Why Schools Struggle to Teach Differently When Each Student Learns Differently
Chapter 1
Why Schools Struggle to Teach Differently When
Each Student Learns Differently
Maria slides into her seat two seconds before the
bell rings and curses her alarm clock. She’s
already behind. Class starts practi-cally before the bell rings because Mr.
Alvera likes to cram the period full with as much information as possible.
Maria glances over the handout waiting on her desk—it’s a bullet-point recap of
last night’s reading, which she digested easily. She shoots a glance over at
Rob and mimes the gesture of taking off his hat. Catching her eye, Rob complies
before
Mr.
Alvera has a chance to say anything.
Rob
tugs a hand through his mussed dark red hair and pulls out a notebook as the
chemistry teacher explains the formula for the thermo-dynamic behavior of a
gas. He tries to focus on the scrawled chalk that says “p V = n R T”—and
diligently copies it into his notebook, as though that will change the fact
that he doesn’t get it. Mr. Alvera has spent some extra time trying to help him
out, but there’s limited time for that, and Mr. Alvera only seemed able to
explain the same concepts in the same ways—just slower and louder. If Rob’s
grades keep slipping, Mr. Alvera is required to report him. And if that happens
before tomorrow night’s soccer game, he suspects he’ll be riding the bench. But
he’s got soc-
21
cer
down: he actually feels worse about the fact that after spending last night
poring over the textbook, he still doesn’t get the concept.
Across the aisle, Maria sits up and raises her hand to ask a question. “Using
p V = n R T, how would I find the density of a gas at standard temperature and
pressure?”
Beside her, Rob’s soccer teammate, second-stringer Doug Kim, looks like
he’s taking notes. Rob’s heart sinks. Doug plays forward, too. Rob never used
to think of himself as stupid, but these days, he suspects, most people at
Randall Circle High School think of him as a dumb jock.
Rob’s
slumped shoulders in the third row of the classroom do not es-cape Alvera’s
notice, but Alvera has little time during the class period to dwell on one kid.
His experience as a teacher has taught him to triage: some students get it, and
others don’t. In a school this big, what can he do? He’s already met with Rob
several times after class and given it his best shot. In his own school days,
he’d been a miserable English stu-dent. Even now, Alvera is not a confident
writer; yesterday, he’d had an-other teacher read over his draft of the memo to
Stephanie Allston about Rob’s class performance. He didn’t want to give the new
principal a bad impression. And he’s not looking forward to talking to Allston
about the school’s star soccer forward. But Alvera can’t afford to pay too much
special attention to Rob; he likes the kid and admires his willingness to work
hard, but Alvera’s got 120 students in his five classes. All he can do is teach
the theory as best he can and move on within the time they have. Alvera allows
himself a fleeting moment of regret. Despite hours of extra assistance, he can’t
get through to Rob. But he knows that Rob isn’t dumb.
And
Rob knows he isn’t dumb. He heads home that afternoon after soccer practice
pleasantly sweaty from running sprints in the hot fall afternoon. Unusually,
though, the exercise hasn’t made him any less frustrated. Maria had been busy
during study hall, and Mr. Alvera had another meeting already scheduled after
school. Now Rob’s going to have to face down a problem set with no idea how to
tackle it.
Rob
is still sitting at the kitchen table, head propped in hands, when his father
arrives home from work. Rob doesn’t even look up at the sound of the door
opening and closing. Flipping through the pages of his textbook to check the
answer to a practice problem, he groans.
“What are you working on?” his dad asks. He sets
his briefcase down and starts going through a stack of mail.
Rob looks up at his father. Keep getting the
problems wrong, or ask his dad? “I don’t understand this thermodynamic gas
stuff,” he says after a long pause, “and Maria wasn’t around to help.”
“Let me see,” his father says, and Robert shoves
the textbook over to his father, who seems surprisingly undisturbed.
“OK, Rob, this isn’t so bad,” his father says. “Tell
you what. Go down to that store that sells the balloons with helium and bring a
few back here.”
The tightness in Rob’s chest eases. Soccer game
tomorrow night! By the time he has dashed to the corner store and back with a
set of bal-loons, the evening has started to cool, but it’s still in the 90s.
His father is waiting for him in the garage.
“Now take one of the balloons and put it in the
car and close the door,” his father suggests. Frowning, Rob does as his dad
says, and the two loiter in the waning light until a bang makes Rob jump. His
father laughs.
“It’s
the balloon! OK, now, I want you to think about the effect of tem-perature on
pressure,” his father says, “and think about how that ex-pands volume beyond
the breaking point of the balloon’s rubber . . .”
Rob
grins. He’s starting to get it.
