Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge discusses a problem in the education system, where districts rely too much on data but don't spend enough time listening to the needs of individual schools.

• While evidence is important, it's worth exploring ways that we can bring more "design thinking" into the education space and find better ways to analyze the data we have.

• Here's how one education partnership may provide an example of the balance needed.

A Toronto-based hospital had a problem. Training scenarios in the emergency room had gone poorly because doctors and nurses talked over each other and gave conflicting directions. Treatments were botched. Patient outcomes suffered.

As sometimes happens within large organizations, the instinct of administrators was to engineer a solution from the top down. But, as it turned out, interviews with ER nurses led them to a faster and less costly solution. They learned that despite their best efforts, there was confusion on the ER floor. Lack of clarity about roles had given rise to conflicting directions and lost time. Armed with this insight, team leaders were simply assigned bright orange vests to indicate that they were in charge.

The problem-solving process deployed by the hospital is referred to as design thinking, a process rooted in empathy that starts with listening. In a way that often feels intuitive to educators, design thinking emphasizes the importance of asking questions and understanding the needs of users and their problems before implementing irrelevant solutions. But in an ironic twist, it is a process that often eludes educators when it comes to informing decisions.

Read the full article about designing for education's data overload by Hisham Anwar at EdSurge.