Unlocking Educational Insights: Institutional Research with Sarah Enterline Roch

Narrator 00:02
Welcome to Talking Technology with ATLIS, the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens. We'll hear stories from technology directors and other special guests from the Independent School community and provide you will focus learning and deep dive topics. And now please welcome your host, Christina Lewellen.

Christina Lewellen 00:25
Hello everyone and welcome back to Talking Technology with ATLIS. I'm Christina Lewellen, the executive director of the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools. And

Bill Stites 00:34
I am Bill Stites, the Director of Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New Jersey.

Hiram Cuevas 00:40
And I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of Information Systems and Academic Technology at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia. Hey, guys,

Christina Lewellen 00:46
how are you? Hello,

Bill Stites 00:47
how'd you do?

Christina Lewellen 00:48
It's good to see you. It's great to be seen. I'm really excited. The ATLIS world right now is buzzin, we came off of a wonderful conference, even people who could not attend, were able to listen to the podcast recordings. And our members were really excited about that our membership continues to grow. And what's really exciting for me is that we are going into like a strategic refresh, we're not going to do the full strategic planning process just because of where it falls in our cycle right now. But we are going to kind of update our objectives and make sure that everybody is still aligned. And so that's a big project that we're working on this summer. And it'll be really cool to sort of see where all of that lands. And it just had me reflecting a little bit about how rewarding it is to work at an organization where the board and the operations team, the staff is so aligned. And you know, we're all in it for the same goals, we are excited about the same progress and success and wins. And so it's been kind of a really, I'm in this reflective space where I'm excited about the future of ATLIS. But I'm also just really proud of how far we've come. And so that sparks me, wondering with you guys, as we sit down for our virtual coffee dates on these podcasts, I've never asked you what you consider some of the most rewarding aspects of your career, we've talked a lot about how it has evolved organically. And it's much different than what you thought it would be. But do you guys have something that you feel is the most rewarding aspect of your career to date,

Bill Stites 02:18
I will give you two quick ones. One is having worked at a school for those of you that have the ability to do so being able to send your children through the school having a career that has given me that only one of my two children have come through the school. But I can just tell you what a wonderful opportunity. That is. That's very personal. And something I'm deeply connected with having him had that same experience here. But the one thing that I would probably say, from purely like a work perspective, I think is just this, the way in which my job and what I do on a day to day basis has allowed me to connect with others, and to share and to learn from others in ways that hopefully have helped others but in turn, have really kind of led to our school being able to develop the program to get the guidance it needs, you know, when we're trying to take on new directions. So I think what's really been rewarding is for us to give as much as we take and to share with the larger community connect with people outside of your four walls, so to speak. So that's what's resonated most

Christina Lewellen 03:21
with me, it is cool to kind of get to that point in your career when you're giving back a bit. Like that's something that you don't really expect when you're maybe earlier in your career. And then you've sort of come along the path and you help folks come with you. That's always very rewarding. So

Bill Stites 03:36
we've always said, it's all about your network. And it's just developing that network and just having those people that can either turn to you, or you can turn to them. Because this job is not easy and developing that and having that to hold on to I think is one of the greatest resources you can have in this field. I will

Hiram Cuevas 03:55
echo what Bill said, it is fun watching your children go through the schools that you work at, you're always there, you're always available to see some of the performances that they're doing. And in some of the athletic events that they're doing that take what's wonderful is I've met Bill sons, and they're both fantastic people. And it's wonderful to see your children becoming fine adults. That's a blessing right there. The second part is I will also echo what Bill said about these relationships. I mean, our bromance started in the mid teens of the 2000s. And it was at the Lawson laptop conference. And that was really important to me, because many of us are in these roles. And we're in isolation. we're by ourselves, and there aren't a whole lot of folks that really understand what it is that we do. But my connection would Bill led to other connections with other folks in the industry. And it is something quite fascinating to see us all together at the ATLIS conference and everybody is just engaging in very similar conversation. And similar experiences that when you're back at your schools, most people don't get it. They really don't have an understanding of what's going on. But this is perhaps the best part of my professional growth is knowing that I have the capacity to phone a friend right away.

Christina Lewellen 05:18
I love that. So

Bill Stites 05:19
hi. I'm going to be like the angry spouse now. Our relationship goes back before the teens now, I was just looking over at my wall because when we got the the award for the spotlight school, and that was 2012. And I knew I knew you before then so we go back further than that.

Christina Lewellen 05:36
Well, you messed up the anniversary, Hiram. Ah, dude. Yeah,

Bill Stites 05:41
no, seriously, it's gone back longer than that. Yeah, well, I

Hiram Cuevas 05:44
will ensure that you have a really good dinner when you drive down, but

Christina Lewellen 05:49
you are in the doghouse, sir. Well, now that that little spousal spat is over, I'm really excited about our guest today. And you know, I think that talking about something that is really rewarding in the ATLIS community is the partnership that we've created with CIRIS, which is the Center for Institutional Research at Independent Schools. It's a budding group of people who are focused on Institutional Research at our schools. There's so much crossover in terms of clean data, and the tech teams that that partnership has been very rewarding for me and for ATLIS. And so today's guest is perfect to have these conversations with we are welcoming today, Sarah Enterline Roch, and she is from St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, Sarah, welcome to our somewhat dysfunctional but happy and loving family. How are you today? I

Sarah Enterline Roch 06:40
am wonderful, thank you so much for including me, I'm very excited to talk with you all, and share what I can with this community.

