Are Data Walls a Waste of Time?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses whether the popular practice of displaying student data on classroom or hallway walls actually improves outcomes or just consumes time.
Key Takeaways
- Data walls consume valuable time - Creating and maintaining large data displays takes time away from instruction and planning
- The evidence is thin - There's little proof that physical data displays improve student achievement
- Focus on using data, not displaying it - Educators should spend their data time on analysis and action, not posters
Transcript
Your school does not need a data wall.
I don't know where this idea is coming from, but I'm seeing a lot of schools build this like wall-sized printout of student data that they're tracking.
And they do meetings to look at the data and update the data and talk about what to do in response to the data.
And I'm wondering, don't you have teaching and learning?
Don't you have formative assessment and summative assessment and curriculum and pacing guides and all that?
Why are we looking at data apart from the actual curriculum?
And why are we putting data on the wall when we already have places to store that data?
This doesn't seem to be helpful in any way to take that data and put it up there like it's some sort of religious display.
This idea of data as a religion, that if we just kind of worship data correctly, then the results will improve.
Where does this come from?
Who is teaching this about these data walls and getting educators to spend so much time putting them together?
Because it is not a trivial amount of time to put a data wall together and to have all this up where everybody can look at it and to spend time talking about it.
But this is the basic practice of teaching, right?
Keeping track of student data, like student learning and student grades and student understanding and misconceptions, that's the basic practice of teaching.
Why do we need to centralize that and put it on the wall?
That's so weird.
It's almost like having a lesson plan wall.
Yes, each individual teacher needs to plan their lessons, but the idea that we need to collect them centrally and then literally staple them to the wall just seems bizarre to me.
Is this something that's happening in your school, in your district?
Are there any books about this?
Where is this idea coming from about data walls?
My guess is that this is something that has just caught on among central office administrators who've not actually done it, but they like the way it looks.
It's pretty, it's flashy to see this data wall.
It says, oh, we're serious about improvement here.
And we don't really think about the fact that This is hundreds of dollars an hour when you have a group of people come together to make a data wall.
If you said, we would like to pay our most highly educated and highly compensated employees to glue stick or staple paper to the wall so they can look at it and go, hmm.
People would say, no, that's a waste of time.
But if we call it a data wall and do the very same thing, then it sounds like a good idea.
I don't know.
If you think data walls are helpful in some way, please let me know how they're helpful.
But I think this is the basic process of teaching and learning, like assessing student progress and teaching and adjusting your teaching in response to how students do on formative and summative assessments.
Teachers are doing that anyway.
I don't know.
Why do we need to do this at the school level?
Let me know what you think.