00:00:00 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Hello and welcome to value driven data science brought to you by Genevieve Hayes Consulting. I'm doctor Genevieve Hayes. And today I'm joined by Doctor Celina Fisk to discuss storytelling and data informed education.
00:00:14 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Celina is a data storyteller and researcher with a background in education who now works with the corporate sector.
00:00:22 Dr Genevieve Hayes
To develop data informed strategies, she is also the author of a number of books including I'm not a numbers person, how to make good decisions in a data rich.
00:00:32 Dr Genevieve Hayes
God and for schools, data informed learners engaging students in their data story. Selena, welcome to the show.
00:00:41 Dr Selena Fisk
Wilson, thanks so much for having me, Genevieve.
00:00:43 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Data science is only useful if it can be used to create value, and one way that value can be created is by using data to influence decision making yet to influence decisions data scientists need to be able to effectively communicate the outcomes of their work, which is something that many struggle with.
00:01:03 Dr Genevieve Hayes
This is because effective data science community.
00:01:06 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Nation isn't just about rattling off a seemingly endless list of numbers or statistics and expecting your end users to piece them all together.
00:01:16 Dr Genevieve Hayes
It's about using those numbers to tell a story.
00:01:19 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And today, we're going to be looking at how you can go about doing that. Storytelling is something we often associate with our time at school.
00:01:27 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So it seems appropriate that someone who started off as a teacher would end up becoming a data storyteller. So Selena, to begin with, can you tell us a bit about your journey from teacher to data?
00:01:41 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, sure thing. So I was trained as a physical education and math secondary teacher, which feels like a lifetime ago now.
00:01:49 Dr Selena Fisk
And I worked in schools in Brisbane, in Queensland and in London in the United Kingdom for about 16 years and I've always loved numbers. I've, you know, loved sport.
00:02:02 Dr Selena Fisk
I used to be ahead of physical education when I was teaching in the UK, which again feels like an absolute lifetime ago.
00:02:08 Dr Selena Fisk
But what I started to see in my career, particularly teaching in the UK, was real accountability for teachers around student results and.
00:02:16 Dr Selena Fisk
Comes and teachers started to be largely kind of held responsible for the outcomes that young people were achieving or not achieving.
00:02:26 Dr Selena Fisk
And as a middle leader in that context, I had a pass rate, if you like, for my senior subjects, that was an annual metric by which you know, my success was measured. My value was measured. If I applied for a job, it was something that I shared.
00:02:38 Dr Selena Fisk
In my application letter and I guess what I I I realised while I was in it that it was pretty horrendous use of data, particularly when we're dealing with teenagers.
00:02:50 Dr Selena Fisk
And there were certainly some things that I would never, ever want to replicate, and I definitely don't encourage companies now to go down the path of doing.
00:02:58 Dr Selena Fisk
But at the same time, what I could see was that it actually really helped me with the work that I was doing and I could be more tailored and targeted and specific in my response to my kids.
00:03:09 Dr Selena Fisk
I could have really great conversations with them as data, informed learners when they had a better understanding of their strengths, their gaps, and then what they could kind of do next.
00:03:18 Dr Selena Fisk
So I kind of had these this tension between these two perspectives of how not to do it, but the value, the value of being able to actually have really good data and evidence on our.
00:03:28 Dr Selena Fisk
Work. So when I moved back to Australia, I continued teaching and that was when I completed my doctorate. So my I I completed an Ed which is a a professional doctorate in education and I started to do roles in Australia and increasingly as we know data has just increased exponentially in different organisations and schools I know.
00:03:48 Dr Selena Fisk
Different to that, over the last kind of 10 to 15 years. And so I finished my doctorate, I wrote a couple of books.
00:03:55 Dr Selena Fisk
I was still teaching full time and then decided to kind of jump out of teaching full time and into self employed data storytelling life at the beginning of 2020 so.
00:04:05 Dr Selena Fisk
I've been, yeah, working for myself since then, and absolutely loving every minute of it.
00:04:10 Dr Genevieve Hayes
That's fantastic to hear. I think it was very interesting when you're telling me your story just then how you're being judged based on statistics.
00:04:19 Dr Genevieve Hayes
But as a maths teacher, you would also have a lot of insight into how those statistics were calculated.
00:04:25 Dr Genevieve Hayes
One thing I've found from speaking to other teachers in schools where they're making use of data to guide how the school works, it's often the maths teachers who are at the forefront of leading the school towards a more data focused way of doing things.
00:04:45 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, absolutely. And I and it's true, I think in any organisation. So I've since branched out and now I work with a lot of people in different fields.
00:04:53 Dr Selena Fisk
You know, whether it's healthcare and real estate and I work with CIO's occasionally and CTO's and there's so many different.
00:05:00 Dr Selena Fisk
Pathways in and careers where data is important, and often it is true that it's the maxi people in any of those organisations that are often they're the ones that often have more confidence to talk about the numbers they have a little bit more understanding, as you say, of some of the statistical methods or models and the way that things are calculated so they can speak with a little bit more confidence.
00:05:22 Dr Selena Fisk
But the problem is, I find that they're the minority and or they're in a data science or business intelligence role already.
00:05:31 Dr Selena Fisk
And so they're not in the rest of the organisation. So it's a little tongue in cheek, you know, you mentioned one of my books is called I'm not a numbers person. It's tongue in cheek, but that's actually what people say to me all the time.
00:05:42 Dr Selena Fisk
Absolutely no, I get it. I get that I need to be able to use numbers, but I'm just not a numbers person, so there is a real gap between the skill and the skill and confidence that some people have got, but the but between their skill and confidence and the expectations on them to actually be able to engage with the data.
00:05:57 Dr Genevieve Hayes
You've worked with both schools and with corporate.
00:06:00 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Once in your experience, how do the schools stack up compared to the corporates with regard to how well they're using their data?
00:06:08 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, it's a good question. I assumed when I first started out in this work that this was a problem that was only being faced by educators.
00:06:16 Dr Selena Fisk
And then the more that I started to work with other people and friends and other colleagues and and then I would work with people where they'd come and say ohh my partner works in this industry and and they're actually facing a really similar.
00:06:29 Dr Selena Fisk
Challenge I guess that was what gave me the confidence to go. OK, this is actually bigger than.
00:06:34 Dr Selena Fisk
Schools and what I'm hearing and what I see every single day in the work that I do, is actually it's the same problems.
00:06:42 Dr Selena Fisk
It's the same challenges. It's skill. It's finding time to build capacity. It's having the right structures, it's having, you know, breaking down those silos around who's got access to which data. How is it being used? What are the expectation?
00:06:55 Dr Selena Fisk
Questions. And so it's hard to kind of say whether anyone is better or worse than the other because obviously within every sector there are companies and there are schools that are absolutely nailing this and flourishing.
00:07:07 Dr Selena Fisk
And there are some who are coming in at the ground level and just pretty new to the journey. So. But yeah, really, really similar across industries.
00:07:15 Dr Selena Fisk
And just I guess the constant thing that I hear everywhere I go is I've got so much data, I just don't know how to.