Christina Lewellen 06:47
I think that there's so many parallels, when I look back at technology leaders and the journey that they've been on for the last 20 plus years, and the journey that ATLIS has been on for the last almost 10 years. It's really interesting, because in a lot of ways, institutional research is similar in that journey, in terms of kind of often being like a, on an island of themselves. And being a single person team. You know, that may grow in time. But a lot of times, some folks like you are out there, the warriors kind of doing the work. So we're gonna dive into that today. But can we start with just learning a little bit more about you and your journey? Tell everybody a bit about not only you, but also your school that you work

Sarah Enterline Roch 07:25
for? Sure, yeah. So my journey has taken several Island hawks, to put it in some sort of a metaphor. But I did not get my start, really, I'm not a technology person. I'm married to someone who started it and has always worked in it. I'm a researcher by origin. So my earliest moments in that work, or in psychology at Denison University, where I got my undergrad, and there, what really compelled me in the courses is just understanding how human perception is an integral force that shapes our reality. And as my professional life started to take shape, when I went to graduate school, here, in Boston, at Boston College, I really got into this idea of teaching for social justice, and what that means, and the beliefs and practices related to social justice. And a lot of the work I did was with Dr. Marilyn Cochran Smith at Boston College, and really understanding that how a teacher views themselves and their teaching and their students really will shape the learning opportunities that are provided to students. So those lenses are essential for you as an educator to understand, but also us as researchers, for us to be able to open the door for that understanding to occur. And so my dissertation was all about elementary school kids, and how they identify and understanding all the variety of ways that students will identify themselves. And that kind of led me towards this path of, well, we need to have good data. Because if we're sort of putting our own perception of what we think a kid is, into our database, that's not right. And that could be biased in a lot of ways. And it could be incorrect. So understanding kind of the importance of accurate and good data collection really became, I think, a professional passion of mine, and why from that, instead of moving into things like psychology or teacher education, I really moved into institutional research that has what I find very exciting serves this idea of being able to partner and collaborate very closely with technology and the folks doing the data management, the data strategy and all of that. You

Christina Lewellen 09:40
are interested in how elementary students self identify a while ago like this is probably before we were having some of the more contemporary conversations around the ways that kids will identify themselves. Absolutely.

Sarah Enterline Roch 09:55
You know, one of my most eye opening anecdotes from my dissertation where Research, which, in hindsight, is the kind of a depressing anecdote, but it was really an invaluable experience where one of the questions on my short little demographic survey was religion. And so my dissertation was all about how the more diverse a classroom, the more motivating it can be. So one of the things I asked was, What is your religion? And I remember one student calling me over saying, I don't really know how to answer this question. And I said, Well, everybody has different religions. You could have multiple at home, which ones do you happen? And he said, Well, my mom is Christian, and my dad was Muslim. But they've told me not to say that I'm Muslim, because people will think I'm a terrorist. And this was, you know, back in the early 2000s. And that really struck me as like, you can't have an identity based on the social view of what that identity means. And I think I've seen that play out in other ways that comes into play with race all the time. But again, getting into sort of how you identify the accuracy of how you identify versus being able to disclose it in a way where it's valuable for what the whatever the reason why you're disclosing it

Bill Stites 11:11
may be when you say, how does the student identify? And when I think about that, you know, I think about the topics that we're talking about now, in the context of where we are now in particular, but one of the questions I have is, Did you do any work on how they identify as a learner? So what type of learner worthy, not necessarily an identity related to gender or ethnicity or race or any of those factors? But was there any looking at you know, what I learned best when I am building I learned best when I was writing or reading, I think back to when I taught third grade? And what engaged kids and what really got kids motivated in terms of if I want them to learn this, I need to structure it in this way. Did any of that work go in that direction? Or was it mostly focused on like the bio demo data that we're talking about, you know, a lot now,

Sarah Enterline Roch 12:05
my dissertation was very much focused on those demographic identifiers, and building a mathematical model to predict how motivating a classroom would be based on the variety within the actual student, demographic makeup, I will say that in the work I did in grad school, and we're talking about, like how a teacher views a student really will influence how they teach that student, in a lot of cases. And this is something that I see in independent schools very much as well, we tend to teach the way that we prefer to be taught. And breaking down that and saying, you know, if you go into a classroom, where people have different backgrounds, from what you had, if you go into a classroom, where people identify differently than you do, and even today, you go into a classroom and 2024 It's so different, no matter what, from what you may have experienced 1015 20 years ago, kids will be learning and prefer to learn in different ways than you will ever have had an opportunity to when you were actually a student yourself. It's so

