Inclusion Conference is Coming!

The Inclusion Conference is coming!

Now that spring is here and Game of Thrones has concluded, saying 'Winter is Coming' just doesn’t have the same effect on me.   

iSummit 2019 is the fourth annual opportunity to stretch our thinking around meeting the needs of all learners in the classroom.

Let me offer you two phrases that have some POWER in meeting the needs of all learners in the classroom: 

THE END OF AVERAGE

The End of Average is the title of a best selling book by Todd Rose.  Who is Todd Rose?  Well, he was a high school drop out with a 0.9 GPA.  He was on welfare with 2 children and working 2 jobs when he got his GED.  And then he went to college.  And eventually. . . . he became the director of the Harvard University Mind Brain and Education Program.   He is keenly aware of what a difference it makes if we attend to the variability in humans when we design instruction.  His analysis of brain research provides amazing insight and his review of our errors in designing for the ‘average’ is INTERESTING.   You see, when we design for the ‘average’ we end up designing for no one.  The air force learned this when they measured four thousand pilots to design the perfect cockpit based on the average arm length, leg length, torso height, etc.  The outcome?  None of the pilots were comfortable.  “If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one”.

What if we consider our teaching methods and our approach to give a roomful of individuals the same lesson, with the same materials and the same measurements?  There might be a reason why so many are not succeeding under these conditions.

THE 7 - 10 SPLIT

 

If you have watched or played just one game of bowling, you know the 7-10 split is terribly hard to solve.  When you throw the ball down the middle you might connect with many pins, but you are taking a chance on missing 7 and 10 because they are not ‘in the middle’.  Shelly Moore makes a very good point regarding the educational implications of this!

You see the similarities right?  If our instruction is always aiming for the middle or the average, we are ALWAYS missing some students.  Those are the students that we talk about because they are underserved, minorities, have disabilities, etc.  

Why don’t we FLIP our approach to instructional planning and START with the students that are not in the middle?  Plan for the students on the edges and we are sure to see an impact in our student achievement.  Perhaps educators can learn from the mistakes of the air force and the bowling game.

Watch these brief videos on THE END OF AVERAGE and THE 7 - 10 SPLIT.  They are engaging!