Seeing Patterns in Data

Part of Isiah’s project I was most looking forward to was examining the results from his survey of his peers. Last week, he worked on developing the survey and he was able to get ten forms back, which is a perfectly fine sample to inform the next stage of the project. The idea is to use the data from the surveys to determine what young people would like to know about Spark so we could design a page of Spark’s website geared toward students.

I was trained in analytics early in my career while working for the federal government in Washington. I worked in national security at the time. When I made the jump to education, I worked for a man who was also a transplant from that world. He had been basically a nuclear war games strategist, during the Cold War when such experts were needed and gainfully employed. When the Cold War ended, of course, so did his professional purpose. He often referred to himself as a “peace dividend,” which was a common refrain at the time as the defense and national security industry was being downsized after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Over time, my boss became my mentor, which he remains today, some 16 years later. One of the things I remember him telling me was the idea of applying skills developed in one industry to another. In both of our cases, it was using the rigorous analytics of the field in which he and I started in and applying it to education. It’s something I’ve done throughout my career.

I told Isiah that analysis is basically looking for patterns in data, figuring out what they mean and, perhaps most importantly, what to do about them. We spent a bit of time entering the data into a spreadsheet and then started looking. Interestingly, five of the surveys were completed by students who are in Spark and five were filled out by non-participants, which is a good (albeit unintentional) sample!

We fixated a bit on one question that had students identify what fields they’d be interested in exploring. I asked Isiah to look at which fields seemed like the most popular. Turns out computers, the medical profession, and science registered the most. We talked about what was common among these fields, and Isiah was familiar with the term STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. I mentioned that more than a third of Spark apprenticeships take place in STEM-related companies. So we agreed that since these opportunities were of such great interest we ought to have a special section of the web page on STEM.

We went through each of the survey questions and put a list together of our “findings.” We then grouped them together – I’m kind of good at “bucketizing” and have always wanted to pass that skill along – and then created the sections of our web page based on that: “What can students explore?” “What can students create?” Isiah was insistent on adding a “Sign up today!” button, which I thought showed good marketing sense.

As we finished up for the session, I felt really good that we did this part of the project. Using analytics to inform practice is a big part of what we do at Spark, and a big part of effective education. So, giving Isiah a flavor for that process offers insight into my work, which is one of the key features of the apprenticeship experience.  It’s also something I just really enjoy doing, and like any mentor, its fun to teach a young person something you just really enjoy doing.

Ironically, perhaps the most analysis I’ve been immersed in recently is about young people just like Isiah. Specifically, I’ve been looking at data from school districts in which Spark operates, where upwards of 40 percent of students do not complete high school on time. That number is sobering in and of itself. What’s more, if you examine the students who do not make it through high school, two-thirds of them either drop out in ninth grade or they are made to repeat ninth grade and eventually drop out. The ninth grade is the great choke point on the path to graduation.

This is the problem Spark is trying to solve. We’re partnering with schools to identify young people in seventh and eighth grade who are showing early warning signs that may lead to eventual drop out. We enroll them in Spark and make sure they are engaged, on-track and ready for success in high school and beyond.

The fact is students of all backgrounds tend to slide in the middle grades. Developmentally, young people start to disengage in school at this age. Gallup conducts a poll of more than 500,000 students each year to measure their level of hope, wellbeing and engagement. While hope and wellbeing remain pretty constant from fifth grade to twelfth grade, engagement drops markedly. Two-thirds of that drop occurs in the middle grades.

This happens to all young people, from every background, in every community. Students in more advantaged communities have traditionally had access to resources and opportunities that help them overcome this commonplace disengagement from school. Other students have less opportunity. Spark is trying to change that equation.

I have a tough time believing that Isiah fits the profile of a disconnected youth. There is no one I have met who seems more connected, more engaged. But, I also know that he’s at an inflection point in his life. He’s at an age where he is beginning to think about his future in more specific ways. Visualizing what he could be, and having people around him – family, peers, teachers, mentors – to encourage and guide, are big parts of the “spark” that he and all kids need to be engaged, on-track and ready.

Tele-mentoring

Like many mentors with Spark, I’m quite busy. I typically have full slates of meetings, phone calls, or “to-do’s” I need to accomplish during precious little “desk time.” I also travel a fair bit, visiting the regions where we have programming or making fundraising rounds in New York or Washington or elsewhere.

So, this week, I missed Isiah at the office. And I was really bummed about it. I was in San Francisco for a set of meetings with stakeholders, our great annual fundraiser, and a national board meeting. It’s common for mentors to miss a session or two. The Spark program staff work with mentors to forecast days missed way ahead of time, which is important so that students know in advance that they won’t be seeing their mentor that day and therefore won’t be disappointed – at least not as much. 

I told Isiah at Match Night that I would be away this week. Since all mentors have to be cleared by a background check, ordinarily we can’t just pass the student off to a colleague. We’d have to skip the apprenticeship session and make it up later (we build in make-up days into the schedule). A majority of our partner companies are now hosting five or more students, in which case fellow mentors in the same office can fill in, which makes it easier. Fortunately for Isiah, he is doing his apprenticeship at Spark, which means he can still come to the office and work with one of my colleagues, because we’ve all been cleared to work with young people.

