Shout it from the mountaintops, "HEY WORLD, I CAN LEARN!"

Sometimes I fantasize about things I will say to my future students.  I want to tell them that I don't care if they know the name of the frog in Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.  Any yahoo can look that up.  What I want to know is can they learn.  Can they think?  Can they integrate information across subjects?  No one learns in high school all the things he will need to know for whatever job he gets.  New information comes across all the time.  My first job out of college was at a bank.  I didn't know anything about banking, but I had demonstrated an ability to learn in my educational background, and that's what matters.

It begs the question: How will we know that students are trainable?  Educable?  We give formative and summative assessments, but those don't always capture a student's ability.  Perhaps one student does well in English but not so well in history.  I would guess that those subjects are more closely related than not and the grade difference has to do with the classroom experience and personal interest.  Do we measure a student's trainability against mastery of core standards?  I'm still searching for answers to this question, but meanwhile I am beaming with excitement for this revolution in pedagogical approaches.

Here's an excerpt from a book I am currently reading for Exceptional Learners.

In the United States, each state has attempted to define what all students must learn, and as a result many American schools and districts have abdicated their responsibility to define essential learnings to the state. Unfortunately, in their well-intentioned attempts to create academic content standards, states have identified far more than can possibly be learned in the amount of time available to teachers. After studying and quantifying this problem at McREL (Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning), Marzano came to the following conclusion: “To cover all of this content, you would have to change schooling from K– 12 to K– 22. The sheer number of standards is the biggest impediment to implementing standards” (in Scherer, 2001, p. 15). The process used to create state content standards might help shed some light on this problem. James Popham (2005) describes the process as one of convening subject-matter specialists and asking them to identify what is significant and important about their subject. This typically results in a document that concludes that almost everything about their subject is important. Popham adds, “These committees seem bent on identifying skills that they fervently wish students would possess. Regrettably, the resultant litanies of committee-chosen content standards tend to resemble curricular wish lists rather than realistic targets” (2005). In too many schools, facing an overwhelming amount of content that they must cover, teachers pick and choose the standards they believe will be most beneficial to their students— or even worse, the standards they like to teach. In other schools, realizing that this haphazard approach to determining what students must learn may negatively impact student performance on high-stakes tests, teachers frantically attempt to cover all of the standards equally— even if this means that many students can never truly understand what they are learning or demonstrate mastery of a standard. When everything is important, nothing is. Both of these approaches are disastrous for student learning.


Buffum, Austin; Mattos, Mike (2011-10-29). Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles (Kindle Locations 1201-1212). Ingram Distribution. Kindle Edition.