00:07:22 Dr Selena Fisk
He said.
00:07:23 Dr Genevieve Hayes
That's what I hear with a lot of organisations, they've got buckets and buckets of data. It's just not in a a format that they can use.
00:07:30 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yeah, I remember 1 organisation telling me we've got however many terabytes of data, but none of it was actually accessible by anyone who could do anything with it.
00:07:39 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah. And then the flip of that is, you know, I then push back to people that say that to me. And I just say, well, why are you collect?
00:07:46 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, yeah. If it's not actually leading to change. If you're not tracking anything very effectively, why are we doing it?
00:07:53 Dr Selena Fisk
But let's actually do more action with less data, and let's get off this hamster wheel of just collecting more and more and more and more and thinking that's the solution when actually we need to scale it back and just be smarter about what we collect and how we enact.
00:08:06 Dr Selena Fisk
The change in our teams and with our people.
00:08:09 Dr Genevieve Hayes
One of the things I wanted to focus on in this episode was data storytelling, as this is one of those phrases that seems to have emerged out of nowhere about 5:00 or so years ago.
00:08:21 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I think the first time I heard it was I had a manager at the time and she announced that she was planning on undertaking training on data storytelling.
00:08:31 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And I don't think she ended up doing it. But I remember thinking, what on Earth are you talking about?
00:08:37 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I just didn't understand it and I didn't know where I'd come from. Since then I've read some books on.
00:08:42 Dr Genevieve Hayes
The topic.
00:08:43 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And a lot of those seem to focus very heavily on data visualisation. Is data story telling just another term to describe?
00:08:53 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Data visualisation.
00:08:54 Dr Selena Fisk
I don't conceptualise it like that. Some people do. I see data visualisation as a really key parts that contributes to the data.
00:09:04 Dr Selena Fisk
Retelling, but it's not the same, so for me I actually talk about three main pieces when it comes to the use of data.
00:09:11 Dr Selena Fisk
The first is data literacy and for me that is understanding the number itself and the metrics and some of those things we were talking about before around how things are calculated or generated, but also having an understanding of what is.
00:09:26 Dr Selena Fisk
High. What's low? What we're happy with as a company or as a team, or what's potentially a bit of a red flag, so just having an understanding purely of the.
00:09:33 Dr Selena Fisk
Works. The second piece for me is the data visualisation because we need really good visualisations that reduce the cognitive load for people in terms of using and analysing the data.
00:09:44 Dr Selena Fisk
What we don't want is people trawling through spreadsheets of raw data like. No, that's nobody's. That's not my idea of fun. Anyway. That would be hard pressed to find many people who enjoy doing that.
00:09:54 Dr Selena Fisk
Type of work, so visualisations are really powerful because they can put millions of data points into some pretty spectacular visualisations and and representations of this of that information.
00:10:07 Dr Selena Fisk
I keep it separate from data storytelling in these three circles or areas that I talk about because in the work I do, I see that there's also a lot of assumptions made about people's ability to read and understand the visualisations.
00:10:21 Dr Selena Fisk
So I think we've got a key. You know, if we're if we're good with numbers, we're good with data.
00:10:26 Dr Selena Fisk
I think we've actually just gotta almost check ourselves a little and remember that actually sometimes the audience that we're working with don't actually know how to read that box and whisker plot or a scatter plot actually doesn't.
00:10:40 Dr Selena Fisk
Have it's not super clear to somebody immediately that a scatter plot allows you to compare two different variables, and you know, I was talking with somebody yesterday who was saying they put a trend line in a scatter plot in Excel and just because they could generate A trend line, they.
00:10:55 Dr Selena Fisk
Said Oh well.
00:10:56 Dr Selena Fisk
There's a correlation there, and so even having people understand the strength of a correlation.
00:11:01 Dr Selena Fisk
Like we actually need to do a fair bit of work around building capacity and just the visualisation piece.
00:11:06 Dr Selena Fisk
So we need good data literacy, we need great visualisations and ours and good skills to be able to read and interpret it.
00:11:13 Dr Selena Fisk
And we tap into those skills when we engage in data storytelling, and I really like and I'm sure this has been one of those storytelling books you've read Brent ***** book called effective data storytelling, and he's based in America, and he's worked with a lot of major.
00:11:26 Dr Selena Fisk
Companies like Amazon and Sony and Nike and that type of thing, and he says that the components of an effective data story, there's three main things and none of them are probably surprising.
00:11:36 Dr Selena Fisk
But one is key data and insights. What are those kind of main messages that you want to share?
00:11:42 Dr Selena Fisk
What visuals are included in the storytelling so you know, what are those punchy visualisations that are really going to convey meaning and convey?
00:11:51 Dr Selena Fisk
I guess the message of what you actually want to share with your audience and the final ones, the narrative. So how do you weave the narrative of humans into that data and the visualisations?
00:12:03 Dr Selena Fisk
To hopefully motivate the audience to lead change or do something with that.
00:12:08 Dr Selena Fisk
Question I love his model. I love the kind of the overlap of those three things, and he's got a Venn diagram which is pretty.
00:12:15 Dr Selena Fisk
Cool. I guess what I do when I the people I work with are often actually not presenting a data story to other people.
00:12:23 Dr Selena Fisk
They're sitting in an office or with a team, and they're talking about the data.
00:12:29 Dr Selena Fisk
And so the way I think about data storytelling is actually getting people to the point of thinking of two questions, and those questions are what are the trends and insights in the data that I.
00:12:37 Dr Selena Fisk
Can see and then the second question is.
00:12:40 Dr Selena Fisk
What do I do about?
00:12:42 Dr Selena Fisk
And so again, I think there's some assumptions that are made around people's ability to actually identify trends and insights.
00:12:48 Dr Selena Fisk
So there's some work around that and there's sometimes some fear around doing something with it and acting on it.
00:12:55 Dr Selena Fisk
But as I say, I see I conceptualise it as visualisation being a really key part of.
00:13:00 Dr Selena Fisk
It, but it's actually not the storytelling.
00:13:03 Dr Selena Fisk
The storytelling is the people. It's answering the questions, it's thinking about actions.
00:13:07 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So what I'm hearing from what you just said is that there's a bad way to do data storytelling, which is basically you print off a PowerPoint slide deck that's got 2,000,000 graphs in it, and you just go to a board meeting and show senior management.
00:13:27 Dr Genevieve Hayes
What all those graphs are and just expect them to draw conclusions because I don't know this bar in the histogram is bigger than this bar or.
00:13:37 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Like that, whereas the good way is to have some point that you're trying to make. So these are the insights that I've drawn from the data and this is what you should do as a consequence of that. And so that incorporates the people understanding what everything means, good data.
00:13:57 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Visualisations and good communication by identifying those insights and the So what?
00:14:05 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, absolutely. And and so the person who's engaging in data storytelling to an audience, absolutely. You've got some really key decisions to make around what are, what is the most important trends and insights that you need to communicate and then what are the best visualisations in order to do that? And then what are the best stories that you?