Christina Lewellen 13:12
interesting now, okay, so we got all wound up, which is very typical of this podcast, and we went straight into your work, we could not even resist ourselves. But let's back up for just a second because you did this research. How did you land in independent schools, and especially the one that you're at right now? So let's kind of finish that journey before we attack you with more questions. Sure,

Sarah Enterline Roch 13:33
yeah, I sort of left off on the island of grad school, I never got to the other islands, I jumped to. I worked at Boston College for several years after I graduated, which was a wonderful opportunity. And then I left that to go into consulting full time, I worked with public school districts around the country, I worked with colleges and universities, very infrequently when I work with independent schools. However, what was really interesting about that half is I got to see the variety of different ways that we look at diversity, and look at issues of equity in many different educational environments. So one story I can share from kind of the K 12 Public School world was the idea that in order to include the entire school community in our school, we actually have to be able to communicate with them. And that sounds simple, but you know, making sure that we are translating things into home languages, if parents do not have English as a primary language, ensuring that when we are sending out emails, it's going to the correct email addresses and it's not just going to something they put on an email or on a forum 10 years ago. So all of these ways that we communicate, really does have a data based structure to it so that we can do it well and do it efficiently. I got took that from like my public school world because there are many, many different languages across this country that are Families seek when their primary language is not English. Also, in the work with the colleges and universities, I had the privilege of working under Jack McGuire, who is known as the founder of Enrollment Management. And the work we did with colleges was using all of this information that we would have about an applicant in order to be able to build a financial model in order to really influence net tuition revenue. And so if you don't have complete information or accurate information about an applicant, you can't really build those models very well. And so you're guessing at what sort of the financial aid or assistance should be not based on really much of anything except hunch. So those were a couple of different experiences in my consulting world that really influenced kind of how I think about do this work. So flash forward to St. Mark's, I've been at St. Mark's for six years and finishing up my sixth year here. And I didn't necessarily see myself as going back into independent schools, I was a K 12, independent school student. It is like coming home in a lot of ways. But I didn't really see myself as a career in an independent school. It's been six years, it's been a wonderful six years, and I have no plans of leaving. And I say that because of all the things that here Annabelle already talked about, like the being able to phone a friend, like the giving, and willingness for this community to really help each other out and provide insight and advice and structure around sort of the professional growth opportunities that we give to each other for free. That's just been such a amazing opportunity, and community to consider myself a part of. So Sarah, what is your role?

Christina Lewellen 16:44
With St. Mark's like, what specifically is the work that you're doing? You bring such a rich background, and those examples of firsthand experiences of how bias can affect decision making. Those are incredible. So how do you bring that into what you do now.

Sarah Enterline Roch 17:00
So I'm the Director of Institutional Research for St. Mark's school, I have a huge office of all me. And so I collaborate constantly. And that's part of the skill set that's required for doing this work. And it takes a certain type of person because unlike some of the consulting jobs I had, or unlike what this work may look like in public education, I'm the one cleaning and coding the data, as well as doing the presentations for boards of trustees. So it's all of the skill sets, all of the things go into this work. Currently, my work very much revolves around a lot of research on the student experience what it means to thrive. As a student at our school, I asked to do a fair amount of work on faculty and staff experience, onboarding, and as well as professional growth and professional development. What that looks like, I was the one of to a co chair for our accreditation process. So leading all of that I also now I'm the chair for our accreditation committee that's tasked with making sure we actually fulfill the recommendations that were required of us. I think a lot of my work falls into those various buckets. So

Hiram Cuevas 18:15
Sarah, what I find interesting is many of the data points that you had mentioned earlier, using the religion example. In particular, I have found that as it relates to enrollment management, many families are less likely to fill out things like religion and ethnicity because they don't want to share that information. And unless it's totally obvious, you can surmise what a child's background may be. And even, you know, just on the surface, that's not always 100% accurate. Given the nature of things today, how has St Marks managed to look at some of these categories as optional fields, and wanted to make them more almost required so that you can have clean data and accurate data? Because when we've been asked to conduct reports on the diversity in terms of religion, we don't have a lot of data points. So as a result, we're making our best guess. But knowing we have a population set that is missing, because it's essentially a null set.

Sarah Enterline Roch 19:20
Yeah, I would say one of the things that has happened at St. Mark's, it's probably happened at many other schools as we had a transition in leadership from our di, senior admin. So at that time, and this was three, four years ago. So what a great opportunity to just understand the profile of our students and how our demographics have changed over time. And when I get into the data, I realized exactly what you were just talking about here. I'm like, we I'll be blunt. We didn't have that data before 2013. It just was not there. What we did have was maybe on like 20% of the kids or something like that. So that was a harsh reality to say like hey, I I can't tell you whether we are more or less diverse than we were 10 years ago. There's lots of anecdote about that. But I can't, from a data perspective share that. One thing that I am very passionate about is being able to provide a safe place for people to disclose their identities in a way that they trust the use of that information. I think, in many instances, the reason why people do not disclose that information is because they don't trust where it's going. And so the way that I like to define it in terms of building that trust is, we can't know if we are equitable. As a school, we can't know if we're inclusive in our programming, unless we know who you are. And the only way to know who you are is for you to tell us how you identify. And if you can't, then we need to work on something else. We are working on equity and inclusion, we're working on building trust. So that's why I mean, a lot of people talk about the work of di as being ongoing. That's why because you always have to build trust. And you always have to continue that so that you can really collect the information you need in order to look at equity and inclusion.

