Tearing Down the Walls: Why One Size Doesn’t Fit All in Education (Part I)

All right, well, welcome Carol Tomlinson to the show. I’m so excited to have you with us today.

I am excited to be with you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk with some of your followers.

Wonderful, wonderful. So not that this is going to apply to many people, but in case people are not aware of who you are and your work thus far, can you give us just a big overview of your work around differentiation and assessment and perhaps even what you’re focusing on now?

Okay, that’s a very long story and I’ll try not to do the long version, but I grew up without any sense of who I might be, what I might be, what the world had to offer, but when anybody asked what I was gonna do when I grew up, which everybody does when you’re a kid, my answer was the same every time, I’ll never be a teacher.

And the reason for that was that my mom was a teacher in the school that I was in in sixth grade after we had moved from a place where I felt very secure to this place. I never wanted to go. And it was evident I was too shy to be bad. So it wasn’t any fun in there, but she’d say something at dinner that let me know somebody had said something to her about me. And I just hated every second of it. So that was my career path, not being a teacher. And of course life is perverse. And so my first real job was being a teacher.

By accident, I applied for a job at the end of the first marking period in the public schools because the job that I had was going to make me dead before I was very old and accepted it and went to the place to teach and actually was taken to the classroom door where I was supposed to teach by the assistant principal who said to the man who opened the door, Mr. Milton, this is your replacement, you’re fired. And that’s kind of how I felt too. And the kids were, it really looked like some bad movie that couldn’t even be believed. They were so awful. They were high school kids. And the only thought I could have all day was, he would have gone home, Mr. Milton would have, but it was, he was in

Oh no!

a carpool and it was not his way to drive so he couldn’t get there. The car was in the school was in the middle of nowhere and so he was stuck and he said well if they think you can do better than I can why don’t you come up here and teach them and I did find enough boys to say I had been told I could observe for a day before I started so I thought I’d go sit in the back and all I could think of all day was I don’t need a job this badly.

No.

I couldn’t do any planning, I couldn’t get unstuck, that was it. And I was a poor teacher that year. I didn’t major in education, I had no preparation other than sitting in classes as a clueless learner. And I was a pretty bad teacher, but my instincts kicked in and I was fascinated by the prospects of learning about those kids and trying to figure the whole thing out and seeing if there was something you could do with them that made them feel more human in the room.

And so we actually on the whole, except for a really abysmal teacher, especially the condition they were all in when I got there, we had a pretty good year. And so that started the game. And I moved from that high school where I had no readiness to teach to directing a preschool where I had even more, less readiness to teach and was in a very multicultural setting in Arlington, Virginia. We started with a license form.

I don’t know, maybe 45 kids. And we started with three and had the 45 by three months down the pike. It was a place where many immigrants were coming in.

Once again, there were so many things I didn’t know, but the trust of those parents and the openness of the kids and the innovativeness of the kids in helping one another more than I knew how to help them, nailed me again. My second bell was if I ever did teach, which I would not, it would most certainly not be in a middle school. And that was because I was so miserable as a middle school kid. I just didn’t want to watch the agony for the rest of my life. And of course, my third job was in a middle school and I stayed there for 21 years and had found my Briar Patch. It was exactly where I should have been. And there, in the first two settings, certainly saw kids differences, but you know, I had no model in my life, no image for teachers trying to understand kids and do something that worked for them. So it took me until this third setting and a little guy who was, came up to me about here, you can’t see, but I’m pretty tall and he whispered something to me, but it was during the class change and I had no clue what he was trying to say. So after the third try, I did get what he was trying to say and he was saying to me, I can’t read. He was 15. He was coming into my class for the first time a month late and he didn’t know the whole alphabet.

And I had the same sense, I think, that many teachers do. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to teach reading. I don’t have materials for him. What am I going to do with the other kids while I’m trying to help him? How do I grade the kid?

But walking back into the classroom with him, I had this really strong sense that he had just demonstrated massive courage by saying to me what he said. And I thought, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can’t let him down. And in the process of sort of breaking the barrier there of thinking everything was whole class stuff, I learned many more things about many more students, all of whom needed me to. And so at that point, we were in a middle school with a hugely bimodal population of big chunks. 

