The concept is simple — by tracking factors that research shows are key indicators of dropout risk — credits, commencement exams, attendance, discipline referrals and out-of-school suspensions — school leaders can keep a bird’s-eye view of each cohort of students and more easily identify those who need extra support to get to graduation day.

Of course, once schools leaders have a better idea of who is most at risk, there is simply no substitute for good, old-fashioned compassion — and good, old-fashioned elbow grease.

Indeed, with a smart tool like CohortTracker™ reducing the effort required for easy and accurate early identification, there is now more time and energy left for that “good, old fashioned elbow grease.” Educators, roll up your sleeves!

For more information see:

• Screen cast introduces CohortTracker™
• CohortTracker™ early warning system

January 27, 2012:

Binghamton, NY – The Greater Southern Tier Board of Cooperative Education Services (GST BOCES) has implemented CohortTracker™ in fourteen school districts in its region. CohortTracker™ is an early warning web application that allows schools to monitor students’ progress towards graduation. Educators can identify students getting off track and intervene before it is too late. The app is licensed by Prism Decision Systems, LLC.

According to Steve Manning, Manager of Computer Services for GST BOCES, “We are very pleased to have gone live with CohortTracker™. The app is simple, user friendly and extremely effective. School principals and guidance counselors will find this early warning system to be a valuable new tool for tracking and managing their students to successful, on-time graduation.”

GST BOCES, which has exclusive license to CohortTracker™ in New York State, will now turn its attention toward statewide rollout. “We hope to have the app available to all New York State BOCES Regional Information Centers before the end of this school year,” Manning said.

“CohortTracker™ is designed to be a general-purpose student achievement tracking system that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any state, regional or local education department,” said Prism president, Sean Brady.

Prism embraces an agile approach and focuses on developing apps that

• Are lightweight, solve a single, urgent problem, and are not burdened by unnecessary features or complexity.
• Deliver focused, actionable, real-time information to educational decision-makers at all levels—in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

“We believe agile apps are the future of data-driven decision-making in education,” Brady said.

For more information see these additional posts:

• Screen cast introduces CohortTracker™
• CohortTracker™ early warning system

About Prism Decision Systems, LLC: Prism Decision Systems provides dynamic group processes and state-of-the-art decision support to clients in the education, health care, government, finance, news and entertainment, energy, telecom, technology and transportation sectors. Sean Brady is president and Andrew Tait, chief technology officer. Typical engagements involve strategic planning, app development, multi-criteria decision support, value analysis, benchmarking and target setting, implementation planning, and conflict resolution. Prism maximizes the human potential of client groups to make and implement decisions that achieve their preferred future.

Media Contact: Sean Brady
info@prismdecision.com
607.771.5411

Pint-sized but leonine, she was playing me as her favorite tune

Write down your plan and read it at least once a day

But first, let’s start with an anecdote.

As a young father, I found myself caught in a power struggle with my pint-sized but leonine daughter. And – no surprise to any parent – I was losing. Terribly. She had me completely figured and was playing me as her favorite tune. She’d call – seeking my attention by displaying negative behavior – and I’d respond – with angry discipline. The pattern was strong, established and escalating. I knew I was in serious trouble when I found her leaning against the screen in a second-floor window.

Coincidentally, I was soon off to the Creative Problem Solving Institute. I decided that I needed to make significant change and transform my relationship with my daughter. Good fortune had it that I went to a session by Roger Firestien. As I recall, he was presenting how to apply the creative problem-solving process (CPS) to personal transformation. He reviewed the standard CPS steps, with which I was intimately familiar:

• Identify a goal, wish or problem
• Gather data
• Clarify the problem
• Generate solutions
• Select solutions
• Plan and act

And then he recommended a strategy I hadn’t heard before: if you really want to implement your plan, write it down and read it at least once a day for two weeks. He guaranteed that fidelity to that final piece of advice would result in success in much less time than that.

