Record the Mechanism and Leave Out the Child’s Identity

The goal is to preserve the mechanism, not the identity. Default to de-identification from the start, and record identifiable student information only when there is a clear, authorized research reason to. Your own school or district’s research and privacy rules come first; this page does not replace them or amount to legal advice.

Avoid Recording#

• student names;
• exact dates of birth;
• exact school names when unnecessary;
• exact teacher names, unless they are public contributors and have agreed;
• disability details combined with rare demographic details that make a student identifiable;
• immigration or family-status details that are not essential to the educational mechanism;
• unique incidents that would allow colleagues to infer the child;
• screenshots from protected student systems;
• direct copies of confidential education records.

Describe the Student Broadly#

Use broad descriptors, such as “third-grade multilingual learner,” “elementary school,” or “middle-school student receiving both language and reading support,” unless more specificity is essential. List roles, not names, unless permission exists. Use a neutral case code on every form.

Before You Publish Anything#

Rate each case for publication risk as low, medium, or high, based on how identifiable it is and what permissions exist. A case that a colleague could trace to one child is not low risk, however well the name is hidden. The book’s own four cases are illustrative composites built from patterns in the research literature and in publicly presented program descriptions, and no identifiable student’s history appears in it.