Why Individualized Pacing Slows Learning
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why individualized pacing often leads to less learning, and why whole-class pacing with support works better.
Key Takeaways
- Pacing Drives Learning - The pace a teacher sets largely determines how much content students will actually learn.
- Individualized Pacing Lowers Expectations - When students work at their own pace, the result is often slower progress and less overall learning.
- Support Without Slowing Down - Students who struggle should get scaffolds like read-alouds and guides, not a reduced pace.
- Coverage Matters - Teaching the same content to everyone helps ensure all students build shared background knowledge and exposure.
- Slowing Down Has a Cost - If teachers match the slowest pace in the room, students may never reach important standards before time runs out.
Full Transcript
Individualized pacing results in less learning and slower learning for just about everyone. And we tend to think of the faster learners, the students who are really motivated, and, oh, couldn't they learn faster with individualized pacing? If they could work at their own speed, they could go faster than everybody. Well, if that's true, which I think is probably not true for most people...
If that's true, why do they need the class to do anything different at all? They can just learn on their own. If you're a motivated student, you can get a book. You can get an app or a website and learn as fast as you want on your own. The thing is, though, most kids are not going to do that. Most advanced kids are not going to do that.
Most kids are going to get dragged along at the pace that their teacher sets. And the pace that their teacher sets is going to determine how much they learn. So, the teacher is responsible for... looking at the standards, looking at the curriculum, and trying to fit in as much as they can, and bringing along as many students as possible with as much content as possible.
And a lot of people say, well, we need to work at individual paces because not every student learns at the same speed. Not every student is going to be able to keep up. Okay, well, if they can learn at their own pace, of course that means some students are going to learn a lot less.
And there's this idea that we can just slow down as much as we need to and get the same amount of learning or more learning Because we're using individualized pacing. And I think when we slow down and lose that whole class pacing and say, this is customized, this is just at your pace, we inevitably end up with a lower pace.
And sometimes people say, well, what if the information is just going over kids' heads, they're not developing the skills, they're not mastering it?
I can't think of any scenario where students are going to grow faster because they're being taught less and slower. If a student doesn't have the reading skills to keep up with the reading in class at a whole class pace, they're not going to keep up with the reading at an individualized pace.
They're going to learn less and slower. So, one simple thing that we can do if we have students who are struggling to keep up is read aloud. Provide supports. Provide some sort of ...guide that will help them keep up, but don't slow down for them,
because students are never going to catch up if we slow down for them.
I think we have a huge opportunity to increase the amount of learning that students do by simply making sure that we get to everything that we're supposed to, by teaching the same thing to everyone at the same time. And people will say, well, they're not all gonna learn at the same speed.
True. Here's the thing, though. When we teach the same thing to everyone at the same time, not all students are going to learn at the same rate, so that means some students are going to learn more from the same amount of instruction, some students are going to learn less from the same amount of instruction,
but they're all going to get through everything. And I think when we think about slowing down, we don't think about the fact that you inevitably run out of time, right?
If you slow down to match the slower pace of learning that some kids need, then they're simply not going to get to a lot of the material. And I think we're going to do a lot better if we get everybody through all of the material.
No, they're not all going to learn the same amount from it, but they're all going to have the same foundation, the same schema, the same exposure, and I think that is worth quite a bit when it comes to being prepared for the next level of material.
Let me know what you think.