Managing the Widening Proficiency Spread

Traditional school curricula often presume approximately the same starting point for a diverse group of students.  Experienced teachers know that students never bring exactly the same levels of learning readiness or competency to class.  Many factors contribute to this, and teachers cope with the problem daily.

As teachers and students begin courses, a classroom dynamic develops in which everyone in class "appears" to progress through learning material at a similar rate.  This is often illusory, but the illusion is also a comfort to many teachers, at least at the beginning. 

But when differences in motivation, study habits, background, learning ability, or learning style begin to manifest themselves, greater diversity in student performance becomes more apparent.  Teachers struggle to keep the group learning together, and classroom management can become more difficult.  To keep advanced students from becoming a discipline problem out of boredom, many teachers enjoin them to tutor their slower classmates.  Where classroom computers are unavailable, the teacher will continue to rely upon more advanced students to tutor classmates, just as teachers do now.

When interactive online multimedia tutorials are available to students outside of class these differences may even increase, exacerbating an already difficult problem.  So, how does one "manage" this increasing range of diversity in achievement levels?  Paradoxically, the answer is: one manages it best by encouraging it to happen!  And the reasons are completely clear.

In classrooms with access to online tutorials across the Internet, many classroom activities will become less teacher-centered than is traditional.  The teacher must decide what small-group activities are still possible and encourage those activities.  More and more student activities may center around use of the computer as an auxiliary source of interaction and information, a personal tutor, provided enough computers are available to students in class time.  Quicker learners should be encouraged to progress more rapidly on their own, while the teacher is available to give more personal attention to slower students.

The chief benefit of using interactive online multimedia tutorials is the increased rate of progress for all students.  Advanced students may be able to "race ahead" through learning material to achieve much more than they might when held in lockstep with slower students.  Depending on student appetite for learning material, teachers may be called upon to provide much more advanced learning materials than ever before.  Watch motivation and achievement take-off!  Slower students will also progress faster and farther than before, profiting from the increased teacher attention!

The principles involved here are not new--just the efficiency of the tools to achieve this outcome.

© 1994, Joseph L. Scott, Ph.D., Germanic Languages & Literatures: josephlscott@hotmail.com

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