Upon my return home, I did just that. I wrote the plan down and then I read it every morning when I got to work, before lunch and before I left for home. Although I read the plan for two weeks straight as recommended, the desired change occurred after about four or five days. I had transformed my relationship with my daughter.

Tierney’s strategies to maintain will power

Tierney’s strategies are based on Roy F. Baumeister’s recent research on will power, which “social scientists no longer regard as simply a metaphor. They’ve recently reported that willpower is a real form of mental energy, powered by glucose in the bloodstream, which is used up as you exert self-control…He and many of his colleagues have concluded that the way to keep a New Year’s resolution is to anticipate the limits of your willpower.”

Here are Tierney’s strategies for managing your limited will power and avoiding “ego depletion” and failure to change:

Set a single, clear goal: Set “a specific goal…and limit yourself to one big resolution at a time…With a finite supply of willpower, it’s tough enough to keep one resolution.”

Precommit: Have a plan and “further bind yourself by e-mailing your goal to friends or posting it on Facebook.”

Father and daughter 20 years on - Close as can be

Outsource: Use newly available tools such as Twitter or websites such as stickk.com. There you can make a formal contract,  identify a “referee” and even put money on the line. “The more you precommit, the better you do, according to stickK’s analysis of 125,000 contracts over the past three years. The success rate for people who don’t name a referee or set financial stakes is only 29 percent, but it rises to 59 percent when there’s a referee and to 71.5 percent when there’s money at stake. And when a contract includes a referee and financial stakes, the success rate is nearly 80 percent.”

Keep track: Monitor your progress continually.  Again, use the emerging tool sets available to you: “Entrepreneurs are rushing to monitor just about every aspect of your life — your health, your moods, your sleep — and you can find dozens of their products by consulting Web sites like Quantified Self and Lifehacker.”

Don’t overreact to a lapse: Avoid the “phenomenon formally known as ‘counterregulatory eating’ — and informally as the ‘what the hell effect.’” That is, don’t use a lapse as an excuse to give in completely and abandon your plan. You know, like the dieter who succumbs, eats a bowl of ice cream and then figures, “Hell, I may as well eat the whole carton.”

Reward often:  Finally, reward yourself often. As Tierney says, “If you use willpower only to deny yourself pleasures, it becomes a grim, thankless form of defense. But when you use it to gain something, you can wring pleasure out of the dreariest tasks.”

Reversal

The parents among you may be curious to know how I transformed my relationship with my daughter. I used a basic creativity technique called reversal. Each time the call came, my response was the exact opposite to what it had been. Instead of angry disciple, I gave my daughter a warm hug and told her I loved her. Simple as that.

CohortTracker™ is an early warning web application that allows schools to monitor students’ progress towards graduation. Educators can identify students getting off track and intervene before it is too late.

The app is designed to be a general-purpose student achievement tracking system that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any education department. Simple, intuitive and easy to use, CohortTracker™ is now available.

CohortTracker™ is a small app requiring small training that elegantly delivers big data to support big decisions. If you would like CohortTracker™ to be available in your state, province or region, contact Sean Brady (info@prismdecision.com).

For more information see these additional posts:

• CohortTracker™ press release
• CohortTracker™ early warning system

In the late '90s, I had a colleague who was fond of saying, “When an operations analyst encounters a problem, he opens a spreadsheet. Now he has two problems…”

Indeed.

If you are responsible for a project that has a spreadsheet as a deliverable, go and suspend it now. Yes, now. Go on. When you return I'll explain why you had to do it.

Done? OK, I'll continue.

First, let me change tack for a moment. I'm actually a big fan of spreadsheets. I use them regularly. Excel is a great application. However…

spreadsheets should not be used for "line of business" applications.

In fact, I'd go further:

spreadsheets should only be used by the person who created them.

And, sometimes, not even then. We've all seen spreadsheets like the one below.

This isn't a spreadsheet. It's a database. And there are applications designed specifically to handle this sort of data. They're called "databases".

