Stemming from thoughts surrounding a conversation that occurred a few weeks ago...
The hypothesis raised was this: "What is the group of students who have the highest frequency of under-achievement?" After some thought, the suggestion put forward was "Students achieving at Level 4".
Rather interesting proposal...
But first some ground-rules.
1. Post title - 'Smart' Kids: Obviously a terrible label to put on anyone. It's far too primitive a classification to use on something as complex and multi-faceted as intelligence. But for the next few paragraphs, let's just assume that I meant students who are in no risk of failing to rise to the Ministry Content Standard at a high Level 3 or Level 4 achievement. Everyone is smart. We're going to allow us to use this narrow definition for now.
2. Under-Achievement: Here's where the meat of the issue is. Under Achievement in the industrial age is evaluated against a common benchmark. 'Sub-standard' is term that may illustrate this idea. But we're in a world of Differentiated Instruction and Board Mission statements with some flavour of "Students Rising to Their Potential", we could consider Under-Achievement being evaluated against the student's potential for learning. (student's, not students').
So the challenge in the hypothesis - ignoring for now the difficulty in ever proving it - is to address students' true learning needs at an individual level. So what does a student achieving at level 2 need? Probably some assistance with learning skills to help them gain strategies to achieve in the content area. What does a student achieving at level 3 need? Work to consolidate their learning and maintain or increase their achievement levels. What does a student achieving at level 4 need? Challenge opportunities to deepen their understanding.
How it can play out, however, is that the challenge and extension opportunities for students achieving at level 3 and 4 are not robust enough and certainly not as urgent as the needs of the struggling student. Even in an ideal situation where the teacher is motivated to provide those opportunities, there are forces at play that weaken the learning opportunity for the standard-achieving student.
First - time and attention is clearly being focussed on the struggling learner. Again and again we focus on strategies for the At-Risk student and target-to-move students who are struggling to reach standard. We set marker students to evaluate research activity and often these are students with content difficulties. This is to be expected and is good sound practice. Still, challenging all learners is time-consuming.
Second, though - the practice of challenging students at standard has a prickly surface. It is not always easy to require students to go beyond what the other students are doing as criticisms can come from all sides - students being challenged, other students, parents. Add to that the fact that many of the curricular expectations within courses don't explicitly indicate a high enough depth of complexity or difficulty to challenge some of these students. So in order to actually challenge them, you have to work beyond the curriculum. That can mean you're struggling for access to resources and possibly 'working without a net' when it comes to justifying evaluation and instructional activities.
However, referring to my previous post "Self-Regulation as primary mission", if we consider the attainment of skills in regulating learning as important enough for all learners, it's imperative that we challenge all learners to the brink of frustration to grant them the opportunities to learn these skills.
And here's where the danger lies. Without those opportunities to be challenged with difficult things to learn, the opportunities to gain Self-Regulated Learning skills don't have the opportunity to truly develop. Certainly students achieving at Level 4 often have a grasp on strategies for getting through the work, but to truly dive deeply into your own learning and understanding the process, one has to be faced with challenges that forces investigation into one's learning.
A simple example of this is the student who achieves high marks through high school and goes to university, only to find out that they really don't know how to study for exams. Or to prepare a large-scale assignment in an area they don't yet understand and struggle with. It could be said that a student who struggled in high school is better equipped to tackle difficult learning because they've had to do it more and have been in the position of using a wider variety of strategies to drive their learning most successfully. Perhaps they've been given the language to articulate their learning strategies whereas a standard-achieving student hasn't really had to pay attention to that.
So what's to be done?
Lest we simply check the standard-achieving students as 'good-to-go', they need to have truly challenging opportunities. Learning Challenges will provide the opportunity to realize Self-Regulated Learning. The concept of the 'Wicked' problems - generally large-scale rich tasks - should be brought to an individual level and smaller scale to provide those opportunities. Often. Difficult.
It's the only way these students will leave us with the skills to be independent learners.
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