The myth of the “average” student

We are about to buy a new couch for our house, and in preparation, my wife has been thinking about the best way to configure our living room.  She’s visualized what various arrangements of furniture will look like with a different sized couch.  I know not to even try to help with this kind of task.  When it comes to spatial awareness—the ability to understand the relationship between objects in their physical spaces, especially when moving them—I am below average.  Or so I thought.

I recently read this article by a Harvard education professor Todd Rose discussing concepts from his upcoming book titled The End of Average.  Rose says that our society is fixated on the idea that there is an “average person” and designs products and processes around these averages.  He argues that there are, in fact, no average people.  “Human beings don’t line up perfectly,” he says.  “[We] all have strengths and weaknesses.  Even geniuses do.”  Which made me feel better about my utter failure at being able to reorganize our living room in my mind.

Maybe Rose’s statement above seems obvious and trite, but, he goes on to point out how in certain places—especially in schools—this focus on the “average” person limits individual progress because we are constantly comparing them to an average person who does not exist.  In schools, this results in our neglecting to nurture the unique talents and skills each individual student possesses while helping them to strengthen or simply work around their weaknesses.  Think of the student who may be a struggling reader but who is an incredible artist.  Or a student who has never been skilled at sports but can solve the most complex of math problems.  Or the student who seems to have difficulty in nearly every class at school but who terrifically manages the supervision of younger brothers and sisters at home.  Each has challenges but also important, useful gifts.

Our constant comparisons—as teachers and as parents—of how one child does as compared to another child are not helpful, Rose, a high school dropout now teaching at Harvard, would say.  Instead, we need to find ways to structure our schools to better support the personalized needs of a wide range of students as much as is feasible so that we can help all our varied students to flourish.  We shouldn’t expect each student to be great at everything (none of us are), so, especially as students get older, it’s much more of a benefit to them if we focus our efforts on assisting them in honing their talents and minimizing their weaknesses without stressing so much about how they compare to one another.

At ANCS, I cannot say we don’t fall into doing some of the comparing Rose cautions against.  But Rose’s article got me thinking about what we do that does support the individual development of each student.  Here are a few ways that I think we do:

• Varied forms of assessment: Using different types of assessment (tests, portfolios, etc.) and giving students choice in the way they express answers (written, oral, artistically, etc.) allows students to capitalize on their strengths and to push themselves in areas that are challenges for them.
• Multiple teachers in most classrooms: By having two adults in the classroom, there is more flexibility in grouping students to better target their unique needs.  As well, because the teachers themselves have different skills and experiences, students get the benefit of seeing how adults can think and learn and work differently from one another.
• Personalized curricular materials: By not relying primarily on textbooks developed by some distant publishing house as the basis for what gets taught, our teachers are able to craft units of study that draw on materials with meaning to the specific students in their classrooms.
• Reflection: Students at ANCS are constantly asked to reflect on themselves and their learning.  From simple check-ins with the teacher to the personalized learning plans our middle school students create, this process of reflection and goal-setting develops an awareness in students of their learning profiles, which is powerful for students to recognize in themselves as the establish their own individual identities within our larger school family.

I’ve got more thinking to do about “the myth of average” as Rose calls it in this TED Talk.  I’ll certainly be reading his book, probably on that couch, wherever it may end up in my living room.