The "spreadsheet as database" is a pet peeve of mine as I receive data in this format all the time—and it's always a major pain. Consistency is hard to maintain when storing data in spreadsheets. You end up with customer IDs in the "Orders" sheet that can't be found in the "Customers” sheet. Or a sales tax of "Smith". A particularly pernicious problem with using spreadsheets in this manner is their tendency to autoformat fields. If I had a dime for every time a numeric customer ID with leading zeros had been formatted as 6.72512E+11…or an order had been fulfilled during the reign of Queen Victoria…

Also, there's a significant risk of messing up your data when it's held in a spreadsheet. Miss the fact that a sort hasn't included all of your columns and your records could be rendered worthless.

Even if you're maintaining a small database for your own use there are more appropriate solutions than using a spreadsheet. You don't have to become an Oracle database administrator. Personal database products like Bento are as easy to use as a spreadsheet. If you have a spreadsheet "database" in a corporate setting, and it's doing more than managing your lottery syndicate, then someone needs to be fired.

So, OK, it's not a good idea to use a spreadsheet in place of a database. But, spreadsheets are perfect for managing your accounts, right? Columns of numbers, balances, etc. Ideal.

Well, not really. The problem is that there are all sorts of rules and structure that can be used to help you manage your accounting—and spreadsheets don't utilize any of them out of the box. A specialized accounting application will check that accounts balance, report outstanding invoices/bills, calculate taxes, etc. You can build some of these features into a spreadsheet, but why do that when the work has already been done by experts? Also, no-one is going to be au fait with your custom spreadsheet, so when it comes time to share the accounts with a colleague, or your accountant, there's scope for confusion and mistakes. If you use a professional accounting package, however, it will have a structure that is familiar to anyone who has experience of business accounting.

Another problem with the use of spreadsheets in accounting is accuracy—a problem that will pop up again and again in this article. It is all too easy for a newly added row not to be included in a summation formula. Or for a tax rate to be changed inconsistently.

Unless your spreadsheet is being used by your lemonade stand business to see if you can afford that hamster, buy Quickbooks.

This seems like an appropriate point to address, in more detail, the lack of accuracy in spreadsheets. Sarbanes-Oxley and similar laws have resulted in more scrutiny of financial planning systems—and consequently, more scrutiny of corporate spreadsheets. Research, such as that reported by Raymond Panko in "What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors", has found that most of the spreadsheets used by organizations contain errors—and that a considerable number of those errors are serious. In one case reported in Panko's research, the error would have caused a discrepancy of more than a billion dollars! Similarly, an article by Mark Ward in New Scientist reported that Coopers & Lybrand found errors in 90% of spreadsheets they audited. Finally, the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group maintains a list of horror stories about real-world losses due to spreadsheet errors. Don't read it with the lights off.

Why are there so many errors in spreadsheets? To be fair, spreadsheets aren't the only models that contain errors. We all know that software has its fair share of bugs. But the sheer number of spreadsheets, coupled with their "homespun" development, and the difficult of reviewing their logic, makes spreadsheet development the Wild West of the modeling community.

It's extremely difficult to develop accurate spreadsheet models. Professional software developers liken it to programming in ancient languages that rely on the notorious "goto" statement. And then there's the challenge of reviewing formulae that contain "variables" such as "JG271". Paradoxically, familiarity with spreadsheets encourages inexperienced developers to "have a go". While I applaud this adventurous spirit, it doesn't result in well-crafted models.

The software development community has invested extensively in languages, frameworks and tools to improve the quality of software. In comparison, relatively little work has been done to improve the quality of spreadsheet modeling—and the work that has been done has had minimal impact on spreadsheet users. People find it difficult to maintain an understanding of complex logic, so they need to break large models down into simpler components. This isn't as easy to do in a spreadsheet as in, say, a modern object-oriented programming language.

Spreadsheets become increasing complex when models contain conditional (if X then Y else Z) and looping (do X Y times) logic. All business analysts will have encountered Monte Carlo spreadsheets that had thousands of rows of automatically generated results—and involved lookup logic for using those results. Macros can be written to address some of the challenges of using spreadsheets, but extensive use of macros is a clear indication that a spreadsheet may not be the best platform for your modeling. You end up dealing with all the complexity of software development, but suffering the weaknesses of spreadsheets for your efforts.

