Dr. Edward Roy Krishnan

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If one was to ask teachers around the world, “What is the most challenging task s/he faces as an educator?”- Two answers could be expected; the first would have to do with motivating and increasing the desire of students to learn. The second would have to do with teaching a mixed-ability class.

Changes in Class Structures

With the type of movement that we are experiencing in terms of worldwide restructuring and relocation of populations across the globe, one can imagine how teaching diverse groups of students pose difficulties to teachers who are not trained to handle such situations. To add to this factor, we have also realized and recognized the fluidity of intelligence, and that no one is dull or bright forever, just because a test says so. In other words, intellectual capacities can be shaped and increased with supportive and stimulating designs of learning environments. Hence, it is commonplace to have classes that are mixed-ability in nature, simply because education is not viewed as trite as it used to be anymore.

A World of Mixed-ability Humans

While mixed-ability classes are good representation of actual work environments and life settings in the real-world, tailoring lessons for them is a definite challenge! On one hand, we want students to have a taste of what it feels like to learn with individuals possessing a wide range of abilities, strengths, and learning preferences. Yet on the other hand, we have to accommodate the needs of every member of such a group in each and every lesson, without compromising the satisfaction and maximum learning of individual students.

The Evil of Similar-Ability Grouping

In the past, schools managed to deliberately produce poor students bysimilar-ability grouping, sometimes called streaming (in the British system). During my high school years, I realized that the best students of the school belonged to the science stream and the poor ones belonged, almost in an ostracized manner, to the arts stream. I also realized that students in the arts stream were assigned teachers who were least committed and possessed low level of teacher efficacy. These teachers did not believe that they could make a significant difference in the lives of students, especially the ones labeled as poor performers. The smart teachers were assigned to the smart students. The not-so-smart teachers were assigned to the poor students. What happened in terms of achievement is almost predictable. My school, like many other schools became subjected to the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy over and over again. Good students continued to do better and poor students continued to struggle and fail. This did not happen because students (on either side of the streams) lacked the ability or aptitude. It happened because of the law of nature that states, we get only what we expect of others(in Social Psychology, this is known as the Pygmalion Effect).

The Advantage of Mixed-Ability Grouping

In a mixed-ability class, although students’ ability and aptitude range from very low, low, average, high, to very high level, they are able to nurture each others’ self-esteem and pull each other up to a similar standard of performance. But some may say that this is not necessarily good for the high achiever because it will hold him/her back. This is a wrong notion. On the contrary, numerous research in peer-tutoring reveal that students learn the best and retain more knowledge (close to 98%) when they teach another peer (It Takes a Learner to Teach a Learner, 2007). It also allows every member of the mixed-ability group to realize that every individual, regardless of his/her level of ability and/or aptitude isgifted and talented in some special way. They learn early in life to harness and celebrate the colorful blend of human potential, without discriminating and superficially appraising each other.

Differentiated Instruction

How do teachers design lessons to meet all the varying needs of a mixed-ability group of students? The following are simple procedures and pedagogical approaches that would enable teachers to effectively teach in mixed-ability classes (Engaging Teaching Methods, 2007):