00:14:25 Dr Selena Fisk
Can share that.
00:14:25 Dr Selena Fisk
Can really emphasise the urgency or the importance of doing something with that.
00:14:31 Dr Selena Fisk
Information. Sometimes we are just sharing a data story and I guess it kind of comes back to the purpose of the data story that we're telling to others.
00:14:38 Dr Selena Fisk
Sometimes we might be telling them something because we want them to know and it is informing them, and so occasionally what it might be, say, if you're presenting to a board, you run your presentation and then there might be questions.
00:14:52 Dr Selena Fisk
At the end.
00:14:54 Dr Selena Fisk
More often what I see data storytelling or where I see data storytelling playing out is where a leader or or a middle manager is presenting some of that data to their team or to people that they work with and wherever possible. Whichever scenario you're using these skills in, I think.
00:15:13 Dr Selena Fisk
We can absolutely say what we noticed. We can absolutely say what our recommendations could be about what to do with the information, but actually real buy in from our people comes when we ask them.
00:15:27 Dr Selena Fisk
And what we what we know about insights? So if I was to tell you a data story right now, the insights that I would choose are completely biassed by my background perspective.
00:15:39 Dr Selena Fisk
You know my upbringing? All of the biases, conscious and unconscious, that we know of, they're all impacting what I see in that data set and therefore.
00:15:47 Dr Selena Fisk
What I would share with you.
00:15:49 Dr Selena Fisk
So actually there's real power in saying these are the things that I've seen. And these are the things that I think are most powerful or important.
00:15:58 Dr Selena Fisk
What do you see? What questions do you have? What do you want to know more about and and actually having? Again, this comes back to that confidence piece. You need people who are confident enough to say.
00:16:08 Dr Selena Fisk
Let's actually have a conversation about this and be happy with people asking you questions that you might not know the answer to right there.
00:16:15 Dr Selena Fisk
But that's actually far more powerful and in the same way, when we think about actions, my recommended actions to you, Genevieve, for example, so say we look at your metrics for the podcast.
00:16:26 Dr Selena Fisk
I can recommend things to you. None of them might be actually useful because I don't know your context all that well.
00:16:32 Dr Selena Fisk
So again, we have to just walk really gently and humbly with it and say, well, these are some of the things that.
00:16:37 Dr Selena Fisk
I think might be possible.
00:16:38 Dr Selena Fisk
But what do you think's possible? What actions could you take? What? What's coming up for you? And really, wherever possible, promoting that idea of it being a dialogue and a conversation rather than just a one way transmission of information from me.
00:16:52 Dr Selena Fisk
To a group of people.
00:16:54 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Do you get much resistance from putting forward that idea that it is a dialogue rather than a one way conversation?
00:17:01 Dr Selena Fisk
I don't. I wouldn't say I get resistance. I I get fear because there's people that it's the what? If you know I'm meant to be the person with the authority and I meant to be the one who knows everything. Like, what if I get asked something that I can't?
00:17:15 Dr Selena Fisk
Answer and am I going to look silly in front of other people? To be honest, I've never really had issues or resistance in terms of having the conversation because I think people realise that they've sat through those data stories before and they've been spoken at.
00:17:32 Dr Selena Fisk
And there's probably times that they wanted to add something or say actually I don't see it like that. I saw this or I thought this was really important.
00:17:40 Dr Selena Fisk
Or could we do this instead? And I think maybe because people have actually sat through some pretty poor examples of data storytelling, they're pretty open to the idea of it, of encouraging the dialogue.
00:17:50 Dr Genevieve Hayes
With regard to the people that you train, do you find people who have more of a numbers background harder to train in data storytelling than people who have less of a numbers background?
00:18:02 Dr Selena Fisk
Well, that's a great question.
00:18:04 Dr Selena Fisk
Do you know, I think this really goes back to primary school, right. Like we go through school and we're a math science person or we're an English humanities person, and people tend to stay in their lane.
00:18:16 Dr Selena Fisk
And it's really interesting how they identify as adults and even the influence of our parents when we're growing up as to whether or.
00:18:23 Dr Selena Fisk
Not we're good with numbers.
00:18:25 Dr Selena Fisk
In saying that, I've had real success with both types, you know, with both groups, and I've had real resistance sometimes from both groups who don't think they need a bit of the other thing they they're they're ******** on the narrative and the anecdotal data, and they don't think they need the numbers or they're so deep in the numbers that they get frustrated that people don't understand why just the numbers alone can work. So it's an interesting space to work in.
00:18:46 Dr Selena Fisk
Because it's actually trying to bring those two things together and say actually we're not in one.
00:18:50 Dr Selena Fisk
Lane or the?
00:18:51 Dr Selena Fisk
Other we're we're running the same, we're running the race together like we're we're all in this and we're we're actually trying to trying to achieve the same things for me.
00:19:00 Dr Selena Fisk
It you know this, this is always about humans. Like I don't work in technical industries where if there's an alert, a data alert, it's literally a safety issue.
00:19:10 Dr Selena Fisk
And and there's very clear procedures about what needs to happen and what valves need to shut. Like, you know, sometimes there are things where if there's a reading that's too high, it just needs to get shut off like.
00:19:20 Dr Selena Fisk
I get that.
00:19:21 Dr Selena Fisk
That's not the industries that I work in, so the industries I work in are often human centric and so I really lead with this is about.
00:19:31 Dr Selena Fisk
People, how do we think about how we serve them better? Like ultimately we're doing the jobs we're doing because we have often a shared purpose and we actually want to make a difference and we want to feel like we've been successful and achieved good outcomes for other people.
00:19:46 Dr Selena Fisk
So the more we can return to that, I think I don't really get people arguing as to why they.
00:19:52 Dr Selena Fisk
Wouldn't include narratives or numbers depending on which side, which lane they're in.
00:19:57 Dr Genevieve Hayes
OK. That's interesting. One thing I've always found when I've worked with a lot of numbers, people, they.
00:20:02 Dr Genevieve Hayes
They often drop the ball at the last minute because they enjoy doing the numbers so much, but they absolutely despise the whole writing up their analysis, preparing the PowerPoint deck that they have to do and all that.
00:20:16 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So they've done this absolutely brilliant analysis and then they do this PowerPoint deck that looks like it was put together in two seconds and then.
00:20:23 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So that they can get back onto the analysis.
00:20:25 Dr Selena Fisk
I get that I get that that absolutely happens.
00:20:29 Dr Selena Fisk
But at the same time, you've got people on the other side who, you know, I've had people say to me, Selena, I've done this work for 20 years.
00:20:36 Dr Selena Fisk
It's worked for me up until now. I've had great results. Why would I change and so they're really hard to get to a point where they're looking at data and starting to think about presenting even, you know, performance of their department or their team.
00:20:51 Dr Selena Fisk
Like using numbers and using metrics if it's just never been.
00:20:54 Dr Selena Fisk
In their wheelhouse so.
00:20:55 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, it's it's absolutely a challenge. I reckon it's, yeah, I reckon people face it on.
00:20:59 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Both sides, another buzzword that's emerged in recent years, is data driven.