It's also all too easy to enter bad data into spreadsheets. A wrong keystroke and a formula is replaced with a static value, rendering the calculations meaningless. Freeform data entry allows you to destroy a model in an instant. Protected cells can only do so much. And, once again, if you protect entire sheets and have users interact with the data exclusively through macros, you're not exploiting the native strengths of the spreadsheet platform in the first place.

Another (ab)use of spreadsheets that I'm compelled to address is their use in business models—strategic planning models, forecasts, simulations, what-if analyses, etc. These models tend to have an extended lifespan, over which they are "tweaked" extensively—by different analysts—and used as the basis for significant corporate decisions. These are probably the most challenge models of all to develop—and, therefore, the most prone to errors.

Consider this: how many business problems are actually a natural fit for a two- or three-dimensional grid of cells? The gap between the real-world and the modeling environment is known as the "impedance mismatch"—and, in spreadsheet modeling, it's generally huge. The gap is generally smaller when a modern programming language is employed, as the software designer can map objects to real-world entities. Higher impedance mismatches place higher demands on the analyst, in terms of understanding the model. So, when dealing with an unfamiliar model—either due to its being a while since the model was used, or because it was originally developed by someone else—the chances of mistakes being made are correlated with the impedance mismatch.

If you are building a business model, use a specialist tool (e.g. a simulation application) or a general purpose programming language. That "little spreadsheet model someone threw together in a few days" will eventually cost you dearly.

Hold on? If spreadsheets are so bad at everything, should we be using them at all?!

Who said they were bad at everything? Certainly not me. I'd even go so far as to paraphrase the NRA and say that spreadsheets don't create bad models—people create bad models. And spreadsheets are actually excellent for one very important business activity—prototyping. Prototyping is when you build a model for the purposes of exploring an idea. Or for checking a theory. It basically building a model that you'll discard once you have your answer. Prototypes have a short lifespan and are only used by (or in collaboration with) the original author. They are never used in production.

Spreadsheets excel (no pun intended) in this activity. They are very inclusive, as everyone knows how to use them. And because a lot of thinking about the process they are being used to study is going on, mistakes are less likely to have grave consequences. They can also form the design specification for a more formal model, as the subsequent development process should place more rigorous checks on the logic.

In fact, one wag suggested that spreadsheets would be used more effectively if the save function were removed. I have some sympathy…

OK. I'm guilty of having been a little provocative in this article. But, only a little. If you are using spreadsheets for anything more than individual prototyping in your organization I urge you to seriously consider replacing them with more suitable models.

Porting your spreadsheets to a modern programming language, for example, will:

• result in a design that is a more natural fit to the real-world problem, and, therefore, produce a more accurate model
• allow the use of standard testing tools to improve the quality of the implementation
• allow the use of source code control systems to manage on-going development

There's a stack of evidence that suggests your spreadsheet models are ticking time-bombs.

Please, don't "solve" one problem by making it into two.

The app is designed to be a general-purpose student achievement tracking system that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any education department. In New York State, the Greater Southern Tier Regional Information Center is currently deploying CohortTracker™ to districts in its region.

Simple, intuitive and easy to use, CohortTracker™ is now available. View our introductory screen cast.

A “critical early warning system”

“CohortTracker™ is exactly the tool we need to monitor the graduation status of every student from the day of their enrollment in our secondary school system,” said Mary Kay Worth, superintendent of the Southern Cayuga Central School District. “I am hopeful that this critical early warning system will be available to school districts across New York State as soon as possible.”

CohortTracker™ Executive Summary View
Click to Enlarge

Executive summary view

The executive summary page lets superintendents, principals and guidance counselors know the current exit status of each enrolled cohort.

There are a number of statistics given for each cohort:

• Size
• Percentage of students still enrolled
• Percentage of still enrolled students who are not on track to graduate
• Percentage of students who have graduated, dropped out, transferred to GED or received an IEP diploma.

