Teachers and Thinking

A common question throughout the years about our school’s instructional methods has been something like “If differential instruction is so good, why doesn’t everyone else do it?” My first comment usually is “Just because everyone else isn’t doing it, doesn’t mean something is not good.”

But the main point of my answer to this question is that in most situations most people pretty much follow the crowd and whatever they are doing. This is also true for teachers and the instructional model of lecturing to larger and larger classes of students.

As a part of teacher training we use a book by cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School? One of his first points is the three properties of thinking: (1) thinking is slow; (2) thinking is effortful; and (3) thinking is uncertain. Interestingly, he continues that because we are so bad at thinking, we rely on memory. He quotes two psychologist who say “Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.” Teachers are people. And like the rest of us they work from their own past experiences in school and what their teacher training in the universities taught them; lecturing to large groups and with material that reaches the middle to low-middle skilled students.

Mark Pennington, a reading specialist who also has his own publishing company, has similar thoughts. Mark’s blog of October 11th titled 12 Reasons Why Teachers Resist Differentiated Instruction has three of his twelve reasons supporting this idea. #1 – We tend to teach the way that we were taught. #5 – Although teachers prize their independence and academic freedom to teach how we want, we are generally conformists. #7 – The influence of university professors.

Bios Christian Academy is not alone in using differentiated education. But for most of the world, to change to differentiated education is like changing the direction of a slow moving train to nowhere. It takes a lot of effort, planning, and desire before it can happen.