A kid scoring way above grade level in a big chunk at a pre -prim or first grade level. And we had to figure out how to do something rather than teach the whole class. It was just a disaster every time we did that. So some of my fellow teachers and I spent a really lot of time over the next 20 years trying to figure that out and loved it, loved what we were doing. We could see the results when it worked, we could see the results when it didn’t work, and it was so great to work with that pack of teachers. So I stayed there for 21 years and

At the end of that time, appropriate to the rest of my pattern, I ended up going to the university to teach with no idea of what any of that meant and started all over being totally stupid again. And it just happened, well not happened, it wasn’t an accident. I didn’t go there to work with a thing called differentiation. In fact, we didn’t call it that. Even in the middle school, we didn’t have a name for it. We called it by the name of the subject we were teaching.

But my colleagues at the university were doing research and of course although I had no clue how you did it I was expected to do that too and so we began doing research and differentiation and conducting institutes on it and that became sort of a way of life and that life of course let me um I worked I understood and learned from firsthand experience with kids for over 20 years which is the best it’s really the best but at the university I was expected to dig down and understand research, you know, vertically and horizontally, and so I did that and that added a lot. It’s just been kind of going at it like that ever since, so that we don’t do the whole program with what my sort of warped history.

Well, but I gotta tell you, I mean, what an amazing story unfolding. And I so resonate with that because my dad was an entrepreneur. I swear I would never be an entrepreneur. I was never gonna start a business. I wanted the steady paycheck and I didn’t want, and what did I become? I ended up becoming an entrepreneur, right? With a very different, a totally different mindset and background than my dad. But it’s still, it’s funny how life just kind of takes you to where you really are meant to be, I think. And we have all benefited so much from your work. I know when we focused on arts integration in schools and working with students with lots of different modalities, differentiation is the key. It is the thing that unlocks that learning for so many of students because one size doesn’t fit all. We don’t wear a one size fit all t -shirt and neither do kids. So I am so grateful for the work that you’ve done over the years and being able to try it out, like your philosophy of being able to work with this and develop it with students and teachers and kind of figure it out while you’re going along is very similar to how I worked with arts integration for many years with teachers. So many similarities along that pathway. I’m wondering for people, and here’s what’s amazing to me, differentiation is still new to many teachers that I work with. So I would love to start with the four pillars that you identify. Can you just share as we begin this understanding of differentiated instruction, can you share what those pillars are and how they can impact student learning?

Carol Tomlinson

So, you know, this is actually even interesting to me too, Susan, because I don’t think we start creating something, and I’m sure that was true for you in your work, with a structure, everything, and then we fill in the structure. We do the work and the structure arises, or I did. So it occurred to me at some point that differentiation has a philosophy. It has key principles and it has certain key practices. And that’s one way that I’ve represented differentiation graphically is sort of a Roman looking portico kind of thing with the three columns. And I won’t try to repeat the whole thing to you, but the philosophy among other things is that diversity is good and valuable. And then we all grow and benefit and become more aware of the world when we figure out a way to embrace that. Another notion there is that we can only teach groups of kids, even the easiest, most homogeneous kind of kid, if there is any such thing, we can’t teach them unless we believe in them. And one of the stumbling blocks, I think, for us in schools is that we necessarily encounter kids that we don’t quite understand or like the little guy in the hall with me, don’t know what to do with. And it feels threatening, it feels challenging, and then we get into this, well of course he can’t do it, he’s that kind of kid, he comes from that place, or not even trying. 

Differentiations is built around a similar philosophy to Carol Dweck’s, which is that we know enough to know that the brain is malleable, that kids can do far more than we believe they can, that any kid who comes to us has more possibilities beneath the surface of the water than we’ll ever see, and that our job is to help them raise that up, but still knowing that if we can raise up a bunch of it, there’s a bunch more down there. So working with the assumption that kids have great capacity, they bring many capacities with them that we don’t even know about because we don’t look for them. And if what they bring is capacity, doesn’t seem to match what we want as teachers, we don’t go hunting for that, you know, and trying to build on it. Dweck talks about the importance of unreservedly believing in the capacity of kids to learn. And not only just saying, I believe, I believe, but teaching them the skills of successful learning which I think is the second part of a growth mindset. And then I believe firmly that the third part of a growth mindset is that we need to build from where kids are and scaffold their learning rather than saying, oh yes, you’re two years behind, so just jump right over here and join us or you’ll sink. And so that’s kind of what I mean by the growth mindset thing. Differentiation talks about the responsibility of a teacher not to cover content or prepare kids for a test, but to maximize the capacity of each learner. And I think if we really truly had a deep belief in that maximizing the capacity of each learner, we’d teach in a very different way than we do now. So that’s another idea. And then one of the big philosophical principles for me is the responsibility for contributing to a reality that would ensure that every kid has equity of access to the most excellent learning experiences that a school can offer any kid. We still put kids in classrooms by what we believe about them. We put them in classroom groups by what we believe about them. And if we believe that all kids were smart, and if we did what I think of as teaching up, and started off by saying, what’s the really best anybody in this building can do for a year’s of learning experiences for the best, most eager, most advanced kids we have? Now figure out how to do that.

