The Innovation Academy workspace at Dysart Unified School District outside Phoenix looked more like a tech startup’s headquarters than a classroom. On one side of the room, students wearing special tinted glasses studied electric circuits at virtual reality stations. On the opposite end of the bright, airy space, another small group of students experimented with piecing together real-life circuits that beeped, buzzed, and blinked when connected.
In the middle of all this activity, seventh-grader Jacob Higuera sat alone with his laptop, intently typing out a social studies assignment. It was only the fifth day of school here in Surprise, Arizona, but he was already getting used to this unconventional classroom setup. He was enjoying being able to make his own daily schedule and having the freedom to work on lessons at his own pace. But Higuera, one of 90 sixth- through eighth-graders participating in the Innovation Academy pilot program this year, still had one big concern.
“At my old school, I got straight A’s because I was told what to do and when to do it,” he said. “But now I’m thinking I might not get good grades in the first quarter.”
While Higuera might feel like he’s on his own, his daily progress is closely monitored by the four veteran teachers who manage the program. The students spend much of the school day working on self-paced computerized lessons that generate data on their progress. The teachers keep a close eye on this data and use it to develop small-group activities that make the material come to life — such as working at the virtual reality stations — or to identify the students who failed to master the lessons on their own and pull them out for extra tutoring.
In fact, it seems as if all eyes are on Higuera and his classmates as they pioneer what the superintendent of Dysart, Gail Pletnick, calls “the future of education”—a personalized learning environment that puts students in control of what, when and how they learn, with teachers as their guides.
Pletnick hopes all the classrooms in the district’s 23 schools will look like the Innovation Academy someday. Right now, most do not. Many classrooms resemble a traditional setup, with a teacher at the front of the room and students sitting in rows, at desks, completing assignments with pen and paper. But even the most low-tech classrooms in the district have one thing in common with the Innovation Academy. Every teacher is encouraged to use “little data”—information collected daily or in real-time on each student’s academic progress—to personalize learning.
According to Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a nonprofit that advocates for high school education reform, little data—and how teachers use it—is the key to making learning as individualized as possible. Classroom technologies make it easier than ever to collect information on students. Now, teachers must figure out the best way to analyze that data and put it to good use.
“We need to look at what data makes possible in the interaction between one teacher and one student,” Wise said.
The concept of little data isn’t new—at least, not to the business world. Back in 2013, Mark Bonchek, CEO of the consulting firm Shift Thinking, wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review in which he defined little data as “what we know about ourselves.” It gives us meaningful feedback on our own habits and behavior. And it’s not to be confused with big data, which Bonchek said is “what organizations know about people.”
For example, big data analysis allows an online bookstore to recommend what a student might like to read next based on previous purchases and downloads she’s made. That suggestion is based on data collected from millions of other consumers and used to spot trends (a reader who likes history books might also be interested in historical fiction).