Bill Stites 21:12
I'm listening to and I'm thinking just how much I agree with what you're saying in that a lot of the work that we've done here at Mk I worked very closely with our director Parrish McLean, who, if you look at the work that he's done, since he started here a couple of years ago, around this area, that clarity of purpose, in terms of why are we asking for the information? And then how are we going to then act upon that, I think is really some of the things that you need to be thoughtful about. Because one of the things that we've been able to do is we've been able to ask her that information, and then develop program around that, once we've had that. So things like affinity groups, or you know, different evenings or different communications around different topics, so on and so forth. We've been able to use that to make a lot of very important decisions, but it's removing that question of what are they going to do with this information? Why are they asking for it? And getting out in front of that really big. But I think that speaks to something that you mentioned that I'm really curious about it, you know, working closely with our Office of Diversity here at Mk. Paris is one of my top collaborators, you know, when it comes to data, who are your top collaborators, because as an office of one, you said, you got to be working with a lot of different people. And when Hiram and I would talk to schools about information and data or whatnot, we would always talk about, you know, a Data Governance Committee get groups of people together, what does that look like for you, where you are now and for what you would recommend for schools to have in that circle of top collaborators?

Sarah Enterline Roch 22:52
Yeah, that's a great question. And I will say, I'm in a very exciting point in St. Mark's history, I hope, my work to date, I would say has been driven by this strategy of looking at research in a kind of top down approach. So if it's something that the head of school wants to look into, or it's something that the senior administrative team wants to look into, then that comes to me and I will prioritize that, rather than just sort of what's of interest necessarily, to me, or maybe of interest to the History Department. And using that frame. So in that realm, my top collaborators have been everyone on the senior administrative team, we do have a position of Director of Strategic Projects him and I work very closely together, in terms of trying to come up with what is strategically important for the school and DEI projects, definitely, I've worked a lot with our admission and enrollment management function. That really, I've used that kind of senior AD team umbrella. I say, it's really exciting now, because kind of based on the last ATLIS conference, there really was a fire started in me, but also, I think, in this community to really become serious about data governance, and data strategy, just for Burien from fiscal Academy did a great presentation on the Data Governance Committee and what it looks like to build one. So I took that back to St. Mark's, and I said, Okay, you know what, we've said that this is important, but let's really get behind it. And that's really started. And so we are, at this point, over the summer, me and the director of strategic projects, and our director of it are getting together, we sent out a form to all the offices that deal with data. That's basically what keeps you up at night. What are your data issues? What is your source of truth and do you not have one? So we're trying to gather all of these questions and potential opportunities for this work, so that come back in the fall, we can really put together a committee that's the right people and then that will get some work done. So I'm very excited to see where that goes. So

Hiram Cuevas 25:04
Sarah, you're talking about a wonderful journey that I think St. Mark's is actually embarking on, I want to take it back just a little bit, when you first started doing this type of work, I want to tease out, you said you were relying on, you know, senior admins or your head of school terms of saying this is what I'm after? What did you use as your sampler to kind of get people interested in this type of work? When you first arrived? There? I'm thinking, you know, did you have like an ala carte menu of different types of things that you are able to tease out with the schools data and say, Hey, this is something for you to think about. And what perhaps were those items that really helped tease out the direction for your school.

Sarah Enterline Roch 25:42
So when I started at St. Mark's, I was handed the very simple, not controversial project at all, which was taking a recent faculty experience survey and reporting on what was found back to the faculty. So it was like, Who is this new person? What is she doing? And why is she telling us where we are satisfied and not satisfied. And so it was kind of like being thrown into the wolves, so to speak. But that was a great way for me to start building these relationships, you know, that from really getting to building the trust, like having faculty see me as a kind of a third party, but an objective researcher and objective view, I was not the dean of faculty, I was not the head of school. And so I kind of was able to aggregate their experience, and present it to senior administration in a way that they believed. And so what that has done is that really opened up doors very quickly. But it also allowed me to say, you know, what, I'm seeing this in the school or I'm seeing this area of opportunity, and getting a sounding board with senior admin to say, is this something we really need to start looking into. Also, another thing that has driven my work is aspects of strategic planning, accreditation, and the like. So we have concluded a strategic plan, we currently are going to be putting a new one in place in the next couple of years, we are going through a head transition right now. So that's been delayed a couple of years, we put into place a community and equity strategic plan. And my voice at the table has been, I think, extremely valuable and welcomed. Because there are goals, for example, this is a very simple one. And I'm sure many schools have it. But we have a goal to increase the diversity of our faculty. Well, what is the current diversity of our faculty? Oh, we don't have that variation. So how do we know what the goal should be? Like we know from our own, again, perceived reality of what the adults look like and what the kids look like. But we don't really know how many of our faculty actually identify as people of color. How do we get at that information? And so that's been, I think, very valuable for the institutional research perspective, to have that voice at the table to say, we can't just come up with these lofty goals if we have no way of measuring or tracking progress towards them. Sarah,

Christina Lewellen 28:12
I'm definitely picking up what you're putting down about the value and importance of trust in these types of endeavors. But let me ask you this, if someone listening to this podcast is someone who is interested in institutional research and sees the value of it, even if they are not identifying themselves as an institutional researcher, but just has interest in presenting this data to make better decisions, but they don't have the attention or support of leadership, any guidance for people in that situation?