00:21:05 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Every organisation wants to be data driven because I don't know it looks good in the annual report.
00:21:11 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yet in your work, you shy away from using this term. For example, you wrote a book called Data Informed Learners, not data driven learners.
00:21:23 Dr Genevieve Hayes
What's the difference between being data informed and being data driven?
00:21:28 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah. Look, we could spend a whole podcast just talking about this. I'm really passionate about it. And the more people dig their heels in and push back against it.
00:21:37 Dr Selena Fisk
To me, the harder I dig in and push back, I just for me, data driven was the context that I worked in in the UK, there was, it was so focused on just the metrics.
00:21:49 Dr Selena Fisk
Nobody cared about the humans. It was the number was attached to a human. But all motivation, the reason why people were doing all the things that they were doing was purely just to hit a mark.
00:21:59 Dr Selena Fisk
It was to hit a target. It was to beat last year's number.
00:22:03 Dr Selena Fisk
It wasn't actually.
00:22:04 Dr Selena Fisk
About improving what was happening for young people and I guess I see that really data driven.
00:22:11 Dr Selena Fisk
Context playing out in some industries.
00:22:14 Dr Selena Fisk
But for me, data informed is where we take the numbers and the metrics and we absolutely value that quantitative information.
00:22:21 Dr Selena Fisk
But we also take into consideration some of the context that sits around the dynamics of the organisation. Some of the other qualitative information and demographics or geography or any of those other bits of.
00:22:33 Dr Selena Fisk
Qualitative data that are.
00:22:35 Dr Selena Fisk
Really helpful for us to actually understand what's going on with the team, with the products, what whatever it might be.
00:22:42 Dr Selena Fisk
And at the same time, I think what we also want to take into consideration is people's previous experience, because if all we're saying is we're using the data to drive the decisions that we make, like I just think it's like at what point are we saying we actually value the experience that people bring and the experiences that they've had in this market or in a previous experience or in a previous company that's similar to us.
00:23:04 Dr Selena Fisk
And I just think the language around data driven can be quite exclusive of that. So for me, being informed by the data is absolutely the metrics, it's the qualitative context information and it's let's tap into what people know and what they believe is going to work in this.
00:23:20 Dr Selena Fisk
The text and I think if we're leading an organisation and we're going to people that for arguments sake are largely not numbers people and we go to them and say right in our strategic plan, we've decided that we're going to be data driven for the next five years and this is going to be our focus. That's a really hard sell as a leader to convince people who.
00:23:41 Dr Selena Fisk
Are maybe very new and just dipping their toes in the water of using numbers to say we're driven by them.
00:23:46 Dr Selena Fisk
It's a really.
00:23:47 Dr Selena Fisk
Big Jump, so informed is definitely softer language, so it's an easier sell it absolutely I think has more focus on people and humans and the and the things that are happening within the systems. And I think it's a lot more respectful of the experience that we bring.
00:24:03 Dr Selena Fisk
When we're making these decisions and thinking about what we do next with.
00:24:07 Dr Genevieve Hayes
A few seconds ago you said that there were some industries that are very data driven. What sprang to mind for me was the tech industry. Is that one of the industries?
00:24:16 Dr Genevieve Hayes
You're thinking of.
00:24:17 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, there's to be honest, it's probably pockets within. So there are pockets in Expedia, for example, that are really data driven.
00:24:25 Dr Selena Fisk
There are pockets in Expedia that would say that they're not particularly data driven, so it's probably not even as simple as saying an entire industry. So one of the one of the ones that surprised me, I was asked to do a keynote.
00:24:38 Dr Selena Fisk
But a a conference a few years ago.
00:24:41 Dr Selena Fisk
And it was from real. It was for real estate agents. And I actually assumed that real estate agents would be really good with numbers and would be great data storytellers because we hear about median house price.
00:24:54 Dr Selena Fisk
We, you know, I monthly I get a suburb report from a local real estate agent that's full of graphs and numbers.
00:25:00 Dr Selena Fisk
It's and and so it it's. It's hard to say. There's certainly pockets that do it well and then there's others where.
00:25:07 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, it just kind of falls down, so I think.
00:25:09 Dr Selena Fisk
There's kind of.
00:25:09 Dr Selena Fisk
A lot of gaps everywhere, unfortunately. Well, fortunately for me, who loves doing this type of work.
00:25:14 Dr Genevieve Hayes
A couple of months back I got one of those. You know, the calls you get from the real estate agents, you know, every three to six months saying, are you looking to buy, sell your house and are you looking to buy a house? You know the.
00:25:24 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Granted, ones and I wasn't, but I immediately started asking the real estate agent all those sorts of questions like ohh, how do you use data and where do you get your data?
00:25:34 Dr Genevieve Hayes
From and the poor guy, whose?
00:25:36 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Don't. He knew how to answer the questions, but he's like we don't use data at all. We just call people and do our thing.
00:25:45 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah. And the report gets spud out and you know, they drop it at your house or they put it in an email and. Yeah, so it's interesting.
00:25:52 Dr Selena Fisk
That while they might be confident in some types of data then not in others, a similar thing actually happened to me in healthcare.
00:25:59 Dr Selena Fisk
Like I I assume because every doctor and specialist that I go to is great, right? They're looking at data. They're making decisions, looking at blood test results, all of that and.
00:26:09 Dr Selena Fisk
Was asked to work with some people in the healthcare industry, but they were all running their own medical practise.
00:26:14 Dr Selena Fisk
Cases. So for them they're really good with patient data one on one, but they were saying from our HR financial perspective from the entire practise they're like where do we start like we we kind of are numbers people and we understand how you can use data to inform your decisions.
00:26:29 Dr Selena Fisk
But at this level with these types of data, we've got no idea. So yeah, it's it's really fascinating.
00:26:34 Dr Genevieve Hayes
The other one I find fascinating is you know how there's a lot of statistics in the.
00:26:39 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Ecology I have my PhD in statistics and every time I've spoken to a psychologist since the first thing they say to me is ohh.
00:26:49 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I had to do statistics as part of my psychology degree, but I really sucked at it. I'm really good at the, you know, one on one with people type thing, but I just can't handle this.
00:27:00 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, it's really interesting, actually, totally off the topic of this podcast. But about three years ago in Queensland, our Year 11 and 12 subjects, our senior subject selection changed in QLD.
00:27:10 Dr Selena Fisk
Secondary schools and psychology was never a subject that was offered in senior school, and it was brought in. And the problem that we had in Queensland was that we had this gap of we just didn't have.
00:27:21 Dr Selena Fisk
People that had been trained as psychology teachers.
00:27:24 Dr Selena Fisk
And you're spot on. What we had was we had all these humanities teachers saying ohh well, we can teach psychology.
00:27:31 Dr Selena Fisk
And then they.
00:27:31 Dr Selena Fisk
Looked at the syllabus and there's all this stats in it, so then the science teachers were saying ohh well, we could pick up psychology because we can teach the stats and then they're.
00:27:40 Dr Selena Fisk
Like but I can't.
