Student data is a valuable tool for both pinpointing where teachers need to focus and measuring student growth. But the numbers are only part of the story. As teachers, you know your students’ names, their families, their interests, and their backgrounds.
However, the information about students that comes in a score form (e.g., a screening test, diagnostic or benchmark assessment, etc.) all sit in a separate plane that is examined in isolation. Your students’ scores might reflect how they did, but they don’t necessarily explain why. That’s why it’s critical to humanize data and see our students beyond the numbers.
No One Wants to Be a Number
We are so much more, and so are our students. Because data is important, we end up putting a lot of numbers on our kids and even color-coding them according to performance. But data doesn’t define us. We’ve heard teachers say, “I’ve never had this many yellows before,” and our response is, “Holy cowabunga, we’re talking about kids, not colors.”
Every data point needs context around it. The more we know about a person being represented by the data, the more we understand it. Without context, the more the person analyzing the data will create their own context that may or may not be accurate.
How can we do better? Student data should be personalized, put into context, and brought to life. In short, we want to humanize data and leverage it to provide guidance to drive focused instruction for each student’s specific needs.
The Power of Equity Pedagogy
Equity pedagogy is an approach to education in which teachers develop instructional strategies and cultivate classroom environments that better support all students, especially those who have been disadvantaged in school and society (Banks & Banks, 1995). This approach recognizes that each person has different circumstances, and our role as educators is to provide the resources and opportunities needed for all students to reach an equal outcome. It’s not about providing the same thing to everyone; it’s about giving everyone what they need and what they deserve.
Some tools allow you to group students by their instructional priorities, essentially what they need to learn to move forward, not by their overall scale score. This kind of grouping saves time and is much more impactful than ranking students by overall scores. For instance, if you’re about to teach multiplication in your Grade 4 class and know a handful of students haven’t yet mastered how to identify and extend a simple pattern and solve one-step word problems, you can teach them in a small group setting as a boost into the next grade-level content. For those who have mastered the skill, you can enrich their learning with a different challenge.
Everyone deserves to grow. Humanizing data helps every student be seen. It gives each of them a sense of belonging and the reassurance that you are concerned about them as individuals and want to partner with them to meet their goals equitably.
Stretching Students beyond Their Expectations
Part of humanizing data includes setting an ambitious goal for each individual. Students won’t grow beyond where they are if we reteach them things they already know. Because not all students raise their hands when they don’t understand, we must create an inclusive, safe environment for all learners—especially Multilingual Learners who may not have mastered English yet but are grasping the concepts far beyond their ability to express them. Goal work requires communicating with students about where they are through regular data chats so they can see their progress toward reaching their stretch goals.
Seeing and Hearing the Whole Student
When we were growing up, we were always told that children should be seen and not heard. However, all students need to be seen and heard to create a thriving learning environment. They need real, relatable, and interesting content. They need to be valued as the great human thinkers they are, regardless of what colors or number have been labeled upon them. We believe that data should always be attached to people with names and faces, who are so much more interesting than the numbers on the page.
Want to hear more? Tune in to the Extraordinary Educators™ Podcast.
