creative and personalized actions to move the organization forward to progressively improved outcomes.