Conference Program

In contemporary educational systems, the growing availability of data has not automatically resulted in more democratic, inclusive, or reflective decision-making processes. While data are increasingly central to governance and accountability, they often remain confined to school leadership or external evaluators and, for much of the school community, opaque - difficult to access and largely closed to scrutiny, interrogation, or debate by those most directly affected by their use - thus limiting their potential to support collective sense-making and shared responsibility, while UNESCO (2021) advocates for “a new social contract”. Research has highlighted how data-informed decision-making can foster improvement only when embedded in participatory cultures and supported by adequate data literacy (Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019). Within this framework, Reflex was developed by INDIRE as a systemic, participatory, and data-informed self-reflection tool designed to support schools in interpreting, discussing, and governing innovation processes in a democratic way. Reflex is grounded in a holistic conception of school functioning (EU, 2022), where innovation is understood as an emergent property of interconnected organizational, pedagogical, and cultural dimensions rather than as the result of isolated initiatives or technological adoption. The framework articulates ten dimensions of school functioning (governance, curriculum, teaching and learning, assessment, collaboration, internationalization, wellbeing, professional development, learning environments, and time management) which together offer a comprehensive lens for reading how innovation is embedded, sustained, and culturally appropriated within school communities. These dimensions draw on and extend existing international frameworks such as Innovative Learning Environments (OECD, 2017), DigCompOrg, and SELFIE (European Commission, 2018), while explicitly addressing gaps related to organizational learning, wellbeing, and temporal structures.
What distinguishes Reflex from other evaluation or monitoring tools is its explicit democratic orientation. The tool is designed to be periodically completed by multiple school actors (i.e. school leaders, teachers, and staff) thus fostering shared interpretation of data and collective reflection on evidence. Rather than producing rankings or prescriptive judgments, Reflex generates shared representations of school functioning that become the basis for dialogue, negotiation, and informed decision-making. In this sense, data are treated not as neutral indicators but as cultural artifacts that require interpretation, discussion, and contextualization within the school community. Within the panel’s focus on knowledge, data, and democracy, Reflex can be understood as a device for democratizing both governance and data literacy at the school level. By making organizational processes visible across multiple dimensions, the framework supports distributed leadership, reduces informational asymmetries, and enables schools to move beyond compliance-oriented accountability toward reflective and participatory governance. Moreover, the cyclical nature of the tool supports longitudinal monitoring, reinforcing organizational learning and shared responsibility for change. The contribution argues that fostering democracy in education requires not only participatory pedagogies, but also shared infrastructures for reading and governing complexity, where data function as a common language for reflection rather than as instruments of technocratic control.