Decide what to review and then what to continue, adopt, adapt, or abandon in order to continuously improve.

Further Explanation

Decide is both the bottom and top rung in the Data Ladder of Inference.

The bottom Decide rung is where you reflect on the decisions you have made, including your goals, and the processes and actions you will use to accomplish them. Specifically, reflect on the areas of focus for which you want to use the Data Ladder of Inference to answer “what is happening?” and “why?”.

The top Decide rung is where you decide what to continue, adopt, adapt, or abandon in order to continuously improve.

• Continue: Goals, processes, and actions that have been in place that we want to continue. This may include replicating past efforts and or scaling in some capacity.
• Adopt: New goals, processes, and actions that we want to implement to help us accomplish our overall goals.
• Adapt: Goals, processes, and actions that we want to tweak. We still think they can be effective, but there are some changes we want to enact in order to hopefully make them more effective.
• Abandon: Goals, processes, and actions that we want to stop working towards likely because we have seen they are unnecessary and or ineffective.

How does it relate to other rungs?

In between determining the areas of focus for which we want to answer “what is happening?” and “why?” in the bottom Decide rung, and using these answers to decide what to continue, adopt, adapt, and abandon in the top Decide rung, the remaining rungs in the ladder help us use data to generate insights to answer "what is happening?" and "why?".

After the top Decide rung in which we have decided what to continue, adopt, adapt, and abandon, we start the ladder over again with the bottom Decide rung. We reflect on our new goals, processes, and actions including the changes we have made and determine our areas of focus for the next iteration of the Data Ladder of Inference.

Why is it important?

Decide is critical because without making decisions on how to change our goals, processes, and actions our insights won’t lead to improvement.

What does it look like in the Data Collaborative?

Within the Data Collaborative our decisions include setting our goals, processes, and actions associated with the Reading Success Pathway (RSP 1.0), Evidence Based Practices (EBP 2.0), and Implementation (IMP 3.0) pillars.

Data Collaborative Tools for Decide:

• Homebase:
  • Routines and Actions Tracking
  • SMART Goals and Reflection
  • Process Documentation

Scaffold

Resources