Data-Driven Decisions and Character Education
At Imagine Harrisburg Pike Community School, our promising practice for the 2011-2012 school year was to incorporate data collection and data-driven decisions into our character education initiatives. Each school year we set character goals in the area of school climate, academic achievement, positive student interactions and family and community. As we have evolved in our commitment to being a school of character, we felt using more concrete data would strengthen our character initiatives and allow us to more effectively impact our students. Just as we track and monitor data of student academic progress, our practice this year involved collecting qualitative and quantitative data to ensure we were meeting our character goals and initiatives. Over the past two years we have increased the data we collected on character initiatives to make sure they are not only aligned to our character mission statement but also are effectively impacting and changing student behavior. We also recognized that as we collected more concrete data, we were more effectively able to reflect on and evaluate our character program as well as more effectively reach our students.