What I thought:

A couple of classes ago our instructor asked us to watch a Ted Talk about data collection. To be honest, I was confused as to why. Of course as teachers we collect data in terms of grades or where students are in a variety of subjects. But how did these two ideas connect? How could data collection relate or even inform my teaching? It took me a while to write this post simply because I had to take so long to process and determine what the video meant to me. Perhaps it would be helpful to know which video I’m talking about.

Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen?language=en

New thoughts through reflection:

Perhaps there is a correlation between data and teaching. It could have been obvious to others but I did not see it at first. When going through this video several times I start to ask myself, how does this relate? All of a sudden it hit me that he’s talking about people. Not specific people but people in general and how we’ve moved through time, adapted and changed. One part that really stood out to me was the idea of diversity within a country. In one part of his video he shows how diverse Africa is in terms of its needs. He split apart Africa into its various areas and spoke to how aid must be varied in Africa depending on the region and that regions specific needs. There are regions with more money and regions with less money and thus they should be given aid differently depending on their needs. So, I finally connected the dots and thought, this is the same in Canada. A large country with various places all needing different things. I started to scope it down from large to small and thought first we have Canada, then B.C, then Langley, then my school and finally it ends up in my classroom. I thought about taking this visual Hans Rosling used to separate Africa and using it within my own classroom. You could use it to determine whether students are given basic needs or whether they’re lacking them and how that could effect performance. You could also look at the variety of family sizes, housing and income etc. All these things determine how a class composition is shaped. Through a long winded thought process and discovery, I now see how collecting data and ‘knowing your students’ creates the conditions to have the best informed teaching.