Walling kids out
When I read this post, all I could think of was that walls keep people out or, in this case, close in the classroom and narrow a focus down to data. Here is the post: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2013/10/becoming-one-data-walls-your-classroom. It talks about DATA WALLS. Here on the walls of a classroom is data about reading logs, books read, and more. And this statement: " I also looked at data walls as a way for the students to be accountable for their work, reflect upon their learning, and how they fit into the scheme of the classroom. After all, shouldn’t the students be held accountable for their learning?"
Since when did numbers reflect all the learning that takes place in a classroom? Are scores and pages and books and sentences and such more important than the environment of a reading community? Can we even measure community? Or attitude toward books and reading? Don't get me wrong, I know we have to conduct assessments, we have to examine how kids do on assessments and adjust instruction. I get that. What I don't get is how data became the coin of the realm and why data is king and when it is ever appropriate to place the data of all kids out there for everyone to see. Maybe I am missing something here. Maybe this data awl is something other than described. But from the little I could glean from this post, privacy is something that has gone the way of the horn book, the slate, and other outmoded items in the classroom.
And I do value numbers. I conduct surveys and share the results. There is a time and place for data, for numbers. The classroom wall is not the place. Taking time to create charts and graphs seems to me to take time away from more valuable activity: reading more books, writing blog posts, thinking of how to connect kids to books and writing.
This thinking about data being essential is what leads to the boneheaded use of books simply by using levels and lexiles to guide their placement. This thinking about data reduces reading to a multiple choice test. This concept of numbers as be-all-and-end-all takes the focus away from the one essential piece of all classrooms: the kids. I fear that kids will become points on a scatter plot, that they will think that they are equal to some number or data point, that data-driven instruction might just "drive" more and more kids out of the classroom.
Since when did numbers reflect all the learning that takes place in a classroom? Are scores and pages and books and sentences and such more important than the environment of a reading community? Can we even measure community? Or attitude toward books and reading? Don't get me wrong, I know we have to conduct assessments, we have to examine how kids do on assessments and adjust instruction. I get that. What I don't get is how data became the coin of the realm and why data is king and when it is ever appropriate to place the data of all kids out there for everyone to see. Maybe I am missing something here. Maybe this data awl is something other than described. But from the little I could glean from this post, privacy is something that has gone the way of the horn book, the slate, and other outmoded items in the classroom.
And I do value numbers. I conduct surveys and share the results. There is a time and place for data, for numbers. The classroom wall is not the place. Taking time to create charts and graphs seems to me to take time away from more valuable activity: reading more books, writing blog posts, thinking of how to connect kids to books and writing.
This thinking about data being essential is what leads to the boneheaded use of books simply by using levels and lexiles to guide their placement. This thinking about data reduces reading to a multiple choice test. This concept of numbers as be-all-and-end-all takes the focus away from the one essential piece of all classrooms: the kids. I fear that kids will become points on a scatter plot, that they will think that they are equal to some number or data point, that data-driven instruction might just "drive" more and more kids out of the classroom.