Isiah came to the office to work with my colleague Amanda, who is as terrific with students as she is with me. I’m glad, because it was an important week. After mapping out our project last session, this week we needed to accomplish the first task, which is creating the survey for Isiah’s peers to determine what they’d like to see on a section of the Spark website for students.

After finishing up a meeting in downtown San Francisco, I walked down to the Embarcadero and got on FaceTime with Isiah for a little bit. I was able to show him some of the beautiful landscape of the city and tell him a bit about why I was there and what I was doing. We were also able to chat a bit about the survey.

He and Amanda had already made good progress on it. They had outlined some of the questions. We want to gather some basic information, of course. So, there were questions on who the respondent is, their gender, their age, what grade they were in, and the like. We then talked about how best to get at some of their interests. We decided to list out a number of ideas and ask people to tick the ones they’d like to see. Other questions were more open-ended.

Isiah’s homework is to get his peers to take the survey. Next week, we’ll work on analyzing the data and using it to start designing the elements of the web page. I was trained early on in my career as an analyst and really enjoy working with data, making sense of it and using it to solve problems. So, I’m especially eager to sit with Isiah next week and go through that process, hopefully sharing some insights into how to do analysis. I like that we’re doing the survey in this project, so we can blend some quantitative work with the more creative aspects of designing the page and promoting it. It feels like a more well rounded experience that way. We’re doing a little math as well as English.

Source: Spark student report cards &
Univ. of Chicago Consortium on School Research

This reminds me how impressed I’ve been by the strides our students make in their core course grades in school during their Spark experience. We are not an academic intervention, yet we are seeing some effect on academic performance. Spark students in Chicago enter our program markedly below the district average in GPA. When they leave the program, they have made significant gains. They start approaching the district average in their GPAs.

My hunch is that the apprenticeship approach gets students more interested in learning. Their level of engagement goes up, and therefore they do better in school. But I also think that many of our mentors do academic-focused things as part of the apprenticeship. Our students do analysis and work on spreadsheets. They are writing, doing research, making presentations. These are all things that students need to do to be successful in their coursework.

Spark is so much more than helping students do better in school. But, doing better in school is one big part of our impact. When students improve their grades, they boost their confidence, and their desire to learn more. It can be the beginning of a virtuous cycle academically. One that we hope will persist with our students for a long time.

Getting from Here to There

When I was thirteen, I wanted to be an architect. I remember it quite well. My school offered a drafting class for seventh graders. It was held in this big open room with high rafters, co-located with what was “shop class” – now we fancily call it “industrial arts” – where you get to work with sheet metal and shellac pretty much anything you want.

I remember that shop class was taught by this rather tall and somewhat portly man, with a slick comb-over and big glasses. The drafting course was taught by a quirky, mustachioed, diminutive man with dark curly hair and big, puffy eyebrows. They were a curious duo for sure. But, they had the distinct advantage of teaching classes where students could get dirty and draw, which made them rather popular. 

I also remember it as a time when my dad became my mentor. The culminating assignment was to create blueprints for a house of our own design. I remember getting early feedback from my teacher – the small one – saying my concept didn’t make the best use of space. When I brought it home and showed it to my dad, he pointed out the long, twisty-turny hallway I created smack in the middle of the house. I remember him taking me around our house and showing me how most of the space was taken up by rooms, and the hallway was short and tight. We sat together at the dining room table redrawing my design until we got it right.

Needless to say, I never became an architect. In high school, I wanted to be a writer, a journalist. I edited the school newspaper and wrote short stories for fun. I carried that quest into college, majoring in communication. But, as a sophomore I decided that in order to be a good writer, I needed to have something to write about. So, I switched to something more content heavy. I loved history and politics, so I changed my major. Over time, I got a degree in history and another in international relations. I eventually wanted to be a diplomat. At some point I took a detour into education – sixteen years long now and counting.

I was telling this story to Isiah when he joined me for our second apprenticeship session. Week two is all about goal-setting. One of the exercises we do as mentors is talk about our own journey to the job we have now. Isiah was floored when I told him I switched career interests a few times. He somehow thought you had to decide really early and you could only major in one thing at college. I told him he shouldn’t put too much pressure on himself and take his time.

We talked about big-picture goal setting. He knows he wants to be a leader one day. So, we talked about all the skills and experiences he would need to become a leader. Being persuasive. Motivating others. Making decisions. We talked about how it mattered less at this point what he was leading, only that he should work hard to put himself in the best position to be a leader of whatever the opportunity may be. We talked about transferable skills, ones you can take with you from job to job, industry to industry even.

Meanwhile, this was the week we had to map out our apprenticeship, which dovetails nicely with the theme of goal setting. Isiah and I talked last week about an idea for creating a new web page on the Spark website that was geared toward students. It would offer information and resources that would get young people interested in Spark. We talked about developing a survey that Isiah could have his peers fill out. We would analyze the data from the survey to determine what to put on the web page. We would also develop a poster we could put up at Isiah’s school and a flyer we can pass out to his schoolmates who aren’t in Spark to get them excited to learn more about it.

