Ed Blog / Writing About Students Without Exposing Them

The Discipline That Matters More Than Any Other

Everything else in public writing about teaching is style; this is the one that can do harm.

You can write badly, dully or wrongly about practice and the cost falls on you. Write carelessly about a student and the cost falls on somebody who did not choose to be written about and cannot correct the record. That asymmetry is the reason this discipline sits above all the others. It is not a formatting preference. It is the difference between a hobby that is harmless and one that is not, and it deserves to be handled deliberately rather than by instinct in the last minute before publishing.

The working principle is simple to state and demanding to apply: write about your own actions, not about identifiable people. You did not teach a memorable student; you tried a particular approach and observed a result. The shift sounds semantic and it is not, because it changes what belongs in the post. Your reasoning belongs. Your adjustment belongs. The specific circumstances that made one young person distinctive do not, however much they would enliven the writing. The interesting detail is nearly always the identifying detail, and that is exactly the trade you are declining to make.

Consent is worth mentioning because it is often assumed to settle the question and it does not. Even where it has been sought and given, the imbalance of position between a teacher and a student means agreement is rarely as free as it looks, and a person cannot meaningfully consent to how a permanent public document will read to them years later. Obligations and institutional policies about all of this exist, they vary considerably between employers and jurisdictions, and they should be checked before publishing rather than after.