Sarah Enterline Roch 28:46
Yes, because I do see those folks in schools that may have like an office administrator role, or may have some data and analysis background, reading some of these systems that they have their hands in and asking questions, and that is perfectly wonderful. And part of I think a lot of us as educators, we are kind of predisposed to always be questioning things. Now, I think to really build this capacity within a school that may not have a institutional researcher on staff or may not have this as a kind of a strategic part of their vision is just to be asking those questions. And it comes down to simply asking questions like, how will we know why do we do this? What is the reasoning behind this particular program in this way, just asking questions that really get people thinking about the reasonings and the why, and then it really opens up the door for Okay, if that's the reason, do we have data to back us up? What is the evidence? And then the next natural step to that is, is our data complete? Is it accurate, and who has access to it? Absolutely.

Christina Lewellen 29:59
So what are some For the examples, like, let's dive into your work a little bit, let's go deeper and talk about some of the things whether it was in your previous life or with St. Mark's, but what are some of the examples of your work where you've been given some, at least freedom, I guess, to go down the path and look into some of these important data points in your school? What are you excited to share in terms of examples.

Sarah Enterline Roch 30:23
So one thing that was really interesting to me, around COVID, when we all sat down, and we all went home, St. Mark's was in the very lucky position to be able to reopen in the fall of 2020, we reopened in a reality that I choose to call choose your own adventure. So we had DEI students and boarding students prior to that, in the fall of 2020, you could be a DEI student of boarding student, or go back and forth, or you could be virtual, at campus, or virtual from home, or, and here's where it got interesting virtual from somewhere else. And so what became really clear is that we needed to know the somewhere else's. And well, there was an assumption in putting our schedule together over that summer, that we were going to be teaching to students, a large number of students who are going to be on West Coast pacific time in California, in Washington, in those states, St. Mark's is in Eastern time, we're in Massachusetts. So we started designing our schedule, with this sort of three hour flexibility. Well, I came in and I said, Well, do we actually know if those kids are going to be in California? And we did, you know, a very simple survey, but just Where are you, when we found out that only three kids were actually in California. So let's not design the entire schedule, what we needed to do is design the schedule was really for us, it became a 12 or 13 hour difference, because we had a huge population in the eastern time zone. And we had a huge population in China, and in Asia. So we had to do a lot of things at 7am, seven 8pm, in order to hit every kid at the same time. And that's a little short survey became something that people did on a regular basis, like where are you today. And so I built a dashboard for our faculty where they could log in and not only see who was in their class, let's see where they were. So this student is in the building, they shouldn't be sitting in their chair, this student is not in the building, but they're in Hawaii, because we had you know, someone who bought a house in Hawaii for that summer that year, why not? If you could, also, we had people saying, well, I'm staying home because I was exposed. And so I will be home for the next two weeks. And before I come back, so being able to really fast and furiously kind of develop that system, that will never happen again. And that dashboard will never be accessed again. But it was so useful for the school to like really get a handle on, we have to actually plan around reality, not around perception. One

Bill Stites 33:07
of the things that you mentioned to me is that's a great use case around that particular time. And I think that was something that I think we all took things out of that period that we're maybe not doing exactly the same way. But definitely taking the lessons learned from COVID is what we would call it and applying that I think it's really interesting to transition those skills over to what you're doing. Now, one of the things you mentioned early on, and I was curious, because we were talking about things that you can use to kind of like, engage people in doing a little bit more with it if they can see why we're asking that question. And you had mentioned early looking at different constituent groups and their experience and how well they're thriving at the school. And whenever I hear thrive, I always go back to Eric, and Moray and the Thrive index that he created down there. I say down there because he's in DC, and I'm a parent jersey. But that thrive index is what I've been using, in my conversations with people hear about, okay, we start gathering this information and we start wanting to look at everyone's experience as a whole. If we have the data, we're going to be able to do this, we're not going to be able to do these things until we get that data. Have there been any of those things? Have you been able to either start something there that you could point to and say if we can add more data to do it, we'll be able to do this? Or have you looked at any other pieces outside of school and said if we can garner some energy around this, we're going to be able to do these things. Are there any other examples like that, that you can share with the audience in terms of things to go to when you need help supporting your