Differentiate by scaffolding up that would be massive. And I think for me now at least, for the current times we’re in and probably for my whole life, which is pretty long by now, I’ve been at this a while, the notion of equity of access to excellence is a mandate of schools. I can’t see how we can escape with conscience. So those are philosophical pieces on the first column. The second one, go, go.

Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Which reminds me, well I’m so sorry, but it reminds me so much of the idea, I always talk about the idea of invest in possibility, not in the outcome. And so I think what, it so captures what you’re talking about, the idea of what possibilities exist for our students and looking at them with that understanding that anything is possible for the person who’s standing in front of you and just recognizing that rather than focusing so much as I think we tend to do in education on the outcome from that learn.

And we look at deficits far more than we look at possibilities to. When the kid becomes his or her deficits in our thinking, I don’t think anybody wants to do that, the way schools are structured shove us into it, but it happens, y ‘all.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, so please continue.

Oh, please interrupt any time. It’ll be much better for people to listen to it, if it’s not that it’s your house. So the second column is a set of principles that are built around the five key classroom elements that all of us have. We may or may not think of them individually. We may or may not put them together as a set, but all of us have a learning environment that we can work with or not.

We do it. I mean, we have a learning environment. If we’re not trying to make it better, it’s probably going to go south. We have curriculum. We have assessment, instruction.

And then what I think of as classroom leadership and management, leadership of students and management with the students of routines that make things go smoothly, not trying to manage kids that’s doomed. But the principles are something like creating a learning environment that’s a catalyst for learning, an environment that propels kids into learning because they feel safe and sane and affirmed and free to make mistakes without judgment. They feel connected, connected to the teacher and become connected to one another. They learn to work as a team. And that’s really a catalyst for learning. John Hattie calls those invitational learning environments. And I think creating an environment that’s invitational, that sets out an invitation every kid every day to learn something wonderful is what that’s about. Curriculum that helps kids see the wonder of learning, makes them understand that they have a gift every day that they bring in that they can figure out this world and be surprised by something every day. And I think we’ve lost that awe and joy almost completely, which is one of many places that your work plugs in really well. It could energize. So curriculum that has very clear learning targets that’s designed to engage kids and the learning targets have to be known and understood equally by the teacher and the student designing the work to engage kids, focusing on student understanding, not memorization and regurgitation. That’s doomed as far as the way the brain’s architecture is. And teaching up, again, planning first for kids who are not only ready to go, but going and excited about learning and trying to keep them excited and then differentiating up instead of down. That’s part of that little thing. And the third one is some

Key practices among those are trying to understand students well enough to address their readiness levels, their interests, and many different approaches to learning that they can opt to have. Another one is choosing instructional strategies, not because we went to a conference and learned a strategy, but both because it meets the needs of the kids and the content of the moment.

And another one is teaching a respectful task, meaning that if we want to dignify kids, if we want the environment to be invitational, we can’t give some kids tasks that look like teacher’s pet work and having other kids work on worksheets for 12 years, which happens.

And then the final one, flexible grouping, making sure that kids are active with one another all the time, but not creating groups that signify bluebirds, buzzards, and wombats, and having those within the classroom or outside the classroom, but a whole spectrum of grouping possibilities that kids have and encounter many times a day in their work. So that’s sort of those pillars and that’s more about pillars than you want to know, it’s good there’s not a fourth one.

No, I’m telling you, this is like a mini master classroom. I’m starting to put all these pieces together, which is fantastic, in a way that I haven’t before. So as I’m listening to you, and I’m also thinking about what I’ve been hearing from teachers, as I’m sure you have over the last several years. And I can immediately hear in the back of my head, these teachers who are like, how do I have time for this now? Kids are different since COVID. Does this even still apply?