...
Rob struggled in chemistry class because his brain
is not wired like his teacher’s or Maria’s. It’s not that Rob is not smart. He
mastered the chemistry concept when the teaching was cus-tomized to the way he
learns. So why can’t schools customize their teaching? As we’ll show, schools
have a very interde-pendent architecture, which mandates standardization. So
how do we get customized learning for each student? Modu-larity allows for
customization, so the solution is to move to a modular architecture in schools.
Only then can Rob have a learning solution customized to how he learns.
Most of us intuitively know that
we all learn differently from one another—through different methods, with
different
hooks, and at different paces. We remember not being able to pick up a
concept at the same time someone else grasped it instinctively. And we remember
that occasionally a teacher or parent or another student would explain it in a
different way, and it clicked. Or perhaps it just took more time. Other times
we figured things out faster than our classmates. We grew bored when the class
repeatedly drilled a concept for those who struggled to get it. And most of us
had friends who excelled in certain classes but struggled in others. Our
expe-rience is that we learn differently.
In the last three decades,
increasing numbers of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have
acknowledged this, too. Researchers have produced a multitude of schemes to
explain the straightforward idea that people learn differently from one
another. This research has bubbled up under different rubrics. Although there
is considerable certainty that people in fact learn differently, considerable
uncertainty persists about what those differences are. At the moment, the only
sure thing is no one has yet defined these differences so unambiguously that
there is consensus on what the differences specifically are. Food fights
periodically erupt in academia about what the salient differences are. As our
understanding of the brain improves, we will better understand how it processes
information—how neurotrans-mitters fire across synapses, which parts of the
brain do what, how these develop, and so on—so we can better understand how
different people learn. As neuroscientists help us to understand these
underlying causal mechanisms, we will then be able to understand some of the mysteries
of how human beings learn and what role our environment and experiences have on
that ability. For now, however, the uncertainty persists.
In this book, we consciously
avoid the controversies about whose definition of these differences is correct
by making a simple assertion—people learn in different ways. Some of this difference is coded in our brains when
we are born; other dif-ferences emerge based on what we experience in life,
especially in our earliest years.
We use one of the more well known
of these rubrics to illustrate what we mean by these differences, and although
you might not agree with the schematic we chose, that’s not the point. In the
pages that follow, we employ language about people possessing different
intelligences, but thinking about this as people having different aptitudes or
preferences or any number of other schematics is fine as well. We merely
introduce this theory of different intelligences so that readers can visualize
how students might learn in different ways, whether the domain or field is math
or music, languages or science.1
Rethinking Intelligence and How We Learn
Research from some academic psychologists has set
the stage for an escape into a new understanding of intelligence. In the past,
scholars reduced intelligence to a number, considered it unitary, and gave it a
name—intelligence quotient, or IQ. They then proceeded to compare people within
age groups by this measure. But some research indicates that intelligence is
much broader than this, although there are still disagreements. Many scholars,
however, use the word “intelligence” to denote competence in a variety of
areas. The result is a proliferation of definitions of intelligence.2
Harvard psychologist Howard
Gardner is the pioneer in this multiple intelligences field. Gardner first
posited the idea of many types of intelligence in the early 1980s as he
introduced his “theory of multiple intelligences.”3 A cursory examination of Gardner’s definition of intelligence and his
categorization scheme shows how people can have different strengths and how the
learning experience can be tailored to those differences. Here’s how Gardner
defines intelligence:
• The ability to solve problems that one encounters in real life.
• The
ability to generate new problems to solve.
That definition escapes the
narrow clutches of an IQ score. In studying intellectual capacity, Gardner
established criteria to aid him in deciding whether a talent that could be
observed was actually a distinct intelligence and therefore whether it merited
its own spot in his categorization scheme. His criteria are that “each
intelligence must have a developmental feature, be observable in special
populations such as prodigies or ‘savants,’ provide some evidence of
localization in the brain, and support a symbolic or notational system.”5 From this, Gardner originally
came up with seven distinct intelligences. He has since added an eighth to that
list and given consid-eration to a couple more.
Gardner’s eight intelligences,
with brief definitions and an example of someone who exemplifies each one, are:
• Linguistic: Ability to think in words and to
use language
to
express complex meanings: Walt Whitman.
• Logical-mathematical: Ability to calculate, quantify, consider propositions and hypotheses, and perform complex math-ematical
operations: Albert Einstein.
• Spatial: Ability to think in three-dimensional ways; perceive external and internal imagery; re-create, transform, or modify images;
navigate oneself and objects through space; and produce or decode graphic
information: Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Bodily-kinesthetic: Ability
to manipulate objects and fine-
tune
physical skills: Michael Jordan.