 
Predefined reports allow the user to filter the executive summary screen by exit status or by No Child Left Behind subgroup (i.e., students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, limited English proficient students or ethnic subgroups).

CohortTracker™ Student Statuses View
Click to Enlarge

Student statuses view

By clicking on a cohort, a user advances to the student statuses page where the students are listed from most to least at risk. The most striking aspect of the student status page is the tracking column on the right of the table.

The colored tracking indicators define performance in five areas: credits, Regents commencement exams, attendance, discipline referrals and out of school suspensions. For any student, red means there is a problem, amber is a warning that a problem might be developing and green means all is well. The colored tracking indicators are defined by a set of business rules that are customizable by school district.

Any column can be sorted by clicking on its heading. Each column can also be filtered by typing text into the column’s filter box.

Because the data in CohortTracker™ is refreshed periodically, users will always have an up-to-date picture of how well or not their students are progressing vis-à-vis graduation.

Student profile view

Users can drill down to get more detailed student profiles. The profile view reveals why each student’s tracking indicator is red, amber or green. For example, the user can see

• Whether or not the student has sat for Regents commencement exams and, if so, the scores earned


CohortTracker™ Student Profile View
Click to Enlarge

• The number of credits acquired to date
• Results for RCT or NYSSA assessments if the student has any
• Available attendance, discipline referral, out of school suspension and tardy data.

“Every principal’s dream”

According to Steve Manning, Manager of Computer Services for GST BOCES: “Working with Prism’s team has been easy and of great value. Their knowledge and experience with app development, student information, assessment, and reporting has been invaluable in creating CohortTracker™. The app is simple, user friendly, concise, and designed with the school administrator and school counselor in mind. School district principals and counselors will find CohortTracker™ to be an asset in tracking and managing their students.”

Indeed, according to principal Luke Carnicelli, “With CohortTracker™, no student should ever be left behind. The app is every principal’s dream.”

CohortTracker™ is a small app requiring small training that elegantly delivers big data to support big decisions. If you would like CohortTracker™ to be available in your state, province or region, contact Sean Brady (info@prismdecision.com) for more information today.

The Data Store: 16 years of financial data for 676 school districts
Click to Enlarge

“The property tax cap in New York State is a game-changer for school districts,” said Center Director Dr. John Sipple. "There is an urgent need for new tools to manage the budgeting process. Thanks to Prism Decision Systems, the Center can now offer the experienced and novice budget professional a sophisticated new tool set for generating multi-year budget scenarios.”

School finance “data store”

The first step in budget forecasting and scenario development is understanding trends. Budget Playground makes this effortless for the user. Fed by a REST web service, the app delivers up to 16 years of audited historical financial trend data for 676 school districts. According to Prism’s chief technology officer, Andrew Tait, “By decoupling the data service from Budget Playground and making it publicly available, the Center is positioned to leverage its existing investment in the data and promote additional innovation by encouraging the development of an array of highly focused “client” apps that help school district administrators overcome their most urgent challenges.”

Intuitive navigation

Budget Playground displays budget history or projections one year per screen. To navigate from year to year, the user swipes the year at the bottom of the screen to flick back and forward through each year’s details. Next to each year’s budget figures, sparklines display the trend (gray) and projection data (blue). As a user swipes from year to year, the spark lines remain the same to provide the context – although the “current year” marker (disc) moves with each swipe. Budget Playground also allows users to display budget data as dollars ($) or as percent (%) increase based on the prior year.

Sparklines: trends (gray) and scenario projections (blue)
Click to Enlarge

Effortless scenario building

Budget Playground is designed specifically to explore various budget scenarios. By default, each scenario that is created and named is populated with budget projections based on the average annual historical increase or decrease. However, budget scenarios typically differ based on key assumptions. For example, will the user assume a 1.6% or a 2.0% real property tax increase? A 3% increase or a 1% decrease in state aid? A 2.0% or a 3.0% increase in teacher salaries? Etc.

