Celebrating People: The Graph vs. The Story

"Maybe stories are just data with a soul."

                                                                       -Brene Brown

Several years ago, I attended a workshop in which the guest speaker was Brene Brown.  While listening to her presentation, she eluded to the idea that perhaps the most important, and critical aspects of life, cannot be quantified. I sit in countless meetings with anxious parents, and hard working teachers, whose hopes and careers rest on graphed data. Sometimes I wonder if we are educating robots or children? As inconsistent data drives our decision making, we seem to have lost sight of the whole child.

What do we graph?  Typically, graphs represent some aspect of learning like oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, math fact automaticity, or math problem solving.We only take time to track this information when a child is not "good enough. Well, we use words like below benchmark or discrepant from peers. There is a plethora of graphs showing growth, a flat line, and inconsistent performance.  These graphs project anxiety, failure, and disappointment.

Perhaps it is a knee jerk reaction, but the presentation of these graphs is typically followed by a story. Proponents of the graph would say it is back pedaling, excuses, irrelevant. These stories often share moments of children displaying courage, empathy, risk taking, responsibility, or a love of learning. Sometimes these functional skills, which are the foundation of our sociocultural existence, are viewed as too fluffy or irrelevant to graph. Is there a research based curriculum? Where are the norms? How do we progress monitor? Perhaps this human dimension is too complex for graphing, or maybe we have not put in sufficient time to learn an appropriate methodology. Most likely, the relationships we develop with children, their school attendance, parental involvement, and school climate present the most powerful data. Really though, with MAP, PARCC, Aimsweb, and STAR, who has time to graph this? Children are multifaceted people whose talents and gifts should be celebrated, not reduced to data points.