Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
When was the last time you heard somebody say,
"Wow, this new government regulation
has really improved the education for my kid!"
(Laughter)
I haven't either, but I bet you have heard somebody say
that their child's life has changed radically
because of the change of school or a new class.
The difference in the quality of education across the schools within a country
is far greater than the difference in the country averages across Europe.
So in order to improve education for our kids right now,
instead of bickering about the next legislation,
we should be finding ways
to improve the quality of education school by school.
And the way we can do this is by building
a strong culture of feedback within every school.
I used to work as a strategy consultant in London.
I helped large organizations improve the way they do business.
I worked with some very exciting organizations
in fields like diamonds and sewage treatment,
and I saw that there was one big difference
between those that were rapidly improving and those that weren't.
And it was their wilingness to listen
to their costumers, to their partners, to their employees.
Feedback from others is at the core of how we improve.
So two years ago,
I left the consulting world and founded Edurio,
which is a web platform that helps schools
very easily collect feedback and analyze feedback
from students, parents, and teachers.
Schools have been working in the dark.
There's a growing desire from teachers and school heads
to find ways to improve the quality of education,
but they often lack the information
to know what they should be doing differently.
Currently, the only systematic data used in schools is the grades.
And is that really a measure of good education?
I was recently having dinner with a friend
who was very impressed with the new school for his son.
He spoke about his willingness to get out of the bed in the morning,
about the wonderful class environment,
and the joy he now had for learning.
He didn't mention the grades once.
As we heard before,
good education is so much more than just imparting information.
It's about motivating,
developing skills and competencies that will support us in life.
So how do you build that?
Well, the University of Chicago has created a framework of five essentials
that are important for good education.
You need effective leadership from the school principal
around a shared vision;
collaborative teachers working together with each other
to improve the way they teach;
involved families,
where the school and a family have a close relationship;
supportive environment that is safe, motivating and fun,
and, of course, ambitious instruction,
where the classes are challenging and engaging.
Our 15 years of research show that if schools are good at most of these,
students' results will be better.
How much of that is measured by the grades?
Not a lot.
So if you want a truly transformational education for children -
which I assume we do, right? -
we need to look wider and help the school
understand how it is doing and where it can improve.
Looking at the grades won't help with this.
In fact, there is just one good way
to find out if we're motivating our students
and giving them the education they deserve,
and that is to ask them.
This is what feedback in education is about.
It's about asking those involved
to share their observations and their feelings.
Feedback isn't evaluating or grading the school,
as it's often perceived.
In personal life, we get feedback all the time
by having personal conversations and asking questions
like "What do you mean I dance funny?"
or "Do you think I should quit my job to pursue my dreams?"
At schools, there are hundreds of students, parents, and teachers.
So if you rely on conversations, you'll only hear from the active ones
and miss out on a large number of people you'd love to hear from.
So in schools, the best tool for this is anonymous feedback surveys.
But more important than how you do this is what questions you ask.
It's important to discuss the full school experience,
so our team has spent hundreds of hours
creating research-based surveys and testing them on over 200 schools
that instead of asking vague questions like "Do you like your teacher?"
look wider.
We ask the students if they understand
where this subject is applied in real life
or if they discuss their mistakes in class.
We ask the parents
how good their communication is with the teachers and school heads.
We even get feedback from the teachers about how they give and get feedback.
That's how much we love feedback.
But asking the right questions is important not just to improve.
It actually tells everybody about what the school cares about.
When we were testing our surveys for the first time,
some teachers objected to one question,
and it was, "Does this teacher treat you with respect?"
One teacher told me,
"My job is not to respect the students, it's to educate them."
Well, if the grades are all that the school focuses on,
you're unlikely to get much more than that.
Now, because of the growing focus on education quality,
schools are moving from having no feedback to collecting feedback,
and sometimes even asking the right questions.
And that's unlocking a lot of very exciting analysis.
An exciting analysis
is how I got interested in educational feedback in first place.
I was studying at the University of Manchester.
I was studying decision sciences,
a science about helping organizations make decisions
based on evidence rather than a hunch.
Anyone who has worked in a large organization will know
that's a little bit like world peace:
everybody's talking about it, but it's never actually happened.
At the beginning of my first year, I got an e-mail from a professor,
he was looking for somebody to help on a research project.
The task was to analyze 10 years of student feedback data
and find out how they link with the quality of education.
Now, I'm one of those weird people
who believe that every question in life can be answered with Excel -
or at least I did before I got into a relationship -
(Laughter)
so, of course, I took up the project.
After waiting for two months
for the university to give me access to the data,
I finally got the memory stick with all the wisdom.
I rushed to open it, and it was an absolute mess.
It was a pile of files in different formats,
depending on whoever had the fun task of typing
hundreds of feedback surveys into Excel that year.
There was broken formulas and missing numbers.
So before I could become a data explorer, I first had to become a data janitor.
