As teachers assess students’ current levels of skills and knowledge, planning ahead with acceleration rather than remediation is critical. Understanding learners is key and you cannot understand individuals while focusing on group averages. Coaches cannot plan for the “average” teacher.
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Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.650] – Steve [Intro]
Hello, and welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out loud podcast. Instructional coaches and leaders create the environment that supports teachers to continually imagine, grow, and achieve. They model an excitement for learning that teachers in turn model for students. This podcast is dedicated to promoting the important aspects of instructional leadership. Thanks for listening. I’m thrilled you’re here.
[00:00:32.880] – Steve
Focusing teaching and coaching on people, not averages. During the past year, I’ve been exploring teaching with acceleration versus with remediation. With remediation, the primary focus is on mastering concepts of the past, things that should have been learned in previous grades or in other courses. Acceleration, on the other hand, is strategically preparing students to do the current level of work, to engage in challenging material. Rather than focusing on mastering all the things from the past before I can proceed, acceleration engages students in the current learning task and provides scaffolding to support that engagement. It provides the necessary previous skills and/or knowledge, but just those that are necessary to stay engaged in the current high-level learning activity. This focus on acceleration reminded me of earlier reading and studying I had done about the problem of working with averages.
[00:02:06.370] – Steve
I had read Todd Rose’s book, “The End of Average,” and watched some of his videos that illustrate that the concept of average almost never applies to the individual. Rose describes how the military discovered that a cockpit built for the average pilot wasn’t right for anyone. There is no average pilot. They all have what was labeled by the military as a jagged size profile. That knowledge and understanding led to the adjustable cockpit. In another example, Rose illustrates studies that were done with brain scans of individuals recalling a vocabulary list that they had been taught. When the scans were combined to form an average brain scan for recall of vocabulary words, it was identified that none of the individual scans matched very closely to the average. Rose states, “You cannot understand individuals while focusing on group averages. Listen in for a moment on his explanation of how that applies to education.”
[00:03:48.810] – Todd Rose
In every field that studies individuals, we found the same thing. There’s no such thing as an average cell. There’s no such thing as an average genome. There’s no such thing as average cancer. In what may be the single most important lesson for education, there’s no such thing as an average student. Now, of course, if you accept this fact, and my guess is most of you do, then it’s not hard to see what the problem is. Our educational system is built on the assumption that there is an average student. Think about it. Most textbooks are designed to be age-appropriate, which sounds great, but it really just means that they’re designed for the average student of that age. Most standardize assessments, like the SAT or IQ test, are explicitly designed based on a comparison to a hypothetical average student. No kidding. Most of our curriculum materials prescribe not only a standardize sequence, but a standardized amount of time for learning. We set those sequences and we fix those times based on what we know about learning on average. Look, it’s no accident how we got here. Our educational system was originally designed in the industrial age by people who were absolutely obsessed with averages because averages seem to work so well in managing factories.
[00:05:24.540] – Todd Rose
The truth is, their system more or less accomplished what it was originally designed to do, prepare generations of students for standardized jobs in an industrial economy. But the world’s changed. Our demographics have changed, the skills that we need have changed, and our economy has changed. We know this. We also know that to meet the needs of society today, education must change. If our goal is to prepare students for a diverse and changing world, if our goal is to help each student become the very best that they can possibly be, then it’s no longer good enough to think about students on average, and to teach students on average, and to rank students against an average. Instead, we absolutely must be able to understand and treat students as individuals.
[00:06:19.960] – Steve
While students have always had a jagged math or reading profile, the pandemic and quarantining has highlighted that fact and maybe in some cases, exaggerated the jaggedness. As teachers begin the year with assessment data identifying, “learning loss” as they compare student scores to some should be average. Coaches need to be encouraging them to look forward with acceleration rather than backwards with remediation and playing catch-up. Students need to be engaged in exciting and challenging learning opportunities, and then they need to be provided just in in-time scaffolding that supports that engagement with needed knowledge or skill. I believe that there is an energy that teachers exhibit as as they build and encourage students’ engagement in challenging work. I think that that excitement is missing when teachers are remediating, certainly not a conscious purposely or purposefully. I’m afraid that during remediation, teachers can exhibit worry or even a sense of struggle that is read by students, creating a negative impact on that learning environment. When engaged in a struggle within acceleration, I think that there’s a teacher energy, a teacher cheering a student on, a teacher exhibiting his or her belief that the learner will succeed that encourages and builds student self-efficacy.
[00:08:29.050] – Steve
It’s important that in our coaching work with teachers, we need to have a similar focus on planning for teachers as people, not for some nonexisting average teacher. This means knowing the people that we’re coaching, knowing about their students, knowing about their goals and desires. It means coaches taking on in their acceleration of teacher growth, that same passion and excitement and belief in teachers, generating that same energy that we’re looking for teachers to generate as they accelerate their student learners. For certain, the challenging task for teachers to practice their growth and skill building are present in their classrooms. As coaches, we don’t have to work to create those the way that teachers may sometimes have to work and design to create those learning struggles for students. I found a great quote in current psychology that I thought can fit here. “Coaching is a process in which people do not not work on goals that should be attained, but work on goals that they really want to attain. As coaches, know your teachers. Work with them to identify their goals. Identify the progress that will build their energy as they accelerate their learning with you. Keep the focus on people. Ban the average.” Thanks for listening.
[00:10:44.810] – Steve [Outro]
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud on iTunes and Podbean. And please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter at Steve Barkley or send your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
