Why Whole-Class Teaching Still Works
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why whole-class teaching is still the most realistic and effective design for most classrooms.
Key Takeaways
- Classrooms Are Designed for Shared Instruction - A class with one teacher and 25 to 30 students is built to teach the same content to everyone, not to deliver fully individualized instruction.
- Personalization Has Real Limits - Teachers cannot teach multiple things at once, so meeting one student's needs individually always requires time and attention away from the rest of the class.
- IEPs Require Actual Support - Specially designed instruction is important, but it takes additional people, time, and money rather than vague promises to differentiate more.
- Edtech Hasn't Solved This Problem - Devices and software have not made personalization work better at scale, despite years of investment in Chromebooks, iPads, and adaptive programs.
- Whole-Class Teaching Isn't a Failure - Teaching the same thing to everybody in a course is a legitimate strength of schooling and something educators should stop apologizing for.
Full Transcript
I think we've got to stop promising that we can meet individual needs in a classroom with 25 or 30 kids and one adult and just teach the curriculum, right? Every class, every grade has standards and should have a curriculum that we're supposed to teach.
And rather than promise that we're somehow magically going to meet the needs of every child as individualized as those are, I think we've just got to be really honest about how school is designed. It is designed to teach the same thing to everybody
And I don't think we should be ashamed of that. I think we should be proud of the fact that we have developed this incredible technology to teach large numbers of children large amounts of information reliably at scale. Something we have done for generations.
But in the last couple of years, we've gotten ashamed of that technology, of the class. We've gotten ashamed of the idea of teaching the same thing to everybody at once. Because we've fallen for this myth. We've fallen for this pipe dream of personalization and individualization and meeting every need. I don't know about you, but I have never come across a teacher who could teach multiple things at once. You can only teach one thing at a time.
So if you're stopping to meet one child's needs, and to meet them where they are, and to give them what they individually need, you're not teaching the rest of the class. And of course, that's why we need individualized education plans. We need IEPs for students who need specially designed instruction,
but we also need people to implement those IEPs. There's no magic where we can just kind of, like, Differentiate and pull time out of thin air and provide that extra support for a student. No, you need, like, an actual person. It takes money.
It takes time to provide that extra support. And if we're going to actually make learning happen in a classroom with 25 or 30 kids, we are going to teach the same thing to everybody at the same time, at the same pace, and that is a good thing.
See, I think we've gotten off track with all of our thinking about skills. We think everything comes down to the individual student's skills. And I think skills sometimes matter, but often they don't. I think far more than we realize, we can teach the same thing to everybody.
Think about any subject that you took as a kid. Your education was not personalized. You did not have teachers, you know, tailoring their lessons to your every individual need. No, you learned the same lesson everybody else did, and there's a reason for that. The reason is, there's no alternative. There's no way you can teach different things to different kids at the same time.
And don't tell me the solution is to put kids on a computer, because that works even worse. And I think this is really starting to catch up with people. It's starting to catch people off guard that, you know, it wasn't just the lack of technology that was keeping that promise of personalization from panning out. We've tried it. We bought the Chromebooks. We bought the iPads.
We have the software. We tried it, and it's not better. What is better is to go back to what we were doing all along, which is teach the same thing to everybody at the same time within a course. Now, advanced courses, yes. IEPs, yes. But a class is designed to teach the same thing to everybody at the same time, and that is a good thing.
Let me know what you think.