Should Student Skills Determine What We Teach?
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why student skill gaps shouldn’t determine whether teachers deliver grade-level content.
Key Takeaways
- Teach The Standard - Students who are behind need access to grade-level content, not a steady diet of below-grade-level work.
- Skills Affect Output, Not Access - Weak reading or writing skills may limit the quality of student work, but they do not prevent students from learning the lesson’s content.
- Use Supports Instead Of Lowering Content - Teachers can read aloud and provide access to content without making struggling readers miss the core learning.
- Content Matters More Than Generic Skill Practice - In most subjects, the goal should be teaching actual knowledge, not replacing content with vague skill-building activities.
- Math Is A Partial Exception - Baeder notes that math can be different because missing prerequisite skills may block access more directly than in other subjects.
Full Transcript
Student skills should not determine what we teach in any given class or any given grade. And I think that really throws people because they think, well, we need to meet our students where they are. We need to meet their needs. But what ends up happening is that we end up not teaching what we're supposed to teach in that grade or in that course according to the standards.
So the kids who are behind continually get below-grade-level instruction and never have any chance of catching up. In fact, they're only going to fall further and further behind if we're teaching them lower-level stuff than we should be teaching them.
And people will say, well, you can't teach kids grade-level stuff if they don't have the skills. And I have to stop there and say, wait a minute. Yes, you can. The content that we teach does not depend on students' skills. There is very little in the way of skill that students have to have in order to benefit from a lesson. Right?
If you're doing a lesson on volcanoes, students don't have to have volcano skills to understand that lesson, to benefit from that lesson. What students' skills determine is the quality of the work that they're able to do in that lesson. So, if I assign students to write... An explanation of how volcanoes work.
Yes, students' writing skills are going to determine, to a great extent, how well they're able to write about volcanoes. But they're not going to interfere with their ability to learn about volcanoes. They can participate in the lesson. I don't have to customize the lesson for them because they're poor writers. I can teach them the same lesson on grade level, and they will benefit from it. Now, will they benefit as much as everybody else?
Well, probably not. The stronger students' skills are, the better they are at learning, right? Learning is more efficient when you have better skills, so that's why we want all of our students to be very strong readers, very strong writers, strong mathematicians. And I do think math is a little bit different, so let's, let's leave out math for now, because...
You know, if you don't understand and have the skill to do a certain type of math problem, like, yeah, you may miss out on a lesson that may completely go over your head. But I don't think that's true in hardly any other subject.
And one big thing that I've been talking about lately is that we can read aloud, right? You don't have to give students written material and say, good luck, and hope that their skills are up to the task. That is going to interfere with their learning.
When I was a middle school teacher, I taught seventh and sixth grade science, and we had lots of students who read below grade level.
So guess what? We didn't do a lot of independent reading. That was not the focal point of my class, and that was not what was going to determine whether you learned the content of that lesson or not. I think the other thing that's going on here,
and why this rubs people the wrong way, is that there are a lot of lessons that don't have much content. The content is, I will develop the students' skills. I don't think that's content.
I think we need to look at the standards. And in a couple of subjects, like reading and writing, yes, there are skill-related standards. But most of the time, we should be teaching actual, factual content. Let me know what you think.