Sarah Enterline Roch 34:46
work? Sure. So we at St. Mark's have gone through an 18 month process at this point to build our own Dr. Model, Eric and his work at Moray has been essential as My phone a friend, but also as a consultant in that work, and that has driven our IT department to really understand and get sort of the support outside of it to build a data warehouse. You know, it's something that IT folks and professionals realize the importance of realize the value of, but until, like the people outside of it really be like, oh, we need this in order to really function and do a lot of the things that we say we want to do. And to say we value we really need good data, connections, and warehousing, and dictionaries and all the like. So, to your question, Bill, I think what has been really great about that process, is we've been able to say we're a school that does fill in the blank. Well, do we actually know that we do that? How do we know? And again, back to the question, how do we know that we are a school that builds experiential learning skills? Where do we see that what has been important for our own data around our students thrive project is to collect self reported information from our students themselves, as well as behavioral data. So sense of belonging, all of that is definitely something we gather from surveys. But we also are asking, you know, are they participating in student clubs? Are they leaders on campus, all of these other sort of behavioral data points, coupled with the self report really builds, I think, a much more valid set of information to in order to look a student driving?

Christina Lewellen 36:35
So how do you sync that up? This is just my ignorance, like, how do you sync those two pieces up self reporting, and then observable involvement? Or however you characterize that? How do you sync it up so that you make meaningful decisions at an admin level? What

Sarah Enterline Roch 36:50
we do in our models, and this is what we got from Eric, and Moray is building these predictive models, where, depending on sort of your level of statistics, knowledge, I won't go into it. But that's a series of regression models. And whether a kid says that they are healthy, will have a certain weight assigned to it, versus the number of times they show up on our health services, because they stayed up too late, and they just can't function, that's the behavioral that will have its own weight associated with it. Now, I'm not saying one is going to be weighted higher than the other I don't know that off the top of my head. But there are, and it is based on sort of predicting an overall health. And so again, kind of looking at the variety, the more data you have, the better in these types of approaches, which is also for me really exciting as an opportunity to say, hey, we're measuring academics, great, we have a ton of academic data, the health data, we don't really get through that much. We don't really track that much. Like how do we know if our kids are thriving from a mental and emotional state, it's hard.

Christina Lewellen 37:55
And if they fall below that line, let's say you define you have your weights that probably would vary school to school, you know, you have your indicators. If a student is failing to thrive, then what? Because now that you have this data, you then need to put the scaffolding and the support around it to move the needle. Right? So is this on a kid by kid basis that you react to this data?

Sarah Enterline Roch 38:17
So we're just at the beginning of sort of, now what, what do we do with this, not that those conversations have ever occurred yet, but for us, we have a couple of different committees that deal with student issues. And so what we plan to present to those groups are from a cohort level, so the ninth graders versus the 10th graders, the boys versus the girls, and trying to sort of get them to talk about programmatically how we're supporting different types of students. Now, there is a small group that we call our students support team that will talk about individual students that are either big red flags, or there's some concerns about the Thrive data will be informative in those conversations. We don't believe that it should trigger any sort of like immediate intervention if you get a low Thrive score, but it should be part of the conversation around a what this team will do for supports for a student. That's incredible. So Sarah,

Hiram Cuevas 39:18
I'm curious, you haven't gotten to the point yet where there is a need for mitigation just yet, based on the data that you find. Are you thinking that there's probably a need for St. Mark's to develop some data governance and privacy policies associated with how this data is actually used? If we're going to be dealing with some sort of mitigation of risk or behavioral issues? So

Sarah Enterline Roch 39:43
yes, I think that's the simplest way to answer that question. It's complex, because and this is where I think institutional research and it and the collaboration partnership is so important, and that is that much of the data that we're using to look got student driving is data we already have, it's already been collected, it's already in our systems that already has all of the sort of security and stuff that goes along with all of our data storage, we're just now using it in a way to inform decisions in a way that we never have before. So to that, I think that's why I'm saying, you know, we as a school are taking a stance at this point is that your Thrive score is not really what this project is about. It's about understanding the holistic nature of an education and experiences, and being able to use the data to inform those conversations. It's not something like GPA that's going to get reported to you, or reported to your parents or anything like that. It's just another piece of way that we are using the information we already have, in order to better drive conversation and decision making.

Bill Stites 40:50
So So one of the questions I've been thinking about is, let's say, Stites has never once had a conversation with CIRIS has never once sat in on any of your sessions before has never done anything related to IR, institutional research, data, data governance, any of those things, what would you go to a tech director and say, This is where I need your help. Help. This is what I need from you. This is how I need to engage with you to move this along. What do you need from us? If we didn't know anything about this topic whatsoever?

Sarah Enterline Roch 41:25
I think a central question is just asking what is our source of truth. And if I am sort of the office administrator in my dean's office, where I, my job is seen students all the time, I know everybody, I practically probably know all of their parents, my source of truth, in many ways will be me. Or if I'm sort of entering data into my own spreadsheets or whatever, that's my source of truth. I think the question then becomes, if someone outside of myself and another department in another role, wants to know about a student, they're not me. So how, what is their source of truth going to be? So I think my recommendation would be for it offices to say, do you have multiple sources of truth? And if so? And the answer is yes, by the way? And if so, which one should be the one that we start training the entire school to be able to access a news, rather than relying on various sources of truth across the school?