• Musical: Ability to distinguish and create
pitch, melody,
rhythm,
and tone: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
• Interpersonal: Ability
to understand and interact effec-
tively
with others: Mother Teresa.
• Intrapersonal: Ability to construct an accurate self-perception and to use this
knowledge in planning and directing one’s life: Sigmund Freud.
•
Naturalist: Ability to observe patterns in
nature, identify and classify
objects, and understand natural and human-made systems: Rachel Carson.6
How does this relate to teaching
and learning? When an educational approach is well aligned with one’s stronger
intel-ligences or aptitudes, understanding can come more easily and with
greater enthusiasm. Put differently, the learning can be intrinsically
motivating. For example, in the above story, Rob struggled to grasp the
material when the teacher taught it in a logical-mathematical form. Almost
surely this form of intel-ligence is not one of his strengths. His classmate,
Maria, has a high logical-mathematical intelligence, so she grasped it
imme-diately. But when his father demonstrated the same concept to Rob in a
different, spatial way that aligned with how Rob learns, he not only
understood, but found it interesting.7
Gardner and others have
researched ways to teach various content materials so that they are in line
with each of these intelligences. In the book Teaching and Learning through Multi-ple Intelligences, the authors
Linda Campbell, Bruce Campbell, and
Dee Dickinson demonstrate this by telling a story about a girl who was several
grade levels behind in school. The more she struggled, the more she hated
school—and her self-esteem plummeted. When she entered the sixth grade, she had
a teacher who observed how gracefully she moved, which prompted the teacher to
wonder if she might learn through movement. Without being an expert in
intelligence typologies, that teacher could see that this student had the gift
of great bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. The student generally refused to
read, write, or practice spelling. But following her hunch, the teacher
suggested to the girl that she “create a movement alphabet using her body to
form each of the twenty-six letters.” The next day, the girl ran into the
classroom before school started with something to show her teacher. She danced
each letter of the alphabet and then sequenced all twenty-six into a unified
performance. She then spelled her first name and last name through dancing.
That night she practiced all her spelling
words through dancing—and performed the dance for her classmates the
next day. Soon she began writing more and more words. First she would dance
them; then she wrote them down. Her writing scores increased, as did her
self-confidence. A few months later she no longer needed to dance out words to
spell them; learning through her strength in bodily-kines-thetic intelligence
had opened a world of reading and writing to her forever. These skills are
important no matter what path she pursues in life.8
Gardner’s research shows that
although most people have some capacity in each of the eight intelligences,
most people excel in only two or three of them. His research, which implies the
need for learning opportunities that line up with individual strengths, also
cautions against pigeonholing people and not developing all their
intelligences.
In addition, these differences in
intelligences are only one dimension of cognitive ability. Within each type of
intelligence, there might be different learning
preferences. Some students need to write a concept down before they
understand it, play it out, talk it through, and so on. Although there is
dispute over this idea, just to make the point clear, a person who learns best
visually in one type of intelligence—by seeing images or reading text—may not
necessarily do well visually when using another type of intelligence. Finally,
nested within these, there is another dimension of difference with which no one
disagrees. People learn at different paces—slow,
medium, fast, and all the variations within.
Given that we all learn in
different ways, one might assume that we would teach in different ways, too.
But think back to your experience in school. Because schools place students in
groups, when a class was ready to move on to a new concept, all students moved
on, regardless of how many had mastered the previous concept (even though it
might have been a pre-requisite for understanding what came next). When it was
time to take Algebra 2, even if we had not yet mastered all the requisites in
Algebra 1, we took Algebra 2. Some people
moved on even if they did not pass the prerequisite
class. Con-versely, it did not matter if some percentage of students could
cover the World History curriculum in a quarter; everyone was stuck in the
class for a full year. And when our fourth-grade teacher taught long division in
the manner that corre-sponded to how she best learned it and understood it,
maybe it clicked for us and maybe not; whether we understood it right away and
became bored with the repeated explanations or sank deeper into bewilderment,
unable to grasp the logic, we sat in the class for the duration.9
Why do schools work this way? If
we agree that we learn differently and that students need customized pathways
and paces to learn, why do schools standardize the way they teach and the way
they test?
Interdependence and Modularity
To explain this conflict between schools
standardizing the way they teach in the face of students needing customization
for the way they learn, we first need to step back and understand the concepts
of interdependence and modularity from the world of product design.
All products and services have an
architecture, or design, that determines what its parts are and how they must
interact with one another.10 The place where any two parts fit together is called an interface. Interfaces exist within a
product, as well as between groups of people or between departments within an
organization that must interact with one another.
