There is an urgent need for our educational system to shift assessment regimes from a narrow, high-stakes focus on grades, to more holistic definitions that value the qualities that lifelong learners will need. The challenge for learning analytics in this context is to deliver actionable assessments of these hard-to-quantify qualities, valued by both educators and learners. This practitioner report contributes to this by documenting the iterative refinement of a practical approach for tracking student effort, deployed in successive versions over six years in secondary schools. This demonstrates how teachers can assess a student quality such as "effort" in a practical way, and the insights that visual analytics can provide as a basis for productive dialogue among staff and students. The engagement and professional development of teachers is critical to embedding and sustaining novel analytics of this sort.