Christina Lewellen 42:25
And are there other ways that tech teams can support IR efforts at schools? Like if they're in a budding new program? What ways can the tech teams be supportive to folks like you who are doing this work?

Sarah Enterline Roch 42:38
Well, bringing it full circle back to the DEI components of this, I think a tech team can be very helpful in helping a school define what it means by diversity, equity, and inclusion, because those are topics that are talked about, but I don't see enough done to really understand how schools defining them. And I'm saying that in a way that I believe schools will have different definitions of them, whatever is sort of mission appropriate for your school may be different, or will be different from the school down the street or the school in another state. And so helping to define what is meant by that will really drive and do see it as an IT perspective, as well really drive kind of how we have systems that are built around those definitions. In other words, back to my faculty of color example, if it's important for us to define diversity as a school by having a diverse faculty in terms of faculty of color, well, if we don't have a system that collects that information, then we can't really say that that's what we value in terms of diversity. So Sarah, can

Hiram Cuevas 43:49
you give us some specific examples of some sources of truth that are used at your school and what other schools may be using, then they don't even realize that they should consider as being sources of truth for their institutions.

Sarah Enterline Roch 44:00
So going back to kind of where my lens always goes, which is on student identification, and student knowledge. So there's a source of truth, which is what was provided on an application, understanding that that may be the parents way that they identify their kid, not the way that the kid themselves identifies. Then there's the source of truth, which I said, The Office administrator who sees the kid all the time, they know who this kid is, they have a sense of how this kid identifies them maybe different. And oftentimes it is from what's in that student information system like Blackbaud or Veracross, because that's what the parent put down on the form when they applied to the school. So those are two separate sources of truth. The kid themselves develops we all know kids change. There are some identifiers that are going to be impacted by their adolescence, and there are some that may not be as likely to be impacted or changed, but allowing for that change to be done. Human two is important from a data perspective. In other words, I don't want to identify a student the way that their parents thought that they were when they were 13 years old, to how they identify that how I identify them when I'm working in an advancement, and reaching out to them when they're 30 years old, understanding that the way that they've identified and the way that they have looked at themselves may have changed over time. So again, all different offices have own systems, where there may be different sources of truth. I also think it goes back to this idea of call it survey fatigue, but form fatigue, you know, the number of time a family is asked who they are, and for their information is kind of insane. And we can do better. If we just linked our data systems together. The

Bill Stites 45:49
only follow up I would have to that would be like, you're talking about the people and their times and where they are, and how they identify as being the sources of truth. I always turn to a good data map, in terms of the where, and where are all of these pieces coming from? And I think one of the things that happens in a source of truth, Hi, I'm for those that can't see, because you can't see him was holding up a map. There are all of those places where we know exist, and all those places that we don't know that they exist, or the other offices don't know that they exist. So it's often you know, we need this data, where's this data? Where's that source of truth for that collection of that date, not the individual as the source, but the collection point for those things. And I think it's helpful to have that type of visual representation. Because I think when you think about anything that has to do with governance, when you think about anything that has to do with, you mentioned standards, dictionaries, you know, warehouses, you know, where are we pulling all of this from? Where is it all going to centralize and kind of come in to? Where do you need to go to work on those things, having a good visual representation. And I say that over a list, because you can make a list, but it's not a connected list, you don't know how all the things flow. That's the only other point I would bring to this and ask for your thoughts on that. Because I think that's where, from an IT perspective, managing all of that not even the data that's in all of that, but just managing all the different things is so much work. And then when you get into what's in all of those things, that's the other level that's on top of it. So just do you have any thoughts to that? I'd love to hear what they are. Well,

Sarah Enterline Roch 47:33
I'm a sucker for good visualization, maps, and data vids. That's my love language. So I also can see how powerful it is. I'm just thinking of like, I know, the maps that I've seen from your work bill have been amazing. And I'm also thinking of the maps I've put together for my St. Mark's folks on the different data points and how they relate to these Thrive dimensions. And we can map them all day long, but like they exist in a level above where the data live. And one thing, I believe it's very simple, but for some for a school that's sort of interested in getting into this work is looking at and getting there that idea of a source of truth, but what is your unique identifier for a person? And if it's this in this system, and it's that and the other system? Like how am I supposed to know that that's the same person of Sarah Enterline. In the student information system is Sarah Roch and razor's edge when she got married? How am I supposed to know that's the same person? And so very simple, I think can be for schools to say, what are your systems? And then the map? The connection is just what are the unique identifiers? I love that.

Bill Stites 48:49
I just needed to say that there you go,

Christina Lewellen 48:51
you're speaking their language.

Bill Stites 48:53
Let's fall in love. So yes, 100%.

Christina Lewellen 48:56
You made their soul happy.

Sarah Enterline Roch 48:58
So Sarah, to take us to

Hiram Cuevas 48:59
an even simpler level, you had been using the word data warehouse, we've heard a lake for our audience who may not be as familiar with those two terms and why the delineation between those two is important, especially in light of this whole primary key, essentially, that we've been just discussing. Could you elaborate on that for our audience?