A product’s design is
interdependent if the way one com-ponent is designed and made depends on the
way other components are designed and made—and vice versa. When there is an
unpredictable interdependency across an interface between components—that is,
we can’t know ahead of time how we must build a certain part until we have
built both parts together—then the same organization must develop both of the components if it hopes to
develop either component.
These architectures are almost always proprietary because each
organization will develop its own interdependent design to optimize performance
in a different way.
By contrast, in a modular product
design, there are no unpredictable interdependencies in the design of the
product’s components or stages of the value chain. Modular components fit and
work together in well-understood, crisply codified ways. A modular architecture
specifies the fit and function of all elements so completely that it does not
matter who makes the components or subsystems as long as they meet the defined
specifications. Modular components can be developed in inde-pendent work groups
or by different organizations working at arm’s length.
To illustrate, consider the “architecture”
of an electric light. A light bulb and a lamp have an interface between the
light bulb stem and the light bulb socket. This is a modular interface.
Engineers have lots of freedom to improve the design inside the light bulb, as long as they build the stem so that it
can fit the established light bulb socket specifications. Notice how easily the
new compact fluorescent bulbs fit into our old lamps. The same company does not
need to design and make the light bulb, the lamp, the wall sockets, and the
elec-tricity generation and distribution systems. Because standard interfaces
exist, different companies can provide products for each piece of the system.
When there is an interdependent
interface, by contrast, integration across that interface is essential. For
example, when Henry Ford built his high-volume Model T assembly line in
Dearborn, Michigan, he learned a painful truth. When his workers pressed a flat
sheet of steel into a die to form it into the shape of an auto-body part, the
steel did not conform itself precisely to the die’s shape (which is the
metalworker’s equivalent of a mold). Instead, the steel sprang back somewhat
after it was fully pressed into the die. Ford’s die makers could cut the dies
slightly deeper to account for this spring-back. But if the batch of steel that
was delivered from Ford’s supplier
on Monday sprang back 2 percent, whereas Tuesday’s
batch of steel sprang back 6 percent, then the size of the parts would vary by
as much as 4 percentage points from one day to the next—and the pieces of the
car just wouldn’t fit together. Working independently, the steel suppliers
couldn’t solve this problem because they weren’t stamping the steel in Ford’s
environment. And Ford couldn’t solve it because he wasn’t making the steel. So
Ford integrated. He built a massive steel complex on the River Rouge west of
Detroit so that as his engineers worked to control the metallurgical properties
of the steel, they could interdependently change the way the dies and stamping
machines were designed and used.
When someone changes one piece in
a product that has an interdependent architecture, necessity requires
comple-mentary changes in other pieces. Customizing a product or service, as a
result, becomes complicated and expensive. Many of these interdependencies are not
predictable, so all pieces must be designed interactively. Customizing a
product whose architecture is interdependent requires a complete redesign of
the entire product or service every time.
On the other hand, modular
architectures optimize flex-ibility, which allows for easy customization.
Because people can change pieces without redesigning everything else, real
customization for different needs is relatively easy. A modular architecture
enables an organization to serve these needs. Mod-ularity also opens the system
to enable competition for per-formance improvement and cost reduction of each
module.
The level of interdependence
found in a product is a function of the underlying technology’s maturity. In
the early days of most new products and services, the components need to be
tightly woven together to maximize the functionality from an immature
technology that is not yet good enough to satisfy customer needs. Customers are
willing to tolerate the product standardization that component interdependence mandates
because customization is prohibitively expensive. They are gen-erally willing
to conform their expectations and their behavior
to accommodate use of the standard product. Differences in usage
patterns—and therefore customers’ individual needs— are not obvious during this
stage of an industry’s evolution.
As an illustration, Apple led the
charge in the 1980s at the outset of the personal computer revolution by
controlling essentially the whole computer—from the hardware and operating
system to the software applications. The archi-tecture of this system was
proprietary and interdependent. The unfortunate downside, however, was that
customization was prohibitively expensive for Apple.
As products and their markets
mature, technology grows more sophisticated, as do customers. They begin to
understand their unique needs and to insist on customized products.
Tech-nological maturity makes customization possible. Product and service
architectures become more modular in this envi-ronment. In the early days of
personal computers, a modular offering was not possible. But the technology
matured, which made the Dell approach to satisfying different customer needs a
realistic option. Peeling the cover off a Dell reveals that Dell does not manufacture
any of the components. A different company makes each. This allows Dell to
invite its customers to specify the features and functions they want and then
to assemble and deliver a customized computer within 48 hours.