To map out the project, we huddled in the conference room in front of the white board. We wrote down all the weeks we had left in the apprenticeship – seven – noted the date when the project was “due” at Discovery Night – December 11 – and then listed all the tasks we’d need to do between now and the end – develop survey questions, build the survey, analyze the results, design the web page, create the content, publish the web page, design the poster and flyer, develop the content, create the poster and flyer. Perhaps most importantly, we have to reserve time to practice the presentation – what Isiah is going to showcase at Discovery Night for all the attendees, which will doubtless include his family, his peers, and members of the school community.

Once we had our list of tasks, we began matching them up with the weeks - next week we'll design and build the survey, the following week we'll analyze the results. And there you have it! We set a goal, we determined the things that will get us there, and we made a week-by-week agenda for getting it all done. Isiah actually got a good kick out of the exercise. He even said he was going to use the same method for his school science project.

Sparking Interest

I’m guessing it was just jitters. I got a call about an hour before Isiah and my apprenticeship was about to start saying he was not feeling well and may not come. This is not atypical. Leaving their school and home communities, often for the first time, can generate some anxiety among students. Indeed, while Isiah says he has been to downtown Chicago before – even toured the top of the Sears Tower – we know that many young people from the south and west sides of Chicago have never been to the Loop. They have never been in a building with a revolving door or an elevator. They have never seen Lake Michigan, one of the great natural beauties of the mid-west, not even a mile away from where many of our students live.

Exposing young people to different people, communities, indeed “worlds” in the metaphorical sense is a core component of the Spark model. Our intent is never to make any value judgment on one world over another, simply that closing the opportunity gap requires exposing young people, regardless of where they are from, to something different. Minimally, it broadens their point of view, and optimally it provides greater access to more options ahead of them in education and life.

Another practical benefit to venturing beyond their home communities, students have to navigate public transportation – an important skill for many working professionals. Spark students travel in multiples – in the case at Gregory Academy, about thirty all together. They are guided and chaperoned by our staff and parent or community volunteers. They are checked and verified at multiple points along the way. The system is quite robust and reassuring, for mentors, school administrators, parents, and students alike, for the sake of safety.

Isiah rallied, aided by his mother no doubt, and he arrived to a warm welcome at the Spark office. The first apprenticeship session centers on mentors like me getting to know our students more, and also giving them an idea for the company, the job that we do, and the people we work with. I gave Isiah a tour of our office – all 2,000 cozy square feet of it – and introduced him to my colleagues.

As we went along, I found myself still calibrating my words and descriptions to his level of experience and understanding, not wanting to dumb down but also not wanting him to feel lost. For example, I introduced Isiah to Spark’s COO and head of fundraising. To explain what it is that they do for the organization, I asked him how much he thought it costs to run an organization like Spark. After a few seconds of contemplation, he speculated: “A hundred thousand dollars.” On top of my raised eyebrow, I rejoined: “Try three point six million.” Over the next few silent seconds, the expression on his face slowly shifted from surprise to curiosity to excitement as he took this in. We then talked about how we need people who can find that much money for us, getting people to donate, and we also need people to count the money, keep it safe, and pay the bills.

Each apprenticeship session includes a “skill of the week.” These are crucial interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies that young people need to develop in order to be successful in school, in careers, and in life. Indeed, recent reports from the National Academy of Sciences and the University of Chicago among many other research reports have increasingly shown these skills to be as essential as academics.  This week, we focused on networking. I can tell Isiah was already rather adept at networking. And he knew it too. I got him talking about how he meets new people and develops friendships. It’s pretty clear Isiah is a connector. Infectiously likeable, genuine and fun, people are drawn to him.

Our Results: Spark Students Improve Crucial Skills

I told him that a lot of the networking we do in jobs like mine is done in restaurants and coffee shops, as well as at events. Clearly, professionals like to eat and drink. Or rather, we like to get out of the office, if you really want the truth. So, after seeking permission from his mother, I took Isiah over to a café in the Sears Tower across the street for our own little networking meeting, so he could get a taste of the experience, as it were.

I could tell he was enamored with the idea. The tea shop is in the airy west side atrium of the building, equipped with comfy chairs. Bright digital displays showcase the drinks on offer, which he selected after some interplay with the counter clerk. He kept mentioning how cool this all was. He said he wanted to come downtown more often. He asked if he could do Spark more than once a week. I confess not knowing if his excitement was driven by the charm of the place or of our engaging conversation, or possibly the number of packets of sugar he added to his drink, which I’m pretty sure exceeded five.

The apprenticeship lasts eight full sessions at the workplace, followed by Discovery Night back at the school. Discovery Night is when all the students and their mentors display the projects they worked on over the course of their apprenticeship. I didn’t expect us to decide upon our project in our first session. But, after talking with Isiah, I got a clear sense of what he was interested in – something that centered on communication, engaging with people, collaborating. So, we bandied a few ideas and rested on one that has some promise. Next week, we’ll map it out. And then the real work of the apprenticeship will begin.