What would be your answer to that? Yeah, or all of it. Like, how do I find time for it? What is, does this apply to the students of today? Like, what is that, all of that.

Yeah, so let’s leave aside the how do I find time to do it for the minute. But I think my experience has been always in teaching that when I find kids who are the most unlovable, they’re the ones who need love the most and kids who life’s together, we’re cool, I’m doing just fine, I love life, it’s going on, people like me, I like them, the world is good. Probably don’t need quite as much differentiation, but I’m still of the opinion that even the most advanced kids, very few of them, know how to advance themselves as fully as they might want to. They need the coach, like the football team does, or the soccer team, to help them move into an arena that they don’t know and understand yet.

And right now, I think what we’re seeing is particularly well suited to differentiation, assuming that there’s some things that aren’t, which I doubt if I believe. But differentiation is very much about dignifying kids and humanizing a classroom and helping kids humanize one another and trying really to make kids, to give kids the opportunity to become the best person they can be.

And so when you find kids who are frightened, anxious at sea, angry with themselves, with the world around them, feeling lost and alone in social media and not knowing how to get out of it, still traumatized from COVID, and in the settings where.

It has become the holy grail that I’m supposed to cover a certain amount of curriculum, stuff it in them, give them a test, and life will be fine if they all do okay, which isn’t going to happen under those circumstances. Kids are in a bad place. The world is in a bad place right now.

And so at that point, I think the very best thing we can do is to create a classroom where we say to the kids silently or overtly, this is an example of a good home. Let’s be at home together. Let’s figure out what that means and treat one another in the way that helps us feel at home and helps every one of us do better than we could if we weren’t together working in here. It calls for a teacher who has a deep respect for kids and treats them with respect who wants to dignify them every day, who models that for the class because kids begin to see that and they sort of follow suit, you know, in a way. And when they don’t, you do what you do with any young person and say to yourself, we can do better than this. Let’s figure out how and keep going back with it again. I think there’s so many things happening now that are really new territory for us.

Some of them are, you know, controversy of the AI stuff, which I think excites kids and terrifies them. It excites and terrifies me. Social media, which have given us many things and taken away many things. Economics, the world state, the state of politics. And for me, all of those things are contributors to kids. I think…

Not the least of which is that growing up is really hard. It’s never been easy. And so I don’t know why we would think that they’re not gonna come back someday without, it’s just in total peace. Life is good if everything’s gonna, it’s not gonna happen. And I think the goals of differentiation and the way we go about it and the things that we suggest that teachers consider.

You tell me that a kid comes in every day and is supposed to get really excited about math or art or anything else. When they feel like a failure every time they start to work with it. Or when their friends are not friends or belittling them. Or when they’re uncertain about what’s happening at home. Or when assessment feels like judgment every time it happens.

The ways that we have been encouraged to teach and almost mandated to teach make them more anxious rather than less and less likely to become who they could be. So in my opinion, differentiation is more needed in more places by more students and teachers than it has ever been.

Oh, I 100 % agree. And I think what you said was so powerful about make this your home and what does that look like and let’s create a safe environment together around that idea. The implementation of that can look so different for so many people. And it’s, again, very similar to the philosophy of arts integration that it can look different.

But it’s the homing idea of a community and of respect and having that go both ways. Staying on this track though, and this is a question I don’t think that we’ve talked about, but I’m just thinking about this. What about teachers who come back and say, I can’t do this because my administrator says that I have to teach this content and I have to do this test. And what you’re saying sounds great but I’m under this mandate. How do we work around that?

Well, that’s a question that’s a really hard one to give an answer to and certainly one to give an easier satisfactory answer. So I’ll start with the less satisfactory ones and try to improve. Many people are where they are, bound geographically, no choices about whether to shift gears or, but if you’re in a school where you feel, demeaned and unappreciated and boxed into something that feels wrong to you most of the time. I advised my graduate students and some teachers that I taught with to find a place that didn’t feel that way. One of the interesting things to me about teaching and one of the things that I love the most is that when I invest what appears to be wisely to students, I benefit as much as they do. And if I can create an environment that is inviting, in curriculum that’s inviting, in instruction that’s inviting, in assessment that’s inviting. It changes the kids almost completely, but it changes me too. I’m feeling very different about the work that I do as opposed to, I’d love to do X, Y, or Z, whether it’s differentiation or not. I’d love to use more art in my classes. I’d love to have a bigger emphasis on creativity, but they won’t let me, or circumstances won’t let me. That diminishes me as much as it does the student. So I don’t think it’s altogether a bad idea to stop and say, wait a minute, this is me, it’s my life, it’s my career. And I am really feeling like all this is wrong and there’s got to be someplace better, let me go find it. But if you don’t want to do that, if you can’t do that, then I think it’s worthwhile to remember a second thing, which is sometimes two or three or four or five or six teachers with an idea that’s powerful and with some trust with the principal or the head of school can work with that person and say, can we talk about this? What can we try?

