2018 ELDA Summit
Education Leadership Data Analytics (ELDA) is an emerging domain that is centered at the intersection of education leadership, the use of evidence-based improvement cycles in schools to promote instructional improvement, and education data science. ELDA practitioners work collaboratively with school and district leaders and teachers to analyze, pattern, and visualize previously unknown patterns and information from the vast sets of data collected by schooling organizations, and then integrate findings in easy to understand language and digital tools into collaborative and community-building evidence-based improvement cycles with stakeholders. Current research in data-driven decision-making and leadership in education has called attention to a significant need for education leaders to develop capacities in these three main areas. On June 8, 2018, the first Education Leadership Data Analytics Summit was held at Teachers College, Columbia University. The Summit was designed to bring together education and research leaders and innovators working at the intersections of individual overlaps of two or three of these three circles in the Venn diagram. The ELDA Summit brought participants together across a wide variety of fields in education.
ELDA practitioners work collaboratively with or within schools and districts, know how to facilitate and lead capacity-building conversations with educators using evidence and data to build trust and collaboration, and work with data through code, analytics, data mining and machine learning, and statistics to visualize and pattern data in new and informative ways. The domain and market is ripe for more capacity building offerings for teachers, leaders, central office staff, and researchers throughout education. Current offerings do not address all three sectors of ELDA of Education Leadership, Evidence-based improvement cycles, and Data Science. Additionally, offerings that do exist in the market are not accessible and do not address the needs of the market, such as providing professional development and continuing education credit (CEU) style non-credit courses to current school and district leaders on ELDA in an accessible format.