Sarah Enterline Roch 49:19
Yeah. And again, my perspective is I'm not coming to this work with really the IT skills that I'm more of like the researcher skill set, but really what I think we're talking about is understanding the storyline of a person within your school community. There are other sort of levels of aggregation, but I think that's really the basic thing. So the storyline starts at some point. Some schools may start the storyline is when they the family first called or first email asking for information about the school and that storyline continues past graduation or past when they've graded out of the school. And so being able to really kind of make sure that each chapter of the story is in the same book, so to speak, is what a data warehouse is. So your admission chapter about that life is chapter one, you're sort of onboarding and entry into the schools chapter two, and making sure that they're connected, and that they feed into each other. And that the storyline continues and can continue, is, I think, a good metaphor for what we're talking about with a data warehouse. Because what that is, is that's making sure all of the stories can be connected for that particular person as they pass through the school community. And

Bill Stites 50:43
so the one thing that you said there that I do think isn't when you come at it from the research perspective, there's what you're talking about, you know, in terms of the warehouse, how to build all those things, I think back to like Hudson Harper, and the work that he's done around that area, and just talking about that. And I think the only point I want to make here is just that it really speaks to that collaboration that we've been talking about, between the different offices understanding, you know, whether it's from the IR office and the tech office, and maybe the different development or alumni, admissions offices, all of those coming together, because the offices know their data, the tech department and knows how to get the data out and get it into a form where you as the person who's trying to ask it and answer form, formulate whatever the questions can then get at it. It's this collaborative effort, if there's anything that I've taken from this whole conversation is really just developing those touch points, those collaborations and making sure that everyone feels bought in and owning this, because it can't be done in isolation. Absolutely.

Christina Lewellen 51:45
So Sarah, as we begin to wrap up the conversation, I have a couple of more rapid fire type questions for you, just because I'm so curious now. Are there any data beasts at your school that you haven't been able to wrestle like if you had a magic wand to solve some line of inquiry that you've had for a while, but there's some kind of issue with collecting the data? What would that be? Well, this

Sarah Enterline Roch 52:07
may be specific to St. Mark's, but probably not. And it relates to a lot of what we've talked about. But one sort of Albatross, I will say, Beast, that's a better way to put it. I like it. Yeah, is being able to build predictive models based on our admission data, to look at the degree to which kids are succeeding in the school. So are the kids that we thought would be really great? Based on our admission rubrics? Do they actually turn out to be successful in the school? And that's, again, this data systems, we've gone through a couple transitions with our admission and enrollment information system. So I think that's part of this. But that's one area that continues to be unfortunately kicked down the road each year a little bit.

Christina Lewellen 52:55
I think you and many, many other folks in your position would have that similar hill to climb. So I think that's a great answer. Now, in the beginning of the podcast, I had asked the guys before you joined us what was an aspect of their career they found incredibly rewarding. And so now I'll pose that question to you as we wrap things up. I mean, you've traveled a long path, including you were one of the youngest PhD graduates of Boston College, like you've had this incredibly diverse career. So is there anything in particular that stands out to you as being pretty rewarding in your career to date?

Sarah Enterline Roch 53:30
Yeah, I will say, coming back to independent schools, as a professional has been like coming back home, that wasn't expected. And it really has struck me personally and professionally as rewarding, because I do feel the sense of community and an independent school is something unique and different from other types of jobs. So I'd say up until I came to St. Mark's, I looked at my work as a job, I worked this many hours, I got the thing is on the to do list done, and it was a job. Now, I really feel like I have a career where I not only love what I do, but I enjoy putting in extra time not because I don't get paid or have to feel like I'm not getting paid. But because I want to help people in this community or in the serious community. You know, I really value the work that we're doing and it feels very much personally fulfilling as a career rather than just this is my professional nine to five type of job. And that's been very rewarding and fits with me it doesn't fit with a lot of people. I know a lot of people like to turn off their laptops and not think about work at all and that is totally okay. I'm not saying that. The independent school life is for everybody. But for me, it's surprisingly it really is. And I really value it.

Bill Stites 54:54
I just want to say a personal thank you because I've been able to sit in a lot of the work work that you've done with CIRIS a lot of that sharing back to the professional learning groups. We've been talking about community a lot. And just a big thank you just for your willingness to give back to participate today and participate in all those sessions. You mean a lot to the community and I just want to be one person to say thank you.

Sarah Enterline Roch 55:15
Well, thank you so much. Your

Christina Lewellen 55:17
name was at the top of the list for folks to come and join us on the podcast. We're so glad we were able to carve time out of your busy schedule to talk through these things. We're grateful for your knowledge and really for this groundbreaking work that you're doing. I mean, St. Mark's is an incredible example to other independent schools. So thank you for sharing both your journey but also your schools journey with us today.

Sarah Enterline Roch 55:37
It's my pleasure, Christina happy to do it.

Narrator 55:42
This has been Talking Technology with ATLIS produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools. For more information about ATLIS and ATLIS membership, please visit the atlis.org If you enjoyed this discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your colleagues in the independent school community. Thank you for listening.