Take a look at this video, if you will, and pause for a
moment to think of its implications. Is
it a salvo in the vast conspiracy some see, seeking to undermine public
education? Or, is it a thought provoking
video on how our children learn?
In Montgomery County, Maryland, a wealthy enclave bordering
Washington, DC, differentiated learning is the latest classroom innovation. Take a look at these tweets from Montgomery
County Public Schools (MCPS) Superintendent Joshua Starr (please see here,
here,
and here),
and you will notice students in groups learning on their own with the teacher
serving as a ringmaster of sorts. Give
each group a computer and you will have replicated Sugata Mitra’s approach.
This
paper asserts that two decades of research has shown that group learning
increases student learning and social-emotional outcomes such as social skills,
self-esteem, etc. The abstract makes no bones about the fact that “groups
with above-average students produced more correct answers and generated a
greater number of high-quality explanation of how to solve the test problems
than did groups without above average students.”
Go back to that video and you will hear Mitra assert that, even on the same
task, some groups did perform better than others.
What then, you should ask yourself, would have happened if each
of these groups in the differentiated classroom were given access to high
quality resources be it via computer or otherwise? The research, it seems is rather unequivocal,
they will learn much more.
Alas, such an experiment is highly unlikely. In some minds it would herald the beginning of
the end of teaching, relegating teachers to a minor role. However, I would ask, don’t we owe it to our
children to give them the opportunity to learn the most? If we are to embrace untested education
paradigms such as differentiated education, shouldn’t we do it in a way that is
known to maximize learning?