1. Do away with lockstep teaching, where all of the students work on the same activity at the same time. This is practically achievable because many schools are now adopting the 25-students-per-class size limit. Where the difference in the abilities is less extreme, a lesson could be introduced to all in the same manner. However, the worksheets and additional exercises are sub-divided according to students’ ability levels (autonomous work). High performers obviously get to go in-depth and do additional exercises and reading, while the struggling ones are intensively supported by the teacher or their high-performing classmates. The use of computers and on-line materials are highly recommended to enable the teacher acquire and make use of a wide range of learning tools for this purpose.
2. In groups where students are widely differing levels, teachers could completely use different lessons for different students. Each student works through a course at his/her own level while the teacher circulates, monitors, and gives help, explanation and practice as necessary. The only difficulty with this approach is the need for teachers to prepare multiple lessons for every period taught, which could be a tedious task.
3. Use co-operative teaching methods that would enable students to take responsibility for different sections of a lesson. In cooperative learning, heterogeneous student groups are given the opportunity to work together to discuss, synthesize, and conceptualize knowledge in their own words. Some highly recommended co-operative teaching methods are: The Jig-saw, the Inside-outside Circle, Pair-of-pairs, Think-Pair-Share, Numbered Heads Together, and Team Games Tournament.
4. The K-W-L (What do I already know? What I want to know? What have Ilearned?) teaching method is ideal to involve the entire class; identify previous knowledge, bring all students to a common platform of understanding on a given topic, and then continue learning more about the same. The strength of this method lies in its ability to benefit every student with varied learning needs at the same time. It also enables students to connect their existing schema (understanding of a concept) to the present and future learning.
5. Group investigation or problem-based learning – this is another method of teaching that enables students with differing abilities and aptitude to work together toward accomplishing a complex learning task. Since the success of the individual members of a group is dependent on the success of the whole group, they usually help each other and learn together. While individual accountability is established by assigning individual-specific/specialized roles, the members are responsible for each others’ accomplishment. While many worry that this method might cause a good student a great amount of stress because he/she would end up doing all the work, an effective system and set of procedures could overcome this apprehensive outlook. If a teacher could identify ways to discourage lethargy and social loafing (free-riding), this approach allows students with differing abilities to achieve their greatest potential as young researchers and scholars!

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The need for New Assessment Forms

Schools’ main role of providing students with the right type of knowledge and skills, through the use of right type of delivery strategies, which culminates in utilizing the right type of assessment tools to check for effectiveness of educational programs, are drastically changing. This is expected because any change in instructional objectives will lead to changes in every other aspects of teaching/learning. For example, since more and more teachers are encouraging thematic-project-based-learning (where students are given a topic on a specialized area and asked to research it, before organizing their findings and presenting their discoveries to the teachers and other students); their evaluation of that particular kind of learning cannot be assessed via traditional assessment forms.

Traditional assessment forms here refers to a host of paper-and-pencil type of tests items that includes but is not limited to multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, matching, and short answers. In other words, the more innovative a teacher gets in delivering lessons, the more he/she would want to think about introducing a variety of alternative assessment tools. Obviously, we cannot ask students to work in groups all through the year only to individually assess them using paper-and-pencil tests in the end. If this happens, then there is a serious inconsistency between teaching and assessment, which should be avoided at all cost. First of all, students wonder why they were encouraged to learn together but not tested together. Secondly, since innovative strategies often address higher level mental processes, traditional assessment tools are significantly limited in providing accurate and wide-ranging information about students’ true learning in the innovative contexts of teaching/learning.

Authentic Assessment

Authentic assessment (assessment situated in ‘real-life/authentic’ learning) is also called as alternative assessment. However, it is often misunderstood for performance-based assessment. While these terms are distinct and carry their unique meanings, the similarity in all of them lies in the fact that they move away from traditional assessment forms – hence, sometimes called as non-traditional assessment. The uniqueness of authentic assessment, as the name suggests, is the ability of the assessment tools to measure true learning (to a greater extent, compared to the traditional methods).

If we examine all the forms of traditional assessment that we have in schools, we would realize that they hardly address the higher level mental processes along with equally important variables that make learning possible – emotional, social, and physical aspects of students’ experiences. Multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blanks, matching, and short answer test items encourage rote learning and students who undergo such regiment do not move up the ladder of cognitive development to think for themselves and evaluate their own learning merely because they are not given a chance to do so. In addition, many students get high scores on these types of tests by stroke of luck – I clearly remember guessing answers for multiple choice questions and still not failing a subject. Does that reflect true learning on the part of a student? Definitely not!

Innovative teaching strategies such as cooperative learning, highly effective questioning, peer tutoring, engaging teaching methods, brain-based strategies, etc. have given rise to the need to use alternative assessment tools. However, there are certain points that we need to keep in mind when attempting to use alternative assessment. A failure to adhere to the principles of effective use of alternative assessment will lead to breakdown in the overall evaluation structures.

