Understanding Your Collaboration Quotient: Powerful, Evidence-Based Data Insights Across an Organization

When an organization decides to put Edthena to work in its classrooms, it’s usually part of some broader initiative—an investment in teacher professional development. A lot of times, no small amount of time and energy is devoted to the process of helping teachers critically reflect on their own practice—all toward the end of achieving better student outcomes through implementing change in the classroom.

The Edthena video reflection and coaching process generates rich data about the kind and amount of learning that is happening through it—data like comment stats, professional skill proficiency, and next-step goal tracking. Together, all of these data make it easy for teachers and their coaches to get a sense of what’s working and what’s not, and implement changes accordingly.

Of course, when teachers record their own teaching, they put themselves in a vulnerable position. There’s nowhere to hide when the camera is on. To keep Edthena a safe space for teachers to be vulnerable—to show flaws and to ask for help—we set clear parameters around who can and can’t access their footage.

No one can see a video without being a known member of the group. It doesn’t matter if you’re a district administrator, department chair, or dean of a college program, you still need to be a member of a group in Edthena to access its videos and surrounding discussion.

But still, for all kinds of decision-makers, it’s important to know what’s happening in their organizations—to be able to spot trends and understand the ROI of allocating their resources into a coaching process. At Edthena, we needed a way to give them that kind of high-level data, all without revealing any private information that hadn’t been explicitly shared with them.

Enter: the Organization Stats dashboard.

Think of this as the “Data Wall” but on steroids, and never out of date.

Activity Metrics Provide Baseline Visibility into the Process

At the bare minimum, organizational decision-makers wanted to see a data dashboard that simply aggregates data across all groups. So we developed the Organization Stats dashboard—a place that conveniently tracks and aggregates things like:

• How many users are registered?  ✔️
• How many videos did those users upload? ✔️
• How many minutes of classroom instruction do those videos contain? ✔️

And the list could be much longer. While this kind of information isn’t nothing, it’s only really telling us whether or not the platform was used, not how it was used, or what any given organization is getting out of it.

Confirmation of usage is certainly a start, if we stopped there, we’d be leaving a whole lot on the table in terms of understanding the true impact of coaching initiatives.

To show a clearer, more nuanced picture of Edthena’s organizational impact, we decided to look beyond the types of questions that simply showed that the platform was used, to the kind that show how it’s used and what happens when it’s used.

The Collaboration Quotient is an Analysis of all Conversations Data

Conversations around videos are the heart and soul of Edthena. They’re what make the platform work for teachers and their coaches. Whether or not conversations are happening around given videos tells us something about their impact.

Rich dialogue among colleagues and peers can be an indicator of engagement. It tells us that teachers are putting something into (and, perhaps more importantly, getting something out of) their professional development process. What we call the Collaboration Quotient (CQ) calculates the number of people participating per conversation, giving administrators a high level sense of engagement in the process.

With the CQ, decision-makers can now see, at a glance, how things are playing out across their organizations.

• A CQ less than 1 tells us that, on average, no one comments on the shared videos
• A CQ close to 1 tells us that the average conversation is one-sided
• A CQ close to 2 or higher tells us that the average conversation is collaborative

To be clear, there’s not really a “good” or “bad” CQ. If two different groups have a CQ of 1.1, it might mean different things.

Take group A, the group of teachers uploading videos for the purpose of self reflection, for example. For this group, 1.1 means everything is as it should be—that teachers are posting videos and effectively making notes to themselves around areas that could use improvement.

For group B, where an instructional coach is providing feedback to teachers, 1.1 tells us that coaching conversations are heavily one-sided. In this instance, it’s worth looking into why that might be the case that teachers aren’t responding to the comments they’re receiving.

What’s important is that the CQ gives decision-makers a clear and consistent metric—one that makes it possible to compare the reality of what’s happening against organizational expectations, all while maintaining teacher discretion over who sees their videos and who doesn’t.

This kind of information makes it possible for administrators and other decision-makers to take actions that are driven by data, rather than intuition or instinct—two notoriously unreliable barometers of whether a process is working or not.

More data-driven insights about professional learning

All told, Edthena offers eight different ways to slice and dice user data across nearly every aspect of our platform at the org level. Each page brings forward something more than vanity metrics—the kind of shiny but useless metrics that might sound nice in a talk, or look good in a PowerPoint presentation, but not actually help you make concrete improvements.

Edthena’s data slicing tools help decision-makers answer questions like:

• Are we providing coaching aligned to our prioritized initiatives?
• How much feedback are teachers receiving?
• Which groups send more feedback than others?
• Does the amount of feedback teachers receive change over time?
• In what ways are teachers collaborating organically outside formal settings where they receive feedback from a coach?
• What professional skills are we measuring most often?
• What is the real-time measure of specific professional skills?
• How many teachers are setting next-step goals from their coaching cycle?
• What professional skills are teachers prioritizing?
• Are teachers reporting follow-through on next steps?

And since no one wants to swim through a sea of raw data, Edthena makes it all easy to access and interpret.

Interested in learning more? Email organization stats at edthena dot com.