The personal computer operating
system is currently going through the same evolution. Microsoft’s Windows
operating system is interdependent. Changing just ten lines of code could
necessitate rewriting millions of others. It would cost millions of dollars to
customize Windows exactly to your needs. The economics of interdependence
mandate standardization, and we live with it. Most of us are unaware of how our
lives might improve if we had easily configurable operating systems at our
disposal; it’s just a luxury that had never been feasible. Once Unix technology
had matured sufficiently, however, an open-source operating system such as
Linux became feasible. Linux’s architecture is modular and standardized and
therefore can be customized—witness how the open-source programming com-munity continually
updates and enhances it, kernel by kernel.
The Schooling Dilemma:
Standardizing Teaching versus Customizing Learning
How does this relate to U.S. public schools? Think
about schooling’s architecture. The dominant model today is highly
interdependent. It is laced with four types of interdepen-dencies. Some of
these interdependencies are temporal:
you can’t study this in ninth grade if you didn’t cover that in seventh. There
are lateral interdependencies, too.
You can’t teach certain foreign languages in other more efficient ways because
you’d have to change the way English grammar is taught; and changing the way
grammar is taught would mandate changes elsewhere in the English curriculum.
There are also physical
interdependencies. There is strong evidence, for example, that project-based
learning is a highly motivating way for many students to synthesize what they
are learning as well as to identify gaps in their knowledge that need to be
filled. But many schools can’t adopt widespread project-based learning because
the layout of their buildings simply can’t accommodate it. And finally, there
are hierarchical inter-dependencies.
These range from well-intentioned mandates, which are often contradictory, from
local, state, and federal policymakers that influence what happens in schools
to union-negotiated work rules that become ensconced in contracts and policies
at the state and local levels. Curriculum and textbook decisions made at school
district headquarters also circumscribe the ability of teachers to innovate,
especially across the curriculum. Although an innovative teacher might see a
way to teach algebra in the context of chemistry, it would be nearly impossible
to do it because the structure of what can be taught in the classroom depends
on how the district headquarters carves up and defines the curriculum; and
changes in the curriculum would also require changes in stan-dardized tests and
admissions standards. Even more prob-lematic, this kind of change in practice
would require changes in the way prospective science and math teachers are
trained and certified.
Because there are so many points
of interdependence within the public school system, there are powerful economic
forces in place to standardize both instruction and assessment despite what we
know to be true—students learn in different ways. The problem is that
customization within interdependent systems is expensive. We explore how
hierarchical interde-pendency restricts customization in much greater depth in
Chapter 5 when we introduce the concept of a “commercial system,” but here’s
one telling example to illustrate the point. In the 1960s and 1970s, society
began requiring schools to cus-tomize offerings for students deemed to have
special needs. By the 1970s, 10 percent of all children were covered by
federally funded programs for children with special needs.11 Students who qualify for these
designations typically require individual approaches, codified in an
individualized education plan (IEP). In another special case, educators place
immigrant students from non-English-speaking families into custom-designed
English language learner (ELL) programs. Customization is almost surely an
important advantage for both these categories of students, but it is also
terribly expensive. For example, in Rhode Island, it costs $22,893 a year on
average to educate a special-education student, whereas it costs $9,269 for a
regular education student.12 Spending increases for special education students have outpaced spending
for regular education by a considerable margin over the last 40 years, to the
point where special education now accounts for over a fifth of the spending in
many districts.13
As a consequence, there is a
constant struggle over who is eligible for “special” consideration, and,
because those costs soak up so many resources (lower staff ratios, special spaces,
tailored instructional approaches), schools increasingly stan-dardize for
everyone else.14 But here is the dilemma: because
students have different types of intelligence, learning styles, paces, and
starting points, all students have
special learning needs.15 It is not just students whom we label as having dis-abilities. Or, to
put it as singer-songwriter Danny Deardorff
did, we are all “differently abled.”16 The students who succeed in
schools do so largely because their intelligence happens to match the dominant
paradigm in use in a particular classroom— or somehow they have found ways to
adapt to it.17
Can We Customize
Economically within the Present Factory Model Schools?
In the one-room schools that characterized public
education during most of the 1800s, teaching was customized by necessity, at
least by pace and level. Because the room was filled with children of different
ages and abilities, teachers spent most of their day going from student to
student, giving personalized instruction and assignments, and following up in
individually tailored ways. But as classrooms filled in the late 1800s, this
method of teaching changed as larger enrollments forced schools to standardize.
