Gap Thinking

One way to help improve teaching and learning is to focus on Gap Thinking.  When students are not providing work at the expectation level of the course, it is considered a deficiency.  Different from the deficiency itself, Gap Thinking is the flawed thinking that leads to the wrong answer.  With just about anything people learn, improvement comes from correcting faulty logic, assumptions, and habits, not from merely pointing out what is deficient.

We can help our students with more precise feedback and instruction when we uncover what they actually think about a topic, and work with them to correct problems or access the appropriate practice needed to reach mastery.  You can gather information about Gap Thinking while you are assessing a students by getting them to reflect during the assessment.  It can be as simple as questions that require description of their process, pointed questions about a specific step, or even ratings of how certain they felt about their answer.

For example, if a student is repeatedly getting a math problem wrong, among the causes could be not knowing how to multiply negatives (previous content), that the student doesn’t understand the steps or process (current content), or may be unable to deal word problems (application).  Regardless, structuring the assessment to provide clues into which of these may be the issue is an effective way to help the student grow.  A good personal trainer wouldn’t merely inform somebody they’re overweight or that they eat too much.  They might help a person realize, for example, that it’s not as simple as how many carbohydrates you eat, but also what type and when.  By the same token, simply telling students they answered 20/30 correctly or wrote a C-level essay does not help them improve.

This really isn’t anything new, is it?  For years, math teachers have asked for students to show their work and marked the type of error.  The additional value of focusing on gap thinking is getting the students to focus on it as well.  If the assessments and criteria are structured with this end in mind, we can increase the students’ ability to diagnose and correct their own gap thinking, or at least have a greater sense of ownership and control.  It’s not hard to see how it can be easier and more effective to help a student when they approach you with a better sense of their own deficiencies. Granted, they will need help with this, but the mentality of “why am I wrong and how do I fix it?” is much more conducive to education than “what did I get wrong, and did I do good or bad?”  If we don’t ask for more, they often stop at judgement, rather than reflect and grow.

(If you're interested in more along these lines, I highly recommend you check out Proficiency Based Assessment, written by a number of school leaders from Steven High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois.  It can be found on Amazon here.  I don't get a kickback or anything...it's just thought provoking book and I recommend it.)

The Single Solution to All Problems in Education (Part 2)

         Typically, because schools are bureaucracies, they respond with such.  Enter all the programs for kids…we have programs to prompt their readiness, interventions while in school, and more remediation in place afterward. We recognize that they have low esteem, self-worth, and we try to build it up. We have lots of systems and programs.  Forms too.

         But what isn’t done often enough is just spending time with them, individually, or in a really small group.  A student that’s gone through years of a certain education system without success is probably not going to respond to more “system.”  They need attention—and even that’s really just the indicator that somebody cares about them, that somebody’s willing to sit and help them. If you have multiple children of your own, you probably know this intuitively.  Family time is great, but everybody needs some time with they are center stage.     

We’re hard wired for this, and again, if students are not getting it at home, the school can struggle mightily to try and make up the difference.  It’s not that teachers don’t care about each individual, they are doing as much as possible. On the other hand, the intent and how hard the teachers are working doesn’t matter to children…they just need to feel like somebody cares about them.  I suspect that being put in a remediation “program,” for example, feels more like be reshuffled or reclassified, more than it seems like somebody coming to help.

Schools do successfully help students like this all the time.  They do it one student at a time though, or in very small groups.  When a student sees somebody really cares—and the threshold is individual time quite often—they engage, and that is when we able to help them.  That emotional void must be filled before they will go on.  Take a look back and Harry Harlow’s research for some grim confirmations of this.  

My student- teaching experience was in a pretty high needs environment.  I left that experience with the realization that high needs kids make you work a lot harder to win them over, but once you do, they will give their all to not let you down.  Over time, I came to believe that this is because they are used to people quitting on them, individually or in a group.  When teachers persist, students eventually realize they somebody really cares about them.  Even where I work now, the most effective interventions we have are really just those that don’t overwhelm the adult with unmanageable caseloads, and it’s the ones like that where we hear the kids saying, “She's like a mom to me.  She really cares and she wouldn’t give up on me.  She helped me every day and that’s why I realized that school is important.”  Quotes like that are great as it is, but when they are accompanied by better behavior, grades, attendance, self-control and respect, all the better.  But that quote came from a student that benefitted from an intervention where the teacher had a lot of time to invest in her due to a small case.  Scaling that up to serve lots of student without losing the individuality is a greater challenge, and given the above it’s likely going to require a lot more labor.

When it comes to effectively helping students, no matter what the problem, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an intervention that worked because it was some great innovation or discovery.  There’s no shortcut or substitute.  Humans need the caring guidance of others who care about them as individuals. Though many are looking for a much more exciting solution than, “Somebody needs to start paying direct attention to these children.” I’m not sure one is available.  Until we reach a utopian society, there are always going to be children in need, and we can’t afford to wait for some perfect, easy-to-implement solution to come along.  The positive side is that each of us, in our roles as educators, parents, family members, or friends, are able to help—no special training required.