00:27:41 Dr Selena Fisk
How do I do?
00:27:42 Dr Selena Fisk
The other thing.
00:27:43 Dr Selena Fisk
How do I? How do I if I'm a science, how do I teach the humanities?
00:27:46 Dr Selena Fisk
Not. And humanities teachers like I don't know any of the numbers part. So yeah, it's really fascinating, as you say, just that merger and that's actually a really good example of where they are brought to.
00:27:56 Dr Genevieve Hayes
An example of the extreme end where you're focusing on the data is a few years ago I was reading a book about the early days.
00:28:02 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Of Google where.
00:28:04 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Apparently, senior management insisted that every decision be backed by data.
00:28:09 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So it was, you know, do we have this shade of red for this button instead of this shade of red? And I suspect that you're getting into just.
00:28:16 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Spurious results with some of those things.
00:28:18 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, absolutely. And that's that whole AB testing, you know, running, rolling out to 10s or hundreds of thousands of people, a couple of different marketing options and seeing which ones get clicked on more.
00:28:31 Dr Selena Fisk
And others. I don't really kind of go down that track because it just doesn't interest me all that much.
00:28:37 Dr Selena Fisk
But when you were talking, I was thinking about like, you know, Jeff Bezos and one of the quotes I use of his is he basically says, Yep, I always get all the data.
00:28:45 Dr Selena Fisk
But at the end of the day, I make my decisions.
00:28:47 Dr Selena Fisk
From the heart.
00:28:49 Dr Selena Fisk
And he said if he had just looked at.
00:28:52 Dr Selena Fisk
The data around Amazon Prime the data was actually indicating that that type of model would.
00:28:56 Dr Selena Fisk
Work and he went. No, I actually think that the market shifting and this is potentially something new that people would really kind of buy into and appreciate.
00:29:05 Dr Selena Fisk
And so he it was a risk, obviously big financial risk and he was obviously in a financial position to be able to do it.
00:29:10 Dr Selena Fisk
But we see how Amazon Prime has really kicked off. So it's a good example of actually he saw the data and then decided to do something different and has still been.
00:29:19 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Really successful. There's a XKCD comic that I saw, you know, a couple of years ago. And you know how when you've got your P value, you know, your usual cut off is 5%.
00:29:29 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So that means that you know one out of 20 you should.
00:29:32 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Be successful if you're just doing it randomly.
00:29:35 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And it was the stick figure in the comic. They were doing some tests to see. Does eating this different this colour Jelly Bean influence?
00:29:43 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I don't know. Let's say exam results. Yeah. And they did 20 tests and one of them, it was statistically significant. So yeah, we'll go with the green.
00:29:52 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Jelly beans? Yep.
00:29:54 Dr Selena Fisk
Absolutely. And that's one of the issues, right?
00:29:56 Dr Selena Fisk
With with people who actually have a stats background, they can pick errors like.
00:30:00 Dr Selena Fisk
That, and that's the the risk I think in data storytelling that we need to be really careful of and and obviously it you would like to think that people aren't doing it deliberately, but we've really gotta make sure that we're trying to be as objective as possible and not just cherry picking the one Jelly Bean going.
00:30:15 Dr Selena Fisk
Ohh yeah, one in five that worked. This is statistically significant and you know I I feel like I've been listening to a lot of different stats.
00:30:22 Dr Selena Fisk
Books at the moment on audible and one they they seem to all mention at the moment causation versus correlation and causation doesn't actually mean causation, and I think it's fascinating that that's actually coming up in all of these books that I'm listen.
00:30:37 Dr Selena Fisk
Too, but it's actually really important. Just because something is correlated and it's performing in a similar way as something else doesn't actually mean that one causes the other, and there's a lot of like, there's some really funny websites online that look at correlated variables and how they don't cause they don't lead to causation.
00:30:54 Dr Selena Fisk
So one I mentioned in my book is like I think it's like the number of movies that Nicolas Cage.
00:30:58 Dr Selena Fisk
Is in in a year versus the number of deaths from drowning in swimming pools, and it's like they're correlated. One is not causing the other, but it's really important that people at least understand that.
00:31:10 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, they're they're not the same thing.
00:31:12 Dr Genevieve Hayes
The other thing that's interesting with like one of the things that I teach, I use that website. You got that Nicolas Cage example from I use some other examples from that website, but another example I found.
00:31:25 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So that's spurious correlation that you're getting with Nicolas Cage in the drownings, but you can also have two variables are correlated.
00:31:33 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Because they're both.
00:31:34 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Being caused by the same variable, even though one doesn't cause the other. So the example that I give is the murder rate in New York is correlated with sales of ice cream in New York.
00:31:47 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yeah, right. One does not cause the other but so both are caused by temperature. So when it's hotter, people get more.
00:31:55 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Angry, frustrated and are more likely to go out and kill someone.
00:31:58 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And they're also, if they don't go out and kill someone, they go out and get an ice cream.
00:32:03 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah. Wow. OK.
00:32:05 Dr Selena Fisk
That's a really good example. I haven't heard that one before.
00:32:08
When you've got.
00:32:09 Dr Genevieve Hayes
These data informed organisations so you gave the example of Amazon.
00:32:14 Dr Genevieve Hayes
But most people are going to be working for an Amazon. What does a data informed organisation look like at the smaller scale?
00:32:22 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, I I think one of the things that they do is they they've just got, they've got a plan, to be honest.
00:32:28 Dr Selena Fisk
And it sounds pretty boring and maybe elementary, but organisations that are doing this really well, I can walk into them and say what data are you collecting? What matters to you? How is it used? And they can talk me through that from.
00:32:42 Dr Selena Fisk
A leadership level and exec level, a middle management level, how that looks for different teams in their organisations and then even for an individual employee.
00:32:52 Dr Selena Fisk
So in a perfect world, even in even at an employee level, they would be able to say, you know, for me, these are some of the metrics that I keep an eye on.
00:33:02 Dr Selena Fisk
This is how I do it and these are the things that I'm looking for and then what it would do like these are some of the kind of key actions or things that I would think about or I'd take it to somebody and would have a conversation about what to do.
00:33:12 Dr Selena Fisk
That clarity doesn't exist in many of the places that I go and work. Obviously you know if if companies feel like they're data informed and they're doing pretty well, they're they're not phoning me, which is fair enough.
00:33:25 Dr Selena Fisk
So it's a bit of confirmation bias in my.
00:33:27 Dr Selena Fisk
Little world, but yeah that.
00:33:29 Dr Selena Fisk
It's it's actually just the lack of clarity.
00:33:31 Dr Selena Fisk
And when where I see it done really well, it's there is reference to evidence informed and decision and data informed decision making in strategic plans that philtres into annual improvement plans. It philtres into annual plans for teams within the organisation. It philtres into even individual.
00:33:51 Dr Selena Fisk
People's Professional learning plans and goals for the year, and so there's a real theme all the way through of, you know, even as a an, an individual employee, I want to go and do this training in this area.