Budget Playground enables quick and easy scenario building. A “slider bar” allows the user to select a revenue or expense item and slide the bar to the assumed percent (%) increase. For example, the user might select Total Expenses and slide the bar to 1.5%. Budget Playground recalculates the Total Expense figure for the selected year. This 1.5% increase also automatically propagates down the expense hierarchy proportionally and forward in time.

By default each scenario solves for Unreserved Fund Balance. That is, the summary impact of the scenario’s expense or revenue decisions is displayed as a change to Unreserved Fund Balance. The user also has the option to see the summary impact of expense or revenues decisions on Real Property Tax.

The slider bar allows effortless, real-time scenario building
Click to Enlarge

The budget professional will want to present various budget scenarios to the board of education, first by emailing the scenarios from Budget Playground to the board, and then by presenting from the iPad via external projection, such as a laptop projector or Apple TV®. What if the Board wants real time modification to the scenarios? Simple: just open the slider bar and make adjustments on the fly.

Sophisticated and easy-to-use at the same time

“Budget Playground is sophisticated and easy-to-use at the same time,” said Dr. Sipple. “Feedback has been extremely positive thus far. Users can complete the complex task of budget forecasting with ease. The software leverages the iPad user interface, resulting in an elegant, enjoyable experience."

For more information contact Dr John Sipple, New York Center for Rural Schools (inquires@nyruralschools.org) or Sean Brady, Prism Decision Systems (info@prismdecision.com).

Future development

Potential future developments of Budget Playground include:

• Crowdsourcing: the capability for users to see other users’ forecasts for each revenue and expenditure category. Users would have the option of crowdsourcing their data anonymously or with attribution.
• Benchmarking: the capability for a school district to compare itself against a pre-determined, peer set of similar school districts or the district’s personally selected set of similar school districts.
• Expansion of the data service to include, for example, national price indices.
• User customization of the reported metrics.

Binghamton, NY, August 5, 2011:

Prism Decision Systems, LLC is now a certified Apple® developer, part of a dynamic and diverse community innovating with Apple technologies, including the iPhone® and iPad®. “There have been more than 15 billion apps downloaded from the App Store™ but the vast majority are for personal use,” said Prism president Sean Brady. “We believe there are great opportunities to provide business apps that solve single, urgent problems for the public and private sector.”

Prism recently delivered an iPad app to Cornell University’s New York State Center for Rural Schools. Budget Playground allows school districts to create multi-year budget scenarios. They can then modify those scenarios in real-time to help boards of education agree to budgets that will be acceptable to district stakeholders. The Center for Rural Schools plans to release Budget Playground to all of New York’s school districts in the fall of 2011.

“The iPad and iPhone have become essential business productivity tools,” said Andrew Tait, chief technology officer. “Prism will deliver lightweight apps that are easy to use and not burdened by unnecessary features or complexity.”

For more information, contact

Sean Brady
President, Prism Decision Systems, LLC
607-771-5411
info@prismdecision.com

• Common core standards
• Data driven instruction including school-based inquiry teams
• New teacher/leader evaluation systems based, in part, on student performance

Figure 1 - Click to Enlarge

The challenge

Just a decade after the adoption of No Child Left Behind, the educational ship of state is once again charting a new course. The challenge to each school district? To climb aboard the ship and not be lost in its turbulent wake.

Districts will thrive if they can overcome inertia without a substantial expense of resources, including wasted time, energy and budget. District leadership will need to adjust their current trajectory and redirect resources to a new set of priorities quickly and efficiently.

A model plan

Chenango Forks Central School District provides a model of planning dexterity that other school districts may want to emulate. For the last seven years, the Forks has followed a disciplined comprehensive educational planning process that includes a set of strategic performance targets, rolling priorities and long-term strategies. Typical human behavior would have suggested that the Forks district team would hold tightly to the plan they were heavily invested in and resist change.