Points to Remember

Innovative teaching strategies focus on how students learn, think, synthesize concepts and construct their own knowledge. As such, any authentic assessment tool utilized to measure such complex learning is obviously more subjective. To reduce subjectivity, teachers could do the following:

1. Decide on appropriate types of authentic assessment tools and define what each one means in the context of measuring students’ learning. The types of assessment tools chosen must correspond to the types of instructional objectives stated. They also need to reflect instructional strategies. Ideally, this is done before students are exposed to a learning theme, not after.
2. Communicate these clearly to students and parents. This is clearly an added advantage of authentic assessment tools over traditional ones because in the latter, students and parents are always left uninformed about what, how, and why learning is assessed.
3. Most authentic assessment tools are rubrics of some sort. When constructing a rubric for an assessment task, be sure to identify the performance indicators first, and then the performance levels expected on each of the performance indicator. Be sure to weight each performance indicator according to their importance in the overall assessment of a particular learning experience.
4. Do not give in to the temptation of subjectively giving an overall score for a learning task, simply because “you are the teacher and you know the good students from the struggling ones.” Follow a predetermined, well constructed rubric and communicate it and its goal(s) to students and parents. Students SHOULD know what they are assessed on.

Rubric for Authentic Assesment

The Future of Assessment

When schools become places where community of learners group together to work on complex and interrelated learning tasks, old assessment practices would become inappropriate tools to gauge students’ learning. With learning perceived to be more dynamic, authentic assessment tools reflect the nature of innovative educational approaches and are geared toward meetings the needs of more meaningful learning experiences.

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When I was in the elementary school, my fifth grade teacher advised us to say “Thank you” to as many people and as many times as possible everyday. He started a trend among the fifth graders to thank others at every opportune occasion. However, being immature and young, we didn’t think much about what we were doing. Without knowing, we were emitting positive energy all around us and making ourselves as well as others feel happier everyday.

Now that I am older, I finally understand what our fifth grade teacher meant. There is physical power and energy in being grateful. There is tremendous healing in the feeling of gratitude. Greatness is achieved when one learns to be grateful and say “thank you” at every step of his walk in life. When one says “thank you,” he focuses on the positive. He shows the feeling of being at ease, communicates satisfaction, and demonstrates acceptance. When one says “thank you,” he is in essence saying that he is happy to have another person’s presence in his life and he is ready for more of such interactions and exchange of goodness. Saying “thank you” neutralizes differences in ego and removes arrogance and pride. It helps people to connect on a mutual ground.

Leaders in corporate sectors testify to this. As long as workers feel unappreciated, they are unproductive, even if they could perform better. The magical ingredient that changes inefficiency to efficiency is gratefulness. While it sounds unreasonable to expect bosses to constantly say “thank you” to workers, the result of this simple act is shocking! The inner transformation experienced by workers who feel appreciated significantly affect how they perceive work and their attitude toward their superiors. They become purpose-driven and feel proud to be part of the growth of the company. Sending workers for more seminars and workshops do not necessarily help improve productivity. This is especially true if employers fail to realize that the feeling of being appreciated is more important than the feeling of achievement. In fact, the more thankful employers are to their workers, the more achievement-driven workers become.

Saying “thank you” works wonders at home too. It is said that wives become more motivated to care for their families when their husbands appreciate them for their efforts. Children become more motivated and committed to do better in studies when their every accomplishment is appreciated. Husbands become excited about spending quality time with their wives and children when he senses gratitude flowing from his family members. In short, a happy family has members who constantly thank each other, on every possible occasion.

Can schools benefit from this? Yes! One of the easiest ways to create a positive environment in a school is by having students, teachers, administrators and staff say, “thank you” to each other as often as possible. If feeling appreciated increases productivity among workers in a company, the same feeling would increase the intellectual productivity of learners. It will also increase quality of teaching, improve administrative operation and relationship, and create nurturing and caring school culture.

Saying “thank you” doesn’t cost anything, yet its effect is more powerful than high voltage electricity.

