Cycle Two Concluding Post: Honoring the Uniqueness of Each Student

Hi everyone. Thank you for your work over this past cycle. I really enjoyed reading your posts and your responses to each other. Given that this is such a mixed class in terms of the age of the children we work with, and the subjects we teach, I always learn an incredible amount. As one of you noted this week, we stand to learn an incredible amount about teaching by dialoguing across the early childhood, elementary, middle and secondary landscape!

I really want to encourage you, as well, to keep these dialogues going. Often, in a response, someone will pose a further question, or take you up on an offer to to share more about what you are doing in your classroom. I encourage you to respond to any questions or requests for more information that you receive! Often, the best way to continue these conversations is via email (you can access everyone’s MSU email by going to Angel, and looking it up on the class roster). Sometimes, a further post on your blog might not be seen by a reader. So please do consider following up these specific conversations via email! It’s fun to get responses on your writing.

Let me start this concluding post with a longer quote, from Nel Noddings, an education writer many of you have encountered before:

If the aim is justice--to provide all students with an education that will meet their needs--the solution is likely to involve the provision of considerable variety in school offerings and to include material that might contribute to personal as well as public life. Offering a variety of curricula does not mean putting together a set of courses labeled easy, average and hard and then equating  hard with best. It means cooperatively constructing rigorous and interesting courses centered on students’ interests and talents. It means that the schools should show the society that a democracy honors all of its honest workers, not just those who finish college and make a lot of money

Noddings goes on to ask how fair it is to force kids into learning certain subjects that don’t interest them, and then turn around and evaluate them against kids who are interested in such subject (say, calculus, or AP history). The implication here is that tracking itself is not really the problem--rather, it’s our belief that some subjects are more worthy than others, that the fine and industrial arts are unsuited to a twenty-first century education--when in reality, for a large number of jobs, and a happy and well rounded personal life, the exact opposite may be true!

In the above quote, Noddings seems to be writing for high school teachers. She takes the course as the unit of analysis. She talks, that is, about constructing courses centered on student interest and ability.

Now that is certainly one solution, but it is perhaps not the ideal one in many situations (courses are long in duration, and hard to get on the books). In elementary classrooms, it is not even a feasible solution at all.

It seems, then, that we need to scale down our “tracking” efforts, and differentiate at a more micro level--on the level of the unit, the project, the lesson, or even the activity. This is clearly where differentiated instruction comes in. As many of you noted, DI shares certain uncomfortable associations with tracking, and hence, can make some of us quite nervous.

But I don’t think it need to. Tracking got a justifiably bad rap, in my opinion, because it tried to take the infinite diversity of human beings--we are all unique and irreplaceable--and tried to boil us down to three classes (remedial/vocational, standard/general, honors/college-bound), determined along one questionable measure (general intelligence). In reality, given the typical spread in a typical classroom, I don’t imagine that breaking kids into one of three groups even simplifies teaching all that much--even in a class of “gifted” learners, there is still an incredible diversity of ability, interest, prior knowledge, and life experience as it relates to any one particular topic.

This is where I personally tend towards heterogeneous classrooms, heterogeneously grouped, and differentiatedly instructed. To my mind, this is the highest ideal for both democratic social relations and individual human growth.

I learned at least two important things about DI, I think, by reading our blogs this week. Here is a summary of them.

1) Sometimes, especially in the early elementary grades, we may need to differentiate our instruction based upon ability--and therefore group according to ability. This, of course, is not in itself a bad thing. It allows us to spend more time with students who need it, and provide work that challenges all students. This type of differentiation is most common, it seems, for work on the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.

However, and there was a pretty strong majority opinion here, grouping only by ability carries great risks with it, and may mean we have overly narrowed what we recognize and honor in our students (and in ourselves!). Therefore, there should be times in all classrooms where we differentiate instruction based on interests and strengths. It means providing options for projects and summative assessments that vary quite radically in the skills called to complete said project or assessment. We want to watch out, especially in the upper grades, of differentiating assignments by making them more “watered-down” versions of the “real” assessment we would prefer to give to the whole class. The key here is that we honor and challenge, to the increasing best of our ability, all students at all times.

2) Folks who are good at differentiating instruction--who have walked furthest down this path--are really good at observing kids. They do lots of formative and diagnostic assessments. They don’t make a snap judgement based on one measure, done at one point in time. Remember what Khan said in his video--in all of his studies, he noticed students who took a while in the beginning to get through a concept. If we assessed them only at the beginning of our time together, we risk mis-labeling them. For these very same students will be near the head of the class at the end of the unit or course!

Therefore, I was reminded by many of you, that DI is not something we do in the abstract, prior to meeting our students. We differentiated based on the emerging and evolving needs of our students! It’s when we can’t imagine a lesson that could possibly meet the needs of our whole class that differentiation becomes a natural strategy. Therefore, I think, we needn’t stress about DI--are we doing enough of it?? If we are careful observers of our students, then we will quickly learn how much and in what direction we need to differentiate our instruction (and in what types of groups).