Americans tolerated it; progressive thinkers from earlier generations
encouraged it. Just as in the early stages of other industries’ histories,
society’s expectations and behaviors actually conformed to the standardization;
Americans no longer expected customized learning. Much of the support behind
this standardization— categorizing students by age into grades and then
teaching batches of them with batches of material—was inspired by the efficient
factory system that had emerged in industrial America. By instituting grades
and having a teacher focus on just one set of students of the same academic
proficiency, the theory went, teachers could teach “the same subjects, in the
same way, and at the same pace” to all children in the classroom.18
The question now facing schools
is this: Can the system of schooling designed to process groups of students in
stan-dardized ways in a monolithic instructional mode be adapted to handle
differences in the way individual brains are wired for learning?19
Some school districts have made
efforts to personalize learn- ing, and many schools have attempted to use
Gardner’s frame-work to teach to multiple intelligences within a classroom. But
because of the high level of interdependence in a classroom, this is not
an easy thing to do successfully on a large scale. Montgomery County Public
Schools in Maryland, for ex- ample, has begun instituting forms of
personalized learning to take into account varied learning needs. Through
real-time assessments, such as those offered by Wireless Generation,20 a
company that provides mobile educational assessment solu-tions, teachers gain
insight into where students actually are in their learning so that they can
then tailor instruction to each student.
The Maryland effort is a noble
one. But teaching to multiple intelligences in a monolithic model is fraught
with problems. Although most students have some capacity in each of the eight
intelligences, most truly excel in only two or three of the intelligences.
Teachers, of course, are no different and excel in a discrete number of styles.
Like all of us, they therefore tend to teach in ways compatible with their
strengths.
What happens then in the typical
classroom is a kind of “reverse magnetic attraction.” Every magnet, you may
remember, has a positive and a negative pole. Like poles repel each other, and
opposite poles attract. In the typical classroom, those “like poles”—similar
types of intelligence—attract, rather than repel, each other.
This reverse magnetic attraction
creates a vicious cycle. The teachers in classrooms are products of the
monolithic batch-processing system that characterizes public education today.
In that system, students who naturally enjoy the teaching approach they
encounter in a given class are more likely to excel. For example, the subject
material in a high school language arts class relates in obvious ways to
linguistic intel-ligence. Students with that intelligence type naturally
comprise most of the ones who excel in language arts. They’re the ones who
choose to major in that subject in college and then choose teaching careers in
that field. Specific subject matter tends to be linked to specific
intelligences through the way textbooks are written—by experts who are strong
in that specific intel-
ligence type. As a result, what has emerged in
every domain are “intellectual cliques,” composed of curriculum developers,
teachers, and the best students in that subject area. Their brains are all
wired consistently with one another. Just as members of a social clique often
are unaware of the degree to which they easily understand and communicate with
one another to the exclusion of those outside the group, members of these
intel-lectual cliques are often unaware of the extent to which their shared
patterns of thinking exclude those with strengths in other kinds of
intelligences.
Students who are not endowed with
strong linguistic intel-ligence are therefore predictably frustrated in an
English class. Teachers are similarly trapped by their own strengths. In any
given classroom; there are students who do not have strong linguistic
intelligence and are therefore effectively excluded from excelling in this
subject. And the pattern repeats itself from generation to generation. The same
happens in each of the academic disciplines. For example, teachers who teach
math tend to have high logical-mathematical intelligence, and therefore the
students who excel in their classes also tend to have this type of
intelligence. Many other students are excluded.
Gardner and others who agree with
him work to train teachers and schools to teach to multiple intelligences. This
effort is more manageable at the elementary school level, with its
activity-center, exploratory learning model. But in most U.S. schools,
especially at the middle and high school level, even a heroic effort by a
teacher to pay attention to multiple intelligence patterns is, because of the
way the system is arranged around the monolithic architecture, almost
guar-anteed to fail. When that teacher caters to one type of intel-ligence,
some students will tune in, but others will tune out.
In summary, the current
educational system—the way it trains teachers, the way it groups students, the
way the curriculum is designed, and the way the school buildings are laid out—is
designed for standardization. If the United States is serious
about leaving no child behind, it cannot teach its students with
standardized methods. Today’s system was designed at a time when
standardization was seen as a virtue. It is an intricately interdependent
system. Only an administrator suffering from virulent masochism would attempt
to teach each student in the way his or her brain is wired to learn within this
monolithic batch system. Schools need a new system.
The Potential for
Customized Learning iN Student-Centric Classrooms
If the goal is to educate every student—asking schools to ensure that
all students have the skills and capabilities to escape the chains of poverty
and have an all-American shot at realizing their dreams—we must find a way to
move toward what, in this book, we call a “student-centric” model. We use the
word “toward” intentionally here because this is not, at least imme-diately, a
binary choice. A monolithic batch process with all of its interdependencies is
at one end of a spectrum, and a student-centric model that is completely
modular is at the other. For a very long time there will be some issues,
skills, and subjects that the traditional model will handle best. But one by
one, the instructional jobs that teachers now shoulder are destined, as we will
show, to migrate toward a student-centric model.
