Back in February 2019, we soft launched My Story Box - an innovation space used by the Advancement Team at the International School of Brussels.
Rooted in the idea of The Periodic Table of Advancement™, this collaborative initiative is one school’s attempt to define the work of Advancement in schools, design a range of tools and resources that will help us in our efforts, and share freely these ideas with colleagues around the world so that they can further build upon them and make improvements.
Several months on, we are already finding that this commitment to collaborative design thinking is changing the way we talk about what we do, the way we go about things, as well as the way in which we imagine the future of Advancement in our school.
One such conversation focused on the growing impact of data privacy on Advancement in schools.
So, earlier this year, My Story Box and 9ine Consulting invited colleagues from schools in Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg, Paris, Stuttgart and Zurich, along with representatives from the Council of International Schools (CIS) and The Educational Collaboration for International Schools (ECIS) to a workshop.
Our goal was to reflect on the impact of recent changes in data privacy law (in particular, the EU General Data Protection Regulation) and begin to design a practical tool that would both determine the work that needed to be done and set out a roadmap for improvement.
Data Privacy and Advancement in Schools: A Framework for School Improvement, the result of this original workshop and many subsequent conversations, was published earlier this month.
Using the conceptual framework of The Periodic Table of Advancement™, the document takes each Element of the Table in turn and encourages us to view these various aspects of Advancement through the lens of data privacy. It provides a set of standards and a framework for improvement.
Of course, the standards are not a comprehensive list of regulatory obligations. Neither do they replicate the accreditation standards and criteria that have been incorporated into accreditation frameworks, such as the recently strengthened CIS International Accreditation Protocol.
What we hope they do provide, however, is a set of aspirational statements - together with a continuum of benchmarks - that, together, go some way to describe the kind of schools that we believe we should all strive to become. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
