E&R Data
You’ve of course heard of “evidence-based practice.” “Data-driven instruction.”
Good stuff, right? Gather the data that tells you what is needed and do what the evidence ensures will work.
But
what data?
what evidence?
My mission in life is to promote E&R data-driven instruction. That’s
Emotional and Relational data-driven instruction.
Emotional data: that is, emotions. Your own. Your guesses about others’.
Relational data: behaviors, patterns, roles that you perceive you and others are playing. Evidence of the fits you and your relational partner(s) are co-creating.
These data are not numerical. They are not quantifiable. They are not scores on an answer sheet or grades on a test.
No. They’re
way more accurate
than that.
Because emotional and relational data reveal how relationships are going. How students are feeling about content and learning; how they’re able to fit with content so as to make sense of it, reorganize and internalize it, relate it to their own lives and use it in their own ways. Emotional and relational data are about the lines between students and ideas (and people), their energy and attitudes, curiosity and creativity, blocks and blunders, their unpredictable trajectories of acquisition, change, development.
Emotional and relational data are fluid, ever-changing. They tell you about people. They are not single performance points in time.
And, importantly,
emotional and relational data occur in
our bodies
because of the intangible but precise and informative ways human beings communicate with each other. Impinge on each other. Verbally, yes, and non-verbally. Body language.
We pick up on these communications and impingements whether we like it or not. We feel others’ emotions. We take offense when people act out on us. We feel hurt, get defensive, shut down, lash out automatically. We melt with compassion; we care and worry and rush in to help. Without thinking or checking our grade books.
And we ask each other questions. Get to know each other. Stand in our gardens and chat amiably over our garden walls with others in their own gardens. Get a feel for each other.
We know so much more about each other than any number on a rubric or a standardized test can capture. E&R data-driven instruction, like its namesake, demands that we organize ourselves to get regular opportunities to look through the emotional and relational data that barrage — and quite possibly irritate — us in our classrooms every single day. And learn from those data exactly what is needed. And do what our (data-driven) instincts ensure will work.