I want to end by reminding you that, at bottom, communities are formed when they recognize the multitude of worthy forms of human occupation. We are currently experiencing a crisis in our system, where all kinds of subjects and programs are cut in order to improve test scores in the basics. This, to my mind, is extremely short-sighted. It harms both individual students and our society at large. It sends the message that people who work with their hands are not as worthy as people who manage hedge funds. Reversing this message is something we can start tomorrow, and is a lesson we need to continue to teach administrators, school board members, and politicians who have lost sight of this reality.

Cycle One Concluding Post: Reweaving the Fabric of Life

Hi everyone, and thank you for your work during the course of our first cycle together. There was a lot of wonderful writing--much of it quite personal, quite insightful, and quite moving. Also, there was some excellent blogging. For those of you new to the craft of blogging, I encourage you to pay attention to our peers in class who seamlessly weave their own ideas together with articles and videos from around the web. It makes for fruitful reading and thinking. Again, thank you to you all.

Before I move to a few of my own comments, let me first introduce you to our class. As in most virtual classroom communities, we are an eclectic and diverse bunch in terms of interests and life experiences. We have traveled much. I can’t begin to summarize it all here, but I can give you a brief overview of some of the salient professional characteristics of our class.

We are all teachers.

In terms of geography, we  are currently working in: Webster City, IA; Colorado Springs, CO; Raleigh, NC; Charlotte, NC; Chicago, IL; Houston, TX; and Baltimore, MD. We have several teachers from the east side of the state (with several of you located in central Detroit), and several from the west side. We also have several folks in the East Lansing area, in Battle Creek, and other locales in southern and mid-Michigan. More than a few of you have just finished interning at MSU. Congratulations to you especially!

In terms of subject matter and/or grade, we have: one early childhood teacher; nine elementary teachers; two middle school science teachers, one middle school music teacher, one middle school math teacher, and one middle school social studies teacher; and three high school English teachers, one high school Spanish teacher, one high school science teacher, and one high school math teacher.

Welcome to you all!!

Let’s start with a point that many of you made--success and failure are subjectively-determined. They have to do with the expectations placed upon us, and those that we place upon ourselves. There is nothing essential about failure, nothing inherently successful. It is our expectations and emotional investments that make them so.  As even our most reluctant students seem to implicitly understand, you can’t fail if you don’t care, and if you don’t try.

Nobody goes through life attempting to fail. But what follows from the prior point is that different students are going to define success differently. For some students, especially older ones, making the teacher look like a bumbling fool is success! For some students, especially younger ones, pleasing the teacher is success! However, as we all know, in neither case has anything necessarily educative taken place.

Education, or as John Dewey would call it, transformative growth, is rooted in a type of failure. That is, failure as a source and phase of an enveloping and emergent cycle of inquiry. As creatures, we desire equilibrium, balance, stasis. But we live in a world of change and transformation. We are driven to action--to thought, to communication--by disequilibrium in our environment. A problem or discomfort that is sensed before it is understood or named. Already, some might say, we are in an area of failure--breakdown, decomposition, dysfunction.

Our next moment is the moment of proper viewing. It is, says Dewey, a moment of taking aim. It is a melding of a desired future with life experience from the past, in the name of making sense out of the present. It is the “fusing” of “temporal horizons.” That is, it’s a coming-to-grips. It’s a making-sense. It’s already a step toward the overcoming of failure.

Inquiry is often inauthentic in school settings because this moment is glossed over. Yet this is, as Parker Palmer would note, the moment where fear can most easily creep in, and close down our ability to frame problems in the correct fashion. My fear of others, of the unknown, or of myself--it is those fears that divert a moment of potential growth into one of blind repetition--of an unceasing eternal reoccurrence of the same.

Inquiry is fulfilled when its results are communicated. When we share and listen. When we make meaning together. Where two people are in communion together, when experience becomes shared, I am of the opinion that failure is simply a superfluous concept--it simply is not a part of the picture.

The goal of education, says Dewey, is the ability to extract more joy from future experience. If we live our lives right, if we take failure in stride, and teach our children to do likewise, failure should not only spur us to action in the present, but allow us to live more wisely in the future.

Dewey reminds us that thoughtful inquiry always has a social dimension. It is done with and for others, as well as for ourselves. This is an important point for us as teachers to keep in mind.

Success might ultimately be measured by the consequences of our actions--do they make the world a better place?

So the challenge for us as teachers becomes:

• Can we imagine assessments and assignments that contribute value to society?
• Can we help students to see that their success is tied up in the healthy maintenance of the social and ecological fabric of life? That no one wins when the Earth is damaged, that there is no victor when others are hurt by our actions?
• Can we help students to develop the ability to see that the consequences of their actions may be quite far-reaching, and therefore they best approach their own accomplishments in a spirit of humility and grace?

Currently, as many of you have noted, the larger public, and in particular, politicians and policy-makers, are woefully out of touch with these existential realities of life--with the pain, the struggle and the joy. Our job, as teachers, on one level, is simply this: to remind them all of the way life really is.

Thank you for your work, and good luck on cycle two!