00:34:04 Dr Selena Fisk
Because this is a gap for me and this is how I know it's a gap, you know this is the data that's actually telling me that I I should potentially go and work on this thing or try and build skill or increase my capacity.
00:34:14 Dr Selena Fisk
So yeah, it's kind.
00:34:15 Dr Selena Fisk
Of everywhere at the same time, I always say data is not the destination. I see people who write in their strategic plan, things like.
00:34:24 Dr Selena Fisk
You know, we are going to be data, data driven organisation or data informed whichever that way they want to describe.
00:34:30 Dr Selena Fisk
That that's actually not the end goal like the end goal is actually about. What are you doing for people who are your clients who are aiming to serve, rewrite your strategic plans so evidence and data is a part of the description, but actually the focus is on the people and and the impact that you're having. But you're just using data and evidence to support the decision making that's getting you to that point.
00:34:51 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So and actually a good example of that is I used to work for Worksafe, which is the works compensation organisation in Victoria and obviously their goal is to minimise the cost of providing workers compensation to people. Yeah, but their strategic goal was we want to help more Victorians get home.
00:35:12 Dr Genevieve Hayes
From work safely, gold.
00:35:15 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good example, because that's actually, they're not just doing it to reduce costs.
00:35:21 Dr Selena Fisk
If they are.
00:35:23 Dr Selena Fisk
I wouldn't want to.
00:35:23 Dr Selena Fisk
Work with them.
00:35:24 Dr Selena Fisk
But yeah, and I get that some companies are completely profit driven, but most have an actual core purpose.
00:35:31 Dr Selena Fisk
And that purpose is in humans, so I think it's a really cool.
00:35:34 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Example and the fact was working there.
00:35:36 Dr Genevieve Hayes
People really did believe that it wasn't about the money. You don't go to work for a government insurer to get rich.
00:35:43 Dr Genevieve Hayes
To go because you have some sort of social purpose in going.
00:35:47 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, you want people to be safer when they go to work. You want them to be able to access help if and when they need it. Yeah, absolutely.
00:35:55 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Before you started working with corporates, you're working with a lot of schools and I'm actually very interested in learning a bit more about that.
00:36:03 Dr Genevieve Hayes
We've talked about what an organisation in general looks like when they're data informed, but what would that look like if it was a school? And how is data being used to inform learning and?
00:36:15 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Improve educational outputs.
00:36:17 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, it it's an interesting one because there's a lot of what we've said already and talked about already that as I say, it's exactly the same for schools. So schools that are doing this well.
00:36:25 Dr Selena Fisk
Will have those data plans. They have clarity. They have those strategic plans linked to annual improvement plans and all of that, I think you know for me, the whole reason I went down this path was the power that I saw using that data with kids had on my practise and had on them.
00:36:42 Dr Selena Fisk
And so teachers who were doing this really well, what they're doing is they're able to look at trends.
00:36:48 Dr Selena Fisk
For their learners, like in terms of learning analytics, so that's a main one. You know. So in we can collect data on formative assessment tasks like activities that are done in the classroom. We can have data from standardised assessments in literacy and numeracy.
00:37:03 Dr Selena Fisk
And the further we dig into that data, what we can start to see is some really clear trends for individual students.
00:37:10 Dr Selena Fisk
We can see trends for small groups of kids or a whole class, or a whole cohort could even be the whole school.
00:37:16 Dr Selena Fisk
And then it.
00:37:17 Dr Selena Fisk
Enables educators to actually be responsive to that. So for example, if I'm teaching Year 5.
00:37:23 Dr Selena Fisk
Fish and I can see that in a standardised assessment that my kids have really struggled with cohesion the most then as a teacher I can go.
00:37:32 Dr Selena Fisk
OK. Well, more so than me. Just knowing that my kids need to get better at writing, which is so big.
00:37:36 Dr Selena Fisk
And there's so much to it, I can actually deliberately design activities to build that understanding of what cohesion looks like.
00:37:43 Dr Selena Fisk
And how to actually embed cohesive devices in their writing? Again, you know it's not about. Then the goal. Well, the reason we do that is not to then just get better grades the next time they do a standardised assessment.
00:37:54 Dr Selena Fisk
It means that if kids can write more cohesively then they're going to be more able to communicate and convey what they think you know, we think.
00:38:01 Dr Selena Fisk
When kids go out and start applying for jobs and writing emails and job applications and that type of thing, we actually want them to be able to convey meaning in a way that's cohesive and not clunky and disjointed.
00:38:12 Dr Selena Fisk
So it's actually about kind of those life or the big picture skills. And so a teacher with some of that learning analytics data can become really kind of fine tuned around their response, their teaching response to what that young person needs to move them forward.
00:38:26 Dr Selena Fisk
At the same time, and a lot of work I do with corporates as well as schools is actually using the data to look at growth and look at the good things that have happened and like, how do we actually celebrate kids that have kicked some huge goals from the last time they did an assessment through the new one and and often times when I work with people, there are assumption around the use of data is that it's it's all about deficits and it's all about looking.
00:38:49 Dr Selena Fisk
The gaps to fill and there is that's look, that's an important part of it, but it's not the only part.
00:38:55 Dr Selena Fisk
There is always so many good news stories in the data that we collect and that we look at.
00:39:01 Dr Selena Fisk
And I just reckon we're missing a huge opportunity if we don't actually recognise those things and celebrate them, particularly with little people and young adults who are working hard and kind of making good improvements.
00:39:14 Dr Selena Fisk
The other thing schools are increasingly starting to do is they're going down the path of tracking student well being, so they're asking students to.
00:39:20 Dr Selena Fisk
Respond to surveys on a semi regular basis just about how they're going, how ready they are to learn, maybe how well they're sleeping. Well, you know what their relationships are like with their peers, that type of.
00:39:31 Dr Selena Fisk
And again, you know, there's an opportunity for teachers to have one on one follow ups with those kids who are struggling or for whom, you know, they might self report quite low.
00:39:40 Dr Selena Fisk
But then there's also, and this is true for well being and for learning analytics. There's also then, at a programme level, middle managers and middle leaders can start to say, well, actually, this whole group of people.
00:39:51 Dr Selena Fisk
Would benefit from this type of intervention.
00:39:54 Dr Selena Fisk
And so some schools are implementing like a specific reading programme, for example, or a specific writing schedule, or in the well being context, it might be OK, well, we're seeing that cyber safety is a real challenge for our year 10 students.
00:40:08 Dr Selena Fisk
So we're going to get some people to come and work with them to build their kind of resilience to that and some strategies around how to actually.
00:40:14 Dr Selena Fisk
Operate more safely online, so there's there's so many opportunities at both at programme level or school level, but then also at an individual level, and I think, you know, we've just got so many brilliant educators doing some really cool things.
00:40:28 Dr Selena Fisk
And by bringing some of this learning analytics in and making it accessible to them like they're just flying with it and they can just be super responsive and give great feedback.
00:40:36 Dr Selena Fisk
And yeah, it's just really good. And then you know, you can start to have those conversations with kids.
00:40:41 Dr Selena Fisk
Too, which is pretty good.
