Who do you have in mind?

 Broadwater State School class of 1929

As we approach the new school year, I have a couple of questions for my teaching colleagues: Who do you have in mind when you are designing your lessons and unit plans for this coming year?  Do you plan mostly for the "average student" in your class?  Isn't that the best way to make sure your lessons will be appropriate for the greatest number of students?

This way of thinking assumes that academic ability is a single quality whose distribution in the population more or less falls on the bell curve.  If that is true, most kids should be "average learners" and if we design our learning environments for them, we should meet the needs of the majority.  We should then just have a few "gifted kids" and a few "special ed kids" for whom we need to make adaptations and modifications.

Over the last few years, however, I have become more and more skeptical of this model. For one thing, teachers keep telling me that their classes are full of needy kids.  At first, it was tempting to assume that they were just exaggerating or panicking; perhaps they were hoping to get more assistant time and support.  I reminded myself that by the end of each year, most of these students do achieve within the acceptable range on our standardized provincial exams.  Those results likely even fell on a bell curve.

But then I started listening more closely to what teachers were actually telling me.  They had concrete evidence of the challenges faced by so many of their students: English Language Learners, difficulties with decoding text, interrupted formal education, ADHD, difficulties with abstract thinking, challenging behaviours, lack of motivation, atypical social skill development, lack of number concept, etc.  They also told me that most of these students had some areas where they didn't seem needy or disabled at all, but where they fit in well or even showed considerable strength compared to peers.  In other words, most of these students were only needy at certain times or in certain contexts.  Rather than classes with mostly "normal kids" and a few "needy" ones, they described classes where the "normal" students had needs that often fell outside the average range and where students who were coded or identified as special needs could often achieve at or above the norm in certain contexts or with the right tools or supports.

Through my studies for my Masters, and particularly in my neuroscience classes, I have become more and more aware of the incredible complexity of the brain and the processes involved in learning.  I have come to appreciate that there is actually a tremendous amount of variability in brain structure and development and in student learning.  Students vary from one another in their interests, traits, abilities, and experiences, of course.  But within each individual, there is also a great variety of strengths and weaknesses in each of these domains.  It seems to me that "the average learner" doesn't really exist, and that we need to adjust our thinking if we are to meet the needs of the students we do have.

In his writings, talks, and videos, Todd Rose presents some powerful analogies to help us understand these issues.  His analogies are drawn from outside the education world; in "The Myth of Average" Todd uses the example of fighter jet cockpits and in "Variability Matters" he uses shoe sizes and Rubiks Cubes. In each case, however, he makes the point that we need to recognize and design for human variability in learning.  He explains why doing so helps to meet the needs of individuals and develop their talents.  He also argues that designing to the edges, rather than to the average, creates the best results for individuals as well as for society.  Take a few minutes to watch his videos; I think you will find them enjoyable and thought provoking.

So what has any of this got to do with classroom teaching?  As we teachers prepare for the new school year, we are setting up classrooms, gathering resources, making year plans and unit plans, and thinking about the classroom routines and strategies that we will be using.  Whether we recognize it or not, these are design issues.  We are designing learning environments and experiences.  If we design those environments and experiences for "the average learner," we are essentially designing them for nobody.  If we design them with the flexibility needed to reach the edges of student variability in our classes, we are far more likely to help all of the students in our classes to be successful.  But these design decisions are best made from the very beginning, rather than trying to adapt and modify lessons and units designed for "the average learner."

So who do you have in mind as you are preparing for the coming school year?