Services
At Ponder we believe in embedding within schools to understand problems and develop solutions collaboratively from the classroom to the executive team. We work with school network leadership, instructional, operational and technical teams to understand pain points, design solutions and implement them, either independent of or alongside network staff. Below are a series of ways we've worked with leaders in the past. Let us know what is top of mind of you and your colleagues.
Infrastructure Mini-Projects
Service 01
Schools Performance Dashboard
REsearch questions
What are leading indicators telling us about the impact of our school system strategy? How are we ensuring we are measuring the right indicators, at the right time, with full confidence to make adjustments?
key services
Ponder DWE (Data Warehouse for Education) allows your school system to centralize raw data from all of your critical systems (attendance, behavior, family communications, state test proficiency predictions, etc) join those data sets, aggregate raw data into representative statistical measures providing leading indicators to compare across schools. We’ll work with you to operationalize the data you need at your fingertips to drive network-level decision-making.
Technical details
Service 02
Instructional Coaching Impact
REsearch questions
What impact is our school systems' instructional coaching program having on our broader strategy?
key services
We all know that developing staff is critical to running great schools, but the impact of a specific program is notoriously murky. Want to know the impact that classroom observations are having on the satisfaction of your junior teachers, or the math proficiency level of your 5th grade students? Use Ponder DWE (Data Warehouse for Education) to connect and integrate data from multiple sources to get a clear picture of the impact of your program.
Technical details
Service 03
Attendance (Monitoring and Response) Intervention System
REsearch questions
How do we ensure our staff are minimizing time reporting attendance and instead unblocking the practical and psychosocial causes of chronically absent students?
key services
Safety, belonging, and learning are all compromised when students are chronically absent. The root causes are complex, ranging from practical issues like transport to deeper issues of belonging at school. Integrating student attendance data into core system-wide processes ensures the right stakeholder is providing the right solution before it's too late.
Technical details
Service 04
Discipline Policy Monitoring
REsearch questions
How is our discipline policy being implemented at schools across the system, and what is the impact on our most vulnerable students?
key services
Exclusionary discipline is a top priority for any school and system leader, and yet time, confidence, and resources to monitor, address, respond, and prevent future suspensions are all in short supply. Use Ponder DWE (Data Warehouse for Education) to ensure reporting allows strategic collaboration based on timely and accurate data.
Technical details
Service 05
Technical Infrastructure Evaluation
REsearch questions
How does the School System’s current data capabilities align with comparably sized school networks? Where are dependencies on vendor data obstructing mission-critical insights?
key services
Most school systems fall into one of two categories: They work incessantly and likely unsustainably across a broad swath of systems to keep them synchronized and maintain data quality; or they stop asking mission critical questions because those questions are simply too hard to answer across their broad swath of systems. Ponder’s process gives school systems the confidence that they are aligning on the highest leverage systems and processes, while leaving schools to lead where their expertise is most needed.
Focus Areas
Ponder’s Technical Infrastructure Evaluation guides school systems to evaluate the following characteristics of healthy data ecosystems to determine where system infrastructure is supporting strategy, and where investment will have the greatest impact:
- Data interoperability
- Data governance and quality
- Data privacy and security
- Data usability and accessibility
- Infrastructure scalability and sustainability
Strategic Planning
Infrastructure Scale Assessment
How far can your current infrastructure stretch and scale as your school system and/or associated goals grow? What are the highest priority bottlenecks, what order should they be addressed in, and on what schedule?
Long-term sustainable student achievement lift
When you look 5-10 years ahead for your school system, what level of student achievement do you hope to reach? Where will you focus your and your staff's energies to reach those goals? How will you measure your progress towards them?
Repeatable Rebrokering Systems Plan
Adding an existing school into your network is a complex, multi-threaded, multi-step process, and never an exact replica of a previous effort. That doesn't mean, however, that each effort needs to be a reinvention of the process. Each adopted school will need a custom set of processes to move it from its present state to operating natively within your systems. Pick the relevant ones from a menu of re-usable recipes and tools.
How Do We Get Started?
Fit Check
1 hour call with School System leadership and Ponder
A fast, structured assessment to understand your desired outcomes and confirm technical compatibility. You leave with a clear picture of how your school system can drive strategy forward with Ponder.
Deliverable/Artifact
- Organizational Readiness
- Assessment/Report (with recommendations)
Partnership Assessment
1 day of Ponder, 1 day of School System time
Technical Assessment (State of Infrastructure) and Full-Vertical Capacity (School to Leadership) to pilot change
Deliverable/Artifact
- Infrastructure architecture diagram
- Existing services
- Data Flow map
- Future State Recommendation
- Staffing Assessment
- Leadership Capacity (System and School)
- Technical Capacity
- Operational Capacity