Dangerous Differentiation

Written by Matt Burns, ICT and Stage Coordinator, William Carey Christian School

All the students in my class are exactly the same...said no teacher ever.

That's right. Students are different. They look different, they behave in different ways, and they think differently. But it's our job, as teachers, to develop a student’s learning by at least one year (possibly more if we can).

It's not a new problem. Students have always been different to each other and so have their educational needs. Teachers have done their best, and by and large teachers have done pretty well over the past 200 years.

But there is only so much one teacher can do from out the front. Teachers can only say one thing at a time. They don't have two mouths.  They don't have two heads. Teachers can only be in one place, saying one thing, at one time. Sure...they can set different levels of work, and can have different levels of expectation for their students. However, with regard to instruction, teachers have pretty much had to teach towards the middle. Even in a support class you have a top and bottom, and even in a gifted class you have a top and bottom.

Distance educators were probably the first group of people to start using personal video instruction to educate students. No doubt students found this video instruction useful. But personal video instruction only really started to catch on in mainstream education in 2007 when educators Aaron Sam's and John Bergmann discovered they could use PowerPoint to make video recordings of their lectures. This proved very successful for them, and their students appreciated being able to pause, and rewind the lectures. They also appreciated being able to access the lectures 24/7.

Despite this, workflow for teachers could initially be quite challenging. In 2007 internet access was less prevalent, so John and Aaron would often make DVDs for students to take home.

This strategy became known as the flipped classroom strategy. The reason it was flipped is because students were expected to access the lecture at home, whereas the homework component of the activity was done in the class. The standard model was ‘flipped’ or inverted.

2007 is a long time ago, and we've had a pandemic since then. It's still going. People don't really use DVDs anymore. These days it's all about Wi-Fi and to some extent YouTube. It doesn't have to be YouTube...perhaps it's Vimeo, or Google Drive. It doesn't matter what it is. What matters is that today it's very easy to create and provide personalised learning content for our students. And when I am referring to personalised learning content, I am referring to the practise of differentiating instruction, and not merely the activity.

Thousands of teachers have created their own YouTube channels and enabled their students to be able to access them 24-hours a day, seven days a week. It doesn't matter what time it is. It doesn't matter where the student is. All that matters is the student has a device and a working Wi-Fi connection. I like to sum this up as…

Whenever (24/7)

Wherever (locality)

Whatever (content)

However (rewind, pause, ½ speed or double speed)

The rise of YouTube and Wi-Fi in education is significant. Or at least it should be. At William Carey Christian School we use a topic pre-testing system which identifies the strengths and weaknesses of each individual student in a given topic. Then, according to the results of student pre-testing, students are set individualised learning paths that cater specifically to each student. Learning gains are high. I have seen effect sizes ranging from 0.7 to 1.2 (the standard effect size of 0.4 being about a year's worth of growth). This is high impact teaching.

And so it should be! This is a pretesting model that determines a student specific weakness, then teaches specifically to that. This model uses personally created teacher videos. Students can rewind and pause part of the video they don't understand. They are specifically watching material that they have shown they do not yet comprehend. They are not wasting time being bored and forced to watch a lesson that they already know. They have a pre-established relationship with the teacher.

At William Carey Christian School we have a range of ways that we can create videos to assist students in their learning. We make regular use of the PowerPoint video recording software. We are active users of screencastify. Further to this we have built a light board room in which teachers can make more traditional style learning videos using minimal technology. Click here if you're interested.

Do students prefer it? Absolutely here's a small bit of qualitative data:

And here's a sample of those student comments (I have included the students' original grammar and spelling.)

I find it easier to because I can pause the video when there's something I need to work out. In fact I can also rewind the video to check something I missed, or, need to work out

I like it because in the video you can pause and rewind it and if you have a question you don't have to interupt the test and the class in the video you can pause it and ask the teacher individually and also it waists the teachers time to have to do that.

because you can listen better without other people doing other things

8 years ago I used to teach a boy called Hugo. He was a lovely young man who struggled with mathematics. Finding myself suddenly with some spare time in the lesson I spoke to him.

“Hugo” I said. “I've got about 10 minutes spare. What are you looking at? Should we work on some maths together?”

‘’No’’ he replied. “I’d rather watch one of your videos.’’  And he got busily to work watching one of my videos whilst I stood there, rejected, like yesterday’s salad.

No. Not all students are Hugo. And many students would prefer to work with the teacher. But Hugo thought my best teaching for him was on that video.

On the video I am always patient. On the video I am never interrupted. On the video I can be paused and on the video I can be rewound. There is no stigma in watching the video. And sometimes there is a bit of stigma with the teacher sitting down helping an individual student in class.

I think the pandemic gave a lot of us a wake up call with what could be done with technology and digital learning, but we're not all really there yet. I think we can probably do a bit more. Old habits die hard (really hard sometimes) and not all change is good change.

But some change is really significant. Like the Gutenberg press allowed much greater access to books, Youtube and wifi have lifted the bar again. How much will you be involved?

Photo by Naassom Azevedo on Unsplash - students

Photo by Aditya Chinchure on Unsplash - flipped

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash - growth