I spent weeks trying to get everything into decent shape.
And many schools have this:
where they've collected the valuable feedback,
but it's sitting in a dusty shelf or a messy Excel sheet.
That's actually worse than having no data at all:
you've spent all this effort collecting
the valuable information you just don't use.
So why does this happen?
Well, analyzing data is really difficult.
Nobody wants to be the data janitor.
It's such a pain.
I have had actual nightmares that have happened entirely within Excel.
And even if we had the time,
we just aren't very good at dealing with data.
The Economist published an article in 2013
showing that a large number of scientific articles
contain basic statistical errors, leading to the wrong conclusions.
And it's true: when we were publishing the research I was telling you about,
after two rounds of external review,
I discovered that I had accidentally switched the axis in one of my charts,
meaning that they showed something completely different than the text.
So expecting schools to improve just based on the plain data
is a little bit like a doctor giving a cardiogram printout to you
and saying, "Here, go figure out how to improve your health!
Use Google."
So instead of the plain data,
we need to give school heads results that are easy to access and interpret.
And this is something we've been doing at Edurio,
and it is giving some very interesting insights.
Look at this chart showing how students feel about the pace of learning.
We saw in many schools that within a class
you have some students saying that the pace is too fast
and some saying it's too slow.
This is something you can't just fix by going faster or slower.
This shows the need for a more individualized learning.
Or here, teachers could compare the results across the classes they teach.
Some who teach both primary and secondary school levels
were very surprised to learn
that they consistently achieve very different results in the two levels.
This shows that the same teaching methods
don't work the same across all year groups.
So they could either start adapting the way they teach the classes
or focus on teaching the ones they click with the most.
So now schools can go further than just collecting the feedback.
They can actually start exploring it.
But still, exploring takes a lot of time.
And time is a very precious resource in schools.
When the OECD surveyed school heads in 34 countries,
it asked, "What is preventing you from being better at your job?"
Workload came first, ahead of the budget.
So wouldn't it be great
if the principal didn't have to spend all this time looking through the charts
and could just see what's relevant for the school?
This is where I want to take schools.
Forget about the results, go straight to the insights.
We can learn from other industries in doing this.
A mentor once told me that innovating in education is really easy
because you don't actually have to innovate,
you can just do what business was doing ten years ago.
And businesses everywhere are finding smarter ways
to analyze massive amounts of data and get to exciting insights.
On Twitter, you have software reading millions of tweets
and understanding how you feel about various products and brands.
In large corporations,
algorithms are digging through employees' surveys to find out
which factors have the biggest impact on employee satisfaction.
And this is really exciting:
algorithms are starting to do the job of researchers
and automatically giving us the insights.
This is what we are working on at Edurio at the moment.
We are analyzing hundreds of thousands of text comments to find out
how the students are really feeling.
We are building algorithms
that find which questions the school should pay attention to.
Here we analyzed
how the different questions in our student surveys
relate with student motivation.
The higher the column, the higher the correlation.
For this school, we found that motivation had a strong link
with how well the students understood
what they needed to do in the lessons and why.
This shows where the school should look first
if it wants to improve the motivation of its students.
And this is only scratching the surface of what feedback can do in education.
Imagine if you were able to predict that a student might drop out
just looking at how their motivation changes across the years
and take action now.
Or if you could advise a child on their future career or study choices
based on how they feel
across different subjects, teachers or lesson types.
Or of you could help a school to figure out
how best to allocate students by class
and which teachers should teach which classes
to have the biggest learning possible.
Suddenly, something very impersonal like anonymous surveys
could start giving very personal insights
about how to improve education for every student.
Suddenly, we can start understanding
not just what the feedback says but what it means.
This is where technology can take us.
But it's not enough.
There are still schools that get all the way to here
and don't get anything out of it.
Because there is one last step missing,
and that's action.
The school has to do something with the feedback it gets.
Not everything - big change programs that try to fix everything usually fail -
but just one, two or three things it wants to do differently next year.
Sounds obvious?
But this is the most difficult step.
And then, the school actually has to communicate
back to the parents, students and teachers about what those improvements are.
People don't want to give feedback if they feel nothing will change;
that's the problem we have with voting.
That's why technology alone isn't enough, schools need a culture shift.
So when will schools start climbing this ladder?
Well, they are doing it right now,
and they are achieving better education for their students.
One of the schools we've worked with recently did a survey on bullying,
where it asked the students
if they had experienced emotional or physical bullying in the school.
The results were encouragingly low,
but they identified a couple of classes where somebody said they had been bullied.
The school then worked
with the school psychologist and the class tutor
to improve inclusion in those classes
and fix the problem before it became a news article.
Now, this is a school that didn't wait for new anti-bullying legislation.
It listened to what their students were telling it and took action.
And these are the actions our children need right now,
school by school, classroom by classroom.
And that is why I believe
every school needs to dare to build a strong culture of feedback.
Thank you.
(Applause)