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“To gain respect, you need to give respect” – at least that’s what they say. But how much of this do we see manifest in the school setting? Very rarely; in fact it is easier said than done. In reality, respect is a virtue that is regrettably overshadowed by pre-occupation with habitual duties – teaching, in the case of teachers, learning, in the case of students, managing, in the case of administrators, and providing, in the case of parents. Everyone is so busy doing what they have to do that respect has been given little if not zero importance.

My friend, who is the Regional Education Director in South Africa travels extensively all over the country. He only makes it home once in a while. But he maximizes whatever time he gets with his family. I happen to visit him last December, where I learned a lesson of great significance. Because he is hardly there with his two children, he chooses not to boss around when he gets home. I had to confront and ask him why he lets his wife to be in-charge even when he is back at home. His answer was, “She takes care of the kids, and she is in-charge when I am not here. I cannot just come in and take charge all of a sudden. My kids won’t have the same respect for me as they have for their mother. If I do that, they will start disrespecting me, and maybe even hate me.”

Implied in this response is a remarkable truth about respect in human interactions. I would say that it is a basic principle that if followed carefully, would save us from heartaches. If you want to be listened to, you have to gain the trust and confidence of the person you want to convince. In the same way, if you want to correct someone, you need to first of all connect with that person.

It is only natural for me or anyone to entertain the suggestions and recommendations of someone we know and have a cordial relationship with. We don’t listen to any random stranger and we definitely don’t trust or respect anyone and everyone that come our way. As natural as this sound, it is not applied in the same way at schools. A new principal could be appointed today and he would have the audacity to reprimand students, teachers, and staff right away. He does so by the virtue of authority vested on him by his superiors. While it is his duty to ensure discipline and order, it is equally important that he does it the right way. But what commonly happens is what was narrated earlier.

It is easier for people in authority to expect others to respect them because of who they are and not because of what they do to gain that respect. It is almost taken for granted that people in authority (in the case of the school, the administrator; and in the case of the classroom, the teacher) are respected by default. They are not expected to give respect to gain respect. This is hypocrisy and when students sense this, they lose whatever little respect they have for the school, and the adults who run it.

A friend of mine once complained about a secondary school student who was extremely rude toward a primary school teacher who commented on his failure to speak in English while in the school premise. When he was confronted by the teacher, the student cussed her with all the foul words he knew. The teacher was disappointed with his response. She felt sad and disoriented. She was shocked by his attitude. I thought about the situation for a moment and told my friend, “How do you expect any other response from the teenager when he was confronted by someone he doesn’t have any connection with?” (Note: the teacher was in primary section and he was in high school – their paths never met except for that time). The same student would have responded differently to his own class teacher or a teacher he connects well. Just because we are teachers, we cannot expect our students to fall on their knees and obey us. Respect is something that we earn. And we can only earn respect by giving it first.

As a teacher or an administrator or anyone in authority, it is easier to go around giving commands, passing orders, setting procedures and demanding obedience. But the most effective way to correct anyone is by connecting with that person. Utilizing the authority that is vested on someone is called coercive-power, while utilizing the authority that comes through connection is called people-power. The former takes people far apart, while the latter binds them together.

Research indicates that principals and teachers who connect well with students stand a greater chance of being effective enforcers of discipline and order. These principals and teachers are visible and supportive to students. They take personal interest in the well-being of children and mingle with them; talking informally, expressing interest in their activities, and encouraging them to do well in studies. Those who fail to do so create unhappy children, hence unhappy school environment.

Dr. William Glasser, the father of Choice Theory and proponent of positive approaches to discipline says that no number of behavior management strategies, however good they are, could ever substitute for a teacher’s respect for his students.

So the next time you want to open your mouth to correct someone, ask yourself this question: Am I connected to this person? If you are not, then you might as well keep quiet and go about other business. At least you still have an opportunity to forge a relationship with that person and then address the problem behavior in the future. If you continue with your plan to correct before connecting, the individual is most likely to hate and disrespect you for the rest of his life. This might sound like an exaggeration, but it is not impossibility. When that happens, you lose the chance of touching someone’s life in a positive way, forever.

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