Subscribe to our Blog
Snake Oil, Education Style
The written word for crisis in Chinese consists of two characters - one representing danger and the other representing opportunity. The latest crisis in Canadian classrooms (pace John Snobelen) is the very wide disparity of learning abilities within a single classroom - easily a 12-grade range in your typical grade 8 classroom, for example. This disparity is the result of several misguided policies, each of them making its own special contribution: social promotion (which makes illiteracy and innumeracy no barrier to advancement), child-centred learning (which allows children to progress at their own pace, even if their own pace is a crawl); inclusion (which places even the most severely-disabled students in regular classrooms); and the list goes on.
Now a 12-grade range in a grade 8 classroom is no joke for the teacher. Obviously, there is no way that he or she can teach lessons that are at the right level for more than a few students at a time. Enter the opportunity!
Differentiated instruction is the latest buzzword, and it is THE ANSWER for teachers who are floundering in “differentiated” classrooms. Like other education fads, differentiated instruction offers wonderful money-making possibilities for thousands of education authors and consultants who are busily conducting workshopss and churning out books and DVDs. Here is a typical example: a DVD on sale for only $575 that promises, among other things, to show teachers how to lead, rather than to manage, differentiated classrooms.
It all sounds great, but there is one catch - differentiated instruction doesn’t work (read this column by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham). Furthermore, this has been known for going on 50 years now.
The peddling of this sort of snake oil is outlawed in most professions - I mean imagine a pharmaceutical company being allowed to sell a pill that not only didn’t work but also actually killed some patients! Yet quacks and fake nostrums are the norm in the field of education.