This paper reports findings from a collaborative teaching and school development project in Western Norway on the development and use of “small data” (Sahlberg 2018). This project has different objectives. Primarily, the project intends to strengthen teachers didactical-analytical competence. Regarding students, it aims to enable them to lead successful and satisfying lives (Nussbaum, 2011). The teacher-researcher collaboration intends to strengthen teachers’ data competence and autonomy that was – surprisingly – documented as being rather weak compared to typical curriculum countries (Tahirsylaj, 2018).

The project

Currently, schools are considered by local and national governance systems as successful when students and schools can point to continuously increasing test results steaming from large scale assessments (Gunnulfsen, 2018). On order to improve those results, the Norwegian Education Agency (Udir 2014) suggests the use of (correlational) big data. This is even true when the success of such agendas have been empirically questioned (Seland, Vibe & Hovdhaugen 2013; Werler & Færevaag 2017).

In order to develop and improve teacher’s pedagogical capacity to approach their classrooms based on data a teacher-researcher project was developed building. In order to realize it, principals, teachers and researchers come together to build a shared vision of schooling and learning, capacity building, problem identification, learning about students, learning to identify related issues and debating problem solving strategies.

To achieve this, the teacher-researcher team decided to develop an approach for the small databased teaching improvement. In contrary to big data, this concept allows for place-based analysis of causal relationships. Small data is coming from collaborative classroom observations, discussions about the student’s world of living and the curriculum development initiatives. Small data is can be any kind of data that matters, that provides timely and meaningful insights and that is common to all teaching staff. Small data didaktik is a way to support the development of teachers' professional skills, it as a tool in the development of teachers' didactic rational way of approaching the classroom.

However, in order to learn about the participating teacher’s current understanding of data, their attitudes towards data use and their data literacy (needed in analytical processes) needs to be mapped. Further, the collaborating researchers needs to know how teachers make teaching relevant decisions. Are their teaching relevant decisions data-driven or intuition-based?

International research has shown that teacher’s data literacy and as well as their culture to work collaboratively is only weakly developed (Helgøy & Homme, 2007; Czerniawski, 2013; Schildkamp et.al. 2014). In order to find out whether these findings are relevant for the local collaboration project, an investigation regarding those issues was conducted. On the background of research problem, the paper will report on the following research problem: - Do teachers show the ability to use data to make informed pedagogical, capability enhancing decisions (pedagogical data literacy, see Werler & Færevaag 2017)? In order to map teacher’s pedagogical data literacy, which is framed as the ability to transform information (assessment, school climate, behavioural, snapshot and longitudinal, etc.) into actionable teaching concepts (Mandinach, Firedman & Gummer, 2015), the researcher team surveyed all teachers (n = 323) of the networking schools (primary and secondary, n = 22). The survey contains items operationalizing the following research questions: - How to teaches understand data? - What are their attitudes towards the data use of data? - How data literate (i.e. able to transform and interpret data) are the collaborating teachers? - Are their teaching relevant decisions data-driven or intuition-based? Besides clustering frequency analysis, explorative factor analysis is applied in order to uncover unexpected pattern.

The project is currently in the process of data collection. Due to the still pending analyses, no statements can be made regarding the findings. However, it is to be expected that teacher’s data literacy is rather weak and that they show rather negative attitudes towards the use of data for decision making. Overall, the research team expects to reveal findings that needs to be taken into consideration throughout the collaborative process.

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