Instead, Associate Superintendent Kathleen Dixon posed the challenge very clearly: how do we incorporate the work required of us by RTTT while maintaining our distinct local character and priorities?

Figure 2: Click to Enlarge

The district team embraced Mrs. Dixon’s challenge from the start, looking with open, flexible minds at how to accomodate the RTTT requirements while making the plan uniquely Chenango Forks’. The first task was to swap some new performance targets for old ones. They added

• NYS Grade 3-8: ELA & math % proficient, disaggregated by all students, students with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students
• Regents ELA: % cohort college ready (> 75)
• Regents Math: % cohort college ready (> 80)

At the same time, they eliminated five performance metrics from their plan while modifying another three (see Figure 1 – click to enlarge).

The Forks breakthrough

The real breakthrough came as the team prepared to take a fresh look at the district’s improvement strategies. The facilitation plan was to have the group explore a wide set of possible new strategies and then converge on a final set of priorities and strategies. However, as the team broke for lunch, Nicole Knapp, the Forks elementary school principal, approached the facilitator and said, “I think I can speed up this whole process.” She left an outline of a brand new way to articulate the district’s strategies.

In effect, Mrs. Knapp had completed a matrix analysis that identified

• New strategies required by RTTT.
• Current district strategies that complimented the RTTT strategies.
• Current strategies that reinforced the district’s recent investments and unique priorities.

All other strategies were jettisoned, allowing the Forks to emerge from the planning session with a tight, focused plan that redirects scarce resources to a new set of priorities that align with RTTT, the Regents reform agenda and the district’s distinct local character (see Figure 2 – click to enlarge). For example, the plan retains these unique priorities:

• Use the Chenango Forks’ Writing Continuum to guide curriculum planning and all instruction.
• Implement the five-year technology plan to increase achievement and to promote 21st century skills for students, staff and parents.
• Incorporate measures of 21st century skills in both the APPR and local assessments.

When the district team returned from lunch, they immediately resonated with Mrs. Knapp’s work and were quite excited by it. She had achieved what Edward DeBono calls “the insight re-arrangement of available information.” The team tweaked her work, approved the plan and adjourned about four hours early.

Yes, the Forks is aboard the ship of state and settled into a state room that they find very familiar and quite comfortable.

Important decisions include multiple, sometimes competing factors. A trade-off is the giving up of one thing in return for another. Just about every complex decision requires that you accept having less of one thing in order to get more of something else.

Ben Franklin’s trade-off tool

Ben Franklin’s trade-off tool provides a simple, intuitive way to weigh trade-offs. Create two vertical columns, one labeled “Pros” and one “Cons.” Brainstorm the two lists. Then pair an item or items from each list with an item or items of equal weight from the other list. These similarly weighted combinations of pros and cons cancel each other out. In the sample graphic, the pros outweigh the cons in the tradeoff “algebra.” No need for a more sophisticated tool to make the decision. The methodology could be taught to a young child.

Visualizing trades in a decision matrix

The beauty of a decision matrix is that you can easily manage the tradeoff analysis because you can see where the trade-offs are.

A previous three-part post described how to complete a multi-criteria analysis. Part 3 illustrated how to construct a decision matrix using the example of the college selection process.

The matrix above displays the final results of assessing three colleges against a set of weighted criteria. The cells with the red border represent the highest score on each criterion. The “Total Benefit” is the sum of the weighted scores. As you can see, the matrix helps to clarify the decision’s specific trade-offs by individual criterion.

These results might lead a family to decide to select Syracuse because it has the highest Total Benefit score and scores highest on three criteria: Distance, Clubs and Food. However, the trade-offs are also clear. Delaware is superior on two criteria: Social Life and Facilities. Temple, on one: Major. The decision framework creates clarity: by selecting Syracuse, the family achieves the greatest Total Benefit but gives up on superior Facilities, Social Life and Major.

The challenge of any complex decision is how to clarify, manage and evaluate the trade offs. Ben Franklin’s trade-off tool and a decision matrix each complete the task in different ways. How do you manage trades in your decision-making?