How might schools start down this
promising path? Com-puter-based learning, which is a step on the road toward
student-centric technology, offers a way. As we explain in subsequent chapters,
computer-based learning is emerging as a disruptive force and a promising
opportunity. The proper use of tech-nology as a platform for learning offers a
chance to modularize the system and thereby customize learning. Student-centric
learning is the escape hatch from the temporal, lateral, physical, and
hierarchical cells of standardization. The hardware exists. The software is
emerging. Student-centric learning opens the door for students to learn in ways
that match their intelligence types in the places and at the paces they prefer
by combining
content in customized sequences. As modularity and
customi-zation reach a tipping point, there is another opportunity for change:
As we explain later, teachers can serve as professional learning coaches and
content architects to help individual students progress—and they can be a guide
on the side, not a sage on the stage.
Is this a pipe dream? How can
schools, which are public institutions driven by political decisions and
seemingly insulated from market demands, make the shift to a student-centric
classroom? In the following chapter, we show that his-torically schools have in
fact done a remarkable job of shifting to meet the public’s demands. Explaining
the disruption theory and a brief history of schooling in the United States
shows that schools actually have consistently improved over time. Although it
won’t be easy, we think they can make this shift to a student-centric
classroom, too, if they take the right steps forward.
NOTES
1. The
Ball Foundation puts forth a different rubric from the primary one we use in
this book, for example. It has done significant work exploring people’s
different aptitudes and what this means for their learning. From a Web site
about the Ball Foundation’s Ball Aptitude Battery: “An individual’s aptitudes
are a primary factor in identifying the types of skills one can expect to learn
most quickly and easily. This in turn is a predictor of the types of tasks that
an individual is likely to enjoy. So an individual who understands their own
aptitude profile can be more confident that their time and energy is invested in
education that is going to offer the greatest rewards.” “The Ball Aptitude
Battery,” Career Vision
Web site, http://www.careervision.org/About/ BallAptitudeBattery.htm
(accessed April 1, 2008). There are many other
theories and schematics in use to think about the differences in how people
learn as well, including talents; motivations, interests, or passions; learning
styles (although there is considerable evidence that the popular
categori-zation schemes in use here are not valid); and so forth. There is also
lots of ongoing work applying this research in education, including that of
Sci-entific Learning, which is based on the work of neuroscientist Paula
Tallal, and All Kinds of Minds, which is based on the research work of
pediatrician Mel Levine. For a good overview of all of this work, we also
recommend
Mary-Dean Barringer, Craig Pohlman, and Michelle
Robinson’s book Schools for All Kinds of
Minds: Boosting Student Success by Embracing Learning Variation (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010).
2. Many
researchers have proposed different categories or types of intelligence. Among
the categories are Peter Salovey and John Mayer’s emotional intel-ligence. See
P. Salovey and J. D. Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagi-nation, Cognition, and Personality, vol. 9, no. 3, 1990, pp.
9, 185–211.
Daniel Goleman’s latest book is
about social intelligence, another category of intelligence. See Daniel
Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New
Science of Human Relationships (New
York: Bantam, 2006).
Robert Sternberg has developed
a multiple intelligences theory that pin-points three intelligence types—analytical,
creative, and practical—based on his own definition of intelligence, which is
culturally dependent and broader than the traditional measure. R. J. Sternberg,
Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human Intelligence (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
In a different line of work,
Sally Shaywitz has broken new ground in under-standing how one set of people,
those with dyslexia, learn differently from others. Shaywitz’s research details
how dyslexics’ brains actually function dif-ferently from others through the
use of correlations in MRIs of the brain. See Sally Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete
Science-Based Program for Reading
Problems at Any Level (New York: Random House, 2003).
3. Howard
Gardner, Multiple Intelligences (New
York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 6. We also recommend reading a delightful book
in which Gardner responds to critiques of his work. See Jeffrey A. Schaler,
ed., Howard Gardner Under Fire: The Rebel Psychologist Faces His
Critics (Chicago: Open Court, 2006).
4. Linda
Campbell, Bruce Campbell, and Dee Dickinson, Teaching and Learning through
Multiple Intelligences (Boston: Pearson, 2004), p. xx.
5.
Campbell et al., p. xix.
6.
Campbell et al., p. xxi.