00:40:42 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yeah. So it's sort of like those employee health surveys that they give you when you're working in a big organisation, but directed at the kids instead of employees.
00:40:49 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and like in a Corp.
00:40:52 Dr Selena Fisk
For it, you know, I say to schools, it's about the follow up. You know, if I'm an employee and week in week out, I'm doing a pulse survey and I'm struggling.
00:40:59 Dr Selena Fisk
I'm saying I'm struggling and nobody calls me. Nobody does anything and they just keep sending me a survey. It's like, well, why would I keep?
00:41:06 Dr Selena Fisk
Doing that survey.
00:41:07 Dr Selena Fisk
So yeah, it's it's, I mean, it's the same conversations.
00:41:11 Dr Genevieve Hayes
In the worst case scenario, I've heard some organisations do it this way.
00:41:14 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Where they tie bonuses to the results of the poll survey. So for the the corporate bonus requires the average pulse survey.
00:41:25 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Satisfaction mark to be above. I don't know, let's say 75%. So you have all the employees saying we're highly satisfied with this organisation because if they don't, they miss out on their bonus.
00:41:38 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, right. Yeah, that's the that's the tail wagging the dog, isn't it? But that's also a really good example of, you know, like they say, you know, the minute we set a target, people work out how to manipulate it and play the game.
00:41:52 Dr Selena Fisk
And that's a great example of that. So targets and goals are important, and I absolutely value them, but at the same time, we just need to be super aware that.
00:41:59 Dr Selena Fisk
When we attach too much meaning to it like that, like a financial bonus or as in.
00:42:04 Dr Selena Fisk
The dev people are absolutely gonna play the game and work out a way of.
00:42:07 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Hitting that target so there's the standardised test data and these student pulse survey data sets. Are there any other data sets like for example schools making use of text data?
00:42:18 Dr Selena Fisk
Text as in what? What type of text did?
00:42:21 Dr Genevieve Hayes
You mean so school reports or you know those slips that teachers fill out that say?
00:42:27 Dr Genevieve Hayes
This student was, I don't know, smoking behind the gym or whatever students do now, vaping behind the gym, probably.
00:42:33 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, the text based stuff really sits in to say. For example, schools have got systems where you've essentially got an online behaviour book.
00:42:41 Dr Selena Fisk
So if there was an incident at school, the teacher could jump on and they would report and record that incident against the student record.
00:42:48 Dr Selena Fisk
And that's handy because you know, if you have a meeting with a parent, you can just go and print all of those incidents out.
00:42:53 Dr Selena Fisk
I I think the challenge with schools and and with everybody to be honest, is how do you actually tap into and harness the power of that qualitative information and the qualitative data.
00:43:02 Dr Selena Fisk
And so I really encourage people to have a strategy around that too, because we have so much of it.
00:43:09 Dr Selena Fisk
We have so many notes we have, you know, you think about a young person with, say, a disability or somebody who requires.
00:43:15 Dr Selena Fisk
Curriculum adjustments.
00:43:16 Dr Selena Fisk
Those young people have got notes from specialists. They've got reports from generally learning support and recommendations for teachers they might have.
00:43:25 Dr Selena Fisk
They would have a pretty extensive curriculum adjustment plan, which would be potentially like you look in 10 pages or more off text and you know if you're in a in a school, if you're a teacher in a school where you have maybe.
00:43:37 Dr Selena Fisk
1/4 of your kids with that type of requirement, that's a whole lot of.
00:43:41 Dr Selena Fisk
Next, so yes, schools want to use that better, and I would say all organisations want to be able to use that type of data better.
00:43:49 Dr Selena Fisk
But like other corporates, they don't necessarily. Unless they're massive, they don't have the money for like an R&D team or an analyst, or they don't have the money to buy an in vivo or an SPSS to actually.
00:44:02 Dr Selena Fisk
Do some thematic analysis of that qualitative information.
00:44:06 Dr Selena Fisk
So yeah, there's a lot of opportunity there for that information because it can certainly add an important part to the picture, you know, like and I with schools I often.
00:44:14 Dr Selena Fisk
Talk about the.
00:44:15 Dr Selena Fisk
Fact that if you're meeting with a parent of a young person who's really struggling, you might be able to talk to them about the number of times they've been suspended. You might be able to talk about the number of days of school they've missed in the year.
00:44:26 Dr Selena Fisk
But actually, the really rich detail of what's going wrong for them is sitting in those pastoral notes in that text based qualitative data.
00:44:33 Dr Selena Fisk
So yeah, it's just as you know, really a lot more time consuming to be able.
00:44:39 Dr Selena Fisk
To process that information.
00:44:41 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So it sounds like that would be the next step on from what the schools are now trying to do with focusing on their numeric data.
00:44:48 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, look, there's people already doing it, but not everybody. So the people who are, I guess ahead of year or a pastoral leader.
00:44:55 Dr Selena Fisk
So those people who deal with those behaviour issues and and challenges they've worked with that type of data a lot for a really long time. But yeah, I guess it's opening up what's possible to other people and even thinking about.
00:45:09 Dr Selena Fisk
You know, emails from parents and emails between colleagues and. And that's true in any in any organisation as well. How do we actually?
00:45:17 Dr Selena Fisk
Put it into a system and structure that is useful for us, but also not one that bogs us down and then just makes us do busy work for the sake of it.
00:45:24 Dr Selena Fisk
That does actually help. So yeah, I think everybody's kind of grappling with that at the moment and anecdotally, you know, your observations, the conversations you have, the things you see that's still all data, it's just qualitative and it's not written down.
00:45:38 Dr Selena Fisk
So again, you don't wanna write all that stuff down, cause why would you? But what's the happy medium where we actually get some good data? And I I I know AI is only going to continue to help us.
00:45:50 Dr Selena Fisk
Build capacity around some of that text based data just to help us really condense that time that it takes to analyse, but we're not there.
00:45:57 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Yet you mentioned before the idea of engaging the students in the data story. How does that work?
00:46:04 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah. So it's interesting because when I present on this, I often have people assume that I'm talking about high school students only, and that's not the case.
00:46:13 Dr Selena Fisk
Like I've had a lot of you know, I've met 5 year olds that have been able to say to me what their goals are and what they're working on next and it's been pretty powerful really.
00:46:22 Dr Selena Fisk
I guess the data just looks different or what I what I classify as being the data different. I guess what it usually boils down to is the teacher having a one on one conversation with the student and the student having a good understanding of where they're at in that subject or in the different types of assessment or the different skills or whatever it might be, and actually setting some goals around what they want to achieve.
00:46:43 Dr Selena Fisk
How they're going to do that so you know, like there, there are schools that do mentoring really well and young people have mentoring conversations with a teacher.
00:46:53 Dr Selena Fisk
And they set really specific goals and they have a good understanding of their data because they're able to access dashboards.
00:47:00 Dr Selena Fisk
So you know, a lot of schools are going down the path of having a visualisation dashboard for student results.
00:47:06 Dr Selena Fisk
And increasingly, schools are actually opening that access to parents and to students. So a young person or their parents at any stage.