Would you be willing to let two or three people have a chance to teach outside the box? And we’ll gather data and when it’s not working, we’ll figure out why, we’ll let you know, come in and watch us anytime. But if we can get out of this box when we’re ready to do that, could you support us with that? I’ve seen that work even in the school that I was in for such a long time. 

My team teacher… I was 20 years older than I was and benefited from many things, but not the least of which was mothering teenagers who were then teenagers for all those years. And we had a principal who was a really good man, but super conservative about everything in life. And if he saw a kid up out of a seat, it was just ghastly. And she started with him saying, Tony, when you walk by the room someday, just glance in the window that’s in the door and take a real quick look at what the kids are doing. How do you think it looks? Does it seem okay? And he actually would start doing that a little nervously every once in a while. But then she went to him and said, you know, next time you come by the door, if you have just a minute, just stop and look in that window for a minute and look at table by table and see what’s going on and what you think. Then she invited him to open the door and then she invited him to come in the room. And he was, he became our champions instead of, it wasn’t the same thing principals do now. You know, if you’re, if you’re not following the pacing guide, you’re not a teacher. My sense is if you are following it, you’re not one, but that’s another story. And so working with the principal saying, can we try something? I’ve seen teachers who felt totally stuck because of mandates and that sort of thing, do that kind of thing. I’m thinking a number of teachers, but one that I was fascinated with was a high school teacher in the district where I taught, who was as traditional as she could possibly have been, taught high school English, and appeared rigid and a little uncomfortable with the kids. But kids are good readers of people, and they knew she had a lot to give them. And one time, I think she was reading the kids, and could see that they were tolerating and trying to do something with what she was doing, but they just weren’t excited. So she invited them to come sit on the floor with her someplace or something and talk about ideas. And then she invited me to come into the class one day when she gave them an assignment, which in essence was sort of a performance assessment, though we didn’t know that term then, to figure out a way to show their peers, what their insights were, what they were coming away with. And then she invited me back for the presentations and it was magical. I think those kids knew that if they messed up, no other student ever would have an opportunity in there. And what they did was the best of their work. And she found it revolutionary and over the summer changed the whole structure of her classroom, changed her syllabus completely, worried the entire summer that because she’d given them that one chance, they’d bombed the AP test, they did as well or better than the kids had ever done before. I watched her do that with more classes and throughout the day and every summer she nearly had apoplexy because the kids were gonna all bomb stuff and they didn’t. And then she began working with her colleagues and they started working together. So sometimes you can change it from the inside out. And the other thing I think is this is not admirable, but one of the books that I read, there weren’t too many books on education a hundred years ago when I was teaching in that place, and one of them was the thing called Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and I’ve always loved that book.

But you can look at teaching as a subversive activity and though this is a sad commentary on teaching, you can close your door and when nobody else is in there, do what you need to do to make it come alive. And if somebody comes in, have a plan for what you’re going to do to shift gears kind of quickly and go into what it is they’re hoping they can see. So those would be my answers to that. The pressure is very real. But giving into it is a sad compromise for ourselves and for the kids, I think.

Yeah, I 100 % agree. I think, thank you for sharing things that are both things that we can aim for as well as realistic for all of us to do, right? And I think that’s important. Many teachers will oftentimes, at least for me, when I share, because again, when administrators walk in and students are working with ARP supplies in a math class, it’s sometimes very difficult for administrators to understand that.

And they wonder quite often, like, what are you doing in here? Are you actually spending the time on the curriculum like you’re supposed to? And often when I tell teachers similar advice, unless it’s something that they can truly do for themselves, even if they start with the realistic and then move towards trying things a little bit at a time, unless we provide them with that, sometimes it’s dismissive that I can’t do that because you don’t know my situation. So I appreciate that you provided.

Thank you.