7. Jack
Frymier, who has spent his life in public education as a teacher,
admin-istrator, professor, and researcher, provides more insight into why this
would be more intrinsically motivating. Because motivation is an individual
matter and children differ from one another, it stands to reason that different
things motivate different children. No effort at instilling intrinsic
motivation will succeed unless it works with these differences. See Jack
Frymier, “If Kids Don’t Want to Learn You Probably Can’t Make ’Em: Discussion
with Jack Frymier,” notes by Ted Kolderie (October 28, 1999), http://www.education evolving.org/content_view_all.asp.
8.
Campbell et al., pp. 63–64.
9.
Gardner’s research supports this. Schools and standardized tests tend to
emphasize linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence and ignore the other
kinds of intelligences. And most teachers tend to rely on one or two
intelligences to the exclusion of the others. Campbell et al., pp. xx, xxiii.
In a Time
magazine story on high school dropouts, the article cited that of the 30-plus
percent of high school students who did not finish school, 88 percent of those
dropping out had passing grades when they left. Dropouts frequently report
boredom as the reason for leaving. Nathan Thornburgh, “Dropout Nation,” Time, April 9, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/print out/0,8816,1181646,00.html.
10.
We sometimes use the word “product”
exclusively, but in this context, it serves as a synonym for “service.” The
concepts of interdependence and modularity and their implications apply equally
to both products and services; we use the word “product” most of the time to
simplify the text.
11. David
Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward
Utopia: A Century of Public
School Reform (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 25.
12.
Jennifer D. Jordan, “Special-Needs
Students Apart,” Providence Journal,
Feb-ruary 8, 2007, http://www.projo.com/education/content/special_education21_ 01-21-07_P83O6B6.15f1fb4.html.
13.
Stacey Childress and Stig
Leschly, “Note on U.S. Public Education Finance (B): Expenditures,” HBS Case
Note, November 2, 2006, pp. 2, 11. Also see Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G.
Rivkin, “Understanding the Twentieth-Century Growth in U.S. School Spending,” Journal of Human Resources, vol. 32, no.
1, Winter 1997, pp. 46–53 for a further breakdown of the increase in special
education costs relative to overall spending. The authors use an estimate from
Stephen Chaikind, Louis C. Danielson, and Marsha L. Brauen, “What Do We Know
about the Costs of Special Education? A Selected Review,” Journal of Special Education, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 344–370 that a
special education student costs roughly 2.3 times what a regular edu-cation
student costs.
14.
An article in Threshold paints a picture of how
teachers who aim to cus-tomize for struggling students give less attention to
others in the class. “Per-sonalization in the Schools: A Threshold Forum,” Threshold, Winter 2007, p. 13.
15.
An article in Threshold brings this point to life with
some in-depth and concrete examples. See Dianne L. Ferguson, “Teaching Each and
Every One: Three Strategies to Help Teachers Follow the Curriculum While
Tar-geting Effective Learning for Every Student,” Threshold, Winter 2007, p. 7.
16. Campbell
et al., p. 127.
17.
There actually is some modularity
and customization in public schools. In the youngest grades, during parts of
the day, students often can stay at various learning centers as long as they
choose, before moving to other centers. In high school, students have considerable
choice in the classes they take. These options allow them to customize what
they learn. But they have little freedom to choose how they will learn it—and
that is the challenge.
18. Tyack and
Cuban, p. 89.
Also, as ethnographer Herb Childress has written,
U.S. high schools are “additive” factories in which multiple certified
specialists screw on their component and pass the child along to another; some
screw on algebra, others world history, others Hemingway. He infers that high
school is devoted to a set of processes above all else. We delve into this idea
more in Chapter 5 when we explain the concept of the value-chain business. Herb
Childress, Landscapes of Betrayal,
Landscapes of Joy: Curtisville in the Lives of Its Teenagers (New York: SUNY Press, 2000).
19.
Success for All is an example of
a “batch processing” system that has tried to customize. It is a reading
program that groups kids by ability. It has a tight feedback loop where it
frequently assesses and regroups its students as it attempts to teach students
at their level. It doesn’t target different learning preferences, however. It
is a slight improvement over the lockstep system and it points in the direction
of mass customization. But it is still stuck in the monolithic paradigm of
schooling.
20.
Among its assessments, Wireless
Generation offers teachers an improved way to conduct early reading
assessments. Teachers have a handheld device that they use when administering a
reading assessment. When the session is over, the teacher has captured a rich
set of data about the student in a far easier manner than was previously
possible. Teachers can then sync the handheld to a Web site to view and analyze
reports on the student as well as the whole class. They can then use this
information to tailor instruction to the students’ needs—and Wireless
Generation’s product offers guidance here, too.
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