00:47:13 Dr Selena Fisk
And a lot of schools can go on and see how they're kind of tracking over time. They can reflect on, you know, are they performing in a similar way year on year, have things changed, how have they changed, where are their strengths in terms of subjects and that looks different for every school and for every young person. But you know, that's pretty common in secondaries.
00:47:32 Dr Selena Fisk
In primaries, it's probably not as quantitative, so it's things like descriptors. So I was in a prep classroom, so five year old kids a little while ago and in the literacy and numeracy continuum there are descriptors of what kids can do right. And and the teachers job really is to try and progress kids up this continuum.
00:47:52 Dr Selena Fisk
So descriptors on that continuum include things.
00:47:54 Dr Selena Fisk
Like if you're.
00:47:55 Dr Selena Fisk
Five. One of the things you might be trying to learn is to count backwards.
00:47:58 Dr Selena Fisk
10 or it might be a skip count in twos, right? And so developmentally, there's a scale at which, like there are some things you have to be able to do first, you can't count backwards from 10:00 if you can't count up to 10.
00:48:10 Dr Selena Fisk
So once the teacher kind of knows where the kids at and what they can do, I've seen these little things on the wall in classrooms where kids have said, you know, with the teachers help they've written.
00:48:20 Dr Selena Fisk
You know, my next goal is to be able to skip count in twos. My next goal is to know.
00:48:26 Dr Selena Fisk
The letter and the sound S or whatever it might be, and so it's just different data. It's just like proficiency descriptor, and then they just make a big deal of it.
00:48:36 Dr Selena Fisk
Like, it's really low stakes when kids achieve it, they come up and they tick the thing off and they're proud and they high 5, the teacher and they have an achievement wall in class and it gets sent home.
00:48:46 Dr Selena Fisk
The parents and it's just that whole. Like, OK, so now I can count backwards from 10. What's next?
00:48:51 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And you get your Gold Star on the thing on the wall. I'm thinking of summer from school of Rock here. Yeah.
00:48:58 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, it's funny. I always think about the very first data wall. If you like that. I remember as a kid I was in year one and it was a.
00:49:05 Dr Selena Fisk
Can you tie your shoelace or your shoe laces data wall? So all of our names were up on the wall and nobody could tie their shoelaces to begin with.
00:49:13 Dr Selena Fisk
And each day we would come in and we would try and show the teacher that we could tie.
00:49:18 Dr Selena Fisk
The laces and as people were able to do it, then they move from this big group of people into the list of people who could now.
00:49:25 Dr Selena Fisk
Tie their shoelaces.
00:49:26 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Ohhh yeah, I remember when I was a kid. The thing that we were all tracking was who was gonna lose their.
00:49:32 Dr Genevieve Hayes
First tooth.
00:49:34 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I didn't lose any teeth until I was in grade one and I was so jealous of the people who lost teeth when they were in prep.
00:49:42 Dr Selena Fisk
Isn't that funny? What you remember?
00:49:43 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Ohh so is there anything on your radar in the AI data and analytics space that you think is going to become important in the next three to five years?
00:49:53 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah. I think for me, there's probably 2, two things. The ability, if there's a dashboard for example, that's producing reports automatically and it's being refreshed or updated daily or however often it.
00:50:04 Dr Selena Fisk
Is, I think AI's got a really important part to play and potentially flagging or directing our attention to things that are not how they would be expected to be.
00:50:15 Dr Selena Fisk
So when we look for so back to, you know, half an hour ago on this podcast when we talked about storytelling for me is what are the trends and insights and what are the actions?
00:50:24 Dr Selena Fisk
I think AI can potentially really help us with what are the trends and the.
00:50:28 Dr Selena Fisk
Insights. So it could potentially suggest in the same way at the moment that Microsoft Excel. You know, if you go to the analysed data, it tries to anticipate how you might wanna visualise.
00:50:39 Dr Selena Fisk
I actually think that being able to prompt people and draw their attention to certain elements is absolutely a key part.
00:50:47 Dr Selena Fisk
The second piece then for me is around automation. So how do we, if there is a threshold data point rather than somebody having to log on to a dashboard, how do we actually?
00:50:59 Dr Selena Fisk
Automate an alert back into an email and that's kind of happening in some industries. With some dashboards. There are some alerts, but what I also know in the the companies I've worked in is that often times we have so many different dashboards for different sets of data and different bits all over the place.
00:51:17 Dr Selena Fisk
This we can't be saying to people. We want you just to kind of have a an eye over all of that every day.
00:51:24 Dr Selena Fisk
So the more we can kind of automate that and alert people to areas of concern when it comes up, I think the better.
00:51:30 Dr Selena Fisk
And then there's the whole predictive analysis. And what's you know, how do we use the old data to predict what's going to happen in the future?
00:51:37 Dr Selena Fisk
That's not amazing yet, but I think that's only going to increase and improve.
00:51:41 Dr Genevieve Hayes
And what final advice would you give to data scientists looking to create business value from data?
00:51:46 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, it's a good question. To be honest. I work with a lot of data scientists and CIO's and CTO's who for whom they are doing some really great work and they're doing what they think the organisation needs.
00:52:01 Dr Selena Fisk
And then I go and speak with the other people and they get frustrated because they're actually not getting what they need.
00:52:07 Dr Selena Fisk
And oftentimes those two teams don't meet, so my biggest bit of advice would be how do you actually go and have a conversation with the people for whom you're producing these things and how do you make sure that it's actually what they?
00:52:19 Dr Selena Fisk
Because I reckon they'll have some ideas about how to modify it and and let you know about things that you wouldn't have been able to anticipate that they would really value.
00:52:28 Dr Selena Fisk
And often times they're pretty small tweaks. I worked with one team where they were producing A6 page report weekly for a group of middle managers, and the middle managers were complaining about it.
00:52:39 Dr Selena Fisk
We got the two groups together. The page became the the report became one page weekly.
00:52:45 Dr Selena Fisk
And the middle manager said actually I can action every single thing on this one piece of paper, and that's all I need.
00:52:51 Dr Selena Fisk
And so everyone was happy the data scientists have less work to do. Shorter reports. Yeah, the team were happier because I had actionable information.
00:52:58 Dr Genevieve Hayes
So on that note, for listeners who want to learn more about you or get in contact, what can they do?
00:53:04 Dr Selena Fisk
Yeah, sure. Connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn, but all my information, contact details and some of my articles and stuff are available on my website, sothatsselenafisk.com and it's SELENAFISS.
00:53:18 Dr Genevieve Hayes
I'll put a link to it.
00:53:19 Dr Genevieve Hayes
In the show notes and I.
00:53:20 Dr Selena Fisk
Thank you.
00:53:21 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Thank you for joining me.
00:53:22 Dr Selena Fisk
Today, no worries at all. Thanks again for.
00:53:24 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Having me and for those in the audience.
00:53:27 Dr Genevieve Hayes
Thank you for listening. I'm doctor Genevieve Hayes, and this has been value driven data science brought to you by Genevieve Hayes Consulting.