Educating children is undoubtedly a most important and noble profession; to my mind it remains the most impactful one of all in terms of shaping the future for humanity: all leaders regardless of their chosen career path have come through formal schooling, all have been shaped by the experience, and like all adults they most likely recall with fondness that special teacher who took a keen interest in their welfare and success over those teachers who knew a lot, were exceptional masters of content. This point underscores the success of Marva Collins’ Garfield Park school for impoverished children in Chicago, and is reflected in the titles of her two monographs, Ordinary Children, Extraordinary Teachers and Values: Lighting the Candle of Excellence. Collins famously put children first, placed their individuality and identity at the core of her vision and mission, and built one of the most successful school models ever conceived around these non-negotiable principles. The story of her success is an inspiration to all educators.
Another way of viewing Collins’ approach might be to frame it in the popular language of Carol Dweck’s ‘mindset’ theory, particularly her ‘growth mindset’, which as John Hattie argues does not mean having a positive attitude but rather having cultivated learning tenacity, or the capacity to approach any difficult and challenging learning event with an evaluative and problem-solving mentality over simply applying the content one learned. Hattie’s identification of students’ self-reported grades as having the highest effect size is related to this concept, and when he urges teachers to push students beyond what they believe they can achieve he is echoing those guiding principles that Marva Collins positioned at the core of her pedagogy, namely, instilling the confidence in students that they can exceed their targets, and convincing teachers that their job is never to ‘meet the needs of children’ but rather to motivate them to exceed their potential.
How different this is then from what we discussed in Part I, where teachers had accepted a predetermined curve and relegated students to a deterministic fate rather break that mould and push them beyond their potential. A fixed and deterministic view of students, based on their ethnic and socio-cultural background, whereby their ability to perform is preordained by metrics over which they have no control, guides so much of what passes for assessment in schools today. Students are reduced to numbers and ciphers rather than being treated as persons who may exercise their will, resolve, determination, self-belief, and effort to always do better, and teachers smugly accept this status quo rather than doing the hard graft of getting to know their learners, truly caring for them, and pushing them to exceed their potential.
The bell curve comes from what is known as Gaussian distribution, or ‘normal distribution’, a probability distribution that is symmetric around its mean, where half of the data falls to the left and half to the right of the mean. The distribution has made its way into many fields, especially education, and most especially assessment, where it has caused much misunderstanding, many misconceptions, and predetermined outcomes for so many students. In future posts, I will be challenging this concept and approaching teaching